...and his Bible knowledge made him an effective
preacher.
Here is Dr. Vance Havner this evening with
a few R's.
First Chronicles 12.32, we read that the
children of Issachar had an understanding of the
times to know what Israel ought to do.
You will observe that these people had a
knowledge of the times, but they also understood
them.
There are men today who know a lot
about what's going on, but they don't know
what to do about it.
I suppose that one of the outstanding characteristics
of this age, believe it or not, is
ignorance.
Never had more school, never had more ignorance.
A lot of it's educated ignorance, and that's
what makes it still work.
Our Lord said, ye do err not knowing
the scriptures or the power of God.
When a man doesn't know the scriptures and
the power of God, he's an ignoramus.
Maybe a PhD, but in his case that
only means phenomenal dirt.
These children of Issachar had an understanding that
produced a knowledge, a knowledge of what to
do.
It was practical knowledge, a knowledge of what
God's people ought to do.
So you have a remarkable combination there in
that statement.
They first of all had a knowledge, and
then it produced an understanding that in turn
produced a practical knowledge of what God's people
ought to do.
I heard of a certain business firm some
time ago that decided to take out group
insurance.
Everybody agreed but one man.
No, he didn't want it.
And the boss said, I'll take care of
him.
So we went over to him, said, I
hear you don't want to take out company
insurance.
That's right.
Well, is that your tool kit there?
Yes.
Well, lock it up.
And is that your lunch box?
Yes.
Well, close it up and go on out
through the office and pick up your check
and keep on going.
Why, the fellow said, I'm ready to take
out insurance, ready to sign up right now.
Well, the boss said, why didn't you do
it earlier?
Well, he said, I never had it explained
to me that way before.
So I believe in an explanation of the
scriptures that gets the Lord's people to do
something.
And if we are to understand the times
and know what God's people ought to do,
I think there are four considerations that need
to be kept in mind.
And first of all is the promise of
our Lord's return.
The church missed the road when she quit
looking for the king to come back and
started building the kingdom down here.
Of course, there is a spiritual kingdom which
is not meat and drink but righteousness, peace
and joy and the Holy Ghost.
Mind you, it starts with righteousness.
Plenty of people are interested in the peace
and the joy today, but not many interested
in righteousness.
Too many are like a man with a
broken arm who doesn't want it set.
He only wants a shot to kill the
pain.
Many of them come to church like that.
They don't want to get right, be right,
do right.
They only want something to ease the pain.
But there is a visible kingdom.
The kingdom of God is the reign of
God in the hearts of men, but there
will be a visible kingdom not brought in
by education, legislation or reformation.
The king will set it up when he
comes back.
And if we understood that, there wouldn't be
so many misguided souls riding all kinds of
queer bandwagons trying to bring in a counterfeit
millennium, superimpose a false kingdom of heaven and
a profane paradise on an unregenerate society.
You've read about Rip Van Winkle.
You know how he went to sleep and
slept through a revolution.
Not the only fellow who ever did that,
of course.
When he went to sleep, George III was
the ruler of America.
And when he woke up, George Washington was
president of the United States.
Rip didn't know the difference, started hoofing it
up for the king, almost got put in
jail.
He was hollering for the wrong George.
We've got a lot of people today hollering
for the wrong George.
You might as well try to explain a
sunset to a blind man or play music
for a deaf man.
You might as well try to catch sunbeams
with a fishhook or talk nuclear physics to
a monument in the city park as to
talk current events in the light of the
Bible to the man on the street who
doesn't read the Bible.
You're casting pearls before swine and that which
is holy to the dogs.
It's impossible to understand any issues today out
of the context of the overall purpose of
God in history.
World peace, the ecumenical movement, the new immorality,
whatever.
These are all pieces in a jigsaw puzzle
that you never can assemble if you leave
out the centerpiece.
The world's not going to be converted.
It ought to be evangelized.
It isn't going to be Christianized.
Constantine tried to Christianize paganism and wound up
paganizing Christianity.
He didn't Christianize it, he just Constantinized it.
And we're trying to do much the same
thing today.
Any and all of our schemes and projects
to create a kingdom of heaven out of
unregenerate men are doomed from the start.
The Chinese have a proverb, you cannot carve
rotten wood.
And you cannot fashion anything enduring out of
unregenerate humanity.
Oh, we need old Will Rogers again to
size up a lot of things that are
going on today.
