Dr. Tyler and Julian Fong, lithium, chapter 3,
verse 10.
In verse 10, that I may know him.
Now, today I want to talk about this,
that I may know him.
In the first place, I believe that God
created the heaven and the earth and all
things that are there in it.
Everybody that believes this is Jewish, say amen.
I believe that God made the heaven and
the earth and all things that are there
in it, and I'm going to believe that
he made all his creatures.
And he made each one his kind of
life, so he is rich.
The kind of life that he chose for
us.
And when he adjusted that kind of life
to an environment which he chose for us,
and as long as each living creature stays
in its own environment, and lives the kind
of life God gave us, that creature fulfills
the purpose for which it is made.
And God being who it is, there can
be nothing better than a creature higher than
this.
He fulfilled that for which God made him.
Now, that's all.
You can't go higher than that.
You can put statues in your parks.
You can write their names on the walls
of famous buildings.
You can give them prizes of all sorts,
noble prizes, influential prizes, and every kind of
prize.
Or you can canonize them if you wish.
And it's all been told, and it's all
been said, they cannot say any more of
this creature than this.
God made him.
Gave him a certain type of life.
Gave him an environment to inhabit.
And he has lived in that environment, and
in relaxed confidence, has lived the kind of
life God gave him.
Now, that's all.
The angels and archangels and each person and
each person and each saint and each prophet
and each prophet can't go any further than
that.
Now, it says here that the angels did
not let their churches stay, but let their
own habitation.
God has reserved in every country, cities, and
in darkness, for the judgment of the great
day.
Do we see a certain order of beings,
or a certain number of beings of an
order, that let their churches sit?
That is, they let the place for which
they have been created, and anyone, anybody, any
intelligent creature, any moral creature anywhere, to leave
this prophecy and escape will know only its
secrets and pains, because they not foretold the
end for which they were created.
Now, that I said generally, of any living
being anywhere, the incidental evidence is that you
and I are willingly part of this system
because we're scared shit.
We're afraid to use our religious imagination, and
we're afraid to believe what the Bible teaches
us.
The Bible talks about angels, and dark angels,
at least one, and parrots, and cherry of
them, and watchers, and holy ones, and principalities,
and powers, and we and I insist on
people, that's all.
We are afraid to rise and let our
faithful imagination encompass the wonder of the whole
universe, the whole of beings.
Now, God created man in his own image,
and there's no other creature as this person.
I cannot find any scripture where God said
he ever created a cherub in his image,
nor a cherub in all of these places
in his own image, nor an angel or
archangel or principality or power, but it's clear
that God made man in his image.
God said affectionately, let us make man in
our own image, poor in the image of
God's created being.
Then came the blessed life, and man began
to live in his soul, so that man,
now here it is, you can take this
out, make it quiet, misquote it, and make
a radical out of me if you want
to do it, but I'm sure you won't,
but as originally created, man was more like
God than any other creature that ever was
created.
As originally created, man was more like God
because of no other creature did God say
he made him in his own image.
And a wise old German Christian says this,
there is nothing in the universe so much
like God as the living soul.
Now, of course, he takes for granted and
admits that man's soul is sinful and lost,
and in that sense, sin is not like
God.
In the soul, a sinner who shall die,
but there is something basic in human nature,
and in the soul of man that can
become more like God than anything else in
the universe.
I wish you could believe that.
I wish that we could accept that as
a part of our truth, and not be
afraid that if we take it and say
we believe it, somebody will charge us with
believing man's all right.
Man's not all right.
Man's a fallen creature.
Man went down like a automobile that left
the highway at a curve, and went over
a jolly downwind among the rocks, and man
is not all right.
Man is lost.
Man is not damned.
I heard a preacher this afternoon talking about
my poor, lost, damned soul.
No, no, never call yourself damned, brother.
You're lost, but you're not converted.
You're lost, but you're not damned.
That's another thing altogether.
But God created man to know him, and
he created man to know him in a
sense and to a degree that no other
creature can know God.
The creatures that are in the presence of
God may not know God as well as
the man-soul that God has made in
his image.
Don't you see?
Don't you see that there has to be
a degree of life there which enables a
man to know God?
Don't you see that the cat there under
your table, or the dog there lying on
the right, you put a record on.
You put on something by Mozart that Beethoven,
and he'll never even open his easy eye,
because there's nothing in that cat's nature that
can understand Beethoven or Mozart.
So go on, as you have at home,
some of the fine records of London, the
great choir there, singing Christmas carols.
Well, no dog will get up and go
over and sit down and gaze, in spite
of that little eye he knows his master's
voice.
No dog ever looks into a photograph.
He lives with curiosity.
He can't appreciate it, because he hasn't got
the kind of life that can appreciate it.
It's a two-year-old baby.
We thought as church that our grandchildren were
unworthy, because when we would play a music,
they'd show their little bodies.
Then we'd find out all the babies do
that.
But everybody's like that.
They'd show their end of them.
They've got an end of them to do
it.
God puts them into the rhythm of the
universe.
Now, I'm not afraid of rhythm.
I don't go for Elvis Presley, but I'm
not one afraid of rhythm, because the beat
of God, the up, down, north, south, east,
west, it drops the music to me as
a little baby.
And so, the little babies are born into
the stream of it, as a creature born
into the water, into the stream.
And when they're old enough to hear music,
they're old enough to smile and close up,
because it's the dance of life that God
gives them that kind of music.
Remember, Billy?
God made us to know him in a
way that no other creature can know him.
He made us to know him into a
degree that no other creature can know him,
because no other creature has quite the capabilities
that man has.
Certainly, the angels have capabilities.
They're holy angels, and they obey God.
And certainly, the seraphim are on the throne
of time, in the fire of God, and
they know God.
But they don't know God.
If man will know God, redemption has been
completed.
For God means that man should be higher
than the angel.
God made him a little while lower than
the angel, so he might really be higher
than the angel.
And when it's all over, and we know
that we are known, we shall rank higher
in the hierarchy of God than the very
angel himself.
But my brethren, man by himself lost his
knowledge.
He lost it.
I read about it over here in Romans,
the first chapter.
Because that when they knew God, they glorified
him not as God, neither were thankful, but
became vain in their imaginations, and their true
heart was darkened.
And even as they did not like to
explain God in their knowledge, God gave them
over to a reprobate mind to do those
things which were not convenient.
As one version says, to do this great
collapse.
So that man by his sin lost his
knowledge of God, so that now man, though
he has the potentiality to know God in
a way no creature in heaven can know
God, he still does not know God because
his conduct is unweighted in his high origins,
and his heart is filled with a huge
emptiness, if you know what I mean.
And so, that's what the matter is.
That's why we have these crises all the
time.
That's why I was treasuring this Christ I
chose, who directed me in his chastity.
Oh, where do you go unless the next
man who's elected president is the anti-American,
and they turn out to be anti-Christian?
Well, what's the matter with it?
They told us it's science and philosophy and
psychiatry and psychology and sociology, and all of
this is all the preparation which remains.
Indeed, we should all, men should all be
like brothers, each other's brothers.
But we're hurting each other more than ever
since the beginning.
There's more hatred and more suspicion and more
treachery and more firing and more extreme odds
and more sceptery and more telling out.
Whenever there has been since the beginning of
the world, what's the matter?
It's because man is filled with a vast
emptiness.
He was created to know God, but by
his sins he chose the gutter and would
like not to have God in his knowledge.
He says man is like a bird trapped
in a cage, like a fish taken from
the water.
And so, man instinctively craves for the image,
and misses it, misses the eternal being, misses
the life, misses the life, misses the friends.
And that's what you never really see on
earth.
It's like a 15-kid getting into an
old banged-up car with pipes and hammers,
and go out on the prowl looking for
anybody, not anybody in particular, but anybody to
cause down in the deep soul of him
is the knowledge that sometime you've got to
die, that this world isn't enough, and there's
a don't understand, and don't take the win
on them, and turn to shame, become perverted,
and like the alcoholic refuse the gutter and
love the gutter.
