Philippians, the third chapter, a very familiar portion,
beginning with verse 7.
And I like to call this Paul's goal.
But what things were gained to me, those
I counted lost for Christ.
Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but
lost for the excellency of the knowledge of
Christ Jesus my Lord.
For whom I have suffered the loss of
all things, and do count them but refuse
that I may win Christ and be found
in him.
Not having mine own righteousness, which is of
the law, but that which is through the
faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of
God the faith, that I may know him,
and the power of his resurrection, and the
fellowship of his suffering, being made conformable unto
his death, if by any means I might
attain unto the resurrection of the dead.
Not as though I had already attained, either
were already perfect, but I follow after, if
that I may apprehend that for which also
I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended,
but this one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto
those things which are before us.
I press toward the mark for the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ
Jesus.
Now, if we can together be as quiet
and thoughtful as possible, without disturbance or distraction,
and do our utmost to concentrate, because we
not only need consecration these days, but concentration,
consecrated concentration.
I want you to think with me about
three statements that I should like to lay
on your hearts.
Life is a series of choices between the
bad and the good and the best, and
everything depends on these choices.
These three things have a habit of getting
in each other's way.
It goes without saying, to begin with, that
the bad is the enemy of the good.
That we wouldn't debate.
An alarming percentage of God's servants are going
down these days in deceit and disgrace, overcome
not by something merely doubtful or debatable, not
on borderline issues, but going down before downright
evil.
David was a man after God's own heart,
but it was gross iniquity that snared him.
Now, Hollywood may glamorize it today, but God's
word describes all such evil as sordid, ugly,
filthy, putrefaction.
And we're shocked every little while when Christian
workers leave town before daylight because their sins
caught up with them.
We are astounded at the unmentionable vices described
in Romans 1, and breaking out now even
in upper brackets of the religious world.
When Paul warned against chambering and wantonness, he
had in mind more than meets the eye
at first reading.
We've grown sentimental about sin.
We have called sickness what God calls sinfulness
and weakness what God calls wickedness.
We are seeing today, for instance, the scourge
of illegitimacy, unwed mothers, and some are advising
a new approach that would revise the code
of morals so as to make such immorality
respectable and subsidized by the welfare state.
Preachers are accused of being pharisaical, and parents
are accused of being puritanical if they try
to warn their flocks and their children.
Many a Christian and many a church today
dates this world, and it begins so innocently
that there is rarely a protest, but one
thing leads to another, and soon it's too
late.
The best rule all the way through is
never to make the first date.
Nothing is bad anymore.
Evil is applauded.
Reputations are enhanced, and box office receipts pick
up in the amusement world if celebrities can
boast of several licentious escapades.
That wasn't true a few years ago.
I remember when a certain movie comedian got
into gross iniquity and the public was thumbs
down on him, but not now.
It would be an asset to him in
the business.
God's word portrays this sinful generation as rotten
from head to foot and pure in its
own eyes and yet not washed from its
filthiness.
Every day we are amazed at weird and
fantastic crimes committed by children not even in
their teens.
I saw some time ago a sign along
the road, dirt per se, and I thought
that ought to be hung over every paperback
book rack in the drugstores and bookstores of
America.
Downright vicious evil wrecks multitudes of Christians and
plays havoc in many a church.
During these years I have learned one thing,
and that is never to take my crowd
for granted anymore.
A Sunday morning congregation is just about the
most innocent looking aggregation on the face of
the earth.
But I've been in many a meeting where
by the middle of the week enough moral
corruption has been conferred.
And often by church officers that no one
dreamed could possibly exist so they don't take
the crowd for granted.
Beloved, you can't play with this world and
not be contaminated.
Be not deceived, evil communications corrupt good manners.
Awake to righteousness and sin, not for some
of you church members, it really means it.
Have not the knowledge of God.
I speak this, you'll shun it.
This vile world is no friend of grace.
Help us unto God.
Romans 7, verse 4 says we're married to
Jesus.
James 4, verse 4 calls whirlings adulterers and
adulteresses.
No decent married man dates another woman, and
no true Christian dates this world.
To flirt with it is to fall in
love with it and to live in spiritual
adultery.
Physical adultery often begins with a look and
a casual conversation that seems innocent enough.
And Christians are lured away from the Lord
gradually in pretty much the same way.
The first flirtations are harmless and the warnings
are ridiculed.
Gross iniquity, the bad is the enemy of
the good.
But I want to make a second proposition
that you may not agree with.
And that is that the bad can be
the enemy of the good.
