In the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, the first
seven verses, the word that came to Jeremiah
from the Lord saying, Stand in the gate
of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this
word, and say, Hear the word of the
Lord, all ye Judah, that enter in at
these gates to worship the Lord.
That's what the Lord has hoped, the God
of Israel.
Amend your ways and your doings, and I
will cause you to dwell in his faith.
Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The
temple of the Lord, the temple of the
Lord, the temple of the Lord are these.
For if ye poorly amend your ways and
your doings, if ye poorly execute judgment between
a man and his neighbor, if ye oppress
not the stranger, the powerless, and the widow,
and shed not innocent blood in this place,
either walk after the God to your hurt,
then will I cause you to dwell in
this place, in the land that I gave
to your fathers, forever and ever.
Now, I don't, or at least I have
not been going to the altar to help
people here, because I'm pretty well dehydrated when
I get through preaching.
Until I get about a quart of liquid
into me again, I'm not able to do
much.
And I thought I'd want to talk tonight
rather than preach a regular sermon.
I thought I'd like to talk to people
at the altar.
And I will take the words of Jeremiah
here, and show what the Holy Spirit says
to speakers.
Now, for tonight I'm not speaking to anybody
but speakers.
But I'm fully convinced that there are many
listening to me, many listening to me, who
are on the verge of a new, satisfying
spiritual experience.
And I'm convinced that there are Christians, that
is, borderline people, who belong to churches but
have never had the experience of renewal we
call the New Birth, and they are just
about ready to come through.
So I'm going to put it around like
this.
As if you were one of those dissatisfied
Christians, or a sinner, an unsaved person not
yet renewed by grace, and I'm going to
tell you how you can be.
Either one, or all, or both, or all
three.
Now, we have here in Jeremiah a kind,
loving God.
Always remember, God is kind and loving even
when he sends people to hell.
Always God is kind.
He can never be anything else.
He is not willing that any should perish.
And he is not willing that any should
be weak or barren or disappointed.
If you are weak or barren or disappointed,
as a professed Christian, or if you are
a sinner on your way to perish, remember
you are what you are out of the
will of God, not according to the will
of God.
God doesn't will it.
And here in Jeremiah 7, God is showing
the way out of danger, and he's showing
the way into the land of Duluth.
This land he called it so lovingly.
And he says, frankly, that it is by
a thorough amendment of life.
Now, amendment, as you know, an amendment, a
true amend, is to correct.
And it is to improve by alteration.
That's a simple dictionary definition.
And so he says, if you want to
continue to dwell in this land, if you
want to know me in power and protection
and safety again as your fathers did, then
thoroughly correct your life.
Change your life, because I'm not satisfied with
the way it is now.
Change it, amend it.
Now, that'll disappoint some of you.
You thought I had a capsule that I
could give you, which if you took with
a glass of water, it would end all
your spiritual trouble.
But people like that, I haven't much to
say to them, except may God have mercy
on you, because the Bible is a very
practical book and very easy to understand in
all things pertaining to our salvation.
Now, it's possible that many of you are
very near to a revival.
I don't like to use the word revival,
because if it's been wounded in the house
of its friend, it's still bleeding.
So I'd like to let it get well,
at least, before I use it again.
So I've gone around to synonyms, and after
all, I come back to revival and say
that some of you are standing on the
verge of revival.
Some of you are standing on the verge
of salvation.
You're like a dusty, weary man who's traveled
all day, and now he stands beside the
bank of a clear, sparkling stream, and he
senses, oh, how he senses a plunge in.
But he just can't quite make up his
mind.
And if I can, by anything I say
tonight, be that which propels you, the detonator
that sets off the little cat there that
will plunge you in, I'll go back and
sleep well tonight, knowing that I've, in the
will of God, been able to help you
a little bit.
Now, I say that some of you are
out of the kingdom of God, but you're
just out a little distance, and you can
perish as quickly five inches out of the
kingdom as you can five million miles.
And some of you are on the border
of actually entering a spiritual experience of such
proportions and intensity and scope that the like
of it will not have been heard of
in the Africa a long time.
And to an individual Christian, it may be
only a day, it may be only an
hour, it may be only a matter of
moments, until that which you are longing for
and are not becomes a reality.
And that which you are and are longing
not to be...
I'll finish the sentence, but anyhow, you know
what I mean.
You are something, and you're longing not to
be that, and you can be delivered from
that.
Or, you're longing to be something that you
conceive to be the purpose and will of
God for you, and you're not, and you
can be.
Now, the desired land may not be very
far away.
You know, unbelief has a little way of
playing with time and space and circumstance, and
hiding itself nicely.
Unbelief says, some other time, but not now.
Faith says, now.
Unbelief says, somewhere else, but not here.
And faith says, here.
Unbelief says, someone else, but not me.
And faith says, me.
So let's not say, somewhere else, some other
time, to some other people.
But let us begin to believe God and
say, now, here, and to me.
Now, it says here, amend your ways.
And I'm going to simply tell you, as
frankly as if I were kneeling beside you
here at the altar, how you can amend
your ways and bring yourself into the will
of God.
For that's all you need to do, ever,
to get in the will of God.
Just as all you need to do to
get wet is get in the river.
And all you need to do to put
up a kite is get the kite into
the wind.
And all you need to do is to
get into the will of God, and the
blessings of God will flow without hindrance.
Now, the first thing, I'm not going to
hold your cookies down, but at least I
want the Holy Ghost to hook you with
some of them, maybe all of them.
Put yourself in the way of God's blessings.
By that, I don't mean go to church.
You can go to church and be in
bed and stay there all your life.
But I mean put yourself in the way
of God's blessings.
