Some of us have had so much adversity
we feel that we could identify with Burr
Rabbit, who you remember was born and bred
in a briar patch.
The Bible gives us light on this subject
and much information about thorns and thistles and
their significance, and it'll help us to understand
these prickly problems of our existence, what they
mean and how, to use another phrase in
this connection, how to grasp firmly the nettle.
That's an old expression, and that means when
a tough problem comes along, don't monkey with
it, grasp firmly the nettle and you'll get
along better.
And so as we find our way through
the briars and brambles of our troubled lives,
it's well to remember at least four things
that the Word of God sets forth about
them, and you start really in Genesis at
the very beginning.
In the third chapter, you read that God
said to Adam, verse 17, Because thou hast
hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and
hast eaten of the tree of which I
commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of
it, cursed is the ground for thy sake,
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all
the days of thy life.
Thorns also, and thistles, shall it bring forth
to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb
of the field.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou
eat it, till thou return unto the ground,
for out of it was thou taken, for
dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return.
That was the beginning of a long, slow
process still going on.
In the beginning God made Adam and Eve
and put them in the garden.
It was beautiful, every prospect was pleasing, and
not even man was vile.
It wasn't chaos, it was cosmos then.
But the devil came, and Adam and Eve
ate us out of house and home, and
God said to Adam, Thorns and thistles, it'll
be your lot from here on, and all
that they represent, trouble, heartache, pain, sorrow, sin.
The natural world is covered with them, and
we have to contend through our mortal existence
with briars and thistles and weeds and weather
and bugs and beetles, and the garden reverts
quickly to the briars and neglect the battle
for a few days and you've almost lost
the war with your garden.
Children are like that, sweet as they are,
they incline to evil and have to be
trained in the way they should go.
They remember the bad so long and forget
so easily the good.
In sin did our mothers conceive us.
I heard of an old preacher who had
preached a great sermon on the depravity of
the human heart.
Somebody came up after the meeting and said,
I just can't swallow this depravity of the
human heart you're preaching about.
The old preacher said, you don't have to
swallow it, it's already in you.
And it is.
So we see that the heart is deceitful
and desperately wicked.
Jeremiah 4, verse 3 says, Break up your
fallow ground and sow not among thorns.
That's a wise admonition.
Some Bible teaching today is almost wasted because
it's like scattering seed in the brier patch.
The heart has not been prepared for it.
And Jesus told us about the different kinds
of sowing.
You remember what he said in Matthew 13,
some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns
sprung up and choked them.
And then he explained it in verse 22.
He also that received seed among the thorns,
as he that heareth the word, and the
care of this world, and the deceitfulness of
riches, choke the word, and ye becometh unfruitful.
The evolutionist, of course, has his way of
explaining everything.
He says we're on the way up.
We started out in a low form of
animation, and we're on our way by fetishism,
totemism, polytheism, monotheism, on our way up to
a knowledge of God.
The Bible says just the other way around.
We started with the knowledge of God and
been going down ever since.
It's not evolution, it's devolution.
Burbank could take a wild rose and turn
it into an American beauty, and some folks
say that proves evolution.
No, it just simply proves restoration to what
it was at one time.
If he can make crab apples fit to
eat, that's not evolution, that's restoration to something
of their original state.
It's a world of thorns and thistles, physically,
naturally, morally, spiritually.
When God created the earth, the old blueprints
did not include sin, and sickness, and disease,
and death, and tornadoes, and earthquakes, and all
the rest of it.
It was never the original purpose of God,
not in his mind to send these devastating
things to wipe out whole neighborhoods and kill
innocent people.
The weather is a matter about which we
somehow haven't had very clear thinking.
I hear some people say, well, God sent
it, and I think they need to think
a little and get straight on it, because
the weather, like everything else, was in pretty
good shape until the devil got into the
picture.
And I don't believe that anything like Camille,
some of you remember reading about that, and
I was down on the coast in meetings
not long after that horrible thing came through,
and they said that next morning you couldn't
hear a bird singing, people spoke in whispers.
One man said to me, everything I had
in this world disappeared.
I don't know where it went.
And that raises some questions.
The weather is beautiful when it behaves, you
see.
But my Bible doesn't explain how God began.
It starts out in the beginning, God.
It does not explain evil.
It starts out with the serpent in the
garden.
When man listened to the devil instead of
God, God said, all right, from here on
you sweat it out.
Now, we've invented machines to get out of
work.
We want a three-day work week, more
leisure.
I don't know what we'd do with it,
considering the way most folks use what they've
got.
But we're still under the sentence, and some
get such a need to escape from it
that they become all the more tangled up
in thorns and thistles, the invisible kind, if
not the visible, and the whole creation groans
and travails together.
Standing on tiptoe, one of the translations puts
it, waiting for the manifestation of the sons
of God.
John Stott, that splendid preacher of England, is
a bird watcher, and I have a close
kinship with that sort of thing.
John Stott was preaching recently over there, and
he said, consider the fowls of the air.
He said, now, that means watch birds.
Well, that's a kind of a literal translation,
I guess you'd call it.
This morning I got up quite early.
The worst thing about people who get up
early, they're always bragging about it.
We just love to brag about it.
It makes other people feel guilty, you know,
and asserts our superiority.
But I go up this hill over here,
and I've been doing that, you know, for
quite a while, and for the last several
times I've had music along the way, even
on a foggy morning like this.
There's a little hooded warbler down here.
Most folks don't know it ever exists, but
I suppose it's a great, great, grandson of
the one that was singing the first time.
And then there's the indigo bunting over on
this side, and I hear the wood thrush,
my favorite, some distance away, singing, not singing,
chiming his vespers at the end of a
perfect day.
Somebody said, if a man seven feet tall
came along blowing a flute, what would you
call that?
Somebody said, I'd call that highfalutin.
Well, a wood thrush does a lot of
highfalutin, if you believe me.
And I thought this morning as I trudged
up that way about old William Law, a
great old Saint who said, Who am I
till I folded up in the bed late
of a morning when the farmers have already
gone about their work and I'm so far
behind with my sanctification?
I love that.
Do you have some trouble along that line?
You haven't arrived.
I can see that.
I wouldn't believe it if you told me
so anyhow.
But we are far behind.
We might differ.
We could get in a lively argument here
tonight on some aspects of sanctification, maybe.
But one thing I think we'll agree upon,
if we're honest, we're all behind with our
sanctification.
It's a good thing to get up early
and get a good start.
Jesus spoke of vineyards and farming and the
soil and gave us a parable of four
kinds of it.
And the human heart's like a field, and
if we don't sow the seed of the
word of God and cultivate it, we reap
a life of weeds and thorns and thistles.
You can't raise a crop to the glory
of God unless you break the soul of
the heart in repentance and cultivate it and
water it and fight the weeds and contend
with the bugs and the wind and the
weather spiritually speaking.
You can't read this book once in a
while and pray when you get in a
pinch and go to the house of God
when you feel like it and watch garbage
all week on television and first thing on
in the morning, last thing off at night
and bear spiritual fruit.
Our children have been neglected, pernicious educational theories,
self-expression, freedom to do as one pleases,
a harvest of johnnies that can't read, a
record year of teenage suicide, teenage unmarried mothers,
dope addicts and drunkards.
Churches are full of backsliders, immature Christians who've
neglected their Bibles and their prayer and neglected
to bring up children and nurture and admonition
of the Lord.
And until we repent and until more repentance
is preached, old Joseph Parker says, if you
ever preach it, you're sticking your neck out.
And how about it today?
That was his time when he said that.
Until the fowler grounds broken up, we sow
among thorns.
And when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, God
started a new plan of redemption for humanity.
The whole creation was to be reclaimed.
And he called out the Hebrew nation to
be the channel through which the Savior came.
And he led his people into the promised
land.
And when they had conquered a great deal
of it, he had more to say about
thorns.
