In the chapter of John, John 8, the
beginning of verse 12, let me read a
rather extended passage.
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I
am the light of the world.
He that followeth me shall not walk in
darkness, but shall have the light of life.
Pharisees therefore said unto him, Thou bearest record
of thyself, thy record is not true.
Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I
bear record of myself, yet my record is
true, for I know whence I came, and
whither I go.
He cannot tell whence I come, and whither
I go.
Ye judge after the flesh, I judge no
man, and if I judge, my judgment is
true, for I am not alone, but I
am the Father that sent me.
It is also written in your law that
the testimony of two men is true.
I am one that beareth witness of myself,
and the Father that sent me beareth witness
of me.
Then said they unto him, Where is thy
Father?
Jesus answered, Ye neither know me nor my
Father.
If ye had known me, ye should have
known my Father also.
These words spake Jesus in the treasury, as
he taught in the temple.
No man laid hands on him, for his
hour was not yet come.
Then said Jesus again unto them, I go
my way, and ye shall seek me, and
shall die in your sins.
Whither I go, ye cannot come.
Then said the Jews, Will he kill himself,
because he saith, Whither I go, ye cannot
come.
He said unto them, Ye are from beneath,
I am from above.
Ye are of this world, I am not
of this world.
I said therefore unto you, If ye shall
die in your sins, or if ye believe
not that I am he, ye shall die
in your sins.
Then said they unto him, Who art thou?
Jesus saith unto them even the same that
I said unto you from the beginning.
I have many things to say unto a
judge of you, but he that sent me
is true, and I speak to the world
those things which I have heard of him.
They understood not that he spake to them
of the Father.
Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have
lifted up the Son of Man, then shall
ye know that I am he, and that
I do nothing of myself, but as my
Father hath taught me, I speak these things.
He that sent me is with me.
The Father hath not left me alone, for
I do always those things that please him.
As he spake these words, many believed on
him.
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed
on him, 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.
They answered him, We be not Abraham's seed?
We be Abraham's seed, and were never in
bondage to any man?
How sayest thou?
Ye shall be made free.
Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto
you, Whosoever committeth sin is a servant of
sin.
But the servant abideth not in the house
for ever, but the Son of Man abideth
ever.
The Son abideth ever.
If the Son, therefore, shall make you free,
you shall be free indeed.
Let us pray.
Our Father, we are here between heaven and
earth, between the peak of eternity past and
the high peak of eternity to come.
The world spins on, and time wears itself
out, and the judgment draws near.
O Lord, we would be serious-minded Christians
and seekers after thee in this hour of
threat and danger.
We pray thou wilt help us to know
that we may listen to thy word with
great concern.
Speak to us, O Lord, and give us
the will to obey, the courage to do,
and the faith to believe.
In Christ's name, amen.
Now, in the passage which I have read
in your hearing, we find the only one
who knows, talking about the only thing that
matters, the only subject that matters is salvation.
If we miss salvation, I want to ask
you, if we miss salvation, what else possibly
can matter?
Before the fact of sin and of human
mortality and coming death, before the fact of
God and heaven and judgment and hell and
man's responsibility to God and the long, long
reaches of eternity, what do politics and science
and art and even health or life, what
do they matter at all?
They matter, certainly, but they don't matter when
set over against these tremendous issues that matter
so tremendously.
Now, I say salvation and my relation to
God and your relation to God, that's the
only thing that matters.
And the only one who knows, is talking
about it here, Jesus Christ our Lord, he's
the only one who knows.
All others are of the earth and they
speak of the earth, Jesus said, but he
alone came down from heaven, he alone, he
alone heard words of the Father and spake
from the Father, and he alone was the
word and is the word, and he alone
was and is God among men, he alone
is the Savior and the light of the
world.
So this man is speaking, and he's speaking
about the only thing that ought to matter
until we get it settled.
Now for each one of us, these words
of our Lord Jesus and other such words
that he spoke to us, are words of
destiny.
If we will not hear these words, then
there are no others, you may be sure
of that.
