Thank you, Dr. Sweden.
Let me take just a moment to express
my joy at this privilege of renewed fellowship
with you, which began, as you know, fifty
years ago.
The first fifty years have been fine.
I'm anticipating the next fifty, and the next
hundred, and the next thousand, and whatever lies
ahead, because ours is a fellowship of earth
and of heaven.
Christians never meet for the last time.
And sometimes I hear people say they've lost
a loved one, but if that loved one
is in Christ and they are in Christ,
they've used the wrong word, they haven't lost
them.
Nothing is lost if you know where it
is.
Death can hide but not divide.
Thou art but on Christ's other side.
Thou art with Christ and Christ with me,
united still in Christ.
Are we?
I want you to think about one of
the finest tributes ever paid to a preacher.
It's 2 Kings 4, 9.
You remember that Elisha had visited in the
home of a Shunammite, and the lady of
the house said to her husband, Let's fix
up a prophet's chamber for him, for I
perceive that this is a holy man of
God which passeth by us continually.
My first pastorate was a country church back
in the twenties.
I was a bachelor then, and I was
a pedestrian.
I didn't own a car.
I didn't buy an automobile until I was
sixty-six.
I wanted to think it over.
I did a lot of walking in those
days.
This is the day of the motorist, and
any man who walks is viewed with suspicion.
You see a man coming down the road
now, just meditating.
You figure he's either out of his head
or out of gas, one of the two.
And he's such a rarity that dogs bark
as though they'd seen a ghost, and policemen
have been known to follow a pedestrian for
blocks to make sure he isn't up to
something.
One memory lingers from that pastorate.
Along my route there was a grocery store,
and the grocer said one day, Preacher, I
want you to know that many a time
when things were not going well, I'd looked
out my store window, and I saw you
going by, and it helped, and I felt
better.
He didn't elaborate on that.
I've never forgotten it.
But it's been my prayer that souls along
my beat, as I make my way through
these years, might be able to say to
some small degree what this Shunammite woman said,
I perceive that this is a holy man
of God who passes by us continually.
That ought to be the ambition of every
preacher and every Christian in their pilgrimage through
this world.
Luke tells us that when our Lord was
on his way to Jericho, somebody told a
blind man, Jesus of Nazareth passed by.
He's still passing by, but not as then.
He passes by in his people, and particularly
in his preachers.
He has no hands, no feet but ours,
and if this world reads the gospel, it'll
be the gospel according to you and me,
for most of them don't read Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
In this same pastorate, I remember that when
I came there, I heard a great deal
about an old minister of years before by
the name of Josiah Elliot.
There had been ministers in that church that
went on to prominent pulpits, and I didn't
hear much about them.
I kept hearing about Josiah Elliot, and I
knew he was a very poor man, and
he had given what little he had to
help boys through school.
But I wondered where were the hidings of
his power, and where was the secret of
his strength?
I decided I'd ask my farmer friend, John
Brown.
He was an unusual character, never in a
hurry, had time to think.
He plowed back there on the creek, and
I made my way through that cypress swamp
one afternoon.
Oh, I spent many an afternoon talking to
John Brown.
He should have been plowing, and I should
have been visiting, but we'd talk all afternoon.
Then I'd come back the next morning, and
we never said good morning.
We just took up where we'd left off
the day before and went on with our
conversation.
And I said to him, John, all I
hear around here is Josiah Elliot.
Now, you've had preachers that I have heard
about, but these people talk about Josiah Elliot.
What was the secret of his strength and
the grit that he has on you folks?
John leaned on the plowhand and thought a
moment as he was wont to do.
And he said, he just loved this.
Then he went on plowing, left me standing
there.
And I made my way back through that
cypress swamp while the wood thrush was singing
his vespers at the end of a perfect
day, and there chimed in my heart something
that said, Though I speak with the tongues
of men and of angels, and have not
love, it profiteth me nothing.
And I said, Lord, help me to move
into the middle of the 13th chapter of
1 Corinthians and set her down for the
duration.
It's a good place to live.
Josiah Elliot was a holy man of God
who passed by continually.
You will observe that this woman said three
things.
I perceive that a holy man of God.
Now, a man of God used to be
a familiar term, but in this psychedelic age,
it indicates a wild and weird and woolly
freak.
In the Bible, it meant a man who
kept company with the Almighty, like Elijah, until
he could say to Ahab, As the Lord
God of Israel liveth before whom I stand.
And when you've been accustomed to standing before
God, kings don't matter much, and big potentates
are just small potatoes when you've been standing
in the presence of the Most High.
Or Enoch, who, like Elijah, went to heaven
without dying, no grave, but if he had
a monument, I think the epitaph ought to
be the Bible epitaph, He walked with God,
he pleased God, and God took him.
I'd rather have that on my tombstone than
all the laurels this poor world could lay
at my feet, or lie in the costliest
mausoleum on earth.
A lady asked an old bishop over in
India, What's the matter with me?
I've read all the devotional books, and I
pray, and I've taken all the steps they
say to step, and I've done all the
things they say to do, and still I
don't seem to know the Lord.
Does God have favorites?
The old bishop said, No, not favorites, but
God has intimates.
And Moses was one of them, because the
Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as
a man speaketh unto his friend.
Nobody knows where Moses' grave is.
God was his funeral director.
But if he had a monument, what an
epitaph that would be.
So these were men of God.
Then the Shunammite woman didn't say, I perceive
that this is a famous man of God,
or a popular, or a brilliant, or a
successful, but a holy man of God.
Now such words as holy and holiness have
fallen on evil days.
That's become a byword, holy this and holy
that, and it has come to mean fanaticism,
and emotional excesses, and rolling in the hay
and foaming at the mouth, and some who
have preached the highest standards have sunk lowest
in practice, and we've shied away in horror,
and we've fallen into a snare, for every
Bible doctrine has been carried to extremes at
one time or another.
And just because some folks go into wildfire
doesn't mean the rest of us have to
live in a deep freeze.
We don't have to freeze, we don't have
to fry either.
One thing is certain, the Bible is so
full of those words holy and holiness that
it takes several pages of concordance to list
them.
I undertook to check them some time ago
and gave up from the high priest wearing
holiness unto the Lord on his forehead to
the multitude in revelation, crying, holy, holy, holy
Lord God Almighty, this book deserves to be
called a holy Bible.
And whether you like holiness or not, you'd
better, because without holiness no man shall see
the Lord.
The world holds a higher standard for us
Christians than we hold for ourselves.
Clarence True Wilson was a temperance author, and
of course you know Clarence Gara was an
agnostic and infidel lawyer, but they were friends.
One day Dr. Wilson said to Clarence Gara,
I'm going to a meeting, I'm going to
speak on at a Methodist holiness meeting.
Clarence Gara said, what's holiness?
Well, Dr. Wilson said, and then gave him
his own definition of it, he said, we
believe that Christians can live above the power
of sin by the Spirit of God.
Clarence Gara thought that one over a moment,
and then he said, well, if I should
ever be a Christian, that's the kind of
Christian I'd want to be.
He had a higher standard than some of
us have for ourselves.
There's a new variety of preacher today who's
not interested in being called a holy man
of God.
He's a Madison Avenue, hail fellow well-meth,
who wants to be called by his first
name, just one of the boys.
So anxious to be relevant that he's forgotten
how to be reverent.
I never cared for reverend as a title,
but it did indicate some respect.
If this Unamite woman had heard Elisha tell
some jokes that some preachers tell at civic
club luncheons, she would never have given us
this text.
Some time ago, somebody said, but you don't
have to wear a halo to be a
Christian.
Well, who said you had to wear a
halo?
You don't have to go around with a
great big button saying, I'm a Christian, carry
a Bible the size of a Chicago telephone
directory.
But the Bible says that Christians belong to
a holy nation, and we ought to show
by countenance and conversation and conduct, some of
the characteristics of our heavenly nationality.
Dr. Jowett said, we are tempted to leave
our noontide lights behind in our study to
move among men with a dark lantern, which
we can manipulate to suit our company.
We pay the tribute of smiles to the
low business standard.
We pay the tribute of laughter to the
fashionable jest.
We pay the tribute of easy tolerance to
ambiguous pleasures.
We soften everything to a comfortable acquiescence.
We seek to be all things to all
men to please all.
We run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds.
We're victims of illicit compromise.
There's nothing distinctive about our character as preachers.
We wear gray when we mix with the
businessmen of the congregation and talk gray in
conversation with them.
It's a sad day for a when he's
mortally afraid somebody will think he is a
preacher.
We're living in a day when tragedy has
become comedy in America.
We are laughing at things that ought to
make us cry, and the cause of Jesus
Christ has been hurt more by unwise jokesters
than by all infidels.
I marvel at the jesting and the flippant
remarks that I hear sometimes during revival.
You remember when Uzzah tried to study the
Ark and dropped dead?
Have you ever studied what exactly was the
sin of Uzzah?
It must be pretty serious for God to
strike a man dead.
Well, he, for one thing, was the son
of Abinadab, and all his life the Ark
had been in his house.
It was a familiar piece of furniture.
He'd seen it all these years, and the
Ark had become just a box.
He had lost his regard for the sacredness
of it as a symbol of God's presence
among his people.
And old Matthew Henry says, perhaps he affected
to show before this great assembly how bold
he could make with the Ark, having been
so long acquainted with it.
Familiarity even with that which is most awful
is apt to breed contempt.
Now, Uzzah was a Levite, but he wasn't
a priest, and only the priest could touch
the Ark, Numbers 4.15, and that only
under certain circumstances.
We're Levites, we're priests.
You believe in the priesthood of the believers.
It's a sad day, my friend, when the
Ark becomes a box, when you become so
familiar with scripture and worship and the ordinances,
that you lose your reverence.
Alexander McLaren said it was a lost sense
of awe in the case of Uzzah.
Nothing is more delicate than a sense of
awe.
Trifle with it ever so little, and it
speedily disappears.
Watch the average Sunday morning congregation.
You don't see much awe out there.
What you see is not awe, it's awful.
And relevance has become more important than reverence.
You can take God's name in vain at
church.
You don't have to curse to take God's
name in vain.
You can do it when you stand and
sing, My Jesus, I love thee, I know
thou art mine for thee.
All the follies of sin are resigned when
you haven't done it.
Have thine own way, Lord.
Hold o'er my being absolute sway, and
you don't mean it.
A tourist in Africa chanced on some boys
playing what looked like a game of marbles.
He drew near and discovered they were playing
marbles with diamonds, because that was South Africa,
where in those days diamonds were mined.
Playing marbles with diamonds, and we're doing that
in the church today.
I've read of a girl who was touring
Europe, and in Vienna she went to the
museum where there is kept on display Beethoven's
piano.
And this poor little thing sat down and
played some rock and roll on it, and
the old caretaker endured it, and after it
was over, he said, Padreski was through here
some years ago, and oh, she said, and
what did he play?
Nothing, said the caretaker.
He said he was not worthy to touch
Beethoven's piano.
I'm sure that poor little thing must have
gone out of there red in the face
if she was capable of embarrassment.
It's an awful thing to treat the earth
like a box.
In cheap familiarity, the holy things have gone.
Watch that.
Somebody has said there's no greater hindrance to
true spirituality than a superficial acquaintance with the
language of Christianity from childhood.
Now, that sounds like a rather questionable statement,
but I've thought that over.
I grew up in a Christian home, and
I thank God for it, but it's dangerous.
I read through the New Testament I don't
know how many times when I was a
very small boy.
I have articles I wrote for the paper
when I was nine, was licensed at 11,
and ordained when I was 15.
But there came a day when I had
to back myself into a corner and say,
hey, you, is this real, or is it
something you've learned until you can recite it?
Is this real to you?
If we ever have a confrontation with a
holy God, and if God ever visits us
again in true revival, it'll end this prostitution
of holy things, and we'll be red in
the face with embarrassment about some of the
silly things we've been doing to try to
put the gospel over.
Oh, you say we must relate and communicate
to the New Age when we're not doing
it too well, with all the new technique.
We're not cutting the mustard.
We're preaching happiness instead of holiness.
God didn't save you to make you happy.
That's a byproduct, but he saved you to
make you holy.
You are predestinated to be conformed to the
image of God's Son.
Now, if you want to be popular, preach
happiness.
If you want to be unpopular, preach holiness.