You read about it in Numbers and chapter
33.
He said, Now you're going to live among
a crowd that has no place for me.
If you will not drive out the inhabitants
of the land before you, then it shall
come to pass that those which you let
remain among you shall be pricks in your
eyes and thorns in your sides and shall
vex you in the land wherein you dwell.
And he said practically the same thing over
in the book of Joshua.
And know for a certainty, chapter 23, verse
13, that the Lord your God will no
more drive out any of these nations from
before you, but they shall be snares and
traps unto you and scourges in your sides
and thorns in your eyes until you perish
from off this good land which the Lord
your God hath given you.
It's amazing how the Jew has retained his
identity through all these centuries.
You find them everywhere, but never assimilated.
We Christians are a chosen generation and a
royal priesthood and a holy nation of peculiar
people.
Jesus came first to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel.
Don't ever forget that.
They wouldn't have him.
They didn't receive him.
His own received him not, but as many
as received him became members of this new
race, those that are the sons, the children
of God.
God wants his people to be distinct and
separate from anybody else on the earth, and
not a physical separation.
Paul said something about in 1 Corinthians 5,
10, you can't isolate yourself.
We must be among them to reach them.
Some of the old mystics back in the
Middle Ages tried hiding in caverns and all
that sort of thing.
We call them mystics.
I think some of them were mistakes.
You do not get holier because you're hiding
a hole in the ground.
It takes more than a hole to make
you holier, and they tried to get away
from all kind of evil with that sort
of business.
But that's not the way you do it.
But there is a sense in which we
are as Romans 12, 2 says, don't let
yourself be squeezed into the mold of this
age.
The professing church today has been taken over
by the world, and it leaned in the
Babylon of Revelation, the world church.
No Christian culture.
This is the devil's age, and as I've
said here already this week, there's never been
a culture since Christianity began where a Christian
feels at home.
If you feel at home in this thing
as it is today, you are at home.
You've never come out.
Birds of a feather flock together, and it
depends on the crowd you like to be
with as to who you are and which
group is your group.
I don't mind saying I'm homesick for heaven.
Some folks say that's morbid, and you shouldn't
be that way.
I don't know how you feel about it,
but I'm kind of looking forward to it
myself.
It's the hope, you know.
I heard of a poor fellow seasick some
time ago on a boat.
He lost breakfast, lunch, and supper, and was
leaning over the rail in dejection and despair.
And one of these cheerful mortals that always
shows up, you know, when you don't need
him, came along, slapped him on the back,
said, chair up.
Seasickness never killed anybody.
Poor fellow said, don't tell me that.
It's the hope of dying that's kept me
alive this long.
And I want to say to you that
it's the hope of dying that keeps me
going sometimes.
Thank God I'm not going to stick around
here forever.
And a lot of our people don't realize
that we're going to be promoted.
The Bible teaches that.
You've been faithful over five cities.
I'll give you ten cities.
His servants shall serve him, sit on thrones,
judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
I hear about so-and-so died an
untimely death.
No such thing.
If they're in the will of God, they've
been promoted too young.
No, no.
God knows what he's doing.
We're in line for promotion, and the best
is yet to come.
I don't want to sit on a cloud
with a halo on one side of my
head plucking a harp all through eternity.
I want to do something.
I've been busy here.
I've got a hope.
We must watch the company we keep while
we're here.
Evil communications corrupt good manners.
Paul quoted that from Menander, the poet.
And you have to watch where you go
and what you do.
I heard of a lady who wanted to
see the inside of a coal mine, never
had been down in there.
And she was wearing a spotless white dress.
And the man at the door said, You
can't go in there like that.
She said, What's to keep me from going
in wearing a white dress?
He said, Nothing but a lot to keep
you from wearing a white dress out.
And that thing is true when we expose
ourselves to things that we shouldn't have anything
to do with.
Now, if you mix and mingle with this
world, the Bible says they'll become thorns in
your side and corrupt your lives and your
testimony.
