In the book of Genesis, the third chapter,
I read a few verses.
It said the serpent was more subtle than
any beast of the field which the Lord
God had made.
And he said unto the woman, Yea, as
God said, ye shall not eat of every
tree of the garden.
And the woman said unto the serpent, Yea,
ye may eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden.
That of the fruit of the tree which
is in midst of the garden, God hath
said, ye shall not eat of it, neither
shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye
shall not surely die.
For God doth know that in a day
ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be
opened.
And ye shall be as God, knowing good
and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree
was good for food, and that it was
pleasant to the eyes, and the tree to
be desired to make one wise, she took
of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and
gave also unto her husband with her, and
he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked.
And they sewed piglets together, and made themselves
aprons.
And they heard the voice of the Lord
God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day.
And Adam and his wife hid themselves from
the presence of the Lord God amongst the
trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam and
said unto him, Where art thou?
Now, the setting of the little message tonight.
Here was the perfect pair, Mr. and Mrs.
Universe.
The perfect pair dwelling in the perfect environment.
And then came the disobedience when, as Milton
said, in an evil hour she stretched forth
her hand, and took of the fruit, and
did eat, and gave unto her husband, and
he did eat.
And the fall came, that great moral disaster
that theologians call the fall.
The scientists deny it ever happened, but everybody
that has the sense he was born with
knows it happened, because the debris is still
in his own heart.
Now, here they were, this beauty pair, bowed
down with care.
And God appeared.
The Lord God was walking as if he
didn't know what had happened.
He didn't know, that is, he walked around
there as if he didn't know, but he
knew all right.
And this beauty pair hid from the presence
of God.
Now, tonight, I hope I may be forgiven,
I hope the engineer may be forgiven, that
he doesn't take that tweak out of my
voice.
If it ain't fair, brother, it just ain't
fair, you're putting it there with your carrot.
I hope I may be forgiven tonight if
I knew some of the same basic elements
that went into last night's sermon, and I
do it without hesitation or apology, only with
an explanation.
So when you hear it, you won't say
the old man is tripping, he's repeating himself.
But at the cost of being repetitious, let
me say that there are certain truths that
keep recurring throughout the entire Bible, throughout all
Christian theology, throughout all hymnology, throughout all the
great sermons of this century.
Certain simple truths, not very many, half a
dozen maybe, or we're expected to say ten
or a dozen, no more than that.
They keep recurring, all this.
Like the primary colors in a painting.
You see, all colors are made up out
of a few colors.
All the various shades that you see everywhere
are compounded out of very few colors.
Some say three, some say five, some say
seven.
They're called the primary colors, and if you
gazed upon the most beautiful garden in the
world with a hundred kinds of flowers in
all of their beauty, you would see only
five or at most seven colors there compounded.
You wouldn't recognize those colors, you would stand
breathless in the presence of this wonderland of
shades of color, and yet all those shades
are made out of those half dozen or
less colors.
Now it is so that everything that can
be said ever from this platform, every truth
that ever can be taught by any Bible
teacher in the world, there are certain primary
colors that make up the painting, certain basic
truths which are woven in as ingredients in
the truth.
And one of those basic truths, of those
primary colors, is what we call the divine
eminence.
I have quoted before in your presence, for
I very frequently quote it to warm my
own heart and my congregation as well, I
have quoted what the old archbishop said about
God.
He said, God is above all things, and
beneath all things, and outside of all things,
and inside of all things.
He is above, but he's not pushed up.
He's below, but he's not pressed down.
He's outside, but he's not excluded.
He's inside, but he's not confined.
He is above all things, pre-guiding, and
he's beneath all things, sustaining, and he's outside
of all things, embracing, and he's inside of
all things, too.
Now that's the eminence of God as stated
by Prince Theologian.
And I rather like it, brother.
That puts God where you are, and that's
what I love.
Now, that is one of the primary colors,
the eminence of God, that God is here.
I can't think of any truth that I
could assert or declare that would have any
more potential glory and good for you tonight
than just to remind you of the eminence
of God, that God is here.
Old David celebrated the eminence or the omnipresence
of God.
He said, God is every place.
He said, if I hide in the darkness,
God's there, and if I go into the
light, God's there, and if I go up
into heaven, God's there, and if I even
go down into hell, even, I'll find God.
Every place I can't escape from God.
And then Solomon, you'll remember, celebrates it.
He said, God said to Solomon, am I
God far off?
Or said the one with the old testament,
am I God far off and not a
god in thy hands?
And David said that in him we live
and move and have our being.
God is here, and that is the most
wonderful and revolutionary fact that I could announce
to you tonight.
It's worthy of the angel of the annunciation,
that there is an invisible but real presence
here tonight, pressing down upon us.
And this great reality is the absolute that
gives meaning to all other meanings.
If you take that fact out of human
consciousness or human thought, you have pulled the
kingpin down out of the arch, and all
of human thought will tumble to the ground.
Now, this presence is the seeking presence.
It says that Adam heard the voice of
the Lord God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day.
And this was not before the fall, this
was after the fall.
This was not among archangels, but with two
sinners, and he was walking in the garden
in the cool of the day.
And this was after the shameful collapse of
their moral lives.
God knew they had sinned, and he wanted
them to know that he knew.
So he appeared, and there was a voice
there.
A schoolmarm could, I suppose, find grammatical fault
with the verse here.
The Bible has a wonderful way of breaking
all the rules, and I rather enjoy it
myself because I've been a rule-breaker since
I can remember.
It says here that they heard the voice
of the Lord God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day.
Now, there isn't a teacher of English anyplace
in Pennsylvania that would give a kid an
F on that, because it said they heard
the voice of the Lord walking.
And of course they didn't hear the voice
of the Lord walking, but they heard the
voice of the Lord who was walking in
the garden in the cool of the day.
And they shook that back to poor little
Junior and said, Who was in there?
I'll flunk you.
But thank God for the good old King
James Version and the good old Bible that
just says it, and then you either like
it or else something happens to you.
It says here that there was a presence,
that God was there, and there was a
voice.
A presence and a voice.
If I only had some way of rubbing
that into you, like an alcohol rub, if
I could get that rubbed into your brain,
there is a presence, there is a voice.
Not my presence, not my voice, not Copp's
presence, not his voice, not Brother Thomas' presence,
not his voice, but a presence and a
voice.
In the cool of the day, here in
Bethel against the hillside, there is a voice,
and I'm happy to tell you that it's
a friendly voice.
I preach a friendly heaven, ladies and gentlemen.
I never have been able to get righteously
wrought up and frightfully and gloomily indignant with
the human race.
Of course we're a bunch of sinners, of
course we are, and unless we repent, we'll
all likewise perish.
But I have never been able to get
any white knuckles from squeezing that fish out,
reminding people they were going to hell.
I have believed in a friendly heaven.
I believe that the blood of the everlasting
covenant has swept the last vestige of antagonism
out of the sky, and that God is
on the side of the man that'll come
unto God's side.
And that the voice that's sound from heaven
is a friendly voice, and the presence unseen
that is here tonight is a seeking presence,
a seeking presence and a friendly voice.
Now, there are lots of voices in the
world.
There's the hard voice of duty.
I remember hearing of one Englishman that said
he thought he'd commit suicide.
He said, I am so sick of just
living.
He said, you get up in the morning
and you put on your socks.
And then he said, you run around a
while and at night you come and take
your socks off.
Then he said in the morning, you put
on your socks.
He said, I'm so sick of taking off
my socks and putting on my socks.
He said, I just want to die.
Well, all that had happened to him was
that he'd sort of made putting on his
socks and taking them off a symbol of
duty.
There were things that were pressing in upon
him and forcing him to do.
The alarm clock that gets you out whether
you want to get out or not, and
the school bell that rings little Junior to
school whether he wants to go.
And so he goes, not as Shakespeare said,
with a shining morning face.
I like Shakespeare, but I've never been able
to understand why he made that mistake.
Whoever heard of a kid going to school
with a shining morning face?
They come home that way, but they don't
go that way.
Now, these are duties.
There's a harsh voice.
Duties are harsh things.
It tells the woman, get those dishes washed.
It tells the woman, have that baby.
It tells the woman, get over there and
get that ironing done.
Get that washing done.
It tells the man, get that day's work
put in.
Tells the engineer, bring in on time.
Tells the soldier, stand that attention there, or
take that hill.
The strong, ugly, harsh voice of duty.
It's every place in the world, but that
isn't the voice I'm talking about.
And then there's an accusing voice, the voice
of our own conscience, telling us that we've
sinned.
That accusing voice that makes us sick and
white when we hear it occasionally.
And there's the harsh voice of nameless fear,
the hard voice of fear.
The world is full of fear, ladies and
gentlemen.
We're scared to dwell.
Our noses quiver like a bunny rabbit with
fear.
We're shamed and we're afraid in the universe.
