Here at the old time camp meeting, amen.
I tell you, I still like camp meeting.
I like revivals in churches and stuff like
this, but there's just something about the camp
meeting atmosphere that I sure like, amen.
It's just like you can just come as
you are, just get in there and just
shout and praise the Lord, amen.
Don't feel cramped in the spirit, amen.
And so we're going to have a special
song for you today.
This is one of our friends and neighbor,
don't live right up the road from us,
and he's going to sing a good song
that I'll tell you I really love.
Lately I've got leaving on my mind, amen.
And so I want to dedicate that to
each one of you.
Maybe you're having trials and tribulations and maybe
sickness and might be out of work or
maybe you might be a pastor, having trouble
at your church, maybe with a deacon or
somebody like that, and I'm sure you can
say the same thing, amen.
Boy, I've got leaving on my mind, just
getting out of here, bless God, and just
going on to be with the Lord.
That's the way we feel so many times.
And then since the bombing of the World
Trade Center, then I got a great message
in there, a timely message by one of
the old war horses that preached all of
them down this country we love very dearly,
and he's home now with the Lord, amen.
Now, but I'll tell you what his message
still rings on, amen.
It's Dr. Vance Havner preaching on where is
America headed, amen.
And so I hope and pray that you
will enjoy this.
Now listen, we love you folks, and thank
you so much for being a part of
this.
And please, if you ever think about it
sometime, sit down and jot us a letter
and let us know what you think about
the meeting.
Will you do that for us?
And God bless you and I hope, pray
God, we'll do something real special for you
this service of the year.
My good friends, again, lately I've got leaving
on my mind, and then Dr. Vance Havner
preaching on where is America headed.
May God bless you now.
Brother John.
That we put on the first part of
the year has run down a little.
And maybe by now we're putting away the
decorations and taking down the banners and lowering
the flags, and life will get back to
abnormal.
Somebody said birthdays tell how long you've been
on the road, but they don't tell how
far you've traveled.
And the big question is how far has
America traveled and where is America going and
where are we going, because we are America.
It is not my wish to paint any
brighter halo around our founding fathers than they
deserve.
I know that they were not perfect men.
There was a mixture of the faith of
the pilgrims and the philosophy of Tom Paine,
Christian faith and deism and purity and austerity
and the perfectibility of man.
We did not inherit an unmixed blessing, but
God overruled it, and they did lay the
foundations with the recognition of providence in the
affairs of man.
Today America stands alone in a hostile world,
a world that marvels at the way we
are hanging ourselves with our own rope.
Corruption in government, the breakdown of the home,
pagan education, and moral putrefaction.
I used to say that civilization is going
to the dogs, but quit that out of
respect for dogs.
There are plenty of people today doing things
beneath the dignity of any dog, and I
wouldn't want to insult the canine kingdom by
any such remark.
Of course, all Americans were not going to
fair meetings before the Revolution.
There was sin and corruption aplenty, but most
of it was changed by the Great Awakening,
the revival that preceded the Revolution.
We ought to be commemorating that, but most
Americans don't even know that it happened and
couldn't care less.
Those 56 gallant men who pledged their lives
and fortunes and sacred honor to sign the
Declaration knew well that if it didn't work
it might mean hanging.
One of them, Harrison of Virginia, a heavy
man, turned to Geary of Massachusetts, a skinny
specimen like I am, and said, Well, we
may hang, but I'm heavy and will die
instantly, but I imagine you'll dangle around for
quite a while.
That was the spirit in which they signed
it.
Now there were some gentlemen there, the olive
branch men, who thought we ought to try
to have peaceful coexistence with George III, although
of course that term hadn't come into existence,
peace at any price.
And we still have their kind among us,
like the Israelites in Exodus, who said, We
were better off under Pharaoh.
We did have security, and you have it
today, and the better red than dead coat.
Everything is secondary to biological survival now.
The main thing is to stay alive.
Somebody asked a boy the other day, What
do you want to be when you grow
up?
And with Adam Balmes in mind, he said,
Alive.
Well, that's a pretty good wish.
Peace at any price, better than no peace.
Life at any price, better than no life,
they tell us.
We're willing today to risk our honor to
save our hides, and from the way things
are going, we may end up with neither
hides nor honor.