There is no alternative, no second choice, there
just isn't anything else.
The words of our Lord, the appeal, the
explanation, the proclamation, the teaching of our Lord
and his apostles, there isn't anything else, there's
no place else to go.
And our reception or rejection of these words
of our Lord bring consequences.
These words of our Lord, to me, they're
terrible as well as wonderful, for they're here
unobtrusive and quiet, but if you don't like
them, there's no place else to go, no
other choice.
If you don't like one country, you may
go to another.
But if you don't like these words of
Jesus Christ our Lord, then there's no place
else to go.
Short of these words or apart from these
words or beyond these words, there's only darkness.
Now what our Lord is teaching us here
is that a Christian is another kind of
being altogether.
A Christian, if he's a true Christian, is
wholly different from other men.
I know that this sounds bigoted, and I
know that in this day of brotherhood and
togetherness, when everybody would brothers be for all
that and all that, I know that I
will be put down as a bigot, and
people will say, he's all right, but he's
narrow and very bigoted, all right.
That will not matter to me, but I
ask you to notice that our Lord has
said that the man who is born from
above is wholly different from the man that's
born from below.
That which is of the flesh is flesh,
and that which is of the Spirit is
spirit.
And the difference between the two is basic
and biological.
It's deep and as basically different as the
difference between species and nature, between creatures.
This is a difference.
A Christian is not somebody that has joined
a church, though Christians do join churches.
A Christian is not somebody who has been
baptized, though Christians do get baptized.
Christian is not someone who tithes his money,
though Christians usually do tithe their money.
A Christian is a being totally and radically
different biologically from what he was before and
from what the other members of his family
are who aren't Christian.
So radically different are they that two shall
be sleeping in one bed and one shall
be taken and the other left.
So radically different are they that if the
Christian dies, he will be carried by angels
to Abraham's bosom, and that sinner in the
family, though related by blood, will perish and
be without hope.
Now there are differences and similarities between people,
as you well know.
Human beings are basically like each other.
We are, as human beings, basically like each
other.
That is, if you peel off the skin
of a red man, you won't know whether
you're looking at a red man or a
white man after skin is peeled off.
We have different colored skins.
I suppose God made us that way and
intended it to be so.
We say that makes us different when actually
it's not any difference at all.
We're basically alike.
And everywhere in the world, wherever human beings
are, there are certain fundamental likenesses between them.
But there are differences that are not basic.
Those differences are incidental.
They have to do with social levels and
cultural levels and educational levels and food differences.
You go to South America, Mexico even, and
they like their food hot.
Americans like it rather pale and without much
heat in it.
And I think Canadians are somewhat the same.
But you go to Spain, they tell me
you'll find they like hot stuff there.
Well, that's a difference, but it's not a
basic difference, that's an acquired difference, that's all.
And the clothing.
Go to India and you'll find them dressing
one way, and go to, well, go to
the United States and they'll dress every way.
But go where you will and people dress
differently, but that's not a basic difference.
There's no difference in the man, whether you
wrap him in silk or wrap him in
burlap, he's the same man.
You can put steel armor on him, he's
the same man.
Put him in a space capsule and he's
the same man.
Everybody is like everybody else, basically.
But the differences are incidental.
There are tall men and short men and
fat men and thin men and dark men
and white men and bald-headed men and
bushy-haired men and kindly men and brusque
men.
Those are not basic differences.
Those are incidental differences.
Acquired differences or temperamental differences are not basic
to the man.
But the difference that separates a Christian from
all other men is a fundamental difference.
It is not an incidental difference.
What they're wanting to do now is to
make religion an incidental thing.
They get on the radio and have debates
about religion and talk it over, or it
gets into magazines and newspapers and they talk
back and forth about it, and they begin
by having an understanding that religion is an
incidental thing and that we can be one
and still have our different religions.
You can, of course.
You can have a society composed of Buddhists
and Mohammedans and Buddhists and Christian scientists and
atheists and Jews and Muslims.
You can weld a society like that together
because they don't make a radical difference.
They're only an incidental difference.
The Jew goes to his synagogue on Saturday
and the Christian to his church on Sunday,
and on Monday they meet and work together.
But when you come to a true Christian,
a Christian that has been born of God
from above, you find that there is a
distinction.
There is a radical, profound, and basic difference
that the Christian is different from other men.
The Christian is different in a great many
ways from other men.
He is different in that he has another
kind of life.
He is different in that he has another
kind of spirit.
He is different in that his source is
different.
He that is born from below is from
below, and that born of the flesh is
flesh.
He that is born from above is spirit,
and is born from above.
He has a different allegiance altogether.
He has a different destiny.
Yet, he may have, along with other people,
he has and does have incidental likenesses.
People are alike, basically, and are different incidentally.
But when a man becomes a Christian, he
is different, basically, and alike only incidentally.
Do you get that?
And that's why Christians are what they are,
and that's why they're different from other people.
That's why they're a minority group in a
society that doesn't understand them, because they're born
from above, they're born of the Spirit, they
have the nature of God, they're a follower
of someone other than any man in this
world, a follower of a man who came
down from above and became incarnated and became
one of us.
And yet we have our incidental likenesses.
See a man drive down the street, you
don't know whether he's a Christian or not,
because all kinds of men drive down the
street.
See a woman shopping and buying food for
her body and for the bodies of her
family, you don't know whether she's a Christian
or not, because those things are incidental and
they're not basic.
Now, I don't know whether I'm making this
clear or not, but I'd like to point
out one thing before I go any further,
that the difference between the Christian and the
non-Christian is not the result of or
because of any natural goodness on anybody's part.
If I believed that Christians were people who
were good by nature, then I would be
open to the charge of bigotry and I
couldn't defend myself.
If I said that the Christians were all
fine people of finer blood and finer fiber
and better minds and they're better people, then
I would, of course, be guilty of picking
certain people and saying that they are better.
But this is not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible teaches that all men have sinned
and come short of the glory of God,
but it teaches that to certain men there
comes a visitation from God by faith, and
that visitation is a new nature from God
to that man, and that though he may
be as bad as his neighbor was, or
is, he may have been as bad as
his neighbor, he is now a new creature
altogether, and he is not a Christian by
training him to be a Christian.
The trouble with some of the denominations, their
creed is right.
If you go to their creed, you will
find it right.
Their catechism is right.
But they make Christians by training them.
You might as well train a Mohawk Indian
to be a Scotsman.
You can't do it.
You can teach him to roll his R's,
you can teach him to wear kilts, you
can teach him even, I suppose, God save
the mark, to play bagpipe.
But he's still a Mohawk Indian.
He's not a Scotsman.
And you might as well try to make
a Christian by training him to be a
Christian as to do that other foolish thing
that I have mentioned.
It can't be done.
You can't turn one kind of being into
another kind of being by training.
You can take a being and train him
and make him a better being than he
was before.
You can take a wild horse and break
him and train him and fix him so
he'll muzzle sugar out of your pocket.
He's a better horse than he was before,
but he's a horse still.
So you can take a man and baptize
him and catechize him.
And write his name down in your church
rolls and teach him to like good hymns
and fellowship with nice people.
But you haven't changed him radically.
He is still what he was before.
But our Lord teaches that there is such
a thing as a change that makes a
Christian.
But there is a change, and that change
begins in the man's mind.
It begins, it's what the Bible calls repentance.
It has to do with his mental life
and his moral life and gets out into
his conduct, but that is not enough.
Repentance is not sufficient.
There's such a thing as a conversion that
is purely and only intellectual.
A man does not believe in God, then
he's convinced there is a God and he
believes in God.
He's had an intellectual conversion, but he's the
same creature that he was before.
Slightly changed, but not radically changed.
Then the man, say, is a gambler.
He decides that's a foolish thing to do
and he quits gambling.
He's a little better than he was, but
he's the same kind of man that he
was before.