Now, here is a man unwilling to join
the local church, for instance, waiting until he
can find a perfect church.
Of course, he never will find a perfect
church, and if he did and joined it,
it wouldn't be a perfect church anymore with
him in it.
But he's a perfectionist, and he has such
a concept of the ideal church that he's
unwilling to work in a real church.
His view of the invisible church makes him
invisible at church, and the abstract best is
the enemy of the concrete good.
That's entirely possible.
I heard of a fellow some time ago
who wanted to join the choir of a
certain church.
And the pastor said, well, I don't believe
you're one of our members.
No, he said, I don't belong to any
local church.
I'm a member of the invisible church.
And the pastor said, then I suggest that
you join the invisible choir.
Sometimes preachers set their sights so high in
the heavenlies that they're not worth much down
in the earth.
With them, people are either all good or
all bad, and they are not able to
work effectively with people as they are.
Now, of course, people are either lost or
saved.
But most Christians, beloved, are dazed, full of
faults and flaws and imperfections.
They have not yet arrived.
And while they are saints in the sight
of God, they are becoming saints in daily
experience.
And we can be so demanding of God's
sheep that we discourage them and drive them
away.
Such a high standard may be set that
one becomes impatient with anything short of that
standard.
All the geese must be swarmed, and we
expect all the rookies to act like veterans.
Our Lord worked with people just like they
were.
He was patient, not tolerant of sin, but
compassionate.
And the bruised reed he did not break,
and the smoking flax he did not quench.
The only crowd he ever blasted were the
Pharisees.
They were those religious hypocrites who thought they
were the best.
They had arrived.
So that's all.
We must never let the ideal best become
the enemy of the concrete good.
It's possible to be busy studying how to
do better and never do what you're doing
well.
I don't suppose that anybody is so starry
-eyed as a young preacher just out of
school and in his first fashion.
What lofty dreams of a church where the
deacon's really deep, where the choir never fusses,
where the committees do not spend time keeping
minutes and wasting hours.
But soon the honeymoon is over, and after
a couple of ulcers he begins to take
stock.
He may find that the best has been
the enemy of the good.
He expected too much too soon, and he
must learn how to work with people as
they are.
Now, that isn't compromise.
That's blending the ideal with the real and
the heavenly with the earthly.
And while we may well lament how far
short of the best we've all fallen, we
must learn to rejoice in the bad that
has become good and the good that has
become better.
You see, a perfectionist has an awfully hard
time of it.
If he's a father, the children ought to
be angels.
If he's a choir director, the singers ought
to be prima donnas.
If he's a Sunday school teacher, what on
earth can make one hang his harp on
the willows, quite like a class of a
dozen squirming little boys, for instance, with their
feet where their head ought to be, and
not getting one thing you say except that
20 years later you find out that in
spite of everything some of the word of
God got into those mischievous little hearts and
they understood something of it after all.
One of my former pastors, Dr. Turner, told
some time ago about a little boy who
came to our Sunday school years ago, and
he was a little terrorist.
Nobody knew what to do with him.
He was just simply an enigma to everybody,
and a mischievous one at that.
He came for some month, and all of
a sudden he didn't come.
The good doctor said, I'm ashamed to say
it, but I think we were all sort
of relieved that he didn't show up for
a couple of Sundays.
Then one evening we were having some sort
of a church get-together, and here he
came down the hall of the church with
a little violin case under his arm, and
he came up to me and said, Dr.
Turner, somebody gave me a fiddle.
And I said, well, that's nice, and what
did they give it to you for?
He said, they gave it to me for
being good.
He said, as dumbfounded as I was that
anybody had even given him a fiddle, to
say that he got it for being good
was almost too much.
And he saw that look on my face,
and he said, you see, Doctor, I'm gooder
than I used to be.
And Dr. Turner said, as he scampered down
the hall with that little fiddle case under
his arm, I said to myself, well, by
the grace of God, some of us are
gooder than we used to be, not with
our goodness, as we heard very well at
breakfast this morning.
But one may say, with proper understanding, and
if you can say tonight that by the
grace of God, in that meaning of it,
that you are gooder than you used to
be, why, it's all because of what the
Lord has wrote.
But thank God, even such poor creatures as
we are, in his hands, can be made
into instruments of duty and usefulness to his
glory.
I remember when I entered Moody Bible Institute
in 1922.
That's a long time ago.
I didn't even apply to enter the institute.
They didn't know I was coming.
I didn't know I was going.
So I got on the train and started
up there.