What does the Bible teach about the now
knowing God, the truth?
Well, it teaches that God can be known.
It teaches that God was not abandoned in
any way, as he abandoned the angels of
sin.
Why did he abandon the angels of sin?
Because they were never made in the image
of God in the first place.
They were made more physically capable of moral
and spiritual perception, but they were not made
in the image of God.
Why did not God abandon man?
Because man was made in the image of
God.
Before God gave man a chance, he sent
a redeemer.
How does the Bible teach that man can
know God?
It teaches that in Christ, and through Christ,
he is the image of the indivisible God,
the brightness of his glory, and the strength
of his justice.
Our old father said this about us.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, Lord
and begotten Son of God, begotten of Him
before all ages.
God is God, light of life, very God,
very God, begotten, not made.
He is the one substance of the Father,
by whom all things were made.
And this is what the Bible teaches.
It teaches that everything that God had is
Christ's.
Don't listen to the liberals who say God
revealed himself through Christ.
Don't listen to the liberals who say that
it was that Christ reflected more of God
than other people did.
Don't listen to the liberals who say that
as one piece of metal might be more
radioactive than another, so certain individuals are doomed
to die in a way that other individuals
aren't, and they are therefore religious geniuses, and
that Jesus Christ was the supreme religious genius,
touching and reflecting more of God than any
other man.
Don't listen to that, because all that amounts
to is to himself, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ was not a receptor of deity,
only though he was that.
He was not the revealer of deity, only
though he was that.
He was, and is, and always has been,
and never shall cease to be God, Light
of Life, God of God, very God of
very God, begotten, not created.
He told that all that God had is
Christ's, is.
He told that no Jesus Christ is to
be back at the ancient fountain again, back
at the ancient fountain again.
We don't say this is the result of
advancing years, because I felt this way when
I was converted at 17.
I certainly didn't have developed this far, but
I went back to the roots of my
being.
But I tell you, my brethren, as we
shall go on into artificiality so far, that
it's a wonderful thing by one wonderful quick
act of our souls' impatient care to go
back to the ancient fountain of our being
and start over again.
And there is no God for ourselves all
over again, back where Adam started, back beyond
where Adam started, back beyond where the world
began, back beyond where the angels began, back
at that ancient, glorious, heavenly fountain we call
the dream of God, the shining of.
And in Jesus Christ, we go back there.
In Jesus Christ, we leave all the environment,
and we go back to the ancient source
of our being.
"'Pick on it, blissful center, rest,' said John
Lewis, and wrote, Now rest, my long-divided
heart, pick on it, blissful center, rest.' And
so back at the ancient source of our
being, we find the beginnings, we start all
over.
Jesus Christ, that I may know him,' said
Paul, that I may know him.
Now, my question tonight is why Christians know
Christ so little, and know God so little.
Well, I'd like to say to you this,
that not all of the Godhead can be
known.
If you serve with any of them, it'll
be a most wonderful thing for us, because
a real good tricking down is good for
Christians sometimes, because then you're tricking them back
to where they belong.
And if any of you have the idea
that you know pretty well all that can
be known about God, you're just about to
burst, and we're warning you just about two
more of the six-pound pressure, and you'll
go.
And when you go, it'll take God a
long time to get you back together again.
Dear brothers, not all of the Godhead can
ever be known, because that being that was
capable of knowing all of the Godhead would
have to be equal to the Godhead.
Just as you can't pour a cup of
water into a vessel holding less than a
quart.
Same, you can't pour all the Godhead into
a ceiling with anyone being less than God.
Now, I have quoted before what some of
the ancient fathers said in arguing for the
Trinity.
They said, look, I didn't like this.
God, the eternal Father, who is beneath, and
is God beneath me, and is love, and
he is love, who told the very nature
of love is to give itself.
And he could not give his love fully
to anybody which was not fully equal to
him.
He told her he had an ancient son,
who is equal with the Father.