Just the same as your horse that was
wild on the prairie is now a gentle
horse that'll muzzle you and snuggle candy out
of your pocket.
But he's a horse still.
So your man who was a gambler but
isn't a gambler is a sinner still.
He isn't the same kind of sinner.
He's switched to his sinning, but he's a
sinner still.
So you might go on and say that
somebody never went to church and now they
go to church, but they're changed in that
way, but that's an interdental change.
That's not the basic change.
So it's possible to have an intellectual change,
it's possible to have a moral change.
Many a man who's gone to prison, paid
his debt to society, and come out and
is doing what he calls now going straight,
but he's not become a Christian in the
true sense of the word, he's just a
better man than he was before.
Certainly a better man to have in the
neighborhood, just as your trained horse is better
than your wild horse.
But he's still a sinner.
But there is a change that completes this
other change, and that is the spirit work
that we call regeneration.
The Holy Spirit takes the truth and regenerates
the man.
And just as there is generation, there is
regeneration.
You and I were all born by generation,
and we are what we are, and all
of us are what we are by generation.
But there is such a thing as regeneration.
Our Lord called it born again, or born
from above.
And when the Holy Ghost completes the act
of regeneration, you've got a different being altogether.
You've not got a trained being.
You've not got the same man trained, nor
the same man improved.
You've got a different man altogether.
He is incidentally like other people, and incidentally
like he was before.
But basically and internally now, he's a different
creature.
He is now a man that has been
born from above, and through the promises of
God he has the nature of God within
him.
And he is now a man who belongs
in a different world altogether.
He was born from above, and he belongs
above.
He was born from heaven, and he belongs
in heaven.
He was joined to Jesus Christ by the
mystery of regeneration, and now he belongs to
Jesus Christ.
He has taken eternity into his heart, and
he's another kind of creature altogether.
And I want to ask you, does that
describe you?
I'm afraid there's an awful lot of church
anarchy even among the evangelicals, an awful lot
that's just a second-rate Christianity that never
makes any change at all, any radical change.
The cowboy decides that he doesn't want to
be a wicked cowboy anymore, so he straightens
up and writes himself a song and goes
twanging around about it round over the country.
Oh, the church's doors are all open to
him, but he's radically the same man that
he was before.
He's incidentally different.
But there is such a thing as a
conversion that makes the man radically different, basically
different, biologically different.
I don't believe anybody is saved until this
has happened to him.
I don't think he's saved when he's confirmed.
I don't think he's saved when he is
baptized.
I don't think he's saved when he's joined
the church.
I don't think he's saved when he starts
to pray the Mohammedans pray, and the Buddhists
pray, and the Zoroastrians pray, and they pray
everywhere.
Prayer rises up all over the face of
the earth by people who live the same
wicked lives they lived before.
The Muslims used to go out to rob
camel trains, and they'd get down on their
knees and ask Allah to please give them
success, and they'd go out and murder people
and rob the trains, camel trains.
I don't know whether they still do it.
They did it.
So there was lots of praying going on,
but the world, it says, if you pray,
you're okay.
Some of these shows they used to have
on, they'd stop and say, now we'll have
one minute of prayer.
Then after the one minute of prayer was
over, they'd sing off-colored songs again.
Give God Almighty his crumb.
Dear God, here's your crumb.
Pass God a crumb as though you were
a dog.
A crumb of one minute's prayer in the
midst of commercialism and wicked entertainment and vileness.
So praying doesn't make you a Christian.
Stopping doing one thing and starting doing another
doesn't make you a Christian.
The evidence of being a true Christian are
internal, and they're spiritual, and they do not
only have to do with the temperament and
the feelings.
They have to do with the heart of
a man.
Now, if anyone objects, if anyone judges the
words of Christ extreme, then let me simply
say, not to apologize, but to explain that
this is Christ's way of saving people.
He saves them by regenerating them, and this
is his way of doing it.
And his is the final authority and the
ultimate word.
