The book of Titus, the book of Titus,
Titus 1, we've been reading just from the
introduction really.
Paul, Paul, he says he is a servant
of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.
Then he refers to the faith God's elect
and the truth which is after godliness, which
leads to godliness, and the hope of eternal
life, which God that cannot lie promised before
the world began and made known in time,
promised in eternity and made known in time,
and has manifested his word now.
This will be the message for the morning.
A little prepositional phrase tagged on here, could
have ended, but hath in due times manifested
his word.
Put a period there and ended it, but
he didn't.
He added through preaching and then explained that
this preaching was committed to him according to
the commandment of God our savior.
So I want to talk a little bit
about this, and I've prayed and hoped that
it'll be helpful to us all.
These two great truths we dealt with last
week, that the plan of God to redeem
mankind was wrought out in eternity, was planned
in eternity and worked out in time and
delivered in time, but was made manifest, that
is, proclaimed, declared in due time, then through
preaching.
Now, I don't think in all my years
I ever felt the weight of a thing
quite like this, those two words before, through
preaching.
And I thought of the condescension of God
that he should use these words at all,
that they should be here, that there should
be any reason for their being here.
How remarkably sure of himself God must be
to impress such a perfect plan to such
an imperfect medium.
This perfect plan, the plan of God drawn
up between the persons of the Godhead before
the world was, a perfect plan to recover
man from his lost condition, to reclaim him
after his fall, to reinstate him after his
disgraceful expulsion, and to give him eternal life
and at last immortality.
This was not an easy thing.
The laws of God being what they are,
and God being who he is, and his
nature being what it is, this was not
an easy thing.
For there was more involved here than things
political.
Things involved here were moral, and they had
to do with the structure of the universe.
They had to do with the very foundations
upon which rests the heavens and the earth
and all things visible and invisible.
And to work out a plan, to lay
its blueprints, and then build according to those
blueprints, and then unveil the structure, it took
God to do it.
It took God to do it, and God
did it.
And he did it in a manner infinitely
perfect and excellent, as might be expected of
God, infinitely perfect and excellent beyond all the
power of language to describe.
That's the perfection of the plan.
And now he makes this known, wonder of
wonders, he makes this known through preaching, one
of the most imperfect of media.
Why is preaching imperfect?
Because language is involved.
And wherever language is involved, there's imperfection.
Always there must be imperfection.
For the simple reason that language is fluid,
it changes.
Language tends to localize itself and mean in
one place what it does a word, a
particular word mean in one place, what it
does not mean in another, mean in one
locality.
And even the nations that use the same
language, use different words to mean the same
thing as, for instance, such a simple thing
as you get into an elevator in America
and into a lift in England.
You ask the conductor if this is the
right change in a train in America, and
you ask the guard in England, I understand.
That's a simple illustration only, and it doesn't
affect anything very profound, but language does become
profound and highly significant, tremendously so when it
deals with the religion and the soul of
a man.
And this perfect, infinitely excellent plan of God
was entrusted to the imperfect medium of preaching.
Preaching which uses language, I say, which the
speaker himself may not always understand fully, in
which the hearer may not understand fully, in
which the hearer, having been brought up in
one area or locality, may mean by a
word one thing and the hearer may mean
another, and so they make no contact.
They fail to do what they say now,
communicate.
Then because of the many languages all over
the world, our missionaries tell us rather heartbreaking
as well as humorous stories of their effort
to get ideas across, efforts that simply cannot
be gotten across.
I remember when my older brother was in
China when he was a young fellow, he
came back and told us smilingly about how
he'd gone into a department store and asked
to buy a cow.
And what he wanted was some garment or
other, which a sailor might want, a handkerchief
maybe, but he'd had a wrong inflection, a
wrong tone, and so what he asked for
in a dry goods store was a cow.
And that's only one of the thousands of
changes and odd angles and facets of meaning,
not only between languages but within languages.
And so he committed, he committed this, the
eternal hope of mankind for recovery and reclamation
and reinstatement and eternal life and immortality.
He committed it to the imperfect medium of
preaching.
And it's imperfect because language is involved and
it's imperfect because preachers are involved.
And preachers are men and hence faulty and
defective.
Paul recognized this in 1 Corinthians 1.21
when he said, it pleased God by the
foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
Paul knew very well that for one man
to stand up on a raised platform and
address other men and talk about things he
couldn't see and refer to historical incidents which
there was no proof for and to offer
gifts which he could not, you could not
weigh in or measure and to talk about
the unseen things and demand they be seen
and unheard things and insist they ought to
be heard.