And the eternal Father poured out his love
into the son who could contain it, and
contain all of it, because the son is
equal with the Father.
And then he said to his wives and
to the old brethren, they said for the
ancient father to pour his love out on
the son would mean that the medium of
communication had to be very close to the
father and the son, and that was a
holy door.
So, there you have the Trinity.
The ancient father in the fullness of his
love, pouring his love to the son who
can be equal to the spirit and the
father.
So, not all of the Godhead can be
known by man.
The limitless infinite spirit being is called God,
filling and surrounding and enfolding and upholding.
But all that can be known of God
is revealed in Christ.
And when Paul said, when Paul said that
I may know him, that I may know
him, no one will know him.
He is not intellectual at all.
You don't know God, but you know the
mother's occasion table, or know the mother's code.
And I was a kid, 16, and so
I learned the mother's code, and I could
send me a few messages, or not too
well, but I was working on them for
a while, you know, go over the old
telegraph instruments.
And I didn't know almost anything, practically nothing
you can't learn.
But it's intellectual.
And Paul said that I may know him.
He did not mean him intellectually.
He meant by experience, personally and consciously.
He meant that I may know God personally,
myself, spirit touching spirit, and heart touching heart,
and conscious knowledge of God.
In all the old Henry's truth, Paul, I
get to heaven, and I'm going to hunt
some of these old fellows up.
I'll be satisfied to sit in this grave
for a thousand years, but after that, if
I get up enough courage, I'll go hunt
up some of these dear old fellows.
One of them will be Henry Sousa.
And Henry Sousa said this, there is a
vast difference between hearing a little piece be
played and really hearing that one has been
played.
Now, it's one thing to hear that there's
been a concert.
It's another thing to have heard the concert.
It's one thing to hear that there has
been a planet suddenly discovered, but it's another
thing to have days on that planet.
Now, this describes almost all Christians.
Not all, certainly, but a great many.
Too high percentage of Christians.
They've heard, they've been completely told that they've
never heard this in text.
They know God only by hearsay.
And I don't want to be harsh and
hard on people, friends, but it's my conviction,
a growing conviction with me, that that's what's
the matter with it now, what's the matter
with the church on earth, the gospel church,
the believing church, that we tend to know
God only by hearsay.
Some have never heard of him except by
hearsay, and others have heard him and known
him, but only faintly.
We've heard only faint echoes of God's voice.
Instead of ever hearing the voice of God,
you can always tell a man or a
woman who's been into the presence and come
out.
There is a vibrancy in the testimony that
you won't find anywhere else.
I claim I can know as much about
a place by reading about it as most
people who go there, but everybody that goes
and travels abroad and comes back, they always
smile at that.
If you've actually been there, you'll know it
in a way you can't know if you've
only read a book about it.
Most Christians have only read a book about
God, that's all.
They've heard the faint echo of the voice
of God, they've seen a reflection of the
light of God, they've seen a photograph instead
of God himself, and their personal knowledge of
God is very slight.
And I don't want to hit your game,
so I will if I ask you, but
I would say that I'm afraid that a
lot of us here, for all our education,
we don't know God for himself very much.
Church attendants and fellowships and kings lean on
each other all the time, and we have
faith and fellowship and religious activity, and all
the various religious crops lean on each other.
But that's one thing, my brethren, that's one
thing.
Jesus had that.
He had his brethren, he had his work
to do, he had his healing, raising from
the dead and opening eyes and unstopping ears,
answering questions and blessing people who had that.
But he also had a personal knowledge of
God that was firm and real to an
individual, so that when he went into the
mountains to pray and waited on God all
night, he didn't think that he was alone.
But God was there.
You know, as modern Christians say, we should
do this and do that and go here
and go there, and the result is we
know God only by his praise.
We hear a bit sweetly, but we never
hear it said for ourselves.
You know, we want things instead of God,
because God wants to give himself.
God wants to impart himself in his gifts.
Preparations from God earn you gifts of danger,
holy gifts of danger.