That's where marrying unbelievers and all the rest
of this comes in.
We must be careful.
We're not in a collusion course with this
world.
We're in a collision course.
That's different.
That's something altogether different.
Whosoever be a friend of the world is
the enemy of God.
Then there is a third.
You have thorns and creation.
You have thorns and Canaan.
And you have thorns and the Christian.
And you have anticipated me already.
And you're thinking about Paul and his thorn
in the flesh.
I don't know what it was, and I'm
glad I don't.
It might be yours, might be mine.
We can all claim it.
I don't know whether it was our trouble
or not.
I know it was an affliction, whatever it
was, that God wouldn't take away.
And the great preacher who had healed other
people was not delivered himself.
And I'm not trying to figure that out
either.
From whatever plague or infirmity it was, God
didn't heal him.
He was the prisoner who freed other people.
And sometimes there is that contradiction, and we
don't understand it.
But Paul identified this trouble.
We have a habit of glorifying our affliction
instead of glorifying God in the affliction.
He didn't glorify it.
He said that thorn was a messenger of
the devil.
We want to get our origins straight in
this thing.
Give everybody their due, including the devil.
He gloried in infirmity, but he didn't glorify
infirmity.
Jesus said, This woman whom Satan hath bound.
That's the straight of it.
Paul wrote to the Thessalonians and said, I
wanted to visit you, but he didn't say
as we preachers do, and it sounds so
lovely the way we say it, we were
providentially hindered.
He didn't say that.
He said, Satan hindered me.
Let's get the thing straight, like he did.
God permitted Satan to afflict Job, but don't
blame God.
Sickness, disease, death, all our other thorns are
of the devil, but allowed sometimes of God
to test us and to glorify himself.
God lets some things happen.
God makes some things happen, but nothing ever
just happens.
So there's order to it after all.
And sometimes it looks like God uses the
devil's grindstone to sharpen his ax.
After all, he takes a grindstone, you can't
sharpen an ax on a cake of butter.
And he takes affliction, and sometimes God allows
it to be used.
We're having a new kind of preaching going
around these days, that if you are sick
or down and speech and so on, that
you're living in sin and something the matter
with you.
If you don't get healed because you didn't
have faith enough, didn't pray enough and so
on.
Some of the greatest saints I've ever known
made their way through this world with afflicted
bodies and tortured minds and marital problems and
financial distress and tragic circumstances.
And our pet little answers and our pet
little explanations offer no solution.
Prayer doesn't remove them sometimes.
Sometimes the most awful things strike some of
the best of people.
I won't forget hearing Ben Haden tell, oh
what a preacher that man is.
Hearing him tell about some years ago, Dr.
Barnhouse told of being in a certain church
for a conference with a young pastor and
his wife, and they were expecting their first
child.
And they had a good time that week.
Barnhouse teased them, and they were in good
natured anticipation.
Barnhouse said near the close of the week,
preacher didn't show up in time for the
service, and Barnhouse rather was pretty sure he
knew what the reason was.
And he said, as I was nearly through
preaching, I just took over, and as I
was nearly through preaching, the preacher slipped in
and took a seat.
And his face was a picture of utter
and abject despair.
And after the benediction, he came up and
said, doctor, we have become the parents of
a mongoloid child, and how am I going
to tell her if she doesn't know it
yet?
Well, he told her, and she went to
pieces for a few moments, but being the
Christian she was, she speedily got controlled by
the Spirit of God.
She said, I'm going to call mother, tell
mother, and she put the call in, and
the operator of the switchboard in the hospital
was an unbeliever and a rather hard type.
She said, okay, she knew about these circumstances.
She said, we'll see now what these Christians
do when everything falls in on them.
And when mother answered the end of the
line, this young mother said, mama, God has
given us a mongoloid child.
And then she gave a wonderful testimony.
Next Sunday the young preacher preached and gave
his invitation, dropped his head.
He really wasn't used to seeing many people
come forward.
When the song ended and he raised up
and looked, there stood the switchboard operator and
several nurses.