If you have a house, a home, you've
paid for it and bought it, and you've
bought it by the sweat of your face,
and you've worked hard and labored and driven
yourself to get it and pay for it,
and your wife takes care of it and
looks after it, and it's yours, and it's
yours by every right.
You haven't cut any corners.
It's yours.
You've bought it.
You've paid the full price.
It's yours.
It belongs to you under every facet and
phase of Canadian law.
It's yours.
If you have a house, a home, you've
paid for it and bought it, and you've
bought it by the sweat of your face,
and you've worked hard and labored and driven
yourself to get it and pay for it,
and your wife takes care of it and
looks after it, and it's yours, and it's
yours by every right.
You haven't cut any corners.
It's yours.
You've bought it.
You've paid the full price.
It's yours.
It belongs to you under every facet and
phase of Canadian law.
It's yours.
Then you have a right to say who
comes in and who stays out.
You have that right.
If I come to your door and you
don't like the looks of me, you have
a perfect right to shut the door and
say, pardon me, sir, I'm busy.
You have that right.
It might not be courteous, but you have
that right to do it.
Now, God Almighty made his heaven, and he
made his earth, and he made man in
his image, and man sinned, and God sent
his only Son in the likeness of sinful
flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the
flesh, and he gave Jesus Christ to be
the last word to mankind, and he says,
this is my heaven, and I have a
perfect right to say who enters it.
This is mine.
By every right in heaven, earth, or hell,
this is my heaven.
In the Father's house are many mansions, and
the Father has a perfect right to say
who will enter the mansion.
My dear old mother, before she was converted,
she was a good little old philosopher, and
she was a moral philosopher, and she was
very much on the side of sinners, and
the idea that a man wasn't going to
heaven because he was a good man shocked
her.
Later on, she was converted, but before that,
she'd be shocked.
She'd say about a man, now there's a
good man.
If that man doesn't go to heaven, there's
no reason to have a heaven.
What's the use of having a heaven if
you shut a man like that out?
Well, the fact is, she didn't make heaven,
and you didn't, and I didn't.
God made it.
It's God's heaven, and God, because God made
it, and God guards it, and God sustains
it, and God garnishes it, and God gives
its ornamentation and glory, and God has a
perfect right to say who goes there and
who doesn't.
And according to scriptures, God has said the
man who is renewed biologically goes there.
There were two men once.
One was a poor man, and he begged
at the rich man's gate.
The other was the rich man from whom
he begged.
The rich man died and went to hell.
The poor man died and was carried by
the angels to Abraham's bosom.
Well, almost everybody believes the poor man went
to heaven because he'd suffered a lot in
his life and was poor and deserved heaven.
And the rich man went to hell because
he'd had a too easy and didn't deserve
heaven.
I never understood that until many years ago
I heard a Canadian preacher preaching in the
city of Akron, Ohio, Dr. Hallman.
I may have heard him years gone by.
He's gone to heaven now.
A great Canadian preacher came down there, and
he stood up there, and he held up
those two men with two points of his
fingers, and I've never forgotten those two men.
He said the rich man died and went
to hell not because he'd been rich but
because he had a nature that hell demanded.
He went where his nature belonged.
And the poor man died and went to
heaven not because he was poor but because
he had a nature that belonged there.
Everything will ultimately find its own place.
It will gravitate toward the place it belongs.
Brothers, you can fool me now, but there'll
be a day when you pack your little
grip and go where you belong.
And the great thing is, where do you
belong?
And that's the question that ought to bother
you.
You say, how can I know, Mr. Torrey,
where I belong?
You belong where your nature belongs.
What's your nature?
You belong where you are inside.
Whatever's in there, that's where, wherever it belongs,
that's where you'll go.
Now, if you belong in heaven, you'll go
there.
You belong in hell, you'll go there.
Anybody wants to complain about it, I don't
know what he'll do about it because God
owns his heaven.
God made it.
God's been very, very patient in waiting to
get people there.
So, if I say to myself now, I
don't like this way of doing it.
I might just as well like it because
that's the way it is.
That's it.
God has said it.
Apostles have said it.