He knew this was a foolish thing to
do.
And yet he said, it pleased God by
the foolishness of preaching to save them that
believe.
And while we do not underrate the printed
word, we say that God has said here
in 1 Corinthians 1.21, it pleased God
by the foolishness of preaching to save people
and in Titus 1.2 that in due
time he manifested his plan through preaching.
Well, what a noble army they have been.
I have a great big book on the
history of preaching which I've lent to Brother
Milton Moore and now I'm almost sorry I
did because thinking over this, I'd like to
check just this thought over again.
The great men who've stood up in the
earth with all their imperfection using an imperfect
fluid medium such as language, they have moved
generations and changed the course of history.
Think of the man Noah way back there
before the flood, who for a long, long
time, probably the longest pastor any man ever
held, 120 years while the ark was preparing,
this man was a preacher of righteousness.
Where he got his texts, I don't know.
Whether he read it or whether he memorized
it or whether it was extemporary, I don't
know.
I don't know what type of preacher he
was, but I know that he was a
preacher of righteousness.
And certainly this old man of God back
there before the flood, you say he didn't
win many and not many were saved.
No, but what he did was this.
Noah didn't win many back there, but he
did deliver his soul and deliver God Almighty
from any remote shred of accountability for those
who hurt him.
If there is such a thing, you know,
as God sending a man in to a
place and saying, now you go and preach
to these people and don't expect converts, you
won't get them.
Don't expect results, you won't have them.
But I want them to know a prophet
has been among them.
Told that to Ezekiel, the man of God.
Now there's such a thing, Noah was that
kind of preacher.
And in hell today, in hell today, those
antediluvians are deeper and more tragically, terribly, and
eternally responsible because Noah preached to them.
And then there's the prophets, the old men
of God.
They were not students in pastor studies.
These prophets of the Old Testament, they were
mostly great rough fellows who, with the exception
of one or two, one a priest and
another one a courtier, Isaiah.
But mostly they were rough fellows that God
had laid his hand on, as he did
on a Billy Nicholson or a Billy Bray
in later times.
And they stood up and declared the word,
declared it roughly and coarsely.
And they struck out and in their striking
sometimes, they hit popes and they hit people
that weren't guilty, but they struck hard, these
mighty prophets of God.
And God loved their sermons and he had
given them the sermons to begin with and
then had them recorded.
So we have the prophets, major and minor,
giving us the sermons that were preached and
how those sermons must have changed man.
And yet God said, I raised my prophets
up and sent them and stretched out my
hands and you wouldn't hear.
And so God delivered himself and the prophets
delivered themselves.
And we come to the New Testament and
we see first of all, Jesus, a preacher,
and we see those apostles who went about
preaching and those disciples in Acts 8, 4,
which says that because of the persecution that
had arisen about Stephen, they went everywhere preaching.
I don't know what kind of preaching it
was, but it was effective.
They went everywhere preaching that Christ had died
and now lives and is at the right
hand of God.
And in post-biblical times, we have the
great preachers down the years, the silver-tongued
preachers.
In later times, 12, 13, 14, 1500, we
have John Towler, that great German orator who
went about all over Germany preaching Jesus Christ
and preparing the ground for the Reformation.
In Spain, a little later, we have Molinus
who went about preaching that you could get
to know God yourself, that you could pray
in your heart and God would hear you,
that you didn't have to pray through beads
and forms and stated times, but anytime you
lifted your heart to God through Jesus Christ,
God would hear you.
He later paid with his life for teaching
such doctrines as that because it made it
tough for the priests.
The hold the priests had on men was
that priests had to be around or you
couldn't pray or you had to pray according
to his prescription.
But Molinus said, God will prescribe for you,
son, go ahead and pray.
So the Spanish Inquisition put him in prison.
Shortly afterward, he died and historians think he
was poisoned, but nobody can prove it.
The judgment day will reveal it.
But Molinus was a preacher known all over
Spain and now known all over the world.
And there was Richard Rowe, one of my
friends.
God in his great mercy allows such things
to happen in heaven.
And I am not so completely overcome with
a sense of my own inferiority that I'll
be afraid to speak.
I want to hunt up Richard Rowe.
I want to hunt up the man who
gave up his monastery and walked out of
it, took a guitar, bless you.
A guitar, the instrument we kind of look
down on in our day.
Usually, I guess, because the way it's been
abused.
But he took a guitar and went all
over England preaching.
Preaching the love of God in Christ Jesus
the Lord.