And it was summed up in one thing,
whatever your wife has that can meet a
situation like that, we won't.
Now, there are still things you might question
in all these circumstances, but somehow and someway
deep under all this.
You see, there's a place for the thorn
in the flesh again and again.
And remember that in Hebrews 11, that Westminster
Abbey of the heroes of faith, some of
them, oh, you talk about victorious lifers, they
were it.
They just marched over mountains and everything else,
who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained
promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the
violence of fire, escaped the age of the
sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed
valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies
of the aliens, women received their dead raised
to life again.
And then all at once right in the
middle of all that victorious onward march and
others didn't fare so well.
You know it, you've read it many a
time.
They had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings
and bonds and imprisonment.
They were stoned.
And have you ever imagined, is there any
more awful way to leave this world than
to be sewn asunder?
And that comes next.
Tempted, slain with the sword, wandered about in
sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom
the world was not worthy.
They wandered in deserts and mountains and in
dens and caves of the earth.
So this preaching to the effect that if
you just follow Jesus, everything will be peaches
and cream from then on is nonsense, because
my New Testament's got a lot of suffering
in it, suffering of the saints.
Now sometimes they bring it on, yes, but
oh, let's get a clear insight in this
thing.
Paul had that trip to the third heaven,
you know, in 2 Corinthians 12.
He went all the way from height to
depth, and then he came back to medium,
to the middle ground.
My grace is sufficient, just like he sang
about a while ago.
Paul had one great experience in the third
heaven, but he couldn't tell about it after
he got back.
If some preachers would have something like that,
you'd never hear the last of it.
You go around lecturing, you're going to get
my address, be illustrated in technicolor tonight, about
my trip to the third heaven.
Well, Paul couldn't tell about it, but he
learned one thing.
God's strength is made perfect in weakness when
I'm weak and I'm strong.
And there's Colossians 1.24, and I don't
pretend to know what all this means.
I'm filling up what's left behind of the
sufferings of Christ.
Now that certainly doesn't mean the sufferings of
Christ for our sin, because that was taken
care of once for all.
But we have been left a residue and
a heritage of suffering in the name of
the Lord Jesus.
How much of it have we known anything
about?
That's something to ponder, beloved.
Paul said, I'm filling up my part of
it.
But when we've exhausted our store of endurance,
our strength fails as the day is half
done.
We reach the end of our hoarded resources.
Our Father's love has only begun.
It's worth a thorn in the flesh to
learn that, and usually that's about the only
way you learn it.
One other thorn stands out in this study,
and you have anticipated me again.
Is there any deliverance from the thorns of
creation, the thorns of Canaan, the thorns of
the Christian?
Yes, and they are symbolized by the thorns
in the crown of Christ.
You know about that.
Matthew 27, 29, Mark 15, 17, John 19,
2, all done in mockery, and yet why
was it thorns?
Why didn't they put some kind of a
wreath on him?
Why thorns?
They didn't know what they were doing.
The soldiers didn't know any more than when
they nailed him to the cross and the
Savior, Lord forgive them, they don't know what
they're doing.
They didn't know any more than Caiaphas did
when he prophesied that the salvation that was
to come and the gathering of the people.
They didn't know.
But that crown of thorns was emblematic and
symbolic of all the thorns of all time,
a thorny creation ruined by sin, a thorny
evil society like the Canaanites, thorns in the
flesh that torment the people of God.
My friend James Robinson, the evangelist, sends out
a picture that he did to his TV
listeners.
I got one of them.
It's not a pretty picture.
I had it hanging over my desk.
I didn't even frame it.
I wanted it to hang there in all
its ugliness because so many of these pictures
of our Lord in the garden, they don't
look like he's suffering much.
Some of them look like he's just suffering
a minor inconvenience, but not this one.
And there's my Lord holding on to a
rock, as it were, there in the garden
and out there.
You barely can make out those sleeping disciples
and the cross up there in the sky
of what's coming tomorrow.
He's at the end of the road.