Prophets have said it.
Thomas has said it.
Our Lord himself said it.
It's been repeated and said again and explained
and annotated and explained some more.
So, there isn't any, if you believe the
Bible, there isn't any way of escaping it.
Here it is before us.
Now, no one is compelled to be a
Christian.
Somebody says, I don't like this either or,
this sharply defined view of things.
I don't like it.
All right.
Nobody's compelling anybody to be a Christian.
Our Lord simply says, it's up to you.
He passes by and says, it's up to
us.
Christ finds men lost and blind and bruised
and he saves them, but he doesn't compel
them to be saved.
He waits for them, but he doesn't, he
doesn't knock them out and let them in
and then find they wake up from their
unconsciousness they found in heaven.
They say when a man is drowning, or
a woman, and he can't swim, yes he
can't swim, that a good swimmer sometimes knocks
him out, hits him hard, and knocks him
into a state of semi-consciousness.
And then when they float, they just take
him to shore.
And when they come to, they're saved.
And we get to heaven that way.
Nobody is going to get knocked out and
then wake up in heaven.
No.
Everybody has a mind of his own.
Everybody has a will of his own.
Everybody can make his own decision.
And our Lord Jesus Christ quietly passes by
and says, come after me.
He that will come after me, let him
come.
And so if we decide to come after
him, we come.
And in coming, we accept our Lord's way
of doing things.
We accept God Almighty's terms for his own
heaven.
Only his children are going to his heaven.
You know how it is in your neighborhood?
We had six sons, as I've often said.
Don't count the daughter, because she came too
late.
The sons were pretty well grown.
So we really had the two families.
But anyhow, we had these six boys.
And you could look out almost any time
out there on Prospect Avenue in South Chicago,
and out in what they call the prairies.
That would be the vacant lot, to the
average person.
But around Chicago, there are prairies.
You'd look out on the prairie, and you'd
see anywhere from 10 to 20 kids playing.
And they would run and chase each other,
and climb over the fence, and tear down
the rose bushes.
And they had themselves a time, until it
was time to go to bed.
And then they sorted themselves out.
The Valentines went over to the Valentine.
Tozers came into the house, because tozers had
their beds in their room full.
And the Owls family, they, their boys, George
and Bobby, they went down to the Owls'
home.
And so, they sorted themselves out, at last.
And there's going to be a terrible sorting
out one of these times, or a wonderful
sorting out.
Everybody's going to go where he belongs.
Everybody's going to know his own father, and
go where his own father is.
They don't like it, it doesn't matter.
But they're going to go where they belong.
He who loves sin, and enjoys the world,
and draws back at the thought of being
changed, he'll go where he belongs.
He who humbly and reverently kneels in the
presence of Jesus Christ, and undergoes the mystery
of regeneration, he died, and he will go
to his place.
Though he's free to remain where he is,
until death takes him where he belongs.
He agrees to have no part in the
Church's redemption.
He agrees to forget the right to his
name, and all that belongs to that blessed
name.
He agrees to give up all the treasures
the true Church has enjoyed during the centuries.
He agrees to remain alone in the world,
He agrees to take the bitter damning consequences
of not being a changed man.
And like the rich man, when he dies,
he will go where he belongs.
Remember, always it's so.
They're dying all over Toronto.
They're dying.
Every day they die.
Look in the newspapers.
And invariably, they go where they belong.
And they belong where their nature is at
home.
Christians go to be with the Lord because
their nature belongs there.
Sinners can't go there because it would be
a vast cosmic incongruity to take a sinner
to a heaven where he doesn't belong.
And that's why it's so foolish to say,
He didn't go to church, but he was
a good man.
He belongs in heaven.
He belongs where his nature belongs.
Our Lord Jesus came bringing gifts for suffering
men.
He came and they bruised him, and they
wounded him, and they drove him away.
And they didn't discourage him.
Still today he walks among us and he
says again, Any man will let him.
And if men judge money and lust and
fleshly gratification to be more desirable than the
many mansions, he can have them.