I landed in the middle of a fall
turn, unheralded and unannounced.
I went into the women's building instead of
the men's when I arrived there.
They gave me a card.
I signed it and they said, Go over
to this next room now and turn it
in.
I went there and there was a lady
at the desk.
She reached out her hand for the card,
and I thought she wanted to welcome me
to the institute.
So I shook hands with her.
That's the way we started.
I hadn't been there very long until I
played the piano a little.
Of course, down here where I grew up,
down in these hills, I had woven into
my piano playing sort of an extra beat.
We have that here in the class.
I didn't know it was there, and some
of those students began looking down their noses,
and one of them finally said to me,
Don't you know that syncopation has sin in
it?
Well, I'd never heard of syncopation.
I didn't even know I was syncopated.
And finally they said, You will appear before
the superintendent of men.
That awful day had arrived.
I ascended those steps in fear and trembling.
I had visions of that great man seated
there at the desk.
I could just see him come down with
his fists on that table and say, Keep
your hands off that piano.
I don't know.
He was a wise man.
And when I went in, he looked at
me with a twinkle in his eye and
said, You know, I said when you came
up from the South brown-eyed and playing
the piano, that we'd have trouble.
Then he gave me one of the most
wonderful little talks out of his heart about
playing to the glory of God, and he
wove all the necessary instruction about that extra
beat into it.
And then to catch the climax, he said,
Now I want you to play for the
evening devotions after supper.
That's wisdom.
Why, you should have seen me marching into
that day, devotions.
That is, Napoleon never crossed the Alps with
any more confidence than I was in that
evening.
And do you know the secret of the
whole thing?
That good man, Superintendent Schaefer, took me as
I was in the hope that I would
be gooder than I used to be.
And you have to do something like that,
beloved.
And we need to learn that.
And if he hadn't, I think I'd added
another beat.
I think that in personal experience, we can
be so demanding of ourselves that when we
fail, we're almost overcome.
Don't expect too much all of a sudden.
You don't learn it all in a day.
You don't grow up overnight.
Let's be sure we thank God for the
progress already made.
We want to fly before we walk.
We want to be perfect before we start
toward perfection.
Paul said, I count not myself to have
apprehended, but I'm on the way.
And by the grace of God, I am
what I am.
He blended the ideal with the actual, and
the best did not beseech the good.
It's not a mark of godliness, dear friends,
to be forever condemning oneself in morbid self
-accusation.
Dear old Matthew Henry has a word about
a peaceable enjoyment of ourselves.
Now, he'd be the last man to mean
by that a complacency with that whereunto you
have attained.
But I can see what he means, and
I think you can see what he means.
Sometimes we confuse obtainment with attainment.
My Lord said, come and I'll give you
rest.
That's obtainment.
Take my yoke upon you and learn to
me and you'll find rest.
That's attainment.
And we don't graduate in a year.
We go on unto perfection, but we don't
reach it here.
And we must be patient both with ourselves
and with others.
I hear a lot about the good old
days.
Well, not just when were the good old
days.
Even the New Testament churches were filled with
ordinary people, even as you and I.
Somebody wrote to a magazine editor some time
ago and said, your magazine is not as
good as it used to be.
And he answered, it never has been.
You mustn't lose sight of the ideal.
And, of course, you don't in the New
Testament.
But at the same time, you find out
that God is working his will through some
very weak saints who often fall far short
of that ideal.
And we mustn't be so enraptured with the
perfect that we despise the imperfect.
You can't be faultless, but you can be
blameless.
And that's the word that's used.
And when a little child writes a letter,
if it does the best it can, it's
not a faultless letter, but it's a blameless
letter.
And what kind of parent would that be
who would say, won't you ever grow up?
Well, can't you do any better than that?
But you rejoice in the progress already attained.
And we ought to do that with ourselves
and with others.
If a child refused to write because it
could not produce the perfect letter, it would
write no letter at all.
But I press on to the final consideration.
We've heard this old adage again and again.
And I may seem to be turning right
back on what I've said, but I think
you can readily see that there's a difference.
The good may be the enemy of the
bad.
Our Lord said to the Pharisees, You tithe
as mint and anise and cumin, and you
have neglected the weightier matters of the law,
judgment, mercy, and faith.
These ought ye to have done, not to
leave the other undone.
Now, they were majoring on the minor.
And they were not putting first things first.
Now, the good's better than the bad, but
we can become so occupied with the good
that we miss the best.
The thing that bothers me most in my
meetings is that we shall settle for good
meetings when we could have the best meetings.
