Members of the Official Board of the Church,
please meet me down here.
Now the difference between a classic and anything
less than a classic is that that which
is less than a classic gets tiring after
you hear it a good many times, a
few times.
But the classic never wears out.
It's good anywhere, anytime, and continues through the
years.
And though heard over and over, never loses
the freshness of its youth.
I mention this because I want to read
again, for I guess about the fifth time,
that beautiful passage from which I've been preaching
lately.
Titus 2, beginning at 11th verse.
The 11th verse.
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation
to all men hath appeared, teaching us that,
denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world,
looking for that blessed hope and the glorious
appearing of the great God and our Savior,
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that
he might redeem us from all iniquity and
purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of
good works.
These things speak and exhort and rebuke with
all authority, and let no man despise thee.
Our Savior Jesus Christ.
You see, we have dealt with the earlier
part of this passage, so we begin with
the last line of verse 13.
It's the last line in my Bible.
Our Savior Jesus Christ.
I read the other day, and the children
of this world are often wiser in their
generation than the children of light, and I
read the other day by a Polish writer
who was writing about communism, that is, he
was writing about, he had escaped from it
and was writing against it, but not from
a Christian standpoint.
He was a child of this world with
such light as a child of this world
may be expected to have, an unusual degree
of it, for he was an unusually brilliant
man.
And he said this, that the only teaching
worthwhile is that which is valid in the
face of imminent death.
He said that because he had been, and
mentioned others who had been at times, faced
with instant death.
And he was forced to say, what do
I believe now?
Here, death's facing me.
It may be a matter of three heartbeats
away.
What is this that I believe?
And he said, no teaching's worth your time
unless it stands solid and true and valid,
faced with immediate death.
I mention this because I begin with the
words, our Savior Jesus Christ.
And I'd like to guess, if I might
be allowed, how many have faced imminent death
with these great, beautiful, meaningful, strong words
in their mouths?
Our Savior Jesus Christ.
If you knew that death was three heartbeats
away, or five or seven, I'm sure you
wouldn't try to remember what the Greek baptizo
was, and what form of baptism was the
proper one.
I'm sure that it would make very little
difference to you whether the Presbyterian or the
Episcopal form of government or the Congregational were
the right form of government.
I'm sure that there would be an infinite
number of things that clutter up your spiritual
thinking now that would fall away from you
instantly if you knew that death was a
heartbeat away.
But there's one thing I'm sure that you'd
cling to and repeat over and over and
over until you could repeat it no more.
Our Savior Jesus Christ.
I know you'd want to say those words
because they're valid under any circumstance, you see.
Those words are good any time, young or
old.
Our Savior Jesus Christ.
Beautiful, wonderful words.
Then Paul goes on to say, who gave
himself for us.
Who gave himself for us.
Now we may learn the value of a
thing by the price men are willing to
pay for it.
That is, we may learn its value to
the individual who's procuring it.
I remember when Charles E.
Dawes, the great American general, was vice president.
I'm not sure he was vice president at
that time, but he had been vice president,
or was, of the United States.
And that was the least thing he did.
He was a great general in the First
World War.
And I remember what he said when they
were, they had him before some kind of
a committee accusing him, or at least inquiring,
why he had paid such vast, huge prices
for horses in France.
And he settled the whole business and set
his inquisitors back on their heels by this
abrupt expression.
He said, I'd have paid horse prices for
sheep if they could have pulled my guns
where I wanted them.
It wasn't a question of how big the
horse was.
It was a question of a desperate and
critical need.
And though he did pay huge and exorbitant
prices for French horses, he used those French
horses to win a war.
And he said, I'd have paid that much
for sheep if they'd have done the job
for me.
Now what I'm trying to illustrate is this,
that a need, a value, determines a price
you'll pay for a thing.
Even though a man is wrong in his
appraisal, personally I think that we human beings
have set a wrong value on jewelry.
I think, for instance, that we've set a
wrong value on diamonds.
A piece of glass can't be told across
the room from a diamond.
And yet the difference that runs up into
the hundreds of thousands of dollars in some
instances is because we have set an arbitrary
value upon jewelry.
I don't mind people wearing it.
I don't own any except this thing to
hold my tie down so I won't flap
around when I get to preaching.
But outside of that I have many and
don't want it, but I think that we
have set wrong values on things.
But the illustration still holds.
We can tell how precious a thing is
to a man or woman by how much
they're willing to pay for it.
We can learn that.
And so when it says here, he gave
himself for us, we learn how dear we
are and were to Christ.
Remember when we say are about Christ or
were about Christ, whether we're using the past,
present, or future tense, we're using all the
tenses there are.
Because Jesus Christ, being himself very God of
very God, embodies in himself all the tenses
there are.
Or better still, he has no tense.
There is no yesterday and today and tomorrow
with Christ.
There is a yesterday and tomorrow and today
with us.
The Bible says Jesus Christ the same yesterday,
today, and forever.
But it's not talking about his yesterday and
today and forever.
It's talking about ours.
We have a yesterday and really not a
very much of a yesterday.
The oldest one of us has a much
of a yesterday compared, say, with a mud
turtle or a crow or a sequoia tree
in California.
We have a much of yesterday, but we've
got a little yesterday.
We have a today, which is getting away
from us fast, and we have an eternal
tomorrow.
So that our yesterday and today and tomorrow
are valid.
But when we apply that to God and
Christ, we invalidate the meaning of it.
For we cannot say that God was, or
would you do me the favor of taking
more water to run me these days.
But one of these times I'll pull out
of this laryngitis and it'll be all right.
Where was I?
That Jesus our Lord has no tenses because
all that he is, he ever was, and
all that he ever was, he ever will
be.
So when we say how precious we were
to Jesus, we mean how precious we are
to Jesus.
And when we say how precious we are
to Jesus, we mean how precious we will
always be to Jesus.
For I, the Lord, change not.
Thank you.
I, the Lord, change not.
Now we can learn how precious we are
to Christ by how much he was willing
to give for us.
What was the price that he paid?
For don't forget that all through the Bible,
Old Testament and New, and particularly in the
New, the idea of redemption is found.
The idea of the paying, the giving of
value for value, the giving of price for
something precious.
And Jesus Christ gave, says the Holy Ghost
here, gave himself for us.
What was he willing to give for us?
Let's look back at the book, say, of
Colossians.
No, Philippians.
Look back at Philippians.
He says, Jesus Christ, 2nd chapter, 5th verse.
Jesus Christ, who being in the form of
God, thought it not robbery to be equal
with God.
Oh Lord, in the form of God, in
the beginning was the word, and the word
was God, and the word was with God.
Thou, oh Lord, art the eternal word, the
eternal Son begotten of the Father before all
worlds by the mystery of eternal generation.
Wilt thou then, oh Lord, give up this
mystery and wonder even for a while that
men might be redeemed?
He answers, yes.
He considered it not something to be held
on to, but made himself of no reputation.
By becoming for a time less than God,
he made himself of a reputation less than
God, and thus to him of no reputation.
Oh Lord, how far will you go?
I will take upon me the form of
a servant.
He had been before in the position of
the master.
Now he stoops to the position of the
servant.
But how much more will you pay for
men, oh Lord?
The answer is, he will be made in
the likeness of man.
And how more, Lord, for the price is
going up.
He will be found in fashion as a
man, and even then he will humble himself.
Not only be a man, but be a
humbled man.
Not a humble man only, but a humbled
man.
And how much more wilt thou pay, oh
Lord?
I will become obedient unto death.
But all of the sons of men are
obedient unto death.
Yes, but for their sakes I choose the
worst death that ever was invented, death of
the cross.
So that is how much he paid for
us.
And the scripture says then, Jesus, our Savior
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, and
who advertised to all the intelligent universe how
precious we are to him by how much
he was willing to give for us.
Now if you're ever tempted to think little
of yourself, I want you to know that
it's never a godly thing to do.
I want you to know that if you're
puffed up and think you amount to anything,
then that's wrong.
I want you to know if you overlook
your sin and imagine you're good, that's wrong.
I want you to know that if you
are inclined to compare yourself with another and
put yourself above that other, that's wrong.
And all these wrongs should be repented of
and amended so they don't occur anymore in
your life.
But this idea of voiding our preciousness and
writing down our value and putting a price
tag on us that's cheap, cross out the
value that used to be and put a
lower one on, that never occurs in the
Bible anywhere, never.
When God wants to talk about man's weakness,
he says that man's breath is in his
nostrils.
When he wants to talk about how little
time he's here below, he says that time
like an ever-rolling stream bears all its
sons away, and that a thousand years in
God's sight are but as yesterday when it
is past.
When God wants to talk about how weak
we are, he recalls us grass and says
we're like the grass that groweth up.
But never anywhere in the Bible does God
say anything derogatory about the nature of man.
For the scripture says, so God created man
in his own image, in the image of
God created he him, male and female created
he them.
And the passage we read from James this
morning said, why curse ye man who was
made in the similitude of God.
That is why it is so sinful to
call a man a fool or to say
raka, because it is heaping contempt upon man.
And remember that there isn't an order of
angels before the throne of God that is
as high as man will be when God
is through with him.
Remember that there isn't a cherubim nor seraphim,
there isn't a creature before the shining throne
of God that gazes upon the sea of
glass.
But what must be beneath man when God
is through with man?
For God has made man in his image,
and when man sinned, turned around and made
himself in man's image, that he might thus
duly and forever unite Godhood and manhood, Godhead
and manhood, so that man is the creature
nearest to God, nearest equal to God of
all the beings that fill the vast universe.
So if you imagine that you're humble by
thinking little of yourself, you're all wrong.
Why callest thou unclean that which God called
clean?
Why callest thou worthless that which God called
worthy of giving himself to die for it?
No, no.
We must remember how dear we are to
Christ by what he gave for us, and
he gave himself for us.
Why did he give himself?
It says, the next phrase, to redeem us
from all iniquity.
Iniquity was our problem, you see.
We were caught in the meshes of iniquity,
and he gave himself to redeem us from
all iniquity.
Notice the prepositions, and they're actually there, not
in but from.
He shall save his people from their sins.
Let me repeat, and I've said it I
guess a thousand times, that any interpretation of
New Testament Christianity that allows sin a place
in the human life is a false interpretation.
Let me remind you once more that any
interpretation of mercy or grace or justification by
faith that allows any kind of sin, external
or internal, to live unrebuked, unforsaken, and unrepented
of, is a travesty on the gospel of
Christ and not the true gospel at all.
He gave himself, and the price was himself,
that he might redeem us and purify unto
himself.
Purify.
Now the one deep disease of the world,
you know, is impurity.
And by impurity we mean anything that is
unlike God.
Sexual misconduct, yes, but that's only one one
facet of this impurity.
Contentiousness is another.
There are some people that you can't say,
it's a nice morning, isn't it?
But what they will say, no I don't
think it is, and start an argument.
If you compliment, they will start an argument.
And no matter what you say, they're contentious.
I've met that kind of contentious people.
They live in the world by the mercy
of the people who aren't contentious, and they
imagine themselves wonderful when they're merely the recipients
of an almost infinite amount of patience on
the part of people who would like to
tramp on them but won't.
And so these contentious people are impure people.
Then there are hatreds, hatreds of every sort.
That's impurity.
Gluttony is impurity, and slothfulness is impurity.
The lazy person is impure, or the person
who works only that he can play is
impure.
Self-indulgence is another form of impurity.