And he said, if you let the love
of God come into your heart, it'll fill
you with sweetness and fragrance and song in
whatever we're preaching.
And I didn't know until I looked it
up recently, but I could have suspected it
that before he died, he got in trouble
because he wrote himself a good stiff book
in which he denied that the Pope had
the authority he claimed he had.
And he managed to die in his bed.
But think of that preacher and what he
did for England.
And later on, when the preachers came to
England after the Reformation, they found soil pretty
well prepared.
And there was Luther.
We'll skip Luther because everybody knows about him.
And there was John Knox, that mighty Scotchman
who preached with a burr.
But who was such a frightful, such a
terrible and terrifying preacher that the bloody Mary
said she feared him, feared him worse than
she feared the armies of Egypt, feared his
prayers to say nothing of his sermons.
Now, yes, there's been a lot of them.
But they are, they are the stars of
the first magnitude.
Think of the thousands of little stars that
barely shine that takes a whole milky way
of them to make a little light.
But they're there and they've got some light.
Thank God for every one of them.
And I thank God for every one of
them today in this city, big and little,
poor and good, that are standing up to
declare the word.
For God has made his word known through
preaching.
Now that's the condescension of God.
And then think of the mighty obligation of
the preacher.
Think of the weighty, enormous, crushing obligation that
rests upon a man who stands to declare
the truth anywhere at any time.
Why?
Two reasons.
One is he is the messenger of the
most high God.
And he comes clothed with the authority of
the most high God with a message from
the most high God.
No secret document ever carried in any portfolio
by any ambassador, top secret, though it might
be from one country to another, can even
compare with the seriousness and weight of the
message carried by the simplest, poorest preacher that
stands the day to preach to a little
flock.
And the future of millions of moral beings
lies in the hand of the preacher, always
has.
You say millions?
Aren't you getting a bit exaggerated?
No.
Suppose that a little unheard-of Methodist preacher
say up in Wisconsin that nobody will ever
hear of but his own superintendent and hundreds
of people who might hear him.
Suppose he wins one man to God.
Suppose that man wins another.
And suppose then that man wins another.
Next man wins two and somebody else wins
three or ten.
Multiply it and see how by multiplying it
runs into hundreds of thousands.
All saved, one two to Christ and to
man.
Each of those two, one two more.
And each of those two more, one two
more.
All you have to do is take a
pencil and sit down, figure it out and
you'll see that the conversion of one person
will run into hundreds of thousands.
In the course of years.
So the future of millions of moral beings
lie in our hands.
The hands of the man who stands up
to preach the word.
Teacher who stands up before his class to
declare the word.
That's a form of preaching too.
Don't rule it out.
It is a form of preaching.
It's giving the word, teaching the word, instructing
man, exhorting man, inspiring man and women and
young people.
If you could only know, I wonder if
we will know.
If you could only know who it was
way back down there, what Swede or German
or Scotsman or Englishman or maybe even some
other country we're not thinking of now.
That a man got up lazy one morning,
head aching and said to himself, I don't
think I'll pray today as much.
I think I'll kind of rest.
And so he puttered around the house and
for a long spirit of God began to
move him.
And he said, I've got to pray.
And he got on his knees and began
to pray.
And as he prayed, the light of God
came to him.
And he went out that night maybe and
preached or the next Sunday.
And somebody as a result of his hearing
God's voice got converted.
And the conversion of that person resulted in
the conversion of one of your ancestors.
And the conversion of that ancestor resulted in
the conversion of one of your lesser remote.
So down to you and you now are
a Christian.
You're home Christian because somebody back there didn't
fail God.
Think of it.
But how can preachers be what they are
sometimes?
I've said and I've got in trouble for
saying, but I kind of thrive on it.
I don't mind it too much anymore.
But I say that if a man is
lazy, the best place in the world to
indulge his talents is in the ministry.
Because nobody checks up on him.
He can sleep till noon.
And if he gets a call, phone call
at 10 o'clock, he can get up
and try to sound alert.
But how can a man upon whose head
God has laid his hands ever be lazy?
When you consider the condescension of God that
he made his perfect plan made through the
imperfect medium of preaching and with the mighty
obligation that lies on the man of God,
how can he be lazy?
How can he be careless?
And yet men are, how can he be
cowardly?
And how can he be covetous?
When George Fox came to England, he had
one category for all ministers.
He called them priests.
And he had one place to put them,
as far down in the pit as he
could shove them, putting his hand on their
bald head and push.
I read his writings years ago, and I
thought, oh, George has been rough on people.
But George knew whom he was speaking.