We tell the world that America is a
great place, with two chickens in every apartment,
two or three cars in every garage, and
a fair land of plastics and gadgets and
giveaway shows, and almost every other citizen living
on a handout from Washington.
If that's all we've got, we're out of
bay.
We ought to tell what it really means
to be an American, the price our fathers
paid in blood, sweat, and tears, to make
this the land of the free and the
home of the brave.
George Washington's foot soldiers didn't stain the snow
at Valley Forge just to create a politician's
paradise, and Abe Lincoln didn't work the floor
all night long at the White House to
pass the time away.
It cost the plenty to purchase this freedom,
and it may cost more to keep it.
It's no time to discuss our American birthright
and make light of our liberty.
One good way to appreciate this country is
visit some other one, and then come back.
I like it here, and some of these
gentlemen who say they like it better somewhere
else, I would be happy to accompany them
to New York and load them up in
a boat and wave after them just as
far as I could see them as they
depart for the land of their heart's desire.
We're living in an epidemic of mudslinging and
milk-raking and character assassination, and the assassins
are having a field day defaming both the
dead and the living.
At least vultures feed only on the dead.
Every great American from Paul Revere down has
been vilified and scandalized.
It has become a disease.
It's about time we had a kind word
about what is still good in this country
and what was good about our forefathers and
what is still right in the nation they
founded.
I don't intend to waste my time on
this smelly business of specializing in scandal.
It rubs off on you, for one thing,
and it's a waste of time.
A bulldog can whip a skunk anytime, but
it's not worth it.
And it all boils down to this, that
there'll never be a better America until we
have better Americans, and that means a better
breed than some of them are today.
How are we going to have patriotism and
honor and decency and integrity and morality and
character if we live as though there were
no king in Israel and every man can
do that which is not right but what
he wants to do?
In the last days, Woodrow Wilson, broken and
disillusioned, said, the sum of the matter is
that our civilization cannot survive materially if it
is not redeemed spiritually.
And Douglas MacArthur, in the latter part of
his days, said the problem is basically theological.
Now, that's a tremendous statement for a general
to make.
It must be of the spirit if we
are to save the flesh.
And I think it's significant that near the
end of their careers, one of America's top
statesmen and one of our greatest soldiers carried
the decision to the public that sounds like
a preacher talking, the problem is basically theological.
Now, there was read to you a moment
ago those words of our Lord, you shall
know the truth and the truth shall make
you free.
We're hearing a lot about freedom these days,
let freedom reign.
But although we hear sermons on this text,
it is really not right to take a
text that starts with the word and and
use it as a complete statement of what
God is trying to say in that particular
case.
And when Jesus said you shall know the
truth and the truth shall make you free,
that was the emancipation proclamation for all mankind.
But if you take it without its context,
just that one verse, you only have two
abstractions, truth and freedom.
The first word in that verse is and,
and so that makes us look up a
verse.
And he said ye shall know the truth
only if ye continue in my word, then
are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.
Now, don't you see what a difference that
makes?
It's like Romans 12, 1 and 2.
I hear preachers sometimes preach on be not
conformed to the world, but transformed by the
renewing of your mind, and that's good advice,
yes, and it's the word of God, but
the first word's and, and you need the
first verse.
I beseech you therefore that you present your
bodies a living sacrifice, and be not conformed
to the world, but transformed.
Now that's the whole message.
And if you go back still one verse
further up, we read that many believed on
Jesus when he said some of these things.
Our reverence was a superficial faith because a
few verses further down he called them the
children of the devil.
Just as in John 2 where I read
that many believed on him when they saw
his miracles, but he did not believe in
them.
It's the same word in the original.
They believed with a superficial faith, and Jesus
knew it was superficial because he knew what
was in man.
Now the sequence is this, if you get
it all, we believe, we continue in the
word, we become disciples, we know the truth,
and we are set free, and that's the
only way to freedom.
And so I would call it, if you
want to use alliteration, freedom through faith that
follows.
The Bible has a lot to say about
keeping this thing up once we make a
profession of faith.
If ye continue in my word, patient continuance,
whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty,
and continueth therein.
After the day of Pentecost, they didn't try
to stay on the mountaintop all the time.
They didn't try to go through this world
singing hallelujah and patting their feet all the
time.
They continued daily.
It has been said that nothing is more
harmful to spiritual experience than too many spiritual
experiences.
Now that may sound contradictory, but it isn't.
Paul went up to the third heaven and
he never could tell what he saw after
he got back.
A great trip, I suppose, and if some
folks had gone there, they would have got
it in Technicolor and got out posters and
gone everywhere lecturing on my trip to the
third heaven.
But God gave him a thorn in the
flesh to keep him from getting proud about
it, and he learned that the thing that
really matters is the sufficient grace of God
from day to day.
The New Testament doesn't have much to say
about special experiences.
Of course, nowadays we are hearing a great
deal about certain subjective experiences that seem to
take care of everything once and for all
and rule out much growth in grace.
We
read, And then the Great Commission.
And many times I have read it from
the pulpit and left out two words on
purpose.
Then I've asked the congregation what two words
did I leave out, and nowhere in this
country have I found more than three or
four who ever noticed a difference.
I don't know whether they weren't listening.
I thought we'd all know it by now,
but the two words are to observe, teaching
them to observe, to do it.
You haven't taught your class anything until you've
taught them to do it, and we haven't
learned anything until we've learned to do it.
Charles G.
Finney, the great revivalist, said, A revival is
a new beginning of obedience to God.
Now that sounds very trite, and there isn't
much to shout hallelujah about in that, but
that's what it is.
The revival isn't a lot of hooping and
hollering and folks joining the church.
It's a new decision to get right with
God and the people.
We need to restructure our thinking today, both
about the country and about the church.
We've had enough oratory and celebration.
It's time to be what we are.
We ought to be Americans.
The word American is an adjective and a
noun.
We say so-and-so's an American, that's
a noun.
We say he's an American man, that's an
adjective.
And the same thing is true of the
word Christian.
It's time to be what we are and
be Christian Christians.
Jesus didn't say, Be the soul of the
earth.
He said, That's what you are.
He didn't say, Be the light of the
world.
He said, That's what you are.
He didn't say, Be my witnesses.
He said, You are my witnesses.
If we ever have another real revival, it'll
be spearheaded by a persecuted minority, scorning the
values of this world and living by rigid
discipline.
Anybody can look well at a dress parade.
Too many of the saints today are out
to wear medals and not scars.
And too much of Americanism and too much
Christianity is like the Reubenites over there in
the Book of Judges when Deborah and Barak
won the battle and the tribe of Reuben
stayed at home.
They were patriotic, but they didn't go to
the battle.
And as the context bears out, they played
little tunes on their shepherds' pipes and didn't
hear the trumpet call to battle.
And sometimes watched Sunday morning crowds of well
-fed, well-clad, well-housed church members saying,
The Son of God goes forth to war.
Honored Christian soldiers, hard to resist the desire
to march down through the crowd and say,
Now hold everything.
That's good.
But just what battles have you been in?
Are you wearing medals or scars?
Amy Carmichael had it right.
You haven't followed Jesus far.
If you have no wound, no scar.
Last winter I was down in Florida preaching
for about 10 weeks in a row.
I was out at Shell Point at Fort
Myers, a lovely retirement center.
And on Sunday morning there was an old
general, 88 years of age, who came to
the service and then he came over to
talk with me one afternoon.
He was a walking encyclopedia of information.
He'd known every president since Theodore Roosevelt.
He'd been a general with Patton in the
Second World War.
And he told a story that I can't
shake off.
He said in the Battle of Normandy I
was standing with Patton and it had really
been tough.
He said here came about 30-odd boys
who had been all shot up.
And some of them would die in just
a little while.
He said the general went over to them
and said, Boys, how are you?
And everyone who could get his hand up
to his head saluted.
And they all said, Fine, General.
And most of them nearly dead.
He said we walked away from there, and
I noticed he didn't say anything and I
didn't say anything.
And finally I looked out of the corner
of my eye and the tears were streaming
down his face.
They called him Old Blood and Guts, but
that got him.
And when I read that, I wonder if
we're growing that kind of Christians today, not
just the Christmas and Easter kind, the Sunday
morning kind, fair-weather saints.
Long ago an old warrior wrote to a
young recruit, Thou therefore endure hardness as a
good soldier Jesus tries.
He knew what he was talking about because
he had been all shot up.