Oh, you say, but doesn't the Bible tell
us if you know these things, happy are
you if you do them?
Yes, but it's conditioned on two ifs, knowing
the word of God and doing the will
of God.
And who wants to hear about that now?
There's a price to pay to be a
holy man of God.
You have to buck the current because the
tide's running the other way.
Now, what was the secret of Elisha, the
holy man of God?
Do you remember that day when Elijah was
to be translated?
This prophet who had lived all his life
in a furious tempest was going to heaven
in a fiery whirlwind.
Elisha made up his mind to be there
when it happened.
Elijah tried to shake him off at Bethel
and at Jericho and Jordan, but Elisha said,
I will not leave thee.
He knew he was the successor to Elijah.
He wanted a double portion, not twice as
much, but the elder brother's portion.
The preacher that God honors today is the
man who has made up his mind to
have the best God has for him and
will not be put off with anything less.
Now, along that road that day, there were
some seminary students, and they knew something was
going to happen.
They inquired about it.
Fifty of them stood to view it afar
off, but nothing happened to them.
And that's as close as some people ever
get to a double portion of God's blessing.
They hear about it and talk about it.
They're in the vicinity, but they never see
the chariots of fire, and Elijah's mantle is
not for them.
Beloved, it is not enough to live in
the neighborhood of a miracle.
Holy men of God don't live on hearsay
and secondhand experiences.
There are plenty of schools of the prophets
these days along the roadside gossiping like these
young prophets did, but it's only once in
a while that an Elisha says, I'm going
through to a double portion into the prophet's
mantle.
You remember what he said to those preachers?
Hold your peace.
Men who are in dead earnest don't engage
in idle chatter with roadside reverends.
Elijah's translation wasn't a subject for idle speculation.
It wasn't a temporary excitement.
Elisha knew it was for him the opportunity
of a lifetime, and if he blew it,
he'd be an ordinary preacher the rest of
his days.
And the preacher who's out for God's best
doesn't have any time to waste on bystanders.
Some stop at Bethel, and some stop at
Jericho, and never get to Jordan because they
talk it over with the schools of the
prophets.
The preacher who's out for the prophets will
do well to say to all these seminarians
who talk about it, hold your peace.
Don't you let anybody stop you short of
God's best for you.
He went the distance that makes the difference.
Down our way we used to have on
radio over Sunday morning a lot of little
mountain preachers and country preachers, and they loved
God and won souls.
They did terrible things to the King's English
sometimes, but they were great souls.
And one morning one of those old boys
was holding forth on the text.
He went a little farther, and every once
in a while in the sermon he'd fairly
blast the elements by yelling, how far have
you went?
Well, I wouldn't have minded it if he'd
said it just once, but every once in
a while, how far have you went?
Finally I couldn't take it any longer.
I was sitting there all alone.
I yelled back at him.
I said, brother, you done went too far
now.
But it is quite a question.
You know what Ruth said to Naomi, I'm
going through in treatment not to leave thee.
Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth
clave unto her.
We've got a lot of saints today who
give the Lord a kiss once in a
while.
God wants people who say, where thou goest
I will go, where thou lodgest I will
lodge.
Thy people shall be my people, and thy
God my God.
She went on to be the great grandmother
of David and an ancestor of Jesus Christ.
Judas betrayed my Lord, not with a slap.
Jesus Christ is being betrayed more today with
a kiss than with a slap.
We notice the slaps and say, isn't that
awful?
But plenty of people give him a kiss
of respect and never follow him.
Have you gone the distance that makes the
difference?
I was preaching to a crowd of preachers
in East Tennessee in the mountains a summer
a year ago.
I got up every morning before breakfast to
climb one of those mountains because I still
can get up them.
And it's a little rough, and I got
about halfway, and discretion told me that maybe
since I'm not quite as young as I
used to be, I ought to settle for
that.
But I saw a light place up there
among the trees, and I said, I believe
if I reach it there'll be a view.
And I made it, and I was rewarded
with a panorama that I'll never forget.
And I said as I stood there that
early in the morning and looked out upon
that unforgettable sight, well, the difference is worth
the distance.
And it is.
That extra mile of prayer, that extra time
with your Bible, that extra season of communion.