Pride is another form.
Egoism is another form.
Self-pity and resentfulness and churlishness, I have
named only a few, but all that is
not of God, this is all impurity.
And the work of Christ is to purify
a people.
Now remember it, my brethren.
You can quote scripture by the yard, but
if you haven't been purified by the fire
of the Holy Ghost and the blood of
the Lamb, you are of all men most
miserable because you will find in that day
that you will be rejected from the presence
of the Lord, because it will not be
your beliefs so much as the state of
your heart that will tell where you go
in that day.
Though your beliefs will certainly take you to
a purity, the work of Christ is to
a people by blood and by fire, and
to rid them of these things.
The churlish Christian excuses it and calls it
by some other name.
The resentful Christian says he's nervous, but he
walks around with a chip on his shoulder,
and I have been informed that if you
find a chip on his shoulder, it's very
likely to have come off of the block
further up.
But resentfulness and self-pity and egotism and
pride, all these we are to be purified
from.
And if we had as many Bible teachers
busy proving or trying to teach how pure
Christians can become as we do, trying to
teach that they can't become pure, we would
have a better church than we have.
Now he says here he purifies unto himself
a peculiar people.
A peculiar people.
Let's look at that a little bit, that
word, peculiar.
Well, that word has been used, it's gotten
into the hands of the enemy, and it's
been used to cloak some very weird goings
on in this, in the Christian church.
But the word has no connotation of strange
or irrational or queer or ridiculous or foolish.
No, Jesus Christ was the perfect example, and
he walked among men with utmost rationality.
Everything he did was as logical and as
clear and salty and sane as a sunshine
on the grass of a June morning.
Jesus our Lord was the perfect example of
a mind that was poised and balanced and
symmetrical and in perfect adjustment to itself.
And yet, of course, he was our example.
He was our sample man.
And he never did or said anything or
left anything unsaid that would cause the raising
of an eyebrow or the wondering if he
might not be quite there.
Now they said he had the devil because
he healed the sick on the Sabbath day,
the false teachers, and those who were, who
believed in commandments instead of people, who loved
law instead of men, those who loved texts
in place of children, and those who would
rather take the evil woman and hurl her
into hell than sear forgiven, they, of course,
said he had the devil.
But read, if you will, all four Gospels
and see, not one instance did Jesus do
or say anything that was not sane and
salty and completely normal and right.
So those who do irrational things in the
name of the Lord have their own selves
to blame.
And those who are queer and ridiculous and
foolish and then then flippantly say I'm a
fool for Christ's sake, they're not.
You know, you can't do anything you want
to do and say I'd do it for
Christ's sake and make it all right.
Keep that in mind, brother.
You can only do for Christ's sake that
which Christ told you to do.
You cannot do what you've decided to do
and then make it good by saying it's
for Christ's sake.
That is offering a swine on the altar
of the Lord and it'll be rejected abruptly
by great God Almighty.
So let's remember that Christians are not to
be weirdies, strange people, oddballs, not at all
in any sense of the word.
But what does the word peculiar mean here?
Well, it means the same thing in Greek
as it does in Hebrew, so the scholars
tell us.
And it's found in Hebrew, Exodus 19 5,
thou shalt be a peculiar treasure unto me
above all people, he told Israel, a peculiar
treasure unto me above all people.
If you'll allow me, indulge me again, my
own family laughs at me, but if you'll
allow me, this afternoon, God willing, about 1
.30, I'll see a little boy, five years
old, blondie, blue-eyed, no, brown-eyed, blond.
His name is Paul and he's my grandson.
And I'll see him.
Well, if we both live that long.
Now there's a boy, really, there's a boy.
And you know, there isn't anything peculiar about
him.
He is sensible, sane, good natured, poised, balanced,
symmetrical in his character so far as a
five-year-old can be.
And he's already learning to read and he's
a wild mathematics and can connect with a
ball every time it's tossed to him.