When the first disarmament conference was being held
in England, when we threw away battleships and
had to build more later, Will said they
might get somewhere over there if it wasn't
for human nature.
I don't know any better way to put
it than that.
The only way to understand the meaning of
history is in the light of the two
advents of Jesus Christ.
Otherwise, what we learn from history is that
we learn nothing from history.
The early Christians were not only ready, they
were expectant.
When I hear somebody say, oh, of course,
I believe in the Lord's return, I know
then that it doesn't make much difference to
him whether the Lord ever comes back or
not.
When he says of course, you don't want
to say of course about that.
It ought to move us more than that.
Dr. Campbell Morgan used to say, I never
lay my head on the pillow at night
without thinking before morning comes.
The final morning may have come.
The early church went out with the glorious
proclamation of Christ's come, in the prospect of
Christ's coming, and in the power of Christ's
contemporary.
Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and
forever.
Dr. Hinson out on the west coast years
ago preached a great sermon on the Lord's
return.
Some students in the crowd didn't see it
that way.
After the benediction, they came to him and
one of them said, Doctor, we just can't
get that out of the New Testament the
way you preached it this morning.
The old doctor said, of course, you can't
get it out.
It's in there to stay.
And it is in there to stay.
A.J. Gordon believed in the Lord's return
and it was said of him, advocacy of
that doctrine cost him much.
It seems to awaken suspicion and lead to
estrangement this great doctrine of hope.
Dr. Gordon says it's not wanted by a
church with millionaire merchants and by great universities,
but it was for the assertion of this
doctrine that our Lord was crucified, Matthew 26,
24.
When our Lord got around to saying, I'm
coming back, then is when the storm broke
loose in all its fury.
But while we look for the Lord's return,
are we to sit with folded hands waiting
to be rescued by his return?
No.
So there is a second consideration, promise of
his return, the possibility of revival.
And I mean the revival, a visitation from
above, God coming down in the latter reign
of spiritual awakening.
There have been such great visitations as in
the days of Wesleyan, American revival, the Welsh
revival, the Shantung revival in China.
Most of us have never seen a revival.
Therefore, we're a little handicapped in talking about
this sort of thing.
Oh, we've seen some local revivals in churches
maybe or on a college campus, but we've
not seen God visit the land in such
a mighty way that multitudes moved before him
like a wheat field before a summer breeze.
And yet I must say that a revival
doesn't have all the answers.
Pentecost was a revival, but it didn't convert
Jerusalem.
We had a revival before the Civil War.
There was a revival before the Korean War.
It doesn't solve everything.
A revival's a good deal like a sale
in a department store.
It's more spectacular, but the main business is
done in the daily merchandising the year round.
Pentecost was a great day, but Jerusalem went
right on to judgment.
Revivals make headlines, but when the books are
added up at the last day, I think
it'll be found that the main work was
done by the faithful preaching of ordinary preachers
and the daily witnessing of ordinary Christians, so
winning in the Sunday school and in the
home.
But we do need a great revival, and
while we cannot produce it, we can pray
for it, prepare for it.
In one of the smogs out in Los
Angeles, the meteorologist said only a wind from
elsewhere can dispel this condition.
Well, beloved, the world is smog-bound.
We're living in conditions of low visibility, mangroves
in polluted darkness, and politically and morally we're
living in a blinding haze.
Black and white have been smudged into an
indefinite gray.
What was once clear is now fuzzy and
indistinct.
The other day, a certain college in its
advertisement said we have over 3,000 students.
They meant to say in our midst, but
they left the D out, and it said
we have 3,000 students in our midst.
Well, there are a lot of them in
our midst today, if you believe me, and
only the breath of God can dispel this
miasma that grips mankind, and only the Holy
Spirit who came like a mighty rushing wind
at Pentecost can scatter the fog.
But let me change the figure a moment.
I saw a sign on a church bulletin
the other day.
The lowest ebb is the turn of the
tide.
Things are at pretty low ebb today, and
the next thing on the program is a
turn of the tide.
But what that tide will bring, I don't
know.
It can bring the return of the Lord,
revival in the church, or if it doesn't
bring one of those two, it will bring
retribution, the judgment of God, so along with
the promise of the Lord's return.
And the possibility of revival is the prospect
of retribution.
If the Lord carries and revival does not
come, there will be the judgment of God.
America is at a Belshazzar's feast, and that
feast, you remember, was characterized by revelry, revelation,
and retribution.
We're on a national binge, and if things
keep on like they're going, we'll have to
swap the eagle as our national symbol for
a vulture.
When Billy Graham was collecting the awful statistics
for his book, World Aflame, his wife Ruth
looked over his shoulder, and she saw the
growing list of awful conditions in this land.
She said, well, if God doesn't judge America,
you'll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
True.
Then there was revelation.
God's writing on the wall today, and thank
God there was one man who understood the
times.
If you're going to be popular in Babylon
today, you have to learn how to talk
out of both sides of your mouth and
walk both sides of the street and be
an expert in the art of almost saying
something.
John the Baptist knew how to reprove a
king, but he wasn't up on communication, dialogue,
and public relations.
He wasn't a guest in Herod's palace.
He was a prisoner in Herod's jail.
And certainly we wouldn't think of calling Herod
a fox as our Lord did.
Your modern Daniel in Babylon is quite at
home in the Feast of Belshazzar.
Thank God at the original Feast of Belshazzar,
there was a queen who could say, there
is a man who knows what time it
is and can read what God's saying.
I'm glad Daniel didn't get up scared half
to death and say, I can't read it.
Too many prophets and too many pulpits today
cannot decipher the heavenly hieroglyphics.
They can't read the writing on the wall,
and others try to cheer up everybody by
saying it has no special significance.
I'm glad Daniel didn't read something else.
He could have.
They wouldn't have known the difference.
There are prophets today who read out of
God's revelation what never was in it.
And the average American is so ignorant of
God's word, he wouldn't know the difference either.
I'm glad Daniel didn't read just part of
it.
There are prophets in Babylon today who are
afraid of the truth, the whole truth, nothing
but the truth.
God had a man who could read it,
read it all, read it right.
I know Daniel is not popular in some
circles.
I know that the companion volume to an
outstanding commentary today says that Daniel ought to
cure us of predicting the future since he
tried and failed.
I know we've been misled by those who
make Daniel's fourth world power to be Greece
instead of Rome and never see any further
than Antiochus Epiphany.
But my Lord said, whoso readeth Daniel, let
him understand.
And read Daniel we will, and make our
way through the Babylon of Revelation 17 and
18 till Babylon's no more.
And then we'll join that innumerable multitude in
Revelation 19 singing hallelujah for the Lord God
omnipotent reigneth.
God grant us some prophets in Babylon who
can decline the table of Nebuchadnezzar and disregard
the decrees of Darius and stand at Belshazzar's
feast and read to this frightened generation what
God's writing on the wall.
We're a little short on prophets today.
I have ransacked libraries.
I've looked everywhere for material on the New
Testament prophet.
You ever try to find anything on that?
It's practically nonexistent.
We have pastors and teachers and evangelists, and
thank God for all of them.
We never have had many prophets, and there
is no prophet at present discernible on the
horizon.
And I'm not talking about the foretellers, but
foretellers, men who speak for God to the
nation and the church.
When I stand before a group like this,
particularly where there are many students, I always
breathe a prayer that somewhere in the crowd
there might be some lad who will take
up the challenge and dare to speak for
God in the prophetic function today in the
best sense, the New Testament sense, of the
word.
The prophet tops the list of Satan's most
hated men, and every demon offers a prize
to destroy him.
He's a disturber of the peace.
He's a Daniel who keeps Darius awake all
night.
He's a John the Baptist who spoils for
Herod the pleasures of a king's palace.
And he's without honor in his own country,
scorned by the scribes and the object of
the hatred of all Jezebels.
Little religious clerics complain because they can't control
him.
His contemporaries stone him, and the next generation
builds a monument in his honor.
He's acceptable to no board, no committee.
He thinks out his strategy far from the
petty bickerings of ecclesiastical politics.
His policy is not determined by swivel chair
experts.
He's accused of living in an ivory tower,
but the trouble with most of us is
we're out too close to see the whole
field.
We can't see the forest for the trees.
The prophet's a man apart who sees the
whole panorama, and we're short on prophets today.
Barclay says the settled ministry began to resent
the intrusion of these wandering prophets who often
disturbed their congregations.
The settled ministry always tends to resent the
itinerant evangelists.
Prophets are not popular.
Where is public appreciation the test of any
preacher?
Whether they hear or whether they forbear, they
shall know that a prophet hath been among
them.
Certainly we're living in a day that cannot
endure sound doctrine because we've come all the
way from heartburn to ear itch.
And in a time like that, people are
not ready to receive the truth.
The prophet won't draw a crowd either.
It's not the business of the preacher to
fill the church.
It's the business of the preacher to fill
the pulpit.
It's the business of the church members to
fill the church.
My Lord preached his crowd away in the
sixth chapter of John.
It's not our business to make the message
acceptable.
It's our business to make it available.
It's not our business to see that they
like it.
It's our business to see that they get
it.
The prophet is a square, and he's an
odd number in a standardized, collectiveized, regimented society.
He walks alone.
He's a poor mixer.
He's not popular at clubs and luncheons.
Amos was not chummy with Jeroboam II.
Amaziah didn't have much use for Amos at
Bethel.
Organized institutional religion and the voice of dissent,
you have it all the way through the
Bible.
Elijah and Carmel, Omaikea, our Lord and the
Pharisees, they're not popular in king's palaces.
They're not wined and dined by Ahab's and
Herod's.
You remember that Elijah faced Ahab, and Ahab
said, Art thou he that troublest Israel?
And Elijah said, You got the shoe on
the wrong foot.
You're the one that's troubling Israel.
Ahab was the troublemaker.
Elijah was the troubleshooter.
We need troubleshooters today.
Businessmen, business firms employ such men to look
for bugs in the machinery and prevent breakdowns.
God needs such men in the church.
New Testament prophets, divinely equipped for the job.
They have an instinct for locating trouble and
a genius for exposing it.
And naturally, they're not popular.
It's much more pleasant to be a Gamaliel,
keeping everything quiet in Jerusalem, than a Paul
exceedingly troubling Philistine.
Such men are called troublemakers, but they don't
create the situation.
They only reveal it.
If you call attention to the bushels and
the beds that smother our Christian testimony, you
shouldn't be accused of making the bushels and
setting up the beds.
They do not put delinquent Christians on the
spot.
Such Christians are already on the spot.
We need some sanctified troubleshooters today.
There's trouble aplenty, not much demand.
Prophets are too disturbing.
They're a contradiction to their generation.
They cause general uneasiness.
They play havoc with the serenity school, and
they irritate the tranquilizers.
And just when the false prophets of the
peaceful coexistence school have lulled everybody to rest
at ease and sound, here comes a prophet
to blast the neighborhood with a siren that
cries aloud and spares not.
And while the scholars are writing wordy volumes
that nobody reads anyhow, the prophet says it
in a colorful paragraph.
Oh, you say, but doesn't the Bible say
blessed are the peacemakers?
Yes.
But the surest way to have peace is
to deal with the troubles that prevent it.
A sick man doesn't have any peace because
he has trouble, and the doctor has to
be a troubleshooter before he's a peacemaker.
May there be somewhere even now in America,
in the backwoods, maybe, a solitary lad who
will walk in the prophetic succession and be
a troubleshooter from Tekoa like old Amos was
long ago?
And is it too much to hope that
there may yet arise in the sunset of
this age a prophet of the Lord besides,
such as Jehoshaphat had in mind?
Are we too far gone to pray that
however unthinkable such a calling may seem to
the average seminarian, some hearty soul will see
to it that the prophet shall not perish
from the earth?
The book of Revelation tells us of a
final babble in ecclesiastical and political.
It'll be man's last civic masterpiece, the counterfeit
of the New Jerusalem that comes down from
above.
I didn't get into the Futurama at the
World's Fair, the General Motors Futurama, but I
like the one that John saw on Padmas.
We're living now in the preliminary stages of
the last chapter of that drama, and even
Dr. Torrance of Edinburgh said the 660th is
the number of so-called Christian civilization without
Jesus Christ, the number of every attempt to
organize this world in a form that appears
marvelously Christian but is in reality anti-Christian.
We're living in Babylon, what we need a
Daniel.
So while we await the return and pray
for revival and face retribution, what can we
do about it besides just be faithful?
I hear that everywhere, all you can do
is be faithful.
Is that all?
Well, I think we can do a little
more than that.
I don't think this is a day to
proceed on a business-as-usual program.
I hear services sometimes announced as usual.
Maybe that's what's the matter with us.
We need to get on an emergency basis.
The hour is too late and the need
too great to go about it as though
we had a thousand years in which to
do it.
The urgency ought to match the emergency, and
we ought to quit living ordinary lives in
these extraordinary times.
So I leave with you another hour, along
with the promise of his return and the
possibility of revival and the prospect of retribution.
I believe that God would have us think
seriously about the program of the remnant.
And I believe God wants to rally a
master's minority, the church within the church, a
faithful few, a task force, a spearhead of
expendables, a dedicated minority scorning the values of
this world and living under stringent discipline.
You remember Laodicea.
He said, I'm about to spew you out
of my mouth, and he did because Laodicea
disappeared.
But he had one more proposition to make.
If anyone will hear my voice, I'm gathering
the assembly of the anyones.
I do believe that our Lord may be
about ready to spew institutional Christianity out of
his mouth.
But he's gathering the anyones.
Dr. Torrey used to say, in order to
have a revival, let a few members of
any church get thoroughly right with God.
Small groups are springing up all over the
religious world today.
Of course, they are all a variety, good,
bad, and indifferent, but the principle is sound.
We've been trying to do it the extensive
way.
Maybe the time has come to do it
the intensive way.
We've been trying to do it the big
way.
Maybe God wants to do it the little
way.
We hear a lot about mobilization, and most
of it's mobilization.
Gideon's 300 is a classic example.
He started out with 32,000.
God said, it's too many.
You will take the credit.
So they got rid of 22,000 cowards
and 9,700 callous and had 300 committees.
And that's just about the ratio in any
day and generation.
We have too many soldiers today of the
kind we have for the kind of battle
we're out to fight and the kind of
victory we're out to win.
Gideon had too many of the wrong kind.
Now, if he were out in ordinary warfare,
he'd have needed 50,000, because the Midianites
were like grasshoppers all over the place.
The church is in spiritual warfare.
The battle is the Lord.
The weapons of our warfare are not torn.
The average runner, the middle church member, knows
absolutely nothing about spiritual warfare, couldn't care less,
and Ephesians 6 is a foreign language to
him.
Yet I hear people say, if we only
had more members, more money, more methods, we
have too many now of the kind that
most of them are.
And as far as statistics are concerned, you
know there are three kinds of lies, white
lies, black lies, and statistics.
And if we won, if we won with
such a mob, we'd take the credit for
it, as God said to Gideon.
We're not going to win this battle by
a motley mob of cowards and careless, but
by a nucleus of the consecrated and the
committed.
We have the unreached multitude on the outside,
and we have the faithful minority on the
inside, but between the two, there's the unfaithful
majority in the church.
And we must do something about that crowd,
that the first business of the church is
not even evangelism, but to get ready for
evangelism by revival within the church.
The only strategy that'll work today is this,
the rallying of a Redeemer's remnant.
We're trying to set the backlog on fire
first.
You can't do that.
You start a fire with kindling wood, as
Mr. Moody said a long time ago in
one of his meetings that didn't build up
very fast, and some of the preachers said,
Mr. Moody, it's slow going.
Moody asked, how do you start a fire?
You start it with a few.
You start it with kindling wood.
If you're going to try to set this
backlog of unconverted and undedicated church members on
fire first, you'll never have a fire.
Begin with the few.
But we're going to have a Gideon's band.
We must have a Gideon.
It must begin with somebody, preferably the preacher,
but if not the preacher, it could be
anybody.
If anyone, it could be the janitor.
If anyone.
What kind of a man does this Gideon
have to be?
Well, he ought to have a burden over
the times.
If God be with us, why has all
this befallen us?
He ought to want to see God work.
Where be all the miracles that our fathers
told us of?
He ought to be conscious of his own
weakness.
My family is poor in Manassas, and I'm
the least in my father's house.
He must be sure he's destroyed the altar
of Baal.
The dearest idol I have known, what e
'er that idol be, help me to carry
it from its throne and worship only thee.
No preacher can lead the church within the
church if he has an idol in his
own heart.
Marshall Foch said, the battle is always won
the day before.
Gideon's battle was won the day before.
You know that from the record.
God's battles are won the day before.
Gideon won his by his concern and his
consecration and his commitment and by his cooperation
with God in eliminating the unfit and concentrating
on 300 who met this.
Now, I don't mean that we're to excommunicate
the unfaithful.
Don't mean that.
Fact is that in the last part of
the seventh chapter of Judges, that 31,700
came in on the last of the battle.
If we began with a dedicated minority, I
believe others would eventually join us and come
to the help of the Lord against the
mighty, but don't start with them.