I was in a New York town many
years ago with a young song leader who
had unusual discrimination.
And one night after the service, I said
to him, Well, we had a good meeting
tonight.
And he said, Two goods.
Well, one doesn't often hear that.
So I said, What do you mean?
Well, he said, You know what you said,
that the good is the enemy of the
bad.
He said, I know this, Church.
These people should have been on their faces
before God in confession of sin.
But everybody settled for a good meeting because
we didn't want to go all out.
So we settled for a good meeting and
everybody's gone out feeling quite hot about it
all.
We should have had the best.
We settled for the good.
Now, it's harder to blast church members out
of this state than it is to arouse
sinners.
Because a man who is living in gross
iniquity may be shocked by the very enormity
of his misdeeds and his wretched state, but
Laodiceans who are rich and increased with goods
and don't need a thing are the hardest
people on earth to awaken.
And it's possible to be so busy going
to Bible conferences and evangelistic meetings and even
bringing bad people to become good people in
evangelism that we see no need for revival
which brings good people to become better people
by the grace of God.
And as much as I want to see
bad people become good people, I have a
burden that the good shall have the best
that God has provided.
Now, the Apostle Paul sets a goal that
reduced our complacency to know him and the
power of his resurrection and the fellowship of
his suffering, forgetting the things that are behind,
and that included the bad, and reaching forth
to the best that is before.
I press on, not settling down in the
good, but moving through the actual on toward
the ideal.
May I warn you tonight, beloved, of the
peril of lesser goals, making the means become
an end in itself.
We have a habit, all of us, of
arriving at little goals and then we have
no ambition to reach the main objective.
I see the danger of arriving today in,
well, for instance, our new church buildings all
over the land.
We spent millions, and we needed new church
buildings.
But I find myself again and again in
one of these ornate temples where the end
of the chapter has become the end of
the book.
They have arrived in a new building, and
I mean arrived.
They have settled down to camp there.
They're not moving anywhere.
Some time ago I talked to a pastor,
and I had helped in a meeting in
a little tumbledown sort of a church some
years before, and now they had quite a
lovely one.
I asked him, How are you getting along?
He said, We're living in idolatry.
We're sitting around admiring the church.
We've arrived.
We've got it made.
No more worlds to conquer.
What ought to be a milestone has become
a millstone.
We've run out of gold.
Sometimes I meet preachers who have let that
happen.
They've arrived, and they have their postgraduate degrees
and their trip to Palestine and their big
church and their new car and their home
out in suburbia in a forest of TV
aerial.
Ecclesiastical security, financial security, social security, eternal security.
They are feathered their necks, and they are
like Baruch.
They are making things comfortable or want to,
and is he ever smug?
He's arrived.
He's settled in the good.
He's not bothered about the bed.
You can't get the flicker of an eyelid
out of him.
He's settled like the Israelites in the Promised
Land.
There remains much land to be possessed, but
he'll never possess it.
He's tired of fighting.
He's not taking off to battle anymore.
He's arrived.
From here on, he will rehash and reminisce
and repeat.
He's run out of gold.
He's got it made.
Any Christian can get into that state, and
it never was easier than it is now.
We don't have many like Jabez saying, Lord,
I'm not satisfied with my boundaries.
Widen my horizon and enlarge my coastline.
We've got too many comfortable saints extending their
physical waistline instead of extending their spiritual coastline.
And there aren't many Caleb's who, even in
old age, are saying, I don't want to
retire on a pension.
Give me a mountain.
Caleb never had to hear that song, old
soldiers never die, they just fade away.
He wasn't in any notion of fading away.
I want a mountain.
I want the best.
Yes.
There aren't many Poe's saying, I count not
myself to have apprehended, but I'm not driving
my tent pegs down in these lowlands.
I'm pressing on the upward way and new
heights I'm gaining every day.
And my heart doesn't have any desire to
stay down here where these doubts arise and
these fears dismay, though some may be satisfied
to dwell where these abound.
I've set my sights high.
My prayer, my aim, how I've done it.
Now, dear friends, this road is not easy.
Any man or woman who is not satisfied
with the good, I'll hear now, but determined
to have the best, is in for a
rough time of it.
You will be the target of the powers
of darkness.
You may be beset by strange maladies of
body, mind, or spirit.
You will be viewed with suspicion by contemporaries,
even in the church.
You will be told a crank by the
moderatists for going too far, and a coward
by the extremists for not going far enough.
You will be a lonely person because you
don't settle like Lot and Sodom.