He knew.
He saw him.
He saw him stand up drunk, and he
had to have choir boys to hold him
up so they could deliver their sermon.
He saw how careless and utterly worldly they
were, and how they cared for the pulpit
only as a man cares for a bench
in a factory as a means of making
a living.
So I'm not going to be too hard
on George.
He may have pushed a fellow in the
face that didn't have it coming, but that
was just an accident.
And mostly, they had it coming.
Well, think of the choir.
How could a man be cowardly when he
considers that God has given him the message
to deliver?
However poor he might be, and however few
might hear him, he's given a message.
And when you think that that message carries
with it such tremendous obligation from God, how
can a man be cowardly?
Back up and say, I'm sorry, I didn't
mean to offend you.
Back out on his message.
Back out on the truth.
Now, if he's honestly wrong, he ought to
apologize.
Preacher's not above apology.
And of course, as a Christian man, ought
to apologize if he's hurt anybody.
But never be afraid.
Then the covetous man.
I don't understand the covetous man.
Man who allows the offer of the board
so much money for so long determine whether
he'll preach or not.
I don't understand it, but how terrible it
is.
Listen to this.
I want to read it to you.
Son of man, I've made thee a watchman
under the house of Israel.
Therefore, hear the word in my mouth and
give them warning from me.
When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt
surely die and thou givest him not warning
nor speakest to warn the wicked from his
wicked way to save his life.
The same wicked man shall die in his
iniquity, but his blood will I require at
thine hand.
And again, Son of man, when a righteous
man doth turn from his righteousness and commit
iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block, for
him he shall die because thou hast not
given him warning.
He shall die in his sins, but his
blood will I require at thine hand.
Think how terrible this is.
And yet we can dare to think these
holy thoughts and mingle them with money and
popularity and what people think and what they'll
say.
Well, then next is the overwhelming responsibility of
the hearer, condescension of God that he should
make his word known through preaching and the
mighty obligation that lies on the preacher and
the overwhelming responsibility it lays upon the hearer.
What puts the hearer under such obligation?
Source of the message, for one thing, God
said this, the most high God, Son of
man, I said this, go tell them I
said this, the God in whose hand you're
held and the God out of whose hand
you'll tumble into hell or in whose hand
you'll rise to heaven.
Son of man, go tell them I said.
Think of this message itself, a message of
eternal, eternal deliverance with approaching death and judgment.
This is the terrible, wonderful, glorious, awe-inspiring
message which the simplest, humblest preacher that gets
up and humbly gives a little interpretation of
John 3, 16.
Maybe he's never gone any further than that.
Maybe that's as far as he's gone, but
he does his best with the elementary things
of the gospel.
But he's God's man anyhow.
And it puts the preacher, it puts the
hearer under obligation.
Remember one thing, my brethren, nobody's done with
a sermon when the benediction's pronounced.
Nobody, nobody's finished with a sermon when the
preacher said, and now lastly, amen.
Nobody, nobody's finished with a sermon.
The hearer may sleep, and some do.
And the hearer may scorn, and some do.
The hearer may resist, and some do, and
reject, and others do.
But he'll face his responsibility certainly, surely, in
that great day.
He'll face his responsibility.
Do you realize you're children of eternity?
Do you realize that you're not born to
die once?
Down here, you're forever, you will rise again
in heaven or hell.
And you'll face up to things.
I don't know how they do it now,
and if this doesn't conform to what you
younger men know about the services, why, you'll
believe that I'm accurate anyhow, because I remember
this very well.
They did it with that first World War.
They took young rookies in, around 21.
I think they didn't at that time take
anybody in under 21.
And a young man went in at 21,
and I saw them.
There they would come out of the woods,
out of the factories, out of the coal
mines, out of the offices.
I remember washing dishes alongside of a professor
of chemistry in university.
And I was, I don't know what.
But there he was.
We were washing dishes together, he and I
back and forth.
Well, they took them all sorts.
And some of them, of course, being Americans.
When some sergeant told them what to do,
they said, you and who else?
America, you know, that's American.
And then they'd be taken in, and they
would say, now line up here, and they'd
all line up.
And then an officer with some kind of
affairs here on his shoulder to give it
a punch, would stand up and read what
they call the Articles of War.
And the Articles of War, I don't remember,
or I think I couldn't recite a phrase
of it.
But what it meant in essence was this.
Your country is now at war with an
enemy.
And whatever you do from here on will
be considered as having been done in time
of war.