Five times beaten with 39 strikes, three times
beaten with rods once stoned, three times shipwrecked,
the night and the day and the deep,
perils of waters, of robbers, my own countrymen,
perils by the heathen of the city and
the wilderness and the sea and false brethren,
weariness, painfulness, and watchings, often hunger, thirst, fastings,
cold and nakedness, and beside all this the
care of the church is not enough to
kill anybody by itself.
And with all of that, he could still
say, I fought a good fight, I finished
the course, I've kept the faith.
I've been faithful to the fight, I've been
faithful to the faith, and I've been faithful
to the finish.
And I'm looking for my reward.
And he sat in a Roman jail.
He wasn't writing his memoirs in a villa
down on the French Riviera.
He was in a jail in the middle
of Rome, waiting to have his head shot,
though.
He had stocks and bonds, oh yes, stocks
for his feet and bonds around his wrists.
And he looked to Timothy and said, Bring
that old coat of mine and my books.
That's about all he had.
And yet I think if Almighty God had
called over the parapets of heaven and said,
How are you doing, Paul?
I'd leave you dissoluted and said, Fine, Lord.
My friends, the taste of this business is
not enough.
We need to get into it.
And the taste of this business is whether
you're just a good soldier when the bands
are playing and the bugles are blowing and
the flags are waving.
But when the fighting is at its hottest
and your comrades are being killed around you,
and you're battling with the stub of a
sword, and all men forsake you.
When the great General Coles, and we do
have a great General, and the other day
a chaplain said he was with MacArthur on
Corregidor, and he said the General attended every
service I held.
And one day I congratulated him on it,
and General MacArthur said, I'm the commanding General
here, but one of these days I'll not
be here.
I shall have gone the way of all
flesh, here today and gone tomorrow.
He said, Chaplain, you are not serving that
kind of a General.
You are serving no ordinary four-star General.
You are serving the seven-star General described
in the book of Revelation, who has seven
stars in his right hand, who is alive
forevermore, and whose kingdom endures forever.
That's your General.
And when that seven-star General calls down
to us and says, How are you doing?
I wonder if you're able to say everything's
all right, Lord.
There are a lot of things I don't
understand.
But the strife will not be long.
Today the noise of battle, and the next
the victor's song.
And this is a strange war we're in
as Christians.
It's already been won.
Jesus won it, you know, on the cross
and out of the open grave.
Our water is back this way.
We're just engaged in mopping up operations.
But it's still a fight of faith, and
it's a time for renewed pledges of allegiance,
and it's about time.
There are too many faded documents and declarations
grown dim.
Not only the Declaration of Independence.
They're doing their best to preserve it, and
it's barely legible, as you know.
Even John Hancock's bold signature will fade in
time.
But the worst of it is not the
fading of a paper.
We're forgetting its original intent and ultimate purpose.
We need some new editions of it in
human flesh.
And then there are too many marriage certificates
that are losing their significance.
I had a million divorces last year in
this land.
The other day I heard of two old
folks in a restaurant.
She couldn't hear well, and he thought he'd
cheer her up, and he said, I'm proud
of you.
She said, eh?
He said, I'm proud of you.
She said, I didn't get it.
He said, I said I'm proud of you.
And she said, I'm proud of you too.
Now there are too many that are tired
of each other today.
I don't know.
I wonder if we got some here this
morning.
You wouldn't admit it, but the certificate's getting
dim.
We need to renew that covenant.
Let me say to you, you never miss
the water till the well goes dry, and
you'd better make most of the fact that
your dear one is probably by your side
this morning.
Then when the day comes that you would
give just about everything you have for one
day, any old day, for the touch of
a banished hand and the sound of a
voice that speaks.
We take each other for granted more ways
than one today.
We do it in the church.
Church covenants don't mean what they used to.
Any other organization with no more loyalty to
its founder, no more joy in its program,
and that uses as much raw material and
turns out as poor a finished product as
the average church would be out of business.
If I dropped into the average church today
as a non-Christian and watched a handful
of church members during a so-called revival
trying to get more recruits for the Army
of the Lord when most of the outfit
they already had has gone AWOL, I'd say
either Christianity is not what it's supposed to
be, or we've been sold a cheap brand
and inoculated with a mild form, or we've
been immunized against the real thing.
Joel said, I'm tired of the pagans going
around saying, where is your God, where is
the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob?
And I'm embarrassed that the pagans walk by
our churches over America and sometimes watch our
feeble ceremonies, moving corpses from one mortician to
another, sometimes preaching a dynamite gospel and living
firecracker lives.