If I were to pray for all the
seventeen gifts in the epistles of Paul, the
gifts of the spirit, and I got them
all, they'd be dangerous to me.
Sweet and good, and God didn't give himself.
Listen, God wants to give you himself.
Didn't I say a while ago, and isn't
it true in the fifties that when God
creates an order of life, he creates an
environment for that life?
And when God made man in his image,
and revealed him by the blood of the
Lamb back to that image, is not God
the environment of the Christian?
Today, see, we call the earth and the
environment for hell, and the air is the
environment for burn, and the earth is the
environment for the nightcrawler and the mole, but
the heart of God is the environment for
the Christian.
And God meant that we should live in
that heart of God, and the great dream
from heaven is that we want God's gifts
and don't want God's.
And even in the church today, given in
the church, it's the same.
And if God gives you a rose without
giving you God, he's giving you a rose
with a thorn, and if he gives you
a garden without giving you himself, he's giving
you a garden with a serpent.
And if he gives you wine without giving
you God, he's giving you that with which
you may restore yourself.
And God wants to give you himself.
You and I, we've got to re-figure
this modern Christian God-free benefit.
What we can get out of God.
You write a book, anybody can write a
book now, you tell us, anybody.
All you have to do is write a
book on 17 ways to get things from
God, you'll have immediate sales.
14 ways to have peace of mind in
the world over the church.
How we can bring God to our service.
And the printer can't keep up with a
book.
We work up God for what we can
get out of him, and that's the great
blight that arrests itself, the great blight that
arrests upon us.
The sovereign God wants to be loved for
himself, and he wants to be appreciated for
himself.
And more than that, that's only part of
it, not even a half of it.
The other part is that he wants us
to know that when we have him, we
have all the rest.
Jesus said it in another way, fifty-first
the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, king
of God is righteousness, and all your sins
shall be added unto you.
Why does God forgive sin?
He forgives sin because sin is the trouble
that chains between him, God, and us.
And if God is ever going to know
us and we know God, the trouble has
to be removed, so God forgives sin.
Why does God pour tears on us when
we trust in the living and the dead?
It's in order that the spirit when he
comes will take the sins of mine and
throw them unto you.
Why does God answer prayer in order that
in answering prayer he might unveil his own
face to us?
And why has God given us the scriptures
that through the scriptures we might know God?
The scriptures, my brethren, are not an end
in themselves.
You hear them talked about as though they
were an end in themselves.
No man can believe more fully in the
verbal inspiration of the scriptures as originally given
than I do.
But verbal inspiration, or any other series of
inspiration, when it makes the Bible an end
in itself is a dangerous thing, because the
purpose of the Bible is not to lead
you to the Bible, the purpose of the
Bible is to lead you to God.
And the Bible is a lattice through which
you look and see how beloved, gathering, lives
with the dew on his hair, as it
was in the song of Solomon.
The Bible is the ladder, the Bible is
the means of communication, the Bible is the
entrance in, and the Bible is never an
end in itself.
If a modern vocation means God, means God,
oh, that God would raise up somebody that
could say it, that could make us church
kids, that could make the Orthodox church kids,
the Bible people, the fundamentalists, we evangelicals, that
could raise up somebody that could make us
spirits.
We've undergone, for so long, indoctrination and brainwashing,
and the kind of things that make God
to be our servant, instead of our being
God's servant.
And we're like that somehow if we pray
God change money, and he does.
I described it that the first few years
of my ministry, if I said he paid
money in, all that's not.
So, I believe God changed money, but it's
pretty cheap when you get all excited because
God changed money.
Somebody over in the Bowdoin Valley was praying
for money to buy an outboard motor.
They needed an outboard motor.
Of course they were praying for it.
Can't you see what they weren't praying for?
And somebody over here heard them, and told
us any $350 should buy them a motor
over there.
I believe in that.
But that's, what you might say, that's down
on the level of the routine.
There's something grander, and higher, and finer, and
richer than that.
And if God doesn't give himself over there
along with the motor, he'll wreck that motor
himself.