And he's just a boy.
And there's nothing peculiar about him at all.
If he was playing on the lawn with
a half a dozen other boys, you wouldn't
pick him out.
Except, of course, he's better looking, but you
wouldn't pick him out.
He would, he'd just be one more boy
there playing on the lawn.
And yet to his father and mother and
to us at our house, he's a peculiar
boy.
Why?
Because he's peculiarly ours.
I saw him when he was just a
few hours old in the hospital, a terrible
homely looking mess of something or other there.
And then, but now he's blossomed into a
grand boy.
Well, now he's peculiar.
How is he peculiar?
A little off?
No.
Because he acts queer?
No.
He's peculiar because he belongs to us.
He is ours, as God said of Israel,
a peculiar treasure unto me above all people.
And every mother knows what I'm talking about.
Every mother knows her little crow is the
blackest.
And every cat knows her kittens are the
softest.
And every father knows his son is the
sharpest and his grandson the brightest.
Everybody knows that.
A peculiar treasure unto me.
Love has made you mine in a way
that logic can't explain.
That you have to feel it to know
it.
And so that same word peculiar came on
over into the Greek and then into our
English, that same word.
The same meaning, I mean, a peculiar treasure.
Etymologically, it means shut up to me as
my spatial jewel.
Imagine that.
Shut up to me as my spatial jewel.
I have you under my hand as my
spatial jewel.
Buddy Robinson used to say, that dear old
saint, one of the few modern saints that
I've ever known, Buddy Robinson said that the
Lord holds him in the hollow of his
hand and every once in a while raises
his hand a little and says, are you
all right, buddy?
Now that was Robinson's simple childlike way of
telling what a butler or a Calvin or
a Wesley would have cloaked in great heavy
resonant resounding English phrases.
But Buddy just simplified it.
Moody had a way of doing that too.
Take some great profound doctrine and simplify it.
Well now that's what it all means.
That the Lord has us as his peculiar
treasure and he is purifying unto himself a
people to be his as spatial jewels.
And yet Israel in the Old Testament, they
were different, but they were not different in
a queer or ridiculous way.
When Daniel, say, went to Babylon, he was
different.
Daniel wouldn't eat the meat of the Babylonians.
And Daniel prayed several times a day facing
toward Jerusalem if that made him mentally disturbed.
Nowadays, you know, they'd have sent out a
booklet on that and they'd have said that
that mental health outfit would have wanted to
take Daniel up on that because he prayed
three times a day facing toward Jerusalem.
But was there anything crazy about that?
No.
Daniel simply recognized a higher loyalty than Babylonian
kings.
And he stayed by that loyalty even to
be cast into the den of lions.
And so in the New Testament, Christians are
God's spatial jewels marked out for him to
be peculiar but not queer, to be peculiar
but not ridiculous, to be peculiar but not
foolish.
And yet they are different.
They are different.
Somebody told me he'd heard a sermon on
the air recently where some preacher, I suppose
he was a young preacher, I hope he
was, God forgive him if he was over
21, but he preached anyhow and said, so
people think to become a Christian you've got
to be a square, but I tell you,
you don't have to be different to be
a Christian.
Oh brother, if he had said five times
five equals 99 and three fourths, he couldn't
have been any wronger than he was.
To be a peculiar treasure unto God does
make you different.
And you do live differently.
You have a higher loyalty and you'll recognize
the right of God to tell you how
to live.
And men's philosophies come and go.
Religions come and go.
Quasi-revivals come and go.
Healing campaigns come and go.
And new ideas come and go.
And scientific notions come and go.
And all the time this Christian has got
his in focus the heart of God and
he's living just alike the way he had
been, going on doing the will of God
and recognizing only one final loyalty.
Thrones and crowns may perish, kingdoms rise and
wane, but the church of Jesus constant shall
remain.
And that constancy is because of her.
She's got God in her focus.
