The Bible has much to say about thorns
and thistles and briars and brambles.
Over 20 words are used to name 200
varieties of prickly shrubs that grew in Bible
countries.
We have plenty of them over here.
We've been scratched and irritated and lacerated and
torn, and if you grew up in the
country, you have probably wondered why such pesky
pests, along with other things like mosquitoes, were
ever created to start with.
That's one thing I want to figure out
hereafter, what was the idea in a mosquito?
Thorns and thistles are symbols of troubles and
trials and testings and tribulations.
And some of us have had so much
of all that that we feel like we
can identify with Burr Rabbit, who was born
and bred in a briar patch.
The Bible gives us light on this subject
and a lot of information about thorns and
thistles and their significance, and I think to
look at it a moment will help us
with some of these prickly problems of our
existence and what the old word means that
we sometimes use is, grasp firmly the nettle.
When some difficult thing has to be handled,
when you grasp a nettle, don't fool around
with it, grip it in your hand, it
won't hurt as much.
And that's true with other problems, too.
We get a start way back in Genesis
at the very beginning.
God put Adam and Eve in the garden,
and it was beautiful, and every prospect was
pleasing, and not even man was vile then.
It wasn't chaos, it was cosmos then, but
the devil came.
And as I said yesterday, Adam and Eve
ate us out of house and home, and
God said to Adam, now you've got to
go to work.
In the third chapter, verse 18, well, verse
17 really, unto Adam he said, 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 bread, till thou return unto the
ground, for out of it was thou taken,
for thus thou art, and unto thus shalt
thou return.
And it's been that way ever since, thorns
and thistles, and they represent trouble and heartache
and pain and sorrow and sin.
The natural world has to contend with briars
and thistles and weeds and weather and bugs
and beetles all the time.
I watched some of the boys out in
the boat this morning spraying some kind of
solution for weed control in the lake.
And the garden, if you don't stay close
by and in it, the middle of it,
that garden reverts in a few days back
to briars.
And if you neglect the battle a couple
of days, you've lost the war.
And that's true, alas, with children, because they're
children of Adam to begin with, and there's
an inclination toward evil, and you have to
train them in the way they ought to
go, for the human heart is deceitful and
desperately wicked.
And it's amazing how they will forget some
good thing you tried to teach them, and
then something that they heard they shouldn't have
heard somewhere sticks.
Now, I'm sure a lot of parents can
testify to that here this morning.
In Jeremiah 4.3 we're told, Break up
your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.
Now, you know what fallow ground is.
It is unproductive because it's undisturbed.
Churches get like that sometimes.
Christians get like that, and the plow needs
to be put in.
To use another figure, we're settled on our
leaves and have not been emptied from vessel
to vessel.
Revival churns up the people and empties the
church from one vessel to another.
I really wonder whether it is possible to
have a deep revival in a shallow generation,
because our Lord told us that the soil
has a lot to do with it.
And he told us about that type of
soil, thorny soil, that represents, he said, People
who hear the word and anon with joy
receive it, but have no depth and no
root.
Now, they come down to church aisles every
Sunday with a smile on their faces.
What are you going to do?
They say, Well, I accept, yes, I believe.
But the first wind of persecution blows some
of them over.
Shallow.
Somebody asked a pastor the other day, How
large is your pastor?
And he said, It's twenty-five miles wide
and one inch deep.
And that's just about the situation in some
of our churches today.
I preached for five years in the First
Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina.
They have a wonderful military college there, the
Citadel.
And I gave the baccalaureate once and conducted
chaplain a number of times.
And old General Summerall, who fought beside MacArthur
in World War I, was a commandant.
He was a great soldier and, I think,
a Christian.
He was an old soldier.
And I remember that one time after I
had talked, we marched out.
And you don't often get to march with
a sure enough general.
So I tried to keep step the best
I could.
We got out there and he took my
hand and said, Thank you.
You get under these boys' hides.
And that's all he said.
Because he never did say much.
And I took that as a compliment because,
my soul, we need preaching today that gets
under the hide and breaks up the fallow
ground.
Because if we don't break up that fallow
ground, we're going to have a lot of
thorns.
You go over to the New Testament and
there's more about that in Matthew 13.
Some of the seed fell among thorns.
Verse 7, And the thorns sprung up and
choked them.
And then in the interpretation in verse 22,
He also that received seed among the thorns
is he that heareth the word, and the
care of this world, and the deceitfulness of
riches choked the word, and he becometh unfruitful.
That's what happens when we don't really heed
the word of God and do something about
it.
Now, this old earth is degenerating.
The evolutionists tell us that man came up
through fetishism, and totemism, and polytheism, and monotheism.
We're on our way up to a knowledge
of God.
But the Bible says man started with a
knowledge of God and been going down ever
since.
That's not evolution.
That's devolution.
Burbank might be able to turn a wild
rose into an American beauty, and he might
be able to make crab apples fit to
eat.
But that's not evolution.
That's just restoration back to what they were.
We're living in a world of thorns and
thistles physically, and naturally, morally, spiritually.
When God created the earth, the original blueprints
did not include sin, and sickness, and disease,
and death, and bloodshed, and wars, and earthquakes,
and disasters, and floods, and tornadoes.
God didn't have that in the original plan.
Now, the weather is beautiful when it behaves.
But sometimes it misbehaves.
And this spring of 77 over the country
gave us an illustration of that.
I preached along the Gulf Coast way back
when Camille, that awful, awful hurricane hit the
coast.
Never forget what the people said.
They said next morning you couldn't hear a
bird singing.
People talked in whispers.
One man said everything I had in this
world just disappeared.
I don't know where it went.
Now, God didn't plan that in the original
blueprints.
The Bible doesn't explain how God began.
It starts in the beginning, God.
It doesn't explain the problem of evil in
the beginning, the serpent.
That's what you have.
When man listened to the devil instead of
to God, God said from here on you
sweat it out.
I just read it.
We invent machines to get out of work.
We're headed for a three-day work week,
I guess.
Although God said work six.
We're still under the sentence.
We try to escape.
We get all tangled up in thorns and
thistles, the invisible and the visible kind.
I get amused.
I'm in Florida a lot in the winter
and I watch all these folks come in,
you know, trying to get away from it
all.
They got it all with them.
They got all the furniture they can lug
and the wife and the kids and the
dog.
I watch them unload one morning, load up
next morning.
I don't call that a vacation.
They didn't get away from it.
They've got it right there with them.
And we're trying to get away, but the
whole creation groans and travails together, waiting for
the redemption and manifestation of the sons of
God.
I'm a birdwatcher.
I make no apologies.
John Stott of England is a birdwatcher.
He preached the other Sunday.
They say in his church on consider the
fowls of the air.
And he said that means watch birds.
Well, it does.
And I watch them.
And my favorite's the wood thrush.
And I've stood many a time in the
late afternoon and listened to that flutist.
He's the flutist among the birds.
Hello.
Who was it the other day said if
a man seven feet tall came along blowing
a flute, what would you say?
And the other fellow said I'd call that
highfalutin.
Well, the wood thrush does a lot of
highfalutin.
And I love it.
And yet, you know, beloved, sometimes as I
listen to that and to others of the
songsters that God has given us, I can't
prove it, and you can't disprove it.
I could quote Dr. Robertson, the great Greek
scholar.
I could quote some of our hymn writers,
old John Keeble.
I could quote him and Goethe, the German
writer.
We're all just saying it.
But I have a feeling, you have a
sense of something there that you can't quite
describe, a longing on the part of a
creation under the reign of tooth and claw,
a longing for something out on the edge
of the Sahara Desert.
Two men were trying to sleep one night,
and they couldn't.
One couldn't because of an unearthly sound.
And he woke up there and said, What
is that?
The other said, That's the desert sighing.
And that's a pretty good description.
We're living in a creation that's sighing.
And after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, he
started a new plan of redemption for humanity
and for the whole creation, called out the
Hebrew nation to be the channel through which
the Savior would come.
And then he led them into the promised
land, and when they had conquered much of
it and settled, he gave them a warning
about thorns.
Said in Numbers 33, If you don't drive
out the inhabitants of the land from before
you, then it shall come to pass that
those which you let remain of them shall
be pricks in your eyes and thorns in
your sides and shall vex you in the
land wherein you dwell.
And Joshua says almost the same thing.
If ye do in any wise go back
and cleave unto the remnant of those nations,
even these which remain among you shall make
marriages with them and go in unto them.
And they to you know for a certainty
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 eyes and
thorns in your eyes until ye perish from
off the good land which the Lord your
God giveth thee.
Now there's the second of the thorns, the
thorns of the Canaanites, and we still have
them.
It's amazing how the Jews have retained their
identity through all these centuries.
You find them everywhere, and they've never been
assimilated.
We Christians are a chosen generation, a royal
priesthood, a holy people.
And Jesus came first to the low sheep
of the house of Israel, and his own
received him not.
But he came to us too, and as
many as received him, to them gave he
power to become the sons of God, even
to them that believe on his name.
The only race questioned with God is the
once-born and the twice-born.
That's the only races there are in the
sight of Almighty God.
And we are told to be careful about
these Canaanites, the wrong company.
God wants his people to be different and
distinct and separate from the world, not necessarily
always physical separation, because as 1 Corinthians 6
.10 says, you'd have to leave the world.
John 17 in the high priestly prayer of
our Lord tells us, we've been saved out
of the world, we're still in the world,
but we're not of the world.
But we've been saved out of the world
to go right back into the world, to
win other people out of the world, and
that's the only business we have in this
world.
That's the setup, association but not assimilation.
Don't get meshed and merged into the fabric
of this age.
Romans 12.2, one of the translations says,
don't let this world squeeze you into its
mold.
That's what's going on today in the professing
church.
It's being taken over by the world and
will end in the Babylon of Revelation and
the world church.
We must watch the company we keep.
Evil communications corrupt good manners.
Birds of a feather flock together.
That woman who wanted to look over a
coal mine and see what it was like
down there and wearing a white dress was
told by the man at the entrance, better
not wear that, what's to hinder me?
She said, nothing to hinder you from wearing
one down, but a lot to hinder you
from wearing one back out.
And so when you get into this world
and yield to it, watch it, watch it.
2 Corinthians 6, 14 to 18 lists all
those things we're not to team up with
and ends up what contoured, and that's the
Latinish word for the musical term in the
original for symphony.
What symphony hath Christ and Belial?
None.
They don't harmonize.
Teddy Roosevelt was a great American.
And during World War I, he spoke of
German Americans as hyphenated Americans.
And he said, if you're an American in
something else, you're not an American.
He said, this is not a polyglot boarding
house over here.
That's a great statement.
But we have some hyphenated Christians.
We call them worldly Christians, which is a
misnomer.
Billy Sunday used to say, you might as
well talk about a heavenly devil.
A worldly Christian is a hyphenated sort of
a character.
The friend of the world is the enemy
of God.
There's another thorn, and you've already anticipated me,
I'm sure, in 2 Corinthians 12, Paul's thorn
in the flesh.
What was it?
I don't know.
It might have been yours.
It might have been mine.
I'm glad I don't know.
Maybe it was eye trouble.
It was an affliction that God wouldn't take
away.
And the great preacher who had healed others
was not delivered himself of whatever plague or
infirmity of body, mind, or spirit it was.
But he understood it.
He called it the messenger of Satan.
I believe in giving the devil his due
about this sort of thing.
He gloried in infirmity, but he did not
glorify the infirmity.
Let's get that thing straight.
Jesus said, this woman whom Satan hath bound,
that's the right origin.
And Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, I meant
to visit you folks.
He didn't say, like we preachers do so
nicely sometimes, I was providentially detained.
He didn't say that.
He said the devil hindered me.
And that's what happened.
God permits Satan to afflict Job, but don't
blame God.
Sickness, disease, and death, and all our other
thorns are of the devil, if you trace
them far enough back.
But God can overrule him and glorify himself,
as he did with Lazarus.
And as our Lord said to Peter, when
he spoke of what death he should, by
what death he should glorify God.
Sometimes God sharpens the axe on the devil's
grindstone.
But it takes this whole world to make
the kind of characters God wants to make
out of us while he conforms us to
the image of his Son.
You can't sharpen an axe on a pound
of butter.
It takes a grindstone.
Some of the greatest saints have made their
way through this world with afflicted bodies and
tortured minds, and sometimes home problems and financial
distress and tragic circumstances, and our little pat
answers don't explain it.
Sometimes awful things happen to the children of
God.
I'm getting tired of this new gospel of
prosperity I'm hearing.
Be a Christian, you'll be a millionaire.
Every Christian a millionaire.
I don't buy that.
Make a positive affirmation every morning before breakfast,
and you'll be president of the company before
you're 40.
There was a young man from Kilpican whose
nose was as red as a beacon, but
by saying it's white 30 times day and
night, he cured it and died an archdeacon.
I don't believe that sort of business.
I heard something else in my Bible.
God didn't say to John the Baptist, Now,
John, you've been faithful to me, and I'm
going to reward you.
I'm going to give you a good old
age retirement.
He sat in the jail waiting to have
his head chopped off, and another one in
the same predicament later on was Paul.
God didn't say, Now, we're going to get
you a villa out on the Riviera somewhere
and let you write your memoirs.
It didn't work out that way.
I know Hebrews 11 lists a great many
wonderful folks who marched over all obstacles, but
right in the middle of it all it
says, And others, and some of them were
sown asunder, and that's a rough way to
leave this world.
We have a great Presbyterian preacher down my
way, the very first Presbyterian church in Chattanooga,
Dr. Ben Haden, a great preacher.
The other Sunday I sat there, and I
get him on Sunday morning when I'm home
and television.
He told something that Donald Gray Barnhouse told
him.
Dr. Barnhouse was somewhere for a conference, and
the young pastor and his wife were expecting
their first child, and they had some good
-natured bantering through the week as the time
drew near.
About Friday night, I think it was, Dr.
Barnhouse said, The preacher didn't get there, and
I knew what that meant, and I went
ahead and took over the meeting.
He said right at the close of my
message, I saw him slip in and sit
at the back.
He came down, and I never saw such
a picture of dejection and misery.
In all my heart.
And he said, Doctor, we are the parents
of a mongoloid child, and my wife doesn't
know it yet, and what on earth am
I going to say?
And the doctor helped him as much as
he could.
He went to the hospital and told her,
and she went to pieces momentarily, but she
was a real Christian.
She came out of it.
She said, I'm going to call up Mother
and tell her that God has given us
a mongoloid child.
She put the call in, and the switchboard
operator was a hard-boiled character.
This woman didn't have any faith in Jesus
Christ.
She heard it, of course.
She got the connection.
She knew what had happened.
Now, she said to a friend, we'll see
whether this thing works or not.
We'll see about this religion business.
And when Mother answered, this Mother said, Mama,
God has given us a mongoloid child.
And then she went on with her testimony.
Next Sunday, the young preacher got up to
preach and gave his message.
Then came down, gave an invitation, dropped his
head.
He didn't really think many folks would come.
When he opened his eyes, there stood the
telephone operator.
She had seen it work.
And whatever it was that could do that,
she wanted.
Well, sometimes God works it out that way.
Paul went from height to depth and then
stopped midway on the happy medium.
And the most important thing in your life
is not a trip to third heaven, nor
even deliverance from a thorn in the flesh
if you had it, but learning that God's
grace is sufficient when we're weak or strong,
when we've exhausted our store of endurance, when
our strength fails ere the day is half
done, when we reach the end of our
hoarded resources, our Father's love has only begun.
His love has no limit.
His grace has no measure.
His power, no boundary known unto men.
For out of his infinite riches in Jesus
he giveth and giveth and giveth again.
It's worth a thorn in the flesh sometimes
to learn that.
And sometimes that's the only way some folks
are learning.
But there's one other thorn reference, and I
think you have already preceded me there.
Is there no deliverance from the thorns of
creation and the thorns of Canaan and the
thorns of the Christian?
Yes.
Because I read in Mark 15 and John
19 of a crown of thorns, and when
those soldiers jammed it down over the already
bleeding head of my Lord, little did they
know what it meant, any more than Caiaphas
did when he made that strange prophecy when
God momentarily restored inspiration to him and he
prophesied the gathering of the nations.
But that crown of thorns is emblematic and
symbolic of all thorns of all time.
Thorny creation ruined the sin in an evil
society like the Canaanites, and thorns in the
flesh that torment the people of God, it
all laid on him.
And one day he who wore a crown
of thorns will return with a crown of
triumph.
Our redemption draweth nigh.
Creation shall be redeemed.
The original beauty restored.
You say, I don't see it now.
No, you don't.
It's coming.
Some of you could use a new body.
I can look at you and tell that
the original equipment is showing signs of wear
and tear.
Looking at me through your trifocals, you've got
your teeth in your pocket, maybe.
You know what I think of when I
look in the mirror, the verse that hits
me?
It doth not yet appear what we shall
be.
But don't get too blue about it if
you know the Lord.
You know one thing that sort of amuses
me, and it often is a serious word,
but you'll understand.
When people talk about a terminal ailment, I
say, well, bless my soul, we've all got
it.
We're going to terminate, aren't we, one of
these days?
And a fellow with a terminal ailment, he
may last longer than we do.
What do you mean a terminal ailment?
Some things are certain and sure, but beyond
that there's something better.
Remember that God has an original purpose.
The purpose of God, and that's what Romans
8.28 is all about.
Some folks never get any further than we
know that all things work together for good,
and then some get a little further to
them that love God.
And they never get through to the cold
according to His purpose.
If you're not in on the purpose, you're
not in on anything else.
And His purpose is a book with three
chapters, His original purpose, His present purpose, and
His future purpose.
And we're in the middle of the book,
and you don't judge any book but the
middle of the book.
You can't form a decent opinion of it,
and if you get discouraged over the way
things are going with you, cheer up, sister,
brother.
It's the middle of the book.
You can't decide things by that.
Keep your eyes on the eastern sky, and
I think that ought to be written out
with a capital E, the middle eastern sky,
for your redemption groweth nigh.
God's going to keep His word.
And one of these days, instead of the
thorn shall come up the fir tree, and
instead of the briar shall come up the
myrtle tree, when He comes back.
In the meantime, we ought to taste the
powers of the age that is to come.
Now, nothing's ever lost if you're in the
will of God.
Even your tears are in His bottle, Psalm
56a.
Did you know God is in the bottling
business?
A lady down in St. Petersburg, a newspaper
writer in one of the papers, a religion
writer, she told me that her eyes were
damaged some time ago in a TV studio
by overexposure to the bright light, and she
went to the eye doctor and he said,
Do you know what the best eye medicine
is?
It's tears.
He said no scientist and no doctor has
ever been able to come up with an
exact match for tears.
And you see a lot of things through
them that you don't see otherwise.
Our Lord says that two sparrows are sold
for one farthing, and five sparrows for two
farthings.
When you spend two farthings, you get an
odd sparrow, and you just throw him in.
And yet the Lord says God knows about
him too.
I got interested in that the other day,
the God of the odd sparrow.
If you think you don't amount to much,
think of the little girls that lay in
the children's hospital, and one of them was
little Amy and Annie.
And Amy said, I ought to pray, but
does God even know I'm here with all
these beds full of people?
And Annie said, put out your arms and
leave them on the outside of the bed,
and then when you pray, make it very
plain to God that I'm the little girl
with my hands out on the counterpane.
Well, that's a precious thing, but does Jesus
care?
Yes, he does.
And when some people say there's too many
beds in the ward and God's got a
trillion worlds to look after, he couldn't be
bothered with me.
If you think God's too great, listen, friend,
you're making him too little.
If he's infinite, it all depends on that.
If he's infinite, if he knows everything, he's
all-powerful and present everywhere, that ends it.
He can handle anything, everything, everywhere.
And so that's why my Lord came to
deal with the thorns of creation and the
thorns of Canaan and the thorns of the
Christian.
Because of the thorns of Calvary and what
they mean, he's taken care of all the
thorns.
And I know nothing that we could do
better than to sing in 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.
And I want you to make this benediction
a song right now, one verse of that
other precious song.
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, thy Jesus is
now.