It's time to be what we are or
take down our sign.
We need to renew our covenants of dedication.
If you're a Christian, Romans 7 says you're
married to Jesus Christ.
And James says that if you're a whirling,
you are an adult and an adulteress because
you are married to Christ, because that verse
doesn't apply only to physical adultery.
Have you noticed there never has been a
culture since Christianity began where a New Testament
Christian can feel at home?
There never has been a culture where a
New Testament Christian can be at home.
If you feel at home, you belong to
the culture.
You don't belong to Jesus Christ.
Birds of a feather flock together and that's
your native habitat in the world if that's
what you love.
The professing church today is like the Jewish
exiles in Babylon in Psalm 137, captives of
this age, without a song, and saying, how
can we sing the Lord's song in a
strange land?
And the only way you can solve this
problem is by making Jesus Christ your Lord.
When you do that, you will be a
better American and a better citizen and a
better church member and a better husband, father,
mother, young person, businessman, whatever you do.
But that making Jesus Lord must be visible
because he said before man, it must be
audible because he said with the mouth, and
it must be credible because he said with
the heart.
When it's credible, when it's real.
And when you're not ashamed, you confess him
before people.
And when you're not ashamed, you confess him
with the mouth.
The Bible says the way to be saved
is to believe that God raised Jesus from
the dead, that's the first move, and then
confess out loud with the mouth, Jesus Christ
as Lord, thou shalt be saved.
And I hope you don't go out this
morning accepting this sermon as information.
I hope it hasn't gone in one ear
and out the other.
As I said at the outset, one thing
is worse than not going to church, and
that's going and not doing anything about what
we hear.
Some of you have probably read the autobiography
of Elton Trueblood who preached there not too
long ago.
And he says, and makes an amazing statement,
that his liberal views were changed by C
.S. Lewis rather lately.
And Lewis said, A man who is merely
a man and said the sort of things
Jesus Christ said would not be a great
moral teacher.
He'd be either a lunatic on the level
with the man who says he's a poached
egg, or else he would be a devil
of hell.
You must make your choice.
Either this man is the Son of God
or he's a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a time
and spit at him and kill him as
a demon, or you can fold at his
feet and call him Lord and God.
But let us not come along with this
patronizing nonsense about his being a great human
teacher.
He didn't leave that open to us.
He didn't intend to give us that option.
And Chuck Colson, you've been reading his book
Born Again, he was also moved mightily by
this testimony, and he said of Jesus he
was either a god or a raving lunatic.
There is less heresy in rejecting him altogether
than to remake him into something he wasn't,
something he isn't.
If anybody listening to me now is saying,
Well, I'm willing to accept him as the
greatest moral leader of all time.
Yes.
He didn't ask for that.
You don't have that option.
He said, I'm the way, the truth, and
the life.
No man comes to God but by me.
No man can say that.
Before Abraham was, I am.
No man could say that.
All things have been delivered to me of
my Father.
No man can say that.
All authority has been given to me in
heaven and earth.
No man can say that.
I am my Father alone.
No man can say that.
He's either what he said, or he's an
imposter.
And you take him all out once more,
he doesn't want your compliments, he wants your
commitment.
Total, utter, and absolute.
I get a little tired sometimes of this
habit of inviting folks down the aisle in
a sort of an apologetic way, as though
Jesus Christ were standing with his hand waiting
to be accepted.
I don't find that word much in the
New Testament, but I do find believe, receive,
trust, obey, follow.
That's what he means.
No wonder everyone listening to me has done
that.
No mortal can with him compare among the
sons of me.
Fairer is he than all the fair that
fell to heaven and train.
I'm glad I can preach to Christ who
was what he said he was, and he
is what he says he is, and he's
the same yesterday and today and forever.
And he wants you to come just exactly
like you are.
You can't come any other way, and that's
why we're going to sing Just As I
Am without one plea.
And I give you the opportunity this morning
to do whatever the Holy Spirit tells you
you ought to do.
If it's to lay aside all your excuses
and all your doubts and say, I thank
Jesus Christ this morning for what he came
to be, as Savior and Lord, or if
you wish to rededicate your life, or if
you wish to come into the fellowship of
this church, the opportunity is given as we
sing this wonderful song.