And any crime you commit in the Army
of the United States under war conditions is
stepped up in its intensity, in its degree
of guilt and the punishment that much the
greater.
Articles of War.
And when a young fellow who wasn't used
to being pushed around fought back, they said,
have you heard the Articles of War?
And if he said no, they said, all
right, come on, they took him over and
let him read the Articles of War.
If he'd heard it, he went to the
guardhouse.
Depends on whether we have or haven't heard.
And so there's an awful lot that this
illustrates.
Let me read again from this same chapter.
Listen to this.
Yet, son of man, if thou warn the
wicked, and ye turn not from his wickedness,
nor from his wicked way, he shall die
in his iniquity, but thou hast delivered thy
soul.
He's heard the Articles of War.
He knows how serious it is now.
He's not an innocent donny in the valley
there stark naked.
He's now a man who's been in some
measure illuminated.
He knows how serious the charge of God
is.
And he shall die in his iniquity.
And over here, nevertheless, if thou warn the
righteous man that the righteous sin not, and
he does not sin, he shall surely live
because he's warned.
Also thou has delivered thy soul.
There you have the two sides of the
same mighty coin.
The preacher with his obligation to tell and
the hearer with his obligation to hear.
Think of the overwhelming responsibility of the hearer.
Not the hearer of Billy Graham or Paul
Reese or Robert G.
Lee or any of the great preachers, but
the obligation to hear the simplest preacher that
preaches today in Chicago United Mission or Pacific
Garden or any hall, storefront hall down the
avenue.
The simplest man who gets up and under
the anointing of God dares to tell the
whole truth.
He lays an overwhelming obligation upon the hearer
to do something about it.
So I say, God have mercy on us
all.
God have mercy on preacher who fails.
God have mercy on that son of man,
that prophet called of God who thinks more
of his home and his car and his
salary and his comforts than he does of
the souls of man.
God have mercy on that cowardly man who
edits out the offensive things out of the
doctrine for fear some hierarchy will rebuke him
or you'll get a reputation for not being
sound.
If any of you young men are going
to be preachers, let me tell you, you
can live down reputations that would kill some
people.
You just want to do it.
They'll say first, you don't believe in eternal
security.
Therefore, you're too bad for you.
Later on, they'll forget that or they won't
know whether you do or not.
And or they'll say that you don't believe
in dispensationalism.
And they'll give you the cold shoulder for
a while.
And the Holy Ghost comes on you and
you get blessed and you bless people and
the people begin to demand you.
And then those that are trying to stand
in your way, they can't stand in your
way anymore.
And so they accept you, pat your back
and say, well, I don't see it quite
with you, but OK, you don't have to
be afraid in America.
Now, there are some places that I suppose
it'd be dangerous to stand for all the
truth, but certainly not in the United States.
We've got enough of the blood of our
Puritan ancestors in us yet and enough of
the blood of the rebel in us that
we don't have to be afraid.
Well, God have mercy on us preachers and
the preachers who fail.
I think of the time I've wasted and
the time I've used wrongly.
I'm not looking forward to the coming of
Christ with as much hilarity as some people
do.
I've heard sermons preached by men.
Cold as ice.
But they were trying to show with what
great joy they'd meet him.
I hope they do.
But I don't look forward to his coming
personally with anything like assurance.
And I consider as a man called of
God when I was 17 years old and
had all these years and how much of
it I've wasted and what a poor wretch
of a preacher I am compared with what
I could have been if I had obeyed
God.
Son of man, says the Holy Ghost, I'll
require his blood at your hands.
And then, God have mercy on the hearers
who ignore, who take for granted who like
a skillful batter have learned to hit every
offering the pitcher makes.
They're used to him now.
They know every curve.
They can hit him every time.
And there are, after you've preached to people
long enough, they either get used to it
or get right with God and get blessed
or else they learn all your curves and
they stand up there and bat him back
to you.
Nothing gets passed.
God helps such hearers who ignore, who toss
every offering back to you and who refuse
to be affected by it.
I can't get over this statement I quoted
the other day by a brother here who
said some people won't let you help them.
It's a terrible thing.
Some people just won't let you help them
and no matter who comes, they won't let
you help them.
Son of man, preach to them.
Either they will or they won't, but whether
they will or they won't, you're free.
And if they will, then they'll be delivered.
If they won't, then they shall die in
their sin.
How terrible both for the man who speaks
and the man who hears.
God help us all.
You teachers, help us all.
It's more than standing up before a few
squirming people.
It's holding holy things in our hands and
we'll all have to give account in the
day of Jesus Christ.
God help us all.
Amen.