You insist on traveling with Abraham.
This road is not crowded.
Few there be that find the way to
life, and fewer still there be that move
into the abundant life.
The average church member I've discovered a long
time since is not remotely interested in the
deeper Christian life.
He is not even casually interested in the
power of his resurrection and the fellowship of
his Savior.
But the man who sets out to know
Christ never arrives down here, but he's always
arriving.
He never fully apprehends, but every day he
keeps on apprehending.
He never knows Christ completely, but every day
knows him better, and that keeps him fresh
without becoming fed up.
He knows the difference between obtainment and attainment.
He does not confuse the means with the
end.
He's not bitter and harsh, for he expects
nothing of himself and very little of others
and everything of God.
He's not satisfied with things as they are,
but he's not impatient.
He's not content with the good, but he
enjoys the good while he moves on toward
the best.
He doesn't confuse the end of the chapter
with the end of the book.
Each victory will help him another to win.
He may lose a battle now and then,
but he wins the war.
And he doesn't settle for a lesser goal.
Each experience is not a stopping place, but
a stepping stone on the way from the
good to the best.
You see, that saves him from St. Vitus'
dance on one hand and regular mortars on
the other.
Now, if you have settled down in smug
and complacent, satisfied with the good, that you
could have the best, I beg you, beloved,
set your sights on a higher goal.
Getting to know God in Christ is the
greatest of all pursuits, and it is not
so much a matter of art as of
heart.
The man who knows God and the people
who know the Lord today are not usually
very conspicuous.
They don't usually make headlines.
Most of them are plain, simple folks.
They don't go around looking strange and acting
mysteriously.
They are not sanctified posers trying to live
up to dramatic versions of themselves.
Sometimes I go to a church, a town
for a meeting, and they take me out
to show me where the bank president lives.
Well, actually, I'm not too interested in that.
I wish they'd show me where the greatest
saint in town lives.
However, they might have to go to the
other side of the railroad track.
He that ruleth his spirit is better than
he that taketh a city.
I'd like to see somebody who's president of
his own spirit by the grace of God.
I'd like to see that man.
The art of all art is to be
conformed to our law, and that calls for
devotion and time and work.
Old William Law said, Who am I till
I folded up in the bed late of
the morning and the farmers have gone about
their work and I'm so far behind with
my sanctification?
That ought to get all of us out
of bed, sir.
Some time ago I was looking over some
old newspaper clippings and I found one telling
about a sermon I preached in the First
Baptist Church of Shelby 45 years ago.
And I said to my wife, and I
said first to myself, I ought to be
a better preacher and a better Christian than
I am, having had this long to work
at this.
Did you ever say something like that to
yourself?
Some of you older Christians?
Did you ever say you ought to, and
be honest with yourself, I ought to be
a better Christian?
I've had a long time to work at
this thing.
I ought to have covered more territory.
The difference between Padreski and just anybody pounding
a piano is not genius alone.
He was a genius, but also devotion and
love for the art and time and form.
And the difference between a man that knows
God and just an ordinary Christian is devotion
and love and time and form, and how
the devil does fight the pursuit of God.
Some of you will bear me witness that
you never knew what satanic opposition was until
you set out for a culture walk with
God.
You housewives, you have learned, if you've gotten
into this, that one of the best ways
to remember things you meant to do around
the house and forgot is to start to
pray.
And the devil will speedily bring all these
little details to your remembrance.
The devil doesn't mind how many sermons we
preachers prepare, if it will keep us from
preparing ourselves.
If you're growing more irritable and impatient and
sour notes and discords are creeping in, let
the Holy Spirit get over it in edgewise
and stop staging concerts long enough to tune
up the instruments.
And if you're developing pus pockets while you're
preaching hell, have a checker.
And it's so easy to do.
The devil will settle for anything short of
knowing God.
If he can't sell you a bad bill
of goods, he will settle for something good.
If it can be made a substitute for
God's best, even church work can crowd out
God.
We can be so busy going to religious
meetings that we never meet God.
And pastors become not under shepherds, but heads
of religious department stores.
And the only way to break out of
all this stress, as far as I can
see, is to become a rebel in this
rat race and make time for God at
any cost.
And if you can't untie some of the
knots, cut them.
Radical?
Yes.
So were the early saints, but they upset
the world.
Learn how to develop a great big healthy
nose.
Cancel that engagement to speak for the sons
and daughters of I Will Arise.
Tell them, I have an appointment.
You do.
You've got one with God.