God won't quarrel with him and he won't,
I don't think that he will even make
trouble for him.
A man called me, very marked English accent,
called me last night.
He was really in trouble.
He said, Mr. Tozer, I have a question
I want to ask you.
I didn't know I could answer it, but
I was prepared to try.
He said, now here's my question.
He said, why do Christians, why have they
got so much trouble?
And a lot of sinners don't have any
trouble at all.
He says, for instance, my wife and I
live beside another couple.
And he said, they're not Christians at all.
Don't claim to be.
They are happy out in their backyard.
He said, there are flowers and all the
rest.
And they just seem quite restful.
Everything's all right with him.
But my wife and I are serving the
Lord Jesus and we're having trouble.
Oh, that was an easy one.
That was an easy one.
I said, go to the 73rd Psalm.
David had that problem.
David said that problem bothered him to a
point where he hesitated even to mention it
for fear he would offend some of the
Lord's children.
He said, I'm in trouble all the time.
But he said, the sinner, he's rich.
His eyes stand out with fatness, he said.
He said, nobody bothers him.
He said, I'm running and in trouble and
persecuted.
What do I do?
I'm in distress.
He said, I don't like to talk about
it, but Lord, you know it's true.
I, as a Christian, I'm having my difficulties.
73rd.
If I said 37th, of course, I had
this bigotry at first.
73rd Psalm.
And he said, now, if I should speak
of these things, I should offend against the
generation of thy children.
And when I thought about it, it was
too painful for me.
Same brother with the English accent.
He said the same thing and he was
distressed.
He said, how about it?
He said, my wife and I are Christians
and we're in trouble all the time.
And he said, these friends over here have
these larks and they're sinners.
He said, when I thought on this, I
was too, it was too painful for me
until I went into the sanctuary of God.
And then I understood.
Surely thou did set the sinner in slippery
places.
Thou castest them down into destruction.
How are they brought into desolation?
As in the moment, they're utterly consumed with
terror.
He says, so foolish was I and ignorant.
I was a beast.
He apologized to God.
He said, I acted like a fool, God,
even thinking about it.
But he said, for me, I am continually
with thee and thou holdest me by my
right hand.
I'd rather have God hold my right hand
and be in trouble than be out of
trouble and have God ignore me.
I'd rather look into the face of God
and suffer than to be without a pain
or a twinge for a lifetime and be
behind the back of God.
He said, thou, nevertheless, I'm continually with thee.
Thou hast holding me by my right hand.
Thou shall guide me with thy counsel and
afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is none upon earth that I
desire besides thee.
That's the answer.
The sinner gets it now.
The Christian gets in trouble because he is
a Christian.
I talked last night, as I mentioned this
morning, with a young brother who's just getting
his M.D. degree very shortly in June.
And he said, now, Mr. Stoker, I'd like
to ask.
He'd heard me preach here and there, and
he thought maybe I might have some answers.
He said, they have parties, and they drink
at those parties.
What shall I do?
He was in distress.
None of the rest of them were in
distress.
They just went and had themselves a whale
of a time, you know.
The fellows that are going to look after
us later on.
They're going to operate on our appendix and
prescribe.
But in school, they're having themselves a whale
of a time drinking, you know.
He said, what shall I do?
Well, I said, one thing's settled.
You don't drink, don't you?
He said, I don't.
I said, that's one thing.
But you know, they think he's a fool.
He's in trouble.
Of course he's in trouble.
But oh, if you have the smile of
God, trouble won't amount to much.
Well, he has these few today who go
along with him.
They are the renewed ones, the changed ones,
the regenerated ones.
They have another nature, a new nature, divine
nature.
And it can be said of them in
the degree, it could be said of Christ
without degree, that Christ was God made flesh.
And of the Christian, it can be said
that God's nature comes into human flesh.
And that makes a Christian.
Some love the world and pay no attention,
but there are still some who love the
name of Christ and would rather be saved,
rather be right with God than to have
anything else in all the wide world.
Are you among them?