Oh, William Lowe said, who am I to
lie folded up in the bed late of
the morning when the farmers have gone about
their work and I'm so far behind with
my sanctification.
Well, we're all behind with that.
Jim A.
before he went to Ecuador, is a young
man, this isn't an old man talking, said,
I went to a friend's house last night
to look at television, and God laid on
my heart Psalm 119, 37, turn away mine
eyes from beholding vanity.
He writes, like one of the old mystics,
it's that extra mile that sings my heart
has no desire to stay where doubts arise.
Fears dismay, though some may dwell where these
are bound.
My prayer, my aim is higher ground.
I'm not going to label that experience.
We argue about it, whatever you want to
call it.
It's that extra mile that gets through to
God's best.
And then this Shunammite woman said, this is
a man of God, a holy man of
God that passeth by us continually.
Elisha didn't hide in a cave and polish
his halo.
He walked among men.
Our Lord didn't spend his days lecturing in
some secluded spot far from the maddened crowds
ignoble strife.
He went about doing good.
Jesus was always passing by.
And so must we, because if we say
we abide in him, we ought to walk
like he walked.
And our walk must match our talk.
Elisha was available to everybody from kings to
commoners, and they all beat a path to
his door.
He solved the water problem at Jericho, put
a prophet's wife in the oil business at
a profit, raised the Shunammite's son, healed Naaman
of his leprosy, purified the poison in the
pot, recovered Lostack's heads, relieved the famine, anointed
Jehu, led the Syrians blind into Samaria.
And after he died, and long after he'd
been buried, they lured somebody else's corpse on
the bones of that old prophet, and that
fellow came to.
Even his corpse woke up the dead.
I tell you, that old preacher had a
lot of vitality in his system.
He had more power dead than the rest
of us have living.
I made a trail of blessing.
Two springtimes ago I spent some weeks in
the Ozarks.
I love it in the springtime in the
mountains.
And an old mountain missionary took me way
back beyond, back in the hills, to show
me some of his work.
And he told me about his predecessor, said
he did a great work there.
He said he used to drive an old
ramshackle automobile down these crooked trails, and he
had a sort of an amplifier in there,
and he'd come down those crooked roads singing
at the top of his voice, I know
the Lord will make a way for me.
I know the Lord will make a way
for me.
If I live a holy life, shun the
wrong and do the right, I know the
Lord will make a way for me.
And they say the mountain folks would stop
whatever they were doing and listen.
And then they'd say that's the missionary going
home.
That's a great way to go home, brother.
That's the way I want to go home.
And I want somebody to be able to
say along the way, there's a holy man
of God who passed by us.
There was another character who used to be
around Moody Bible Institute, and I thought so
much of him, Homer Hammond Tree.
Homer Hammond Tree grew up in little old
greenback Tennessee, sang the gospel all over the
land, taught music here.
Out of the hills he came and back
to the hills he went.
All his life he was just a big
old Tennessee mountain boy.
Well, last fall I was preaching in Johnson
City and Knoxville and Maryville, and I said
to the preacher, where is greenback Tennessee?
And he said, it's not far out here.
I said, let's go over there.
And I found the country cemetery, and I
found Hammond Tree's grave.
He never married.
He lay there alone beside a big shade
tree.
And on that tombstone, the words which I
believe are on Mr. Moody's tombstone, or part
of it at least, the world passeth away
and the less thereof, but he that doeth
the will of God abideth forever.
The last time I heard Hammond Tree sing,
he and Paul Beckwith sang the story of
Jesus will never grow old.
It's good to grow old singing a song
that won't grow old, that ageless theme that
the ears cannot dim, nor time outdate.
He that doeth the will of God, that's
success, that's fulfillment.
And if a man miss that, he's failed,
though his corpse be housed in the stateless
mausoleum.
But if he does God's will, he's a
success, though he resteth to finish in a
country churchyard out in the hills.
Well, I came from those hills just across
the line in North Carolina, not far.
And when my journey is over, I could
wish to go back to those hills, and
I could wish that all those whose lives
are touched along the road might be able
to say, to some degree, I perceive that
this was a holy man of God who
passed for us.
Continue.
And may that be said of you and
of me, that we were holy men and
holy women.
Let's turn in our hymn books to hymn
number 325.