God wants to give gifts, but every gift
he gives, he wants to give himself in
gifts.
And that's the wonder of it, my darlings.
He wants to give himself.
But how does you as God, you as
God, use God to get you God?
Use God to give you safety?
Use God to give you peace of mind?
In heaven, at last.
All right.
If God was 50 years old, he would
say, God, I don't know.
My heart craves thee, I want thee.
My heart is, my heart is pained, nor
can it be at rest till it finds
rest in thee.
And I'd rather have thee and nothing, than
to have everything rolling in my way.
You can't be sure God's making you prosperous,
businessmen.
You can't be sure he can't.
You're prospering, you say, because you're tired.
Well, go ahead and cry.
That works all right with me.
I think you should, but if you're prospering,
you're not coming from God's care.
Maybe the economics level of the day makes
you rich.
Maybe you're pretty sharp, cutting corners.
You'd better have God in your band than
have all the riches in the world and
not have God with you.
God is searching for those who were put
beneath the cloud of forgetting, the verdict of
all the things that ever God has made.
For he is a jealous lover and he
suffers no rival.
And he don't want anybody to stand in
there and take his place or even bring
no one to take his place.
He wants us to seek him, to seek
God.
And to dedicate him, let me, somebody asked
him about seeking, and he said, well, let
me tell you something.
If anybody comes seeking, he's telling you to
seek him, to seek any more than more
love.
Don't listen to them.
The only truth of the order, listen to
me, that which is more God, seek to
know the shining God.
You can't all know all that God had.
You can know all that God had revealed
in Christ to your soul infinitely more than
you now know.
And if the church of Christ would come
back to this, and would get so blinded
and furious and stop feeling and would begin
to seek for God himself, then all the
gifts of God would come along with God.
And all the blessings of God would come
along with God.
We want the fullness of the spirit.
We want clean paths.
We want the principle within.
We want love divine, all love excelling.
We want all of that.
But if we seek those things apart from
God, we've only found the rose and the
thorn.
But if we find God, then we'll find
all of these things, seeing God.
And better I say a thousand times, may
God through Jesus Christ take him away.
If you say, I have accepted Christ and
I am he good, oh very wonderfully good,
that's good.
But do you know him?
The man Paul had been converted to when
he was one of the world's great Christians,
when he wrote that I may know him,
and that I may know him and the
power of his suffering, he made conformable unto
his death.
He was plowing on and plowing ahead, and
that it appeared to be that the knowledge
of Jesus Christ, he had what he called
the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus
my Lord, the excellency of the knowledge of
Christ Jesus my Lord.
My friends, this is what you and I
are here for.
Somebody wants to know what the legal life
is.
I almost withdraw from the term anymore.
I almost shrink from hearing it, because everybody's
talking about the deeper life, but nobody seems
to want God.
God's given for life.
Jesus Christ given for life.
And as I plunge further into the knowledge
of the kind God, my heart moves out
into God's presence, and there's less of me
and more of God, and the life becomes
deepened and strengthened in God, so that this
is the next step, that I might know
him.
And anything that keeps me from knowing him
is my enemy.
If it is a friend that stands between
him and me, that friend is an enemy.
If it is a gift that stands between
him and me, that gift is an enemy.
If it is a remission that stands between
him and me, that remission is an enemy.
If it is a defeat I had once,
and I allow that defeat to get me
down, and stand between him and me, I'm
the forget type.
Forgetting all the things that are past, I
plow forward and press on.
And if it's a victory that I have
back there, that victory stands between me and
the knowledge of God.
I've got to put that victory behind me.
Well, I suppose I might as well stay
in bed.
I don't know whether anybody knows what I
mean.
I know everybody goes to God before I
think some of you do.
But, dear friend, do you see what I
mean?
That, that, that all of this heathening of
the gospel by, by making God our church.
God running around with a basket, giving away
presents.
A throne of diamonds like John of New
Rock, or a neat scramble for the diamond.
A crown of new diamonds.
You know, I've talked about it.
I found a crown that had the image
of God on it.