You've probably heard Brother Duncan tell us up
at Keswick and Moody Church that he has
an appointment with his boys each day, and
when somebody else wants an appointment, he says,
I tell them I have an appointment.
That's sensible.
Well, we have an appointment with the Almighty.
You have a date with deity.
Years ago, I was with Dr. Paul Reese
in his conference out in Minnesota, and I
heard that great preacher tell of a missionary
in India who came to an old bishop
and said, Oh, Bishop, I don't know what's
the matter with me.
I've read all the books, and I've taken
all the steps, and I've done all that
they say to do, and still I don't
seem to know the Lord very well.
Does God have favorites?
The old bishop said, Not favorites, dear, but
he does have intimates.
Now, most men are strangers to God, and
some are just acquaintances.
None are favorites, but thank God the few
can be intimates.
Everyone could be.
Few are.
Forgetting the bad behind them, pressing through the
good around them, they would reach to become
conformed to the image of his son.
Some time ago, I read of an art
student whose teacher put him outdoors one late
afternoon at a spot something like this to
paint a sunset.
Before him lay the hills and beyond the
hills.
On the horizon over here there was a
barn, and he became very involved painting that
barn.
He wanted that red roof to be just
right.
Late in the day the teacher came to
see how he was getting along.
He took in the situation, put his hand
on the pupil's shoulder, and said, Now look,
the sun is almost down, and you're so
busy putting a roof on a barn, you
have no time to paint the sunset.
And after all, he said, you are painting
a sunset and not shingling a barn.
I don't think I need to press the
application tonight.
The sun is going down, beloved, on all
of us.
Fast to its close ebbs out life's little
days.
And what a tragedy to let even the
good keep us from the best and become
so occupied with lesser goals that we fail
at the great objective.
What a pity to miss the sunset painting
the barn.
And painting barns is quite all right.
There isn't anything wrong, mind you, with painting
barns.
But it's poor business when you can be
painting sunsets.
Some of us in Christian experience are dabbing
around here and there with a lot of
even religious activities and good things.
First thing you know, it'll be all over
with us, and we shall have spent our
precious years putting a roof on a barn.
I beseech you tonight, you who have come
to this mountaintop, won't you resolve under God
that you will not stop short of Paul's
goal and follow to be your goal and
every Christian's goal to know him and the
power of his resurrection and the fellowship of
his Son.
Let us stand.
Now, Father, we have a feeling that it
would hardly be possible to gather this many
people together without having some of all three
of the classes we have talked about tonight
here.
There may be some in our gathering who
are beset by gross iniquity, who are even
tempted tonight to bow all transgressions.
There may be someone in Christian work here
tonight who is so beset and is feeling
the terrific pull of this world and the
flesh and the devil.
O blessed Holy Spirit, convict such a one
right now until they shall turn from all
that to the Savior and the cleansing blood
and his forgiveness and the filling of the
Holy Spirit that they may get in that
good path and that bright way that shineth
more and more unto the perfect day.
We have a feeling, dear Lord, there may
be some who are too exacting.
Thou knowest what a failing that is.
Maybe we have set the sights so high
that we are not very usable for the
among people as they are.
Help us, Lord, to cultivate a proper understanding
of the needs of the human heart and
remember that so many people are weak and
babes and they are like Mr. Little Faith
and they need our tenderest care, and that
includes ourselves so often.
And then, Lord, practically all of us are
in that other groove.
And it's so easy, dear Father, to become
so wrapped up even with good things that
we think that's enough.
And we get into a sort of merry
-go-round around and around the same duties,
and they're not bad things, they're good things,
but we're not going anywhere much.
Oh, save us from the peril of lesser
goals, dear God.
Maybe there's a preacher who has slipped in
here tonight who is busily engaged with good
things and has not lately covered much ground
and taken much of the promised land in
his own experience.
Maybe there's a very zealous church worker, and
thank God for every one of them.
Somebody must do the work.
And yet it's so easy, Lord, to work
our fingernails off in religious work and not
cover much territory in our spiritual progress.
And we mistake activity for profit.
Speak to us, Lord, and oh, God forbid
that we miss the sunset painting the barn
and become so occupied with lesser goals that
we fail that which matters most, to know
our Lord and the power of his resurrection
and the fellowship of his servants.
Oh, wilt thou bring any resolves that are
welling up in hearts right now to fruition
in the prayer meetings that shall follow in
the evening, grant that no one shall try
to lay aside whatever whisperings of God are
coming in their ears without settling and going
through with him this night.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.