Here we are, orphans in the wide world
with the vast forces roaring up and down
that can tear us apart and hurl us
back to the earth again, back to our
native dust.
And men are afraid.
They try to laugh it off, and they
hire Bob Hope and some others to try
to make us laugh, but we're a bunch
of scared cats.
And it's more than something to laugh about.
It is a terrible thing, and it's causing
us to get old before our time, and
it's putting men in insane asylum.
It's driving them to suicide.
Sheer fear, the voice of fear, the haunting,
ghostly voice that is sounding that makes men
afraid.
But there's a wonderful voice because there is
a wonderful presence.
The only reason the Bible has any meaning
is because there is a voice and a
presence.
If God Almighty had stayed a million, million
miles beyond the high imperium and had thrown
our Bible down through it and then lapsed
into silence, the Bible wouldn't have had any
more meaning than any other book.
You might as well read Mother Goose's Bible,
except for the fact there is a presence
here, making the Bible warm.
There is a voice here breathing through the
Bible and speaking to us in the Bible,
and when we read the text, the voice
speaks to our heart and the presence is
here, and it's a warm and a friendly
voice, an inviting voice.
The voice of God is not the voice
of justice hunting us down.
If there had been no Calvary, no blood,
no atonement, he might have had to come
as a voice of vengeance.
But because there was a lamb on a
tree, his voice is the voice of invitation.
He says, come and draw near and believe
and rest, and so on.
These happy, warm, inviting words.
Down in the South, you go up to
the door and somebody will come out and
invite you to come and set a spell.
The voice of God is a warm, hospitable
voice like that, and says, Come unto me,
all ye that labor and are heavy laden.
You go through your Bible, if you will,
or if you have a contortance, and see
how many times the word come is found.
I like the old church bell in the
street.
I always think the church bell says, Come,
come, come, come, come.
The man who wrote The Church in the
Wildwood must have had that idea, because you
musicians will remember that the bell rings, come,
come, come, come, come, come.
I always forget how many comes when I'm
singing it and come in in the wrong
place.
But there are a lot of comes there,
and the bells and God's people are ringing,
and they're all saying the same thing, they're
saying, Come.
I'd like to say this, and I suppose
I'll get accused here of being mystical if
not downright nutty, but I believe the voice
of God is a very musical voice.
It must be a musical voice, because God
is the great musician.
He put the 1-2-3-4 beat
in the universe, and he put the rhythm
in the universe.
It's all there, and it's only sin that
makes the world such a harsh and unmusical
place.
If we could hear the voice of God,
we'd hear something very wonderful and musical.
I don't think that we'd ever want to
hear a symphony orchestra again, and I'm sure
we'd never want to hear banjo.
If we heard the voice of God, for
there's all of the beauty of the sunshine
and all of the sound of the sea,
it says in Revelation that Jesus' voice was
like the voice of many waters.
Have you stood on the shore at night
and listened to the booming of the surf
as the restless waves come splashing in and
beat over the rocks?
There's something wonderfully musical about it.
I always have pictures to have of Jesus
I never cared for, but I remember one
painting of Jesus that I rather liked.
It showed him sitting on the shore of
the sea on a rock, looking out, brooding
smoothly over the lake.
I think he must have done that sometimes
and listened to the voice of nature.
Some people don't like birds, and artists up
in Chicago went down with some small artists
into what they call Brown County in Indiana,
a very wonderful place.
One of the artists, after the second day,
almost had a nervous breakdown.
He said, I can't stand these birds.
He said, I just can't stand them now,
that's all.
He said, in the morning, last thing at
night, all day long, he'd keep, keep, chatter,
keep, keep.
He said, they're driving me crazy.
He said, goodbye, and he packed his suitcase
and went back to Chicago where he could
hear diesel engines and elevated trains.
He had trained his poor buseers to the
music of the clack, clack of an elevated
train, and the horrible, hoarse, devilish sound of
the diesel engine.
I don't know why they ever put that
horn on a diesel engine.
The diesel engine is all right, but why
did they have to borrow a pop gun
from the devil and put it on for
a whistle?
That's what I'd like to know.
You'd think it was the devil with a
bad cold trying to blow his nose.
And yet, that fellow liked it better than
he liked to hear a robin thing with
a dew on the grass.
Because he's a diseased man, ladies and gentlemen.
There's something beautiful in nature, and any man
who'd rather hear a record than hear a
rooster crow ought to have his head examined.
And anybody that would rather hear Toscanese play
the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven rather than hear
a cricket at night ought to have his
head examined if he had to hear it.
Because everything that God made, he made beautiful
and good in its time.
And when God speaks, it's a musical voice,
people's voices.
They may be nasal or adenoidal or guttural
or scrapey or high or too low, but
all the voice of God, how beautiful it
is.
Dr. Simpson said that one time, he had
been reading an old book.
He didn't say what book, but I think
I know.
I could tell you people some things if
I wanted to.
I think I knew what he'd been reading,
because I run on to reports in my
own reading.
He said he was reading a book one
time, the gist of which was that God
is waiting to speak in the depths of
your soul if you get quiet enough to
listen to him.
So he said, I decided to try it,
that I knelt down all by myself.
He said, I began to listen in my
own heart to see if I could hear
God speak.
And he said, I never knew before how
nervous I was.
He said, I never knew how noisy the
world was and how noisy I was.
But he said, little by little, I put
it all away and put it all for
me, and I began to listen.
And pretty soon I began to hear.
And then he launched into one of those
poetic descriptions of his that I can't imitate,
that's a great, lovely, fragrant, beautiful musical voice
of God.
It was things like that that made A
.D. Simpson, Simpson.
He was hearing God speak in his heart.
My friend, that voice is in his tabernacle
tonight, not in mine, not in my rather
nasal voice that sounds like Truman's.
My voice is more or less distorted by
this good gadget here.
That's not musical, but there is a voice,
and you won't hear it if it doesn't
come out of my mouth, if you'll bow
the Goodyear, which is your Goodyear, bow your
Goodyear down a little toward your chest and
listen.
I think you'll hear God speaking, because there's
a presence, and that presence is speaking, and
it's a speaking presence and an inviting voice.
And God is here tonight with that presence
and with that voice.
Now, there are some people who hide from
the presence.
You will see that the Adam and Eve
hid from the presence of God.
Sin made them ashamed.
They had gotten into their sin together, and
now neither one could help the other one.
She was their feminine arch, couldn't help Adam,
and he with his masculine strength couldn't help
Eve.
They had gotten in together, and now they
had to each one get out alone.
And I might soften and develop that thought
a little.
Listen, young fellow, you're going to get into
sin with that girl, but when you get
out, you're going to get in all out,
all by yourself.
If you ever get out, she can't help
you.
And listen, you old man, you're part of
a business firm and there's a bit of
chicanery going on and a crooked deal, and
you're going to sign a paper that will
make you a party to a crooked deal.
You get in with the company, but when
you get out, if you ever do, you'll
get out all by yourself.
That's the terrible irony of sin.
You sin with a crowd, but you crawl
out of a mire if you ever crawl
out all by yourself.
Nobody can help you out.
Adam took courage from Eve and Eve took
courage from Adam, and they held hands and
pinned together.
And now they couldn't help each other, and
so they got scared and fled from the
presence and the voice into the garden, or
into among the trees of the garden.
Such painful confusion as it all was.
So they hid from the presence and they
hid from the voice.
I was thinking down in my room, that
would be the biography of some of you
dear people.
You're hiding from the presence and shrinking from
the voice, and you've been doing it a
long time.
If anybody could write your life, I could
write your life, and I think for a
lot of you I could convince that you
might not say you have a life that's
worth writing.
It's good that some of these young evangelists,
16-year-old evangelists, write their lives.
All they can say is, I was born.
But you have a little more.
You've been hiding from a presence and shrinking
from a voice, and those are the two
major truths in your life.
And they have been because there's another major
truth, and that is that you've sinned and
you're ashamed.
There's something about sin that makes us ashamed,
and particularly ashamed when God is near, and
we sense that God is near.
When God is in this place, it was
then that Jacob was ashamed, and it was
then that Isaiah was ashamed, it was then
that Daniel sat down at Soni, it was
then that John threw himself like dead on
the ground when the presence of God moved
down.
Oh, if we could only recapture a sense
of God's presence.
You never need to pray for God to
come, although if you do pray for God
to come, God won't get mad.
Theologians sometimes get mad about things that God
smiles about.
God will know what you mean.
When you say, O God, come into our
midst, you don't mean, God, come into our
midst, you mean, O God, make me conscious
of thy presence in the midst.
When a blind man says, O God, let
the sun shine, he means, O God, heal
my eyes so I can see the sunshine.
A deaf man can't hear the birds sing,
and so a sinner can't sense the presence
of God.
That's the terrible woe of it.
So we walk the world, orphans, without any
sense of the divine presence.
I tell you that to live in a
world like this, even to live in a
city like Chicago or New York or Pittsburgh
or Philadelphia, and have the presence of God
put velvet on all the hard pavement and
put peace and quiet in all the rocky
towns, to have God with you, to know
that God is there and to sit with
you to bed at night and to be
able to smile in your sleep and know
that God is there and to have God
all around you, I tell you it's a
wonderful thing, and it's real, and it's just
as real as the air that breathes.
For just as the atmosphere touches on you,
all parts of your body, 14 pounds to
the square inch at sea level, so the
presence of God pressures in on your spirit.
And you can live in the world and
not be conscious of that atmospheric pressure until
you're reminded of it, and so you can
live in the world and not be conscious
of the presence of God there to help
you.
Now, I want to call attention to you
that self-condemnation that drove Adam and Eve
from the presence of God is a very
good trance.
To be condemned, to condemn yourself, it's a
very good trance.
It's a wonderful moment in the life of
a man when he says, Oh God, I
accuse myself!
Oh God, I did it!
It's a wonderful moment in a man's life
when self-condemnation hits him.
And I think that one of the difficulties
with us is that we can't get conviction
on people anymore.
People come to God without having any conviction
of their own iniquity, and the result is
they never get very deeply saved.
They're poorly born.
Now, I'd like to think that you can
be saved even though you're not very well
saved.
I'd like to think that, you know.
I wish I could think it, and I'm
not sure but what I'd do in a
kind of an oblique way, hope that there
are some people that will get to heaven
by the skin of their dentures.
But I'm not sure, brethren, I'm not sure.
But I believe that we'd get converted more
wonderfully if we got convicted more deeply.
But we're afraid to get people convicted.
I preached at council one year.
I preached about Salome and Herod and Herodias
and that dancing girl, you know, the old
man and John the Baptist preaching his head
off.
I preached that, and I preached sin.
I told people they were sinners.
And an Alliance preacher, now as big as
life and twice as noisy, came up to
me afterwards and said, You never should have
done it.
You make people feel they're sinners.
He said, Why, nobody will come tonight.
They feel they're criminals.
And in spite of that, somebody gave an
order call, and they came flopping down to
the front.
I tell you, we need to know we're
sinners.
We need to find that out.
We need to know it, and we need
to have it borne in upon us.
Up around Chicago, everybody's a theological sinner, but
nobody's actually a sinner.
All those good Calvinists up there are theological
sinners.
You just beat a bush anywhere, and there'll
be a Calvinist with a Bible under his
arm, hop out and say, All our righteousness
is absolutely right.
All have sinned and come short of the
glory of God.
But if you turn on him and say,
I don't believe you're quite right, brother, your
text's wrong, he'll get quite mad.
He's a sinner, all right, but he's only
a theological sinner until you prick him, and
then he becomes a sinner indeed.
We need to know that we're sinners indeed,
ladies and gentlemen.
No theological man ever went to Heaven who
was a theological sinner, who just went to
God and said, God, I read in the
Bible that I'm a sinner, and if I'm
a sinner, I suppose I ought to get
saved.
Will you please save me?
Nobody ever got that way.
You can't do it that way, brethren.
God Almighty knows that your emotions are tied
up with our good and our bad, and
he knows that if you're not emotionally smitten,
you'll never be emotionally lifted.
He knows that if you make a man
sick to his stomach of a sin, he'll
quit it.
But if you're only convincing theologically that he's
a sinner, he'll sneak around back to the
building and commit it again.
After our trouble in these terrible days, we
want to make religion easy for people, and
so we never bring any self-condemnation down
on them.
Now, when self-condemnation hits you and you
know you're a sinner, you can do one
of two things.
You can let that self-condemnation drive you
to the wounds in Jesus' side for cleansing,
or you can let that self-condemnation drive
you into the wilderness to hide from God.
As people react those two different ways to
self-condemnation, when Peter self-condemned, he was
literally, when Judas felt it, he committed suicide.
You can go one way or the other.
Self-condemnation is a good friend, because it
tells you how bad off you are.
It's also a dangerous mattress if you let
it drive you from God.
If a man says, now I am so
bad I don't think God would ever have
anything to do with me, self-condemnation has
become his enemy, then not his friend.
I remember once a woman, a young woman,
a nurse, came to see me and she
said, just to tell her I'm backslidden.
She said, I have backslidden completely because she
said I have been among doctors and I
find they're sad, very pleasant.
She said, they're no good and I have
lost my spiritual life.
She said, I am so bad that I'm
not even going to bother God about it.
She said, I just don't think that God
would do right if he forgave anybody that's
as bad as I am.
That was a tough one.
Now, if you preachers don't think that was
a tough one, it was.
You didn't have to convince her that she
was a sinner, she knew it, but she
was so self-condemned that she felt that
God wouldn't do right if he forgave her.
So I was thinking hard and praying hard,
and finally I got enough wisdom and said,
Listen, Elizabeth, you've hurt God awfully bad, haven't
you?
She said, Oh, I've wounded God by my
sin, yes, I've wounded God.
I said, Are you willing to give him
one more blow?
Are you willing to smite God's heart one
more time?
She said, No, but how could I do
it?
I said, One more blow would be to
walk out of his presence and not accept
his forgiveness.
She dropped to her knees and said, I'll
never do it, I'll never do it.
She said, I've hurt God so much I
won't hurt him anymore.
Oh, God forgive me.
And God forgave her and started all over
again.
So you see, self-condemnation almost ruined her.
But don't you let it drive you into
the woods, and don't you let it drive
you to the end of a rope or
to a gas chamber.
Remember that God condemns you in order that
he might forgive you, and he brings conviction
in order that he might pardon you.
And the voice invites us into his presence.
Now, that's my message tonight, really, that there
is a voice that's inviting you into his
presence.
If you say, I am no good, well,
that's one thing in your favor anyhow.
Thank God, my friend, thank God for that.
There are a lot of people strutting up
and down, maybe some of them right in
this campground, maybe some of them out there
sitting on benches listening to me.
They are so proud of themselves and feel
they are somebody.
They are so important to know as the
fellow said they can strut sitting down.
They amount to something.
They are somebody indeed.
They drive a big car.
Well, it's too bad for them, because they
think they are somebody and therefore they are
nobody.
But the man who thinks he's nobody is
on his way to become somebody if only
he'll take Jesus Christ at his word.
Oh, what a sinner we've been.
What a sinner you are, man, with your
dirty teeth.
Not all the chlorophyll toothpaste in the world
can get the nicotine stains off of those
uppers of yours.
Your mouth is dirty and your lungs are
dirty, and if you had all the smoke
that you run through your system in one
place, you could inflate the biggest balloon on
the continent.
And your tongue is dirty.
Your tongue is dirty.
You've cussed and black-eyed and told dirty
stories, and your eyes are dirty.
You look at every woman you see, and
your mind's dirty, and you think evil all
the time.
You're just plain dirty, and yet you take
two showers a day and rub yourself with
no-smell sticks, and you're absolutely fastidious
when it comes to the outside, and you're
full of dead men's bones in the inside.
And because you smell like Mr. Colgate, you
want me to think you're all right.
No, sir, not all the aftershave lotion in
the world will take away the smell of
pollution that God Almighty smells coming up out
of your heart.
But it was that kind of people that
God came to when he came to the
Garden.
They were already reaching with iniquity, but his
presence was there, and his voice was inviting
them home.
And it's that fellow's like you, if you'll
admit it, it's fellows like you that God's
looking for tonight.
Now, if you try to cover up, God
will overlook you and pass you by, and
you'll never hear a sound of his voice.
But if you'll say, Oh God, I did
it, I did it, God will draw very
close to you feelingly and make you know
it.
God wants a confessing people, an honest people,
the people who won't hide and say, I
didn't do it.
The younger generation now growing up is cursed
with psychology and psychiatry.
They have invented other names for sin.
David said, I have sinned in my sight,
but now they call it by some other
name.
But you can call a cat or a
skunk by another name, call him a striped
pussy if you want to, but he's the
same foul, reeking animal he was before.
You can call a stinking dead body by
the name of cadaver or some other nice
scientific name, but it's the same old foul
thing.
You can call garbage by another name, but
it's garbage still.
You can call your sin by another name,
but God Almighty knows it's sin, and until
you've called it by its right name, God
won't do very much for you.
A man who's under conviction and facing going
through his pastor goes to a psychiatrist, and
the psychiatrist says, the trouble with you is
you've got a guilt complex.
I can cure you in 17 lessons, three
dollars a lesson, lie down on that couch.
He lies down on his couch.
Now, try to remember their back as far
as you can.
I know what I'd do.
If I had words in the hands of
one of them, he'd say, what's the first
you can remember?
I'd say, when the doctor said it's a
boy.
But, well,
we'd go to the psychiatrist now and get
our backs cracked in place of going to
the preacher and get our hearts wounded.
We need to go and know that there
is a voice of self-condemnation that's a
very good voice, and still it doesn't drive
God away from us.
God comes where condemned men are, but he
never goes where men are that aren't condemned.
Are you a condemned man?
The voice of the Lord is drawing near,
and you can hear the voice of the
Lord in the garden, calling you into his
presence.
And the blood of Jesus Christ has quenched
the fiery sword, and now you can enter
the presence of God, and he'll receive you.
Now, if you'll only know it.
Let's talk a minute about Samuel, then I'm
done.
Remember little Samuel, the voice sounding, little Samuel.
I don't know how big he was.
Let's say he was seven years old.
He was so little that he still had
to sleep with the light on.
I don't know how big that would make
him, maybe six or seven.
A little chap, and God spoke to the
boy, and he'd never heard that voice before,
but was friendly, and he thought it was
Eli.
He jumped up and went into the other
room and said, This thou call me?
No, he said, I didn't call you.
Go back to sleep.
He went back to sleep, and he called
him again.
God called Samuel.
A voice was calling a boy, and the
boy didn't know what the voice was.
He went back to the old heavy man
of God, and he said, Thou didst call
me?
No, he said, I didn't call you, but
I perceive that God is calling you, son.
So the next time you hear a voice,
say, Here am I.
Samuel went back, and I bet he didn't
go to sleep that time.
I don't know for sure, and I don't
want to read anything into the text, but
knowing boys, I'm pretty sure that when he
found out the highest God of heaven and
earth was trying to get through to him,
I'm sure he didn't turn his head off.
I'm quite sure he kept tuned in.
I don't think he went to sleep.
He lay there, his ears all cocked in
the flickering light of the candle, and a
voice said, Samuel, here I am, God.
And there began one of the greatest ministries
that the world ever knew.
But you see, God was calling Samuel, and
Samuel didn't know it till an old man
told him.
God's calling some of you tonight, and you
didn't know it, but I've told you tonight.
Now, if you have as much wisdom as
Samuel, you'll listen real hard in the next
five minutes, and you'll see what God is
saying to you.
This presence is here, and that voice is
speaking.
If you listen real hard, maybe it'll mean
the beginning of a life that just hasn't
been lived on earth for a generation.
I don't promise it, but oh, I say
it'll mean a change in your life.
I haven't forgotten.
I haven't forgotten how I roamed the hills
of Pennsylvania, dirty mouth, lying, nasty, high-tempered,
unsaved boy.
I haven't forgotten that.
Nobody would have loved me then except my
mother.
Nobody, because they couldn't.
I was too nasty.
I was a little mouse trying to get
big enough to be a rat.
I was a wicked boy trying to grow
up and be a wicked man.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord
speaking to me over in the city of
Akron, Ohio.
God spoke to me and said that if
I'd go home and pray and take God
to have mercy on me, as soon as
I could be converted.
Thank God I'd never read the Schofield Bible
then.
Thank God I'd never been to Bible school.
Thank God I'd never heard the professional evangelist,
because if I had, I'd have known that
that verse wasn't just sensationally for me.
I'd have known it belonged to somebody else.
But not knowing it, and God knowing that
I didn't know it, I went home and
went to my mother's attic and got on
my knees and said, God, have mercy on
me, a sinner, and God converted my poor
old soul, my poor young soul.
Thank God nobody got to me and tried
to explain that verse.
If they had, probably I wouldn't have been
converted today.
I'd have been lost in the explanation.
I suppose you've all heard of Mel Trotter.
Mel Trotter was a great Christian and a
great brother.
He was preaching at Biola one time, at
his Bible Institute of Los Angeles, where they're
pretty dispensationalistic.
He got blessed as he was talking, and
he started giving his testimony.
He said, Here I was, and he described
himself as a terrible, dashing drug addict, certainly
a drinker, and a wicked fellow bound with
all kinds of bad habits, and the devil
ragging him and putting his spurs into him.
He was about exhausted and ready to die,
and he said, I pray God, have mercy
on me, a sinner, and God save me.
Well, he got blessed on it, and he
had a long lifetime of blessing behind him.
One of the teachers, I think it was,
came up to him afterward and said, Mr.
Trotter, that was a good sermon, but you
were all mixed up in your exegesis.
Don't you know that dispensationally, God have mercy
on me, a sinner, wasn't for you?
You shouldn't have prayed that prayer.
Trotter said, Well, maybe not.
But he said, I didn't know it at
the time.
He said, Anyway, the mess I was in,
God would have saved me if I'd have
said, Mary had a little lamb.
He said, No, you ought not.
God doesn't care about your theology, but he
wants to know you've got a hungry heart.
And if you've got a hungry heart tonight,
man, and you've heard a voice, you can
come home, and you can come home now.
I was in Chicago United Mission some years
ago, preaching down among Cedro, among the bums.
A young fellow with a bright face, maybe
22 years old, got up and turned around.
You know they'll do when they get enthusiastic.
He turned around and faced the audience to
give his testimony.
He had just been converted maybe a week,
and he was all boiling over with it.
He said, Dear friends, God saved my soul.
Do you know how he did it?
He saved my soul the day I took
his name in vain.
And he said, I want to exhort you,
take his name in vain in your conversion.
Of course, he didn't mean that, but God
knew what he meant.
And I suppose the theologian there, particularly if
he had a degree, probably would have fainted
and they would have had to have brought
him to with a good stick and a
shot of ethyl gasoline, just to bring him
to.
But the point was, that poor fellow came
up out of paganism, and he had an
arm in his heart, and he believed in
Jesus Christ, and God converted his soul.
There will be many a theologian rightly devising
the word of truth that when he breathes
his last will go down where dead men
go that have rejected the blood.
There will be many a poor ignorant fellow
who didn't know the difference between believing in
Jesus Christ and taking his name in vain.
I mean, he knew better, but he didn't
at that time know better.
Now, after a few years have gone by
and he's read his Bible, it's probably he'll
ask that his own foolishness.
But the point is, he got converted.
That's all.
So if you will put your pride aside,
who are you anyhow, man?
You got a big chest?
Yes, sir.
And you know, those big chests are the
places where coronary thrombosis hits first.
The bigger the chest, the greater the chance
you have of tumbling over with a coronary
case.
Pull your chest in, fella.
God doesn't care about the size of your
chest, but he wants to know, are you
a self-condemned, sin-cursed, God-hungry man?
You're very beautiful, are you, sister?
Very beautiful.
Indeed, I'd like to see you 50 years
from now.
Oh, you're so beautiful indeed.
Those eyebrows are arched beautifully, those lips, you're
all done up so gorgeously.
Wait till old Mother Nature and Father Time
get done doing the tango on your face
and see what happens to you.
Well, no, no, sister, you
haven't got anything to be proud of.
If you've got a pretty face on in
front of your head, God gave you that,
why don't you thank him?
And if you've got a big chest, why
don't you take a yoke on your shoulders
and carry it for the Lord Jesus?
And if you've got an education, why don't
you put it under your feet and come
to the blood?
If you've got a lot of money, why
don't you thank God for your money and
start distributing it right away, helping the poor
and supporting nations?
Because what's your money anyhow?
I saw a fellow two or three weeks
ago, he has a Cadillac and he has
a big four-port hole, no, three-port
hole, do it, a cabin cruiser and a
power motor.
But he just wears one pair of pants,
the same as I do, he doesn't wear
two, and he just eats one meal at
a time, the same as I do, he
doesn't eat two meals at a time, he
just sleeps in one bed at a time,
the same as I do, just walks around
in one pair of shoes, the same as
I do, and I haven't got any do
-it, or any Cadillac, or any cabin cruiser,
or any speedboat.
Well, let's put away our pride, and let's
listen to the voice tonight, the gentle, sweet,
inviting voice, oh, how foolish thing it is,
how damnably foolish the whole business is, and
how wonderfully wise it is to come to
Jesus Christ and believe.
So come tonight, maybe you're a little Samuel
there someplace, maybe you're a Mel Cotter there,
maybe you're a Jerry McCauley there, maybe you're
another Dr. Simpson there, maybe you're a Paul
Rader there, you come now, but whatever you
may be in potentiality, you're a singer in
actuality.
So come just as you are, without lines,
please, throw yourself across this altar tonight, put
your pride under your feet, and in one
sweet, happy moment, you can pass from death
to life, and Jesus Christ will become your
Savior.
Please get silent, please get quiet, let's listen.
Everyone, everyone, everyone, is he speaking to you,
man?
Is he speaking to you, woman?
Get quiet, get still, this may be your
hour, the day of your visitation.
Pray, people, all you happy Christians who know
the joyful sound, you pray, because there are
a lot of people in here that aren't
happy Christians, and Fr.
Thomas is going to lead us in a
song, and if he leads us, we all
get joyful.