Wonderful, isn't it?
But nothing compared with the deep knowledge of
God himself.
Knowing, knowing, you know this knowledge of God,
nobody's out of you.
Nobody's going to have you out of it.
They can come and point that sick, angry
finger at you, and call you every name
the law permits.
And when they see you, you'll feel bad
about it, but you'll know you know God.
They can come and argue with you, and
give you shit to prove you're all wrong,
and when they see you can say, well,
you're pretty good at torture, but I happen
to know God.
You got things too late.
You come to prove I can't, and I
met God before you ever came to prove
it.
So we can know God for ourselves, that
I might know him.
The good thing is, some of you are
finding him.
I know that.
Some of you are trying to.
I've gotten letters, I've gotten phone calls, I
have had personal conversations, and I know that
some of you are finding the Lord in
a new, rich, deep, and wonderful way in
these last weeks.
And I'm glad.
But, uh, how about a direct, shanty-speaking
call of prayer.
Now, before we do pray, why, we're going
to find out, before I let you pray,
I want you to remember me.
You're your own, your own lonely heart is
talking back to you, and the enemy in
you is bigger than you are.
You're not sure, maybe, quite about it all
intellectually, but your heart has to drop.
Do you want to know what Paul knew?
Do you want to know what God has
revealed and given?
It's been explained to me since I'm a
year old.
And if they say to me, Mr. Tozer,
that I might have this grace, this courage,
this faith to rise and put behind me
and under my feet, whatever those plans are,
ambitions, or hopes, or plans, or gifts, or
victories, or anything that prevents me from knowing
the Lord Jesus, would you raise your hand
and be afraid for me?
Anybody here, if you say, I do want
to know.
Put your hand up if you're going to
pray.
Say, yes, I do.
Do you want to know?
Yes, I do.
Do you want to know?
Yes, yes, yes.
God, for the hands that have gone, now
that's not the way to say it.
Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, in the beginning is
the Word, and the Word is this God,
and the Word is this man, and in
the beginning is God.
We thank you, Lord Jesus, that when we
come to you, we go back to the
beginning.
We go back as Paul, and back as
Moses, back as Abraham, back as Adam.
We go back to the beginning, the life,
the time, and the life of every man.
Indeed, we sing of Paul.
Indeed, we know of Paul.
We pray for him to be resurrected as
a monk.
In the name of thy Son, Jesus, we
pray, Paul, that thou would take these young
people, and these older ones, and lead them
to be pastors, and dream pastors, and see
the ways that may be rough and hard,
and painful and certain, but lead them, Lord,
lead them until all is behind them, everything's
behind them, and they put behind them everything,
everything, what they were, and what they are,
and what they're proud of, and what they're
ashamed of, and what the victories they've had,
and the defeats they've had, and the mistakes
they've made.
Oh, may we lead these things on, and
teach them how to look forward and not
backwards, and keep right feet.
You know, Father, that when you talk about
these things, some come because they feel that
they'll be given a capsule that they can
swallow, or a text they can memorize, or
some one little tip they can do.
Oh, God, it is not just received, but
rather by the cultivation of the knowledge of
God in Christ Jesus, by faith, and humility,
and prayer, and trust, and confidence, and obedience,
and pressing onward from the blasts and mountaintops
of tears and anger, and the thought of
the mystery comes at the sunlight.
Come, Holy Spirit of heavenly love, come with
all our faith and power, and we pray
these, we pray God, we pray his love,
and we pray for all of these, and
we pray, Lord, for some who didn't request
a prayer for anything, but who could have,
and who perhaps have this night without even
salvation, and we pray for all the churches
that are coming, bringing their services.
We pray right now, it will be within
a half an hour or so.
Bless them all, Lord, and grant these churches
whatever they must, and they have to preach,
and whatever shepherd might find lost sheep, and
whatever harvest he finds on hand.
There'll be victory in the church of Jesus
Christ this night, and we pray these throughout
all this hour, and we will this day,
we ask this in the name of Jesus
Christ, our Lord.
Amen.