And so other things come and go.
They're like the winds that blow and the
storms that come and pass, but we go
on.
That makes us different, but doesn't make us
foolish.
It makes us right.
Put one sane man in a ward where
everybody else is in a bad, advanced state
of paranoia, and the one man who looks
right and is right will look wrong.
H.
G.
Wells wrote a book called The Country of
the Blind.
Just a simple little story, and it was
just to tell, to bring before his readers
an idea.
A man fell into a little valley somewhere
where people had no eyes.
And he of course had eyes.
And there among these blind people who had
learned to live without eyes, they were scientists
and philosophers and poets and all the rest,
without eyes.
And he had eyes.
And it wasn't very long until they were
preparing to operate on him to get rid
of those strange perturbances that were just beneath
his eyebrow because they said it made him
act queer and say queer things.
But his queerness was his own sight.
He saw and therefore he was different from
those who did not see.
And so a Christian is one who sees.
And because he sees, some people who don't
see say he's all wrong.
But when God says he makes a peculiar
people, he doesn't mean that he makes a
lot of ridiculous and queer people.
He merely makes them his, peculiarly his, shut
up unto him.
And of course the world won't like them
because they're his.
Lastly, zealous of good works.
These peculiar people, they sing loudly, but they
give generously.
They pray long, but they work hard.
Zealous of good works.
The Bible knows nothing of armchair Christians.
The Bible knows nothing of ivory tower Christianity.
I maybe could mention this.
Just within the last two weeks, I've had
a least partial offer.
And if I cultivate a little bit, it
would become a valid offer.
From a foundation with 13 million dollars in
it, to be turned out to pastor like
a fine old horse that has seen his
day and just write and have my time.
Just do nothing but accept a big salary
and just be retired to write and have
fun.
I'll give you three guesses whether I'm going
to accept it or not.
An ivory tower Christian.
For me to move out among the blue
birds and sit with an electric typewriter
in an air-conditioned study done in knotty
pine, you couldn't sell me that, my brother.
You couldn't give it to me.
You couldn't get me to take it.
I'm not for sale.
And furthermore, if I lived, I don't suppose
I'd live very long at that rate, but
if I lived even a year, I'd become
an ivory tower suburbanite.
A Christian that just couldn't live unless I
was looking on green things and that just
have to have a bird song in order
to be happy.
No, my brother, the Bible teaches that we
are to be zealous of good works.
I talked last evening to a woman.
I don't know too much about her and
I'm not setting her up as an example,
but she was here at our meeting and
her husband told me of how in the
pursuance of her work, she goes to all
these areas north of here into places where
it looks dangerous for anybody to be.
He said, she's got faith, Reverend.
She's got faith.
She goes in anywhere.
He said, she's afraid of nothing.
She was a little afraid, but she went.
And yet she belongs to a congregational church
somewhere in the suburbs.
But she comes in where the need is
and goes from home to home.
And I say, God purifies unto himself a
people peculiarly precious to him.
And while they're down here, they're going to
be zealous of good works.
Now the church can silence her critics by
good works and she can silence him no
other way.
Take doctrine and they'll turn your doctrine against
you.
Quote scripture and they'll say that isn't the
right translation.
You can silence your critics only by godliness
and good works.
And nobody can argue down godliness and good
works.
The devil himself wouldn't try it.
He wouldn't try it.
He knows better.
Godliness and good works shut the mouths of
everybody.
They may take you out and hang you,
but they'll respect you while you die.
Godliness and good works.
And yet not to be seen of men,
but to imitate our Lord who went about
doing good and healing all that were oppressed
of the devil.
So we have it again, this beautiful passage
that can't be worn out.
Our savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for
us, that he might redeem us from iniquity
and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous
of good works.
Then Paul adds these words.
I don't know why they're here, but they're
here.
These things speak and exhort and rebuke with
all authority and don't let anybody despise you.
Amen.