It is a great error to look for
grace as a kind of magic which operates
intrinsically and trickfully, jumps on you as a
benign bit of mercy out of the dark,
and when you come to, you're blessed.
Grace doesn't operate like that because God doesn't
operate like that.
To believe that is to charge God with
caprice and make salvation out to be a
kind of divine accident.
There are no accidents in the kingdom of
God, and nobody ever got blessed by accident,
never.
It never happened, because God blesses only moral
intelligence, and he would have you approach him
morally intelligent.
Now, it doesn't mean your IQ has to
be equal to Einstein's, but it does mean
that you've got to come to him intelligently
and approach God with the understanding that you're
one personality and he is another, that he
understands your language and knows your thoughts, and
that you can tell him what's on your
heart the same as you would tell your
friends.
Very many times people come to my study.
I don't call much.
I have a reputation for not calling much,
but God says, If you won't call, I'll
send them to you.
So they come to me all the time,
and very often I simply say, Now, you
pray.
I can't pray.
Well, I say, Now listen, you spent a
half an hour telling me your troubles.
Can't you tell God what you told me?
God is intelligent.
He understands, and that's the beginning of a
nice prayer.
And they begin to get a hold of
God, because they've forgotten that God's intelligent, too.
If he understands English, he even tends to
read you Dutch, or whatever you speak.
If you say, Ain't God know you, you
mean, ain't?
And whatever you say.
If you say, There was my enemy?
God says, I know there was.
He understands.
God will talk your language to your brother.
He won't fool with words.
He wants your heart to talk.
So you come to God, and just get
straightened out and put yourself in the way
of God's bliss.
Then the second thing is, let repentance do
its healing work in your heart.
For repentance has a healing virtue that comes
to the soul of a moral creature.
The Pharisees, the Bards, we might say that
repentance is not strange, but it falls like
a gentle rain from heaven upon the place
beneath.
So when we repent, it does something for
us.
Let us be careful that we don't try
to plunge into the kingdom of God without
having repented.
We have just lived through, I hope we've
lived through, a theological tunnel in which we
were taught that repentance was so to choose.
But brethren, repentance is for everybody that gets
converted.
There isn't any remote possibility of anybody ever
entering the kingdom of God, ever, anytime, anywhere
in the world that hasn't repented first.
Repentance is a prerequisite at the door of
the kingdom of God, and we repent or
we perish.
And not all the Bible expositors and likely
dividers of the distinct word of God can
ever change God Almighty's fire.
Either we repent or we die.
So let repentance do its healing work.
Now, I think I ought to talk a
little more about repentance and point out what
I mean by repentance.
I mean that I am to amend and
correct and improve a lot of things in
my life.
For instance, my business and my job.
What about it?
Is there anything in your business that displeases
God?
And if there is, you've got to stop
that.
But you say, if I do, I'll be
on release.
Well, then go on release.
Now, I'm serious, and I'm not trying to
be funny or dramatic.
If your business is keeping you out of
the kingdom of God, you'd better let your
business go and get in the kingdom of
God.
But you say, how do I live and
how does my family live?
How do the birds live?
God never allowed a bird to live.
I can give you this on the authority
of the Bible, plus the multiplied authority of
a thousand instances that we might know in
Christian biography, that if you must give up
your job to become a Christian, if it's
a dirty job, if there's wickedness in it
and you can't do it and if you're
right and you give it up to get
converted, God will have another job for you
before the next bill comes in, and you
don't have to worry.
Now, another thing.
Your personal finances.
Now, you ought to talk about that a
little.
Maybe you need to correct those.
But you say, isn't salvation by grace?
Yes, sir.
Salvation is by grace if you'll mend your
ways in your doings.
Now, about any debts you might have, an
outlawed debt.
Some people, at the statute of limitation, run
out on their debts and then they waive
their debt.
How many of you have debts hanging back
there?
You say, well, but I don't owe them
now legally.
Yes, but you owe them morally.
And God is not talking about the laws
of Pennsylvania, he's talking about the laws of
the kingdom.
And if you owe anybody any debts and
you haven't paid it, or at least you're
not trying to pay it, you needn't apply
to the kingdom of God.
And you won't receive dishonest people into the
kingdom.
You'll receive people into the kingdom who were
dishonest and who were thieves, but you can't
continue to be dishonest and come into the
kingdom of God.
You leave your dishonesty at the door or
you stay out.
So, if you're the grocer, pay that grocer.
If you are behind in your payments, pay
up.
And you say, but I can't, I'm hopelessly
in debt.
Well, all right, go to the manual and
be frank with him and say, I'm hopelessly
sunk, but I'll do my best.
And usually that's about all these men want,
is the knowledge that they've got a hold
of an honest man.
It's about all.
So that I'm not talking about debt.
Most people have some debt or other, I'm
sorry to say, in these terrible American days.
We'll usually owe somebody.
And I'm not talking about normal debt.
I suppose when I get home I'll find
the gas bill due.
I'm not talking about our normal.
I'm talking about the fellow that's trying.
You will stay out of the kingdom of
God until you turn to dust and ashes,
but you'll never enter until you've amended your
ways and your doings now set the law.
And in your personal friendships, as a pastor
of a great many years, nearly 26 years
in my present church, I am prepared to
say this without qualification.
That particularly among young people, the most deadly
and terrible enemy to spiritual life is bad
friendships.
Now, a Christian becomes a Christian, and Jesus
Christ then becomes first.
And he must become a Christian with the
understanding that he will give up any unholy
friendship.
If he continues his unholy friendship, he'll backslide,
and any little spiritual touch he might have
had will evaporate like the morning dew.
Young people, