What does this mean?
And Peter answered, this is that, which was
spoken by the prophet Noah.
And I want us to think about it
with the sentence inverted a little, is this,
that.
Today the knighted world is watching a bewildered
church with its confusing projects and programs and
its movements and counter-movements and it's asking,
what does this mean?
And the big question is, is this, that.
Is the life and work of the church
today what Peter and Joel are talking about?
When I say church, I don't, I mean
of course first of all the big institutional
organizational set-up, the profession church.
There is a true church within the church
of all genuine Christians.
God knows how many members there are in
it.
It's like the faithful remnant in Malachi and
the faithful here in Sardis and there is
where the real scream of God's purpose is
flowing.
The rest of the profession church will end
up in the world church under antichrist.
But the question is, in the church as
we think of it today, is this, that.
Is the program of the profession church today
what Peter was talking about?
Most of it is not.
It's the feverish and feeble and frustrated and
futile attempt to secure secondary results without the
primary causes.
When you grow a crop, you have to
do four things.
You break up the ground, you sow the
seed, you cultivate the crop and you gather
the harvest.
Now God has called different men for different
functions in that connection.
The business of the Bible teaches to sow
the seed of the word and the pastor
cultivates it and the evangelist gathers the harvest.
But there needs to be a ground-breaker
-upper, a John the Baptist first of all,
to break up the ground.
I'm afraid, beloved, we're trying to harvest when
we haven't broken up the fallow ground.
We're trying to take up item number two
and three and four when we haven't put
on our agenda item number one.
We're trying to produce the results of revival
without the revival.
We've had all kinds of revivals.
We've had building revivals, but God dwells not
in temples made with hands.
Our bodies are the temples of the Holy
Spirit.
And unless we bring them to church sanctified
and meet for the Master's use, God won't
even look at us, though we meet in
a church as big as the Pentagon.
Too many church members today are not human
temples, they're human chivalry.
And if we don't have more holy temples
in our congregation, our other temples of brick
and mortar will just be Ichabod Memorial with
the glory divine.
Then we have church membership revival.
We've stuffed the church rolls with the names
of baptized pagans, and you can't find most
of them with a church warrant, and yet
we glory in the protection.
One of the unmentioned sins that we shall
have to confess if God ever enters the
heavens and comes down is this.
We've had stewardship and tithing revivals, but if
a Macedonian doesn't give God the Macedonian before
he gives God the money, if he doesn't
give self before substance, we're only gathering vain
oblations that Isaiah preached about.
We need to hear Amos at Bethel again
with his irony and sarcasm.
Come to Bethel and transgress at Gilgal, Mother
Clark, transgression.
Bring your sacrifices every morning and your tithes
after three years.
And our Lord is saying to the Pharisees,
you tithe but you neglect the weightier matters.
These ought you to have done and not
to leave the other undone.
We do need revivals of all these things,
and there are others who are saying we
need revivals of this and revivals of that,
and they tell us now we need an
ecumenical revival.
We've always had an ecumenical fellowship.
I go to Bible conferences.
For instance, I've gone a lot to Lenona
Lake, and people of all denominations come there,
and they love the Lord Jesus and love
the Lord.
We don't think much about it up there.
We're all one in the Lord Jesus.
Any sensible Baptist recognizes anybody who knows Jesus
as his brother in the Lord.
We've agreed on that all through the past.
We might not be able to live theologically
under the same roof as some folks, but
we can be neighborly just the same.
I heard of a fellow who couldn't get
along with his wife, and he built her
a house next to his.
And the story goes that one day a
friend came along and looked in the kitchen
window and saw blueberry muffins and cakes and
pies and said to him, Why, I didn't
know you were a cook.
And he said, Oh, they came from next
door.
And the visitor said, Well, why don't they?
Why can't you all get along?
He said, Nobody could get along with that
woman, but I'll tell you one thing.
You couldn't ask for a better neighbor.
Now, I am saying you may not be
able to live under the same roof as
some folks, but why not be neighbors with
all of my fellow of the Lord?
This big super church is another matter, and
it's not a sign of strength.
It's a sign of weakness to try to
get everybody together in one great big mulligan
stew in the name of theology.
The early church did not grow by consolidation.
It grew by diffusion.
And most of the church membership of America
doesn't know what it's all about anyhow.
What good would it do to get them
all together?
A hundred blind men can't seem to better
than one blind man.
Then they tell us that we need a
theological revival.
I prefer to call it a doctrinal revival.
Not many Christians are theologians, but every Christian
ought to be able to give a scriptural
reason for the hope within him.
That's doctrine.
And if you mean a return to the
truths that were once believed, we do need
a doctrinal revival.
The scriptures tell us that in the last
days there will be a departure from the
faith.
Some people refuse to see that today.
Anybody who does see it is called a
pessimist and a viewer of alarm and a
witch hunter because he sees the wolves coming.
Well, that's the time to see the wolves
coming, and not when it gets into the
flock.
We are sheep among wolves, but you have
to look out for the wolves among the
sheep.
A man would have to be blind in
both eyes and bereft of his brains not
to see Satan as an angel of light
drawing a church salary in many a place
today for denying the truth.
I'll say one thing for Bob Ingersoll.
He stayed out of the pulpit.
We ought to give him credit for that.
He didn't draw a church salary for preaching
infidelity.
And in his day, he had a lecture
on the mistakes of Moses.
And one fellow said, I wouldn't cross the
street to hear Ingersoll on the mistakes of
Moses, but I sure would like to hear
Moses on the mistakes of Ingersoll.
Then we have these inclusivists today who say
we have room for all grades and shades
of theology in our fellowship.
Friend, that's too much room.
Can two walk together if they be not
agreed to the same fountain, cannot send forth
both bitter water and sweet?
We may differ on minor details, but liberalism
is another matter.
Liberalism is not a different variety of Christianity.
It's another religion altogether, root, branch, and fruit.
And Paul said, if we are an angel
from heaven preaching the other gospel, let him
be damned.
That's the saying of the great preacher.
Dr. Phillips said the early church opposed false
doctrine in a manner that sounds almost unchristian
to us today.
Now, some of us here lived through the
theological controversy of over 30 years ago when
we had everything from William Jennings Bryan to
Harry Emerson Foster.
I remember those years.
I was upset by some myself.
I was inclined to take a liberal position
on some point.
I can't go into all that now, but
the good Lord got me out of it.
I remember telling my father that I couldn't
anymore go back to the old position and
a chicken could go back into its shell.
But thank God the Lord unhatched me.
I remember sitting in the woods up here
in Catawba County reading Gresham Machen and that
old Presbyterian straightened me out in that book
on liberalism and Christianity.
Today we have new personalities and new terminology,
but it's the same old virus under a
new name.
You can call rheumatism arthritis, but it keeps
on hurting, just the same.
You can put the poison in a new
bottle, it will kill you, just the same,
and all the more dangerous because it is
in a new bottle with a new label
on it.
You can't go by terminology.
Just because you employ a certain term doesn't
mean much these days.
Just because you've got athlete's foot doesn't make
you an athlete.
Liberalism talks tolerance, but it's always one-way
tolerance.
It's tolerant of everything going its way.
It has kind words for apostates and nothing
but scorn for old-fashioned Bible-believing Christians.
If you take a stand against it, you
are not Christ-like.
And there's no peaceful coexistence along this line
anymore than there was with the Israelites and
the Canaanites or the free world and communism.
Of course, the answer is not in the
bitter fundamentalism.
Some of our brethren of other fellowships that
I need not name have demonstrated that.
They started with the best of intentions, and
then they degenerated into splits and subsplits and
splinters and little groups like these matches that
won't strike on any box except the box
they came in.
And they whip it off, and everybody who
doesn't dot all his I's and cross all
his T's like they do.
The answer, beloved, is not come-outism.
It doesn't lie in going down the street
and starting another church.
You need a revival in the same old
church.
That's a good place to have a revival.
You don't have to pull out and leave
the denomination.
I've seen some good people back through the
age pull out, and most of them got
out on a limb and sawed the limb
off.
I don't like a lot of things I
see.
Of course not.
Southern Baptist is not perfect.
Show me a crowd that is.
But nobody's ever told me what to preach.
I've had perfect liberty to preach as a
Southern Baptist all these years.
I've been a Southern Baptist longer than most
of you have been in this world.
And I've had liberty all the time.
I don't believe, though, in turning the old
ship over to the new years.
We were here first.
One of my best friends was W.G.
Riley of the First Baptist in Minneapolis.
He baptized my wife.
And old Dr. Riley used to say, I'm
standing where Baptists used to stand.
When they get right, they'll be where I
am because I'm where they used to be.
Oh, how we need a doctrinal revival.
But while history repeats itself, it rarely reverses
itself.
And I can't think of any great church
or church body that ever changed gears and
returned to the old paths once it began
to deny the faith.
The momentum increases, and there is a point
of no return.
Then they tell us we need a social
revival.
Revival of social involvement.
Well, Christianity has always had social implications.
We're the souls of the earth.
Salt doesn't do any good in a soul
shaker.
It has to be shaken out and rubbed
into the corruption of a decaying civilization.
I didn't have to read Bonhoeffer to know
that we belong out in the world, ministering
there.
As the Father sent me into the world,
so send I you into the world.
Some of the greatest advances in the betterment
of society have followed great spiritual awakenings, like
the Wesleyan revival.
That's one thing.
But it's something else when the church becomes
a party to political movements masquerading as moral
issues, government-sponsored and sociologically-oriented reformations.
We've got no business being amateur sociologists.
That's not our main business to begin with.
And unless religious social action is the spontaneous
expression of a vital and personal Christianity, it's
a fake and a fraud, you can give
all your goods to feed the poor, and
without love you will be profited nothing.
We're having a vast expenditure of time and
ink and brains today over the supposed polarization
between evangelism on one side and social action
on the other.
Some folks say it's just two sides of
the same coin.
The church has majored on the vertical man
-to-God relationship, and now we're catching up,
they say, on the horizontal relationship.
Some are more excited over Lazarus and his
poverty than they are over diabetes on his
way to hell.
Some are trying to put the robe on
the prodigal while he's still feeding hogs, trying
to put a ring on his finger while
he's still in the pigsty, killing the fatted
calf for a generation feeding on her, building
bigger and better hog pens out in the
far country.
They've forgotten that the prodigal son was rehabilitated
after he went home, and there isn't any
record that he said, I will arise and
apply for government aid.
Why, my old-fashioned father up in Catawba
County wouldn't have known a sociologist if he'd
met one coming down the middle of the
road, but he was for better roads and
better schools and cleaner politics just because he
was a Christian, and his influence moved out
in all directions.
Neither evangelism or social action will be any
better than the people back of him.
You had a great Negro preacher here last
year who said a sick church can't help
a sick world, and how true that is.
We're trying to propagate a low-grade anemic
Christianity, and we've confused normal Christians with average
Christians.
The average Christian today is a subnormal Christian.
A normal Christian would be an oddball in
the eyes of the average church member.
And until the church repents, and until we
have a better grade of Christians, you're going
to have one group of evangelism, encompassing sea
and land to make proselytes when we already
have too many of the kind most of
them are, and the other propagating a truncated
social reform under religious auspices.
We are polarized, you say, between these two,
and which comes first?
Well, neither one of them comes first.
This is not a chicken-and-egg question.
I'll tell you what comes first.
You have it in the Talley Declaration.
Three things mentioned there.
First, the deepening of the spiritual life within
the church's homes and individual Christians.
And we were supposed to have taken care
of that last year in preparation.
But I noticed that Dr. Clout said some
time ago, and I read it out of
a biblical recorder, but have we used 1968
to get ready?
Have you searched your heart for self-centeredness?
Real, real dishonesty should be living unto a
lack of spiritual concern for our world.
Are you saying it's yet four months and
in comes harvest?
If you don't see the need to your
people now, there'll probably be no harvest.
That's the thing some of us are trying
to say.
You know the condition.
Have you seen a large electric sign with
some of the letters out and others quivering
like that?
That's a picture of the membership of the
average church today.
I don't know how many of your members
are out, and I don't know how many
are shaking.
Oh, we need to be plugged into the
socket of divine power, first of all.
My Lord said, Go ye, but he first
said, Pray ye.
I've heard sermons trying to get young people
to say with Isaiah, Here am I, send
me, when they've never said, Woe is me.
You're not ready for, Here am I, when
you've first said, Woe is me.
The first item on God's program is repentance,
and it's the last thing the Lord said
to the church and the last thing the
average church will do.
I know some of you are getting awfully
tired of hearing me talk about things.
You say, I keep on sewing on that
same old string.
Well, I'm like that old boy playing the
cello who just kept sewing on one note,
and somebody said, You don't play one that
way.
You run your fingers up and down the
note.
Oh, I said, Those fellows are looking for
the right note.
I've already found it.
I know some of these boys today, they're
still hunting the right note.
Thank God, I've been sounding the note all
through these years, and I'm sold on it,
and I believe the first thing the church
needs to do is repent.
I know you can't repent all the time.
I know you can't grow a crop by
breaking up the ground all the time.
You have to do the rest.
The seeds must be sown and the crops
cultivated and the harvest gathered.
But you can't do anything else until you
do break up the ground.
My Bible says, Break up your fallow ground,
sow not among thorns.
A lot of Bible teaching today is just
sowing seed in a briar patch.
The harvest has not been broken up.
The church can do many things after she
repents, but she can't do anything till she
repents.
Oh, she can build buildings and raise money
and add more members and encompass sea and
land for proselytes and put on programs and
have a name to be alive and popular
and prosperous.
But the Lord will steal it out of
his mouth.
Now, when Peter said, This is that, which
was spoken to Joab, he was, of course,
talking about the outpouring of the Spirit.
But Joab, before he ever said anything about
the outpouring of the Spirit, said, Go yourselves
and lay minty, priests.
How ye ministers of the altar!
Come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers
of my God, for the meat-offering and
the drink-offering is withholding from the house
of your God.
Sanctify fast, call a solemn meeting.
Gather the elders and the inhabitants of the
land into the house of the Lord your
God and cry unto the Lord.
That's repentance.
Blow the trumpet in Zion.
Sanctify fast, call a solemn assembly.
Gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation.
Assemble the elders.
Gather the children and those that suck the
breath.
Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber
and the bride out of her closet.
Let the priest, here is the text he
used earlier today, The ministers of the Lord
weep between the porch and the altar, and
let them say, Spare thy people, O Lord,
and give not thine heritage to reproach that
the heathen should rule over them.
Wherefore should they say among the people, Where
is their God?
After that he will pour out his Spirit
on all the place, and then whosoever shall
call on the name of the Lord shall
be saved.
Now, that's evangelism.
Whosoever shall call on the name of the
Lord shall be saved.
But what comes before this?
Repentance on the part of God's people.
That's the divine order.
You can't change it.
Some time ago a seminary president on the
West Coast lamented the fact that the social
reforms of 19th century England grew out of
spiritual revival, and he said the church today
seems indifferent to such matters.
But the difference is they had a revival,
didn't they?
We haven't had one.
And we're trying to have the revival result
without the revival.
Just a few months ago I had a
meeting in First Baptist Church of Brunswick, Georgia.
That's down on the coast, close by the
great Methodist campground, Epworth-by-the-Sea, where
John Wesley ministered and George Whitefield and Charles
Wesley, back in 1735.
I had the preacher to drive me over
there one morning.
I said, I want to stay over here
a while.
And I walked around over that place and
saw that wonderful marker that Bishop Arthur Moore
had put up with these words of the
great Methodist bishop on it.
Let us read the story of John Wesley
again.
This cultured, conscientious gentleman, resolute in self-demise,
punctual in all observances, doing all to give
his kids, and avoiding evil, had everything but
peace in his own heart.
Then the room in Aldersgate Street, and his
face-to-face encounter with his Savior, presently
that masterful little man climbed on his horse
to set out on the conquest of England
with only one resource, the assurance given him
that Christ had taken away his sins.
Soon that spark of grace set ten thousand
hearts on fire.
I spent all morning over there by myself,
meditating on John Wesley, and all the words
that he gave in 1735 was before he
was ready to preach.
Don't forget that.
I told that to the preacher boys at
SNU some years ago when I was at
the conference at First Church Dallas before it
got so big they had to move over
to the auditorium.
And I said to them, and I say
it to you tonight, no man seemed better
qualified for evangelism than Wesley.
His mother, one of the greatest women ever
lived, his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, all
preachers.
And he was an Oxford man, and a
man of prayer, and separated from the world,
and a man of rigid discipline.
He was a nomad of a work partner,
but he was not ready to evangelize because
he hadn't had a personal revival, and he
had to have a confrontation with Jesus Christ
three years later, 1738.
As I walked along those sacred grounds all
alone that morning, I could not resist the
conclusion that for the most part we are
today like a pre-orders-gate Wesley.
We're like a pre-Pentecost church.
Wesley said, I came over here to convert
the Indians.
But who will convert me?
And I have a suspicion that a lot
of us today are trying to convert Indians,
and we need a conversion.
There are two kinds of conversion in the
New Testament, Matthew 18, verse 3, except you
be converted and become as little children.
That's conversion unto regeneration, and a lot of
church members need that.
And then the other one is Luke 22,
verse 32, where Jesus said to Peter, When
thou hast converted, strengthen the brethren, and a
little later feed the sheep, and that's all
the same thing.
That's conversion unto renewal, and most of us
need that.
Wesley faced an evangelistic challenge in America, but
what he needed most was not the challenge
that he saw in America, but the change
that he felt that others gave him.
And the big question before us tonight, beloved
ears, is the change within us sufficient for
the challenge before us?
Are we ready within for what we face
with us?
John Wesley admitted his need, and God made
it.
And if only we could bring ourselves to
a like admission, God would meet us, but
we're rich and increased with goods and have
need of nothing.
And so God is waiting, and the revival
that started with John Wesley and shook the
nation is waiting to begin.
This is what was spoken of the Prophet
Joseph, repentance, revival, and reaping.
And the biggest business is to make sure
that this is that.
And when this becomes that, and not before,
then this bewildered world will ask, What shall
we do?