I have an artist friend in Maryland, Ken
Hudler, who paints nothing but the sufferings of
Christ.
Now, he knows that no pen, no brush
can depict all of that, but he has
a try at it because it's so much
on his heart.
And he doesn't have a pretty picture in
the book.
I have the book of it.
Some of them are frightful.
And when they took my Lord down from
the cross, his visage was so marred to
be exact in the translation and interpretation, he
didn't look like a man.
So battered was he.
And that's encouragement for some of us who
have seen precious ones go away who didn't
look like themselves, because it's the guarantee of
a day when we'll all look better.
I sat all day beside the one who
meant more to me than anybody else in
this world.
She was already dead, except that the machinery
kept the heartbeat going.
The doctor said she's dead.
Cold comfort that was.
But I held her hand, a cold hand,
all day.
And I found myself saying, Lord, help me
to remember the way she did look and
to think about the way she's going to
look, but help me to forget the way
she does look.
Many more have had that experience.
That's wrapped up in this crown of thorns.
Creation is going to be redeemed.
The original beauty restored.
God's not going to let the devil get
away with the mess he's made down here,
and we've helped him out.
And there won't be any more Canaanites in
the land, in evil society, for the saints
shall reign and rule.
I get a lot of pleasure out of
that.
I go around sometimes and I get to
a new town in the residential section.
I run into the district that says, keep
off the grass, don't trespass private property.
And I say, that's all right, you can
have it.
Now it's going to be mine anyhow one
of these days.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
I said, friend, you've got the lease, but
I've got the deed.
So we've got a great time coming.
And all thorns in the flesh will be
no more because you won't have any more.
You'll have your new Easter outfit on that
great getting up morning.
We're wearing out.
No more evidence of that than others at
the present time, but there are.
Some of you are looking at me through
those trifocals.
You've got your teeth in your pocket.
Bless your heart, you're getting along the best
way you can.
I heard of a little old six-year
-old, been out in the sun too long,
was peeling off.
And he was walking, he said, just look
at that.
He said, six years old and wearing out
already.
Well, we are.
When I look at this face in the
mirror, you know, one verse comes to me
again and again, it does not yet appear
what we shall be.
I said, Lord, you've got to improve on
this.
And I think he will.
But bless God, it was all wrought out
in Calvary, in the open grave.
The signs of his return multiply.
Keep your eyes up in the eastern sky.
God will keep his commitment to the chosen
people, Israel, and his commitment to the purchased
people of his church.
And instead of the thorn shall come up
the fir tree, and instead of the brow
shall come up the myrtle tree, and it
shall be to the Lord for a name,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be
cut off.
Does Jesus care?
He certainly does.
That's why he came.
And God cares.
And sometimes you get rather old by the
vastness of this universe and you think, well,
how could God possibly have any interest in
poor little me?
He doesn't even know I'm around.
And that reminds us of that immortal poem
about the two little girls in the children's
home.
And one said to the other, I want
to pray, but how will God know I'm
here?
The other little girl said, well, put your
hands out on top of the counterpane instead
of under it, and say, Lord, I'm the
little girl with her hands out on the
counterpane.
I know you smile at that, but sometimes
we wish we could somehow impress the Lord
that this is me, Lord, and you know
what a fix I'm in.
And he does care.
I don't know how he does it, but
don't forget that he is infinite.
And he not only can keep all these
stars where they belong, but he can keep
us where we belong if we let him.
And so it was all gathered up in
its time, we not only sang with our
lips, but cried out from our hearts, King
of my life, I crown thee now, thine
shall the glory be, lest I forget thy
thorn-crowned brow.
Lead me to Calvary.
Or see from his head, his hands, his
feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,
or thorns compose so rich a crown?
Before you leave tonight, I want you to
sing that other crown-of-thorns verse.
I love thee because thou hast first loved
me, and purchased my pardon on Calvary's tree.
I love thee for wearing the thorns on
thy brow.
If ever I loved thee, my Jesus, it
is now.