Sermon number 7, the concluding service in a
series, Voices That Entreat Us.
The Voice of the Saved.
Hebrews 12, verses 1 and 2.
July the 29th, 1962, 7 p.m. There's
a difference between being lost and being damned.
I have heard men, in their eagerness and
urgency of spirit, refer to sinners as damned
and invite them to come.
It's a total impossibility for a damned man
to make any approach toward God.
The fact is, there is a difference between
being lost and being damned.
Being lost is what everybody is who is
not saved, but being damned is what the
lost are after it's too late, and there
is no hope for them ever to return.
We are not damned in this world, we
are lost in this world.
By we, I mean people.
Men can be lost in this world and
lost finally or damned in the world to
come.
So men are lost, but they are not
deserted.
Scripture says, My spirit shall not always strive
with man.
Those are words, they're burning words.
My spirit shall not always strive with man.
But while they carry a finality about them
like doom, they also carry hope in them
because you could not say, My spirit shall
not always strive except the spirit were striving.
The fact that he puts the word always
in there indicates that there is a time
when the spirit is striving, and that time
is now.
Now I would, if I were writing a
book, put a little footnote in for my
way of explanation, and I would say that
it's necessary to annotate what I have said
and put this footnote in that there may
be individual persons who have been deserted and
with whom the spirit no longer strives.
But those are individual persons I'm talking about
and not the great masses who are simply
careless and sinning and not minding it.
Now, not only is it true that man
is lost but not deserted, but it's true
that God is entreating us, Be ye reconciled
to God.
And his voice is sounding in many voices.
I've talked about the voice of the lost,
and I've talked about the voice of Christ's
blood, and the voice of conscience, and the
voice of reason, and the voice of God's
love, and I could go on and on
because there are so many more voices than
I have been able to designate.
But tonight I want to talk about the
voice of the redeemed, and what I want
to say is this, summing it up before
I begin, is that the ransomed have a
voice, and that voice is sounding, and sounding
not only now in the testimony of living
men, but it's sounding down the years.
It is the voice of the ransomed, and
they're all saying the same thing.
They are saying, Be ye reconciled to God.
Now, a little text, if I wanted to
use a text, would be that one in
Hebrews, Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about,
With so great a cloud of witnesses, Let
us lay aside every way.
Now, Paul, of course, or whoever wrote the
book of Hebrews, had in mind the old
Roman amphitheater where they used to meet as
they meet here in Maple Leaf Gardens or
in Yankee Stadium or wherever men do meet
to put on games.
Paul must have attended them sometime in his
life, though I seriously doubt whether he ever
bothered much with them after he got right
with God.
I doubt it.
I don't say he didn't, but I say
it doesn't seem like Paul to write.
Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, under Timothy,
my beloved son, meet me tomorrow morning down
at Maple Leaf.
I don't think he would write that.
I can't conceive it, though I don't say
it would be wrong to do it.
I just say I think he was too
busy.
But he did draw on his knowledge of
the games, the Olympic games, and so he
paints a picture here for us.
I'm assuming Paul wrote the book of Hebrews.
I explained when I began my morning talks
on the book of Hebrews that nobody knows
for sure who wrote it, but if it
wasn't Paul, it was somebody else.
And my personal opinion is if it wasn't
Paul, it was a man named Paul.
So if I say Paul, you more or
less have my opinion of what I think
about it.
But whoever wrote this was used to the
Olympic games and knew about them.
And one thing that evidently impressed him deeply
was tier upon tier upon tier of spectators
all the way around.
And the tracks down here and the wrestling
arenas and the boxing arenas and all the
rest could be seen.
And then tier upon tier upon tier and
the person down here looking as if it
was going into heaven itself of people all
the way around.
And they were looking on.
Seeing therefore, he said, that we have so
great a cloud and they look like a
cloud.
As you were down there looking out, they
might well look like a cloud.
Seeing you have a great cloud of witnesses.
Who were these witnesses?
We won't press it too far nor try
to go profoundly into exegesis here.
But only say that these runners who were
down here running or anybody, athlete of any
sort, but runners in that chapter, they were
greatly affected by the people round about them.
Every preacher knows he preaches better to a
large crowd.
And everybody that engages in competitive sports knows
he does it better to a large crowd.
And everybody knows too that if a man
is competing in the games he will do
his work better if he knows that some
of the old champions are present.
A fighter goes into the ring to defend
his title or to try to take another
title.
And there's just another Joe back there, another
Mary on the way up to the spectators
all the way around.
But if he knows back here there are
men who themselves once competed in that same
arena and won and were champions and wore
the laurel and who know what it's about
and who bear the scars and bruises of
the contest on them, I think that these
athletes have a good deal more spirit when
they go into the contest.
And so the man of God who wrote
the Hebrews said, Listen you, listen you people
that are halfway in and halfway out, don't
you know that here were the old champions
that competed in the ring of faith once
who fought, who ran, who boxed, who drew
lance?
These men of faith, don't you know about
Abel and don't you know about Noah?
And don't you know that that old champion
back there, Joseph and Jacob and Moses, they
all sit there.
They won, they won, they were, they bear
the marks and the scars of their combat
on them.
But they're around you everywhere and their voices,
even though you don't hear them, the voices
are there, the voices that are more eloquent
than in the oratory, the voices of the
redeemed who have made it through and who
by the grace of God have laid down
their cross and picked up their crown and
are now safe from it all.
No more contests, no more tears, no more
bruises, no more heartache, no more grief, no
more being out of breath and ready to
drop with fatigue, no more hunger, no more
rags, no more nakedness, no more persecution, no
more jails.
They've made it through, the Saints of God.
And they are saying to us and saying
to everybody, come on, come on, don't the
other fellows as tired as you are, give
it another half mile, you can do it,
come on.
It's the cheer that we get from other
people.
Why do we like to meet in meetings
like this?
Well, you don't have to meet like this
to be a Christian.
You're a Christian because you believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
And you're a Christian because he gives you
power to become the sons of God when
you believe on his name.
That's why you're a Christian.
So you're not a Christian, your Christianity doesn't
rub off from the elbow of the man
that sits near to you.
It doesn't come out to you in a
song, it doesn't come to you by the
talk and conversation of the people.
But being a Christian, it's great to be
with other Christians, to be surrounded by witnesses
who will say, I made it so you
can.
That's why I believe we make a great
mistake when we draw too sharp lines between
young people and older people in our churches.
I'm not going to say we must abolish
the young people's societies, but I do say
that we have made great mistakes down the
years by drawing a sharp chasm between the
old people and the young people.
Do you know the young people need to
be around the old people?
And the old fellow that has come up
the hard way and lived and loved and
served and walked with his God until the
sun is shining on his old gray dome
and everybody knows what kind of a saint
he's been, the very fact he's there will
give to the young fellow more zip and
more spirit and will urge him to prayer
and will nudge him along to want to
walk with his God a whole lot better
if the young fellow sees the old fellow.
But if we separate the church down the
middle and say, all you young people who
don't know much about it, you worship God
over here and the old saints over here,
I think it's a great mistake.
I think that the old saints need the
young people.
The old sheep need the sight of the
lambs.
And I think also that the lambs need
the old sheep.
And so the man of God says here,
you look around you, these witnesses, they were
only in their imagination, of course, because they
couldn't actually see from heaven above.
I assume they couldn't anyhow.
I'd hate to think that some of the
dear old saints who have gone to heaven
would have to look down.
I'd hate to think that the early Christian
missionary alliance people would have to look down
and see the mess we're in.
And I'd hate to think that the Methodists
that started that great denomination would have to
look down now on some things that are
going on in that denomination.
And so with all the denominations, practically all
of them, I don't know any of them,
but what their founders would be, grief-stricken,
if not downright ashamed.
So I hope that God spares the saints
the sight of what's going on on the
earth.
But they're there anyhow.
Their presence is there.
A cloud of witnesses grating away into glorious
self.
And so every Christian that gets on his
knees now and prays knows that he is
in the way the Father's throng.
He knows that he has all holy tradition
behind him.
He knows that he has Bible history behind
him.
He knows that he has the call and
hears the call and the voice of the
saints who have made good.
He knows he is being cheered on by
men living and dead who walked with God
and are walking with God.
Now, these witnesses, a great crowd of them,
I say.
You're not hearing their sermons, maybe, nor hearing
their songs, because their tongues are silent now.
And we're not hearing John Wesley and John
Knox and Martin Luther and Charles Finney and
the rest of them.
We're not hearing them, but yet we're hearing
them, too.
We're hearing their voices, the voice of silence,
the voice of the knowledge that they did
it, they went, they made the true by
the grace of God.
They walked with the Lord and are not,
for the Lord took them.
And that, to any Christian, is a great
source of encouragement.
The writers of the Psalms used to say,
in the hour of their great distress and
pressure of soul, they used to say they
remembered the days of old, the years that
were past, and what God had done to
their fathers and done for their fathers.
And they said, Oh, God, you did it
for our fathers, do it for us.
And they took courage from the fact that
around them, grading away to the skies were
great clouds of men and women who walked
with God, and sleep now waiting for the
trumpet that shall wake the dead.
So their voice of the saved is coming,
their voices are coming to us out of
the world above.
I don't mean literally, if you cock your
ear you can hear John Wesley again or
Martin Luther, I wish I could.
I wish I could, I'd fast a week
if I thought it would help me, but
I know I can't ever hear them again.
I can read their works, but I can't
hear them speak because their voices are for
a little time silent, and yet they're not
silent, I repeat, they're being heard.
The fact that they ever lived is a
voice.
The fact that they walked with God is
a reason why I can walk with God.
And so their voices speak, their lives speak
with a loud voice to us, even though
their tongues are silent.
The fact that redeemed men have been here
constitutes a powerful argument for the Christian faith.
The fact that anybody has lived a Christian
life in a world like this, has been
a good and holy man in a world
like this, that in itself constitutes a powerful
argument for the validity and authenticity of the
New Testament and the gospel of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
So bad is the world, so deep in
sin, so bad is human nature, so unutterably,
incurably evil is human nature, that if there
was not something supernatural in the gospel of
Christ, nobody could be a Christian.
When I first became a Christian, I was
converted, as you may have heard me say.
I was converted, old-fashioned, simple, old-fashioned
way.
I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as
my Lord and Savior, went and joined the
Church and got to work.
That's about all there was to it, but
the transformation was complete revolutionary, and finally it
happened, and I know it happened.
And then later on in my life, I
began to read every kind of atheistic literature,
the philosophies of the Romans like Kyrgios and
the rest of them who did not believe
in Christ, the Greeks and the Romans who
did not believe in God.
Some of them, this Cretius who wrote His
Nature of Things did not believe in God
nor in any world above.
I read, or at least read at, His
Nature of Things, and I read as much
or more atheistic literature as I did Christianity.
I used to get on my knees after
I had read a book or read a
chapter or two maybe in a book, and
he pushed me into a corner and proved
that I couldn't prove there was any God
and that I was having hallucinations and all
the rest.
I couldn't answer it because I wasn't scholar
enough to do it, but I would turn
away from that book and get on my
knees, and with tears near the surface I
would kneel, and with joy in my heart
thank God that I had found him before
I found that book, that I had found
him before I had found a book that
said I couldn't find him, that I had
been converted before I read the book that
said conversion was a hallucination.
And I knew what conversion had done for
me.
It had taken a high-tempered, sulky, angry,
mean-spirited rascal of a young fellow and
had turned him into a God-loving and
Christ-honoring young fellow who wanted to do
the will of God the best he knew
how.
So I knew he couldn't argue me down
because I already had what they said I
couldn't have.
So the fact that any righteous man ever
lived in the world is a good, sound
argument for Christianity, because without this power of
the gospel, no man could be a good
man.
And then the fact that any redeemed man
ever lived in the world constitutes a convincing
witness against sin-loving men and indifferent men
and stubborn men who refuse to walk with
God.
If any good man ever lived, that man
may long be sleeping in his dust, now
be moldering along with the just.
And still, the fact that he ever lived
is saying to every sin-lover you ought
not to love sin, saying to every indifferent
man you ought all to wake up and
do something about your soul.
And constitutes an eloquent entreaty.
Let us, says the Holy Ghost, see them
by their hair, the old champions, the old
champions with the withered leaves on their brows
and the bruises and scars and marks to
show where once in combat they fought or
ran or wrestled.
Now you're in there.
You can do it.
Wonderful what a little encouragement will do for
people.
A while ago I asked the Lord to
give me the spirit of Barnabas.
You know, Barnabas was called the man of
good words.
He spoke good, encouraging words.
And a good, encouraging word to a Christian
that's having a tough time of it sometimes
will help them very greatly.
Well, now these voices, I don't think I
need to go into it in any great
detail, but I think here about this man,
Abel, that we've talked about before.
He being dead yet speaketh and his loyal
obedience to God cost him his life.
I suppose it did.
I think he probably was the first martyr.
He certainly was the first man murdered in
the world.
And his killing was the first fratricide, the
first murder.
And Cain killed him as the first murderer.
Abel, the first man murdered.
But I would suppose from reading it, both
in the Old Testament and the New Testament
commentary on it, I would suppose it was
his faith that cost him his life because
he believed in Jesus.
Looking forward to the cross, as we look
back, he believed in God, he believed in
the efficacy of the shed blood, and so
he brought a lamb and slew it.
And God spoke his word of approval, and
Cain heard it.
And Cain got no approval, and so Cain
became angry.
And I would suppose there was the first
time the flesh and the spirit ever came
together in hostile warfare.
Later on we see it plenty.
Later on we see it in Jacob and
Esau.
Later on we see it in David and
Saul.
Later on we see it in Peter and
Judas.
Later on we see it all down the
centuries, the hostile conflict between that which is
of the flesh and that which is of
the spirit.
But this is the first indication of it,
that there was Abel.
They looked for him and found him buried
out there somewhere, a shallow grave with the
leaves pulled over him, and Cain crying to
look innocent.
But God said, I hear a voice.
I hear a voice!
It's the voice of Abel.
It's the voice crying from the ground.
There is another voice, as this twelfth chapter
tells us, that cries more loudly, and that's
the voice of Jesus' blood, which cries not
for justice but mercy.
But the voice of Abel's blood does cry,
and it tells us, I made it.
Now I would like to ask these men,
I would like to ask these men if
it were possible, Abel, you could have lived
a long time, men lived a long time
in those days, up to 969 one man
lived.
You might have lived upwards of a thousand
years, Abel, but because you insisted upon praying
and obeying God and living a right life
and trusting in the bloody sacrifice, you got
killed early when you were a young chap.
If you had it to do over again,
would you do it, Abel?
You know what Abel would say.
You think for one second that Abel would
sulk and say, I'm sorry.
From his high place yonder, is he sorry?
Ask the captain that brings his ship in
through the roaring storm and all battered and
bruised, ties her up in her safe harbor,
asking, Captain, are you sorry you brought her
in?
Are you sorry for the wind and the
gale and the howling storm?
And he'd smile and say, No, now I
look back and I enjoy it.
The main thing is she's tied up safe
and her cargo is safe and her people
are safe.
So we ask Abel, Abel, are you sorry
you had such a stormy voyage?
And I'm sure he would smile and say,
No.
The voice of that redeemed man is saying
to every one of you, get on your
knees and get right with God and straighten
your lives out and quit fooling and quit
trying to be a Western 20th century civilized,
educated, sophisticated, over-stopped Canadian American or whatever
you are, and believe in God now and
get right and streamline your life and strip
for the race.
That's what Abel would say to us if
he were speaking.
I think he probably would say it in
a good deal more refined language than I
have, but he would say something like that.
Then there was Enoch who walked with God
and God took him because he pleased God.
Now if you ask Enoch, Are you sorry
about this?
Do you wish it was some other way
now?
No.
Enoch would smile and say, How could I?
A man who walked with God and then
was taken to be with God?
A man who spoke in the power of
the Holy Ghost and left my testimony among
men?
Do you think I'm sorry now?
No.
No, it's not sorry.
Ask that soldier who, as the famous Canadian
regiment did here at Dieppe, is that the
way you pronounce that?
French town?
I never could pronounce it right.
But the other day they had the anniversary
of it here in the newspapers and over
the radio.
They talked about it.
Canadian soldiers made themselves famous around the world
by that terrible fight.
Some of them came away.
A great many of them sleep over there.
But some of them came away from that,
walked away from it bloody but undoubted, came
back after the war was over and went
back into the shops and out onto the
farm and into the stores and into the
classrooms and went on their regular lives.
Ask any one of them.
Are you sorry about that?
Do you wish you'd been home cutting out
paper dolls?
Do you wish you'd been home teaching tatting
and knitting in a school for children?
Not a one of them.
Not a one of them but would straighten
his shoulders and snap to the old military
bearing and say, I'm proud.
Proud of my people.
Proud of my regiment.
Proud of that hour.
You ask Enoch.
Ask Noah.
Ask Abraham.
Are you sorry?
Were you sucked in by the emotional vortex?
Did somebody get fanatical and win you?
No, Enoch would say.
I walked with God.
No, Noah would say.
I heard a voice and I recognized it.
No, Abraham would say.
I'd never go back to my idol making.
Never back to Ur of the Chaldees.
I thank God for the high privilege, he
would say, of going down with my family
into the Holy Land and becoming the father
of the faithful.
And from me proceeded finally the Messiah in
holy lineal descent from my loins.
Nobody ever sorry they served God when it's
all over and tent down and the wind
has blown the dust away and the devil
has gone to look for somebody else and
the Christian feels around for his laurels and
nobody's ever sorry about it.
Ask old Jacob.
Jacob, are you sorry?
The way you lived, sorry you got wrestled
with that night on the bank of the
river?
Jacob would smile and say, no, that's where
I got my new name.
Ask Joseph.
Joseph, are you sorry that you saw the
sheaves bowing down to you and the sun
and moon and stars bowing?
Are you sorry, Joseph?
Are you sorry for what you had to
pay for your religion?
Oh, Joseph would say, thank God I praise
him every moment for what he did.
This is the cloud of witnesses, the old
champions, the old bruised champions.
Once in the early days of the church,
about 324, maybe I'm wrong by a few
years, there met the council of the church,
the last, I would suppose, the last ecumenical
council.
The council of the church.
Over the old matter of Athanasius, Naras, whether
Jesus Christ was the Son of God or
not, they came in.
The delegates came in.
They came in not slapping each other on
the back as the delegates do now when
we gather to these hotels.
They came limping in.
They came in with one arm hanging loose
in the sleeve.
They came in with one eye out.
Some of them came in with no tongue
in their mouths.
It had been torn out by pincers.
Some of them came in with a foot
off and some with a leg.
How did they get that way?
The persecutions under the Roman emperors.
The champions gathered there.
Many of them had died.
Millions of them had died, but a few
had been tortured and turned loose, and these
were the ones, many of them, not all,
but many of them, who came to that
famous council and gave us that Athanasian creed,
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus
Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
They were the old champions.
They had the scars to show for it.
You suppose that after they had sat around
there a few days and discussed theology and
made their speeches, a young fellow just starting
out who never knew persecution, sitting beside an
old man with a silent tongue, stub of
a tongue and couldn't talk but the light
of God in his face, do you think
that young man was ever the same again?
Do you think that he went out pitying
himself because he had to give up something?
I think he went out with his chin
up, saying, There is a man whose tongue
was torn out for his faith, and there
is an old man whose leg was burnt
off for his faith.
And here is another man whose eye was
put out for his faith.
I'll never complain again.
Brethren, it's this kind of thing that I
hear.
I hear it in all Christian history.
I hear it from the Church Fathers.
I hear it in the voices of the
patriarchs.
I hear it in the psalmists and prophets
and apostles.
I hear these voices.
They're the voice of the ransomed, the voice
of the victors, the voice of the saved,
and they're all saying the same thing.
We made it, you can.
The blood of Jesus cleanses, the power of
God enables, and God hears prayer.
And he that's in you is bigger than
he that is in the world.
You can make it through.
Don't get discouraged and pity yourself.
Weep on your own shoulder and get a
crick in your neck from self-weeping.
Quit it.
Straighten up.
You haven't suffered yet, striving against sin.
I think about the lady whose chauffeur had
driven her out, two ladies.
And the chauffeur was driving along, and something
went wrong with the car.
And here was one of these black, lovely
things with a little flower pot and a
flower in it, and all the little telephone
and all the rest.
And while the man with the uniform and
the cap was out trying to fix up
the engine, she patted her two gloved hands
together like a martyr and turned to the
friend beside her.
They were on their way to a religious
meeting.
And she said, Now I know what the
apostles went through in their day.
Sitting in the back seat of a luxurious
car, five minutes, while the tire on the
engine gets fixed.
I don't think God laughs, but I wouldn't
blame an angel for chuckling.
And I think the devil must hold his
black sides down when he sees such things.
Well, they speak all with one voice, and
they say, We weren't compelled to suffer.
Nobody put a chain around our neck and
made us go.
We wanted to do it.
We followed the Lord because we'd chosen to
follow the Lord.
We wanted to follow the Lord.
Both the suffering and the glory are ours
by our choice.
We wanted it that way.
I think they all speak with one voice
and say, You can serve God under any
circumstances.
You can serve God in this terrible age
in which we now live.
You can serve God now.
Circumstances may be various and different, each from
the other.
You can serve God now.
God will receive you and bless you and
keep you, and so be reconciled to God.
Don't listen too avidly to your radio.
Don't sit glued as though you were hypnotized
looking at your TV.
Don't spend too many minutes going over your
newspaper.
Live clean from the world.
Find out what's going on.
I always listen at 10 o'clock at
night to see who's going to shoot who,
and what Diefenbaker did and John Kennedy and
the rest of them.
But when that's over, I'm thinking of something
else.
I don't want to get so embroiled in
it that I become a part of a
society that I've repudiated, that I might follow
the Lamb with this reverie going.
In closing, be reconciled to God.
To be reconciled, one of three things happens.
A and B are alienated from each other.
They seek a reconciliation.
There can be a reconciliation achieved between A
and B one of three ways.
A comes all the way over to B,
or B comes all the way over to
A, or they each come halfway.
Either A changes completely, B changes completely, or
they compromise.
Be ye reconciled to God.
What does that mean?
That God is going to come over on
my side.
That's the way it's preached now.
God is so nice and kind and old
-fashioned and Hollywood-ish that he'll come clear
over on my side.
No, he won't.
God the Eternal God.
I change not, says God.
If there's any changing to be done, man,
you and I do it.
God's right the first time.
You and I are always wrong.
And the alienation is our fault, not his.
Thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the
praises of Israel.
So if there's any coming to God, it
must be we must come to God.
But you say, how can we come to
God?
We can come to God because Jesus Christ,
who was himself God by his blood and
death, took away everything that can prevent the
reconciliation.
Be ye reconciled to God.
We can because seeing that he died once
for all and he died for all, and
he took away all that was between us
and God, and we can come now.
So the change must be on your part.
The reason you and God haven't been getting
on is you haven't been right.
God isn't going to change, so if you're
going to be right, there's only one way
to do it, and that's for you to
make the change.
Make the change by repentance, faith in our
Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Redeemer and
Lord.
Will you do it?
You Christians that have dragged around and pitied
yourself and lived half in and half out,
God help you and pity you.
There are a thousand voices from a thousand
directions, right on in this huge strip of
territory from Hudson Bay to the border, from
the Maritimes to Vancouver.
If you could go back and know the
history of the Saints that have lived right
on this country, you'd straighten up and say
to yourself, I can't afford to be a
half-Christian.
These great Saints set an example for me.
Down in my land, I know her sins,
I know her money, I know her entertainment,
I know her sins, I know her sins
better than you do.
I also know that you can't go into
a cemetery from the rock-bound coasts of
Maine to the slopes of California, but what
there lies in peaceful silence, the dust of
some holy man or woman who lived and
loved and served and suffered and rejoiced in
triumph.
I can't walk as I often have walked
through these old cemeteries and not know that
there lies the dust sacred to God.
For it was once the dwelling place of
the Holy Ghost and will be again when
our Lord Jesus comes to raise the dead
and rapture the living.
So the voices of holy men and women
of all ages everywhere are saying, get right
with God, straighten out, come back to God,
read the Bible, pray, get family altar, start
giving, start going to prayer meetings, start having
personal prayer.
And God will be with you.
Let's pray.
It could be that somebody would like me
to offer prayer for you.
Last Sunday night after service, a young man
from another country who was a Roman Catholic
came to me, said he had heard me
twice, and he was concerned.
I can't recall word for word, but something
to the effect that he was deeply concerned
about his soul and his relation to God,
and could I help him.
I prayed with him, exhorted him, and then
told him to read the gospel of John,
prayerfully asking God for life.
Maybe he's here tonight, I hope he is.
He promised to keep in touch with me.
Maybe you would like to have me pray
for you.
If you would, simplest old-fashioned, this way
I know just to raise the hand, so
I'll know who wants prayer.
Would you raise the hand?
Who would like to have me pray for
you?
For any need at all that might be
in your life.
Any need that might be in your life,
put the hand up.
We'll know that somebody wants prayer.
Dear Lord Jesus, we pray tonight that thou
will help us to hear thy people.
Oh, we thank thee for that glorious Jerusalem,
the golden, milk and honey blessed, where dwell
the spirits of just men made perfect, and
where thy church will someday be.
We thank thee, O Lord Christ, victorious, triumphant
Lord Jesus.
God hath made thee both Lord and Christ,
and hath set thee head over all things
to the church, and hath made thee heir
of all things.
Thou who art the shining forth of his
glory, and express image of his person, in
whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily, we love thee, Lord Jesus.
We want to serve thee.
We want this church to be a Christ
church indeed.
We repudiate the ways of worldly churches.
We repudiate the psychology and philosophy of worldly
churches.
We insist we want to be a New
Testament church.
Make it so, Lord, we pray thee.
Bless these dear friends for Christ's sake.
Amen.
Now unto him that loved us, and washed
us from our sins in his own blood,
and has made us kings and priests, unto
his God the Father.
To him be glory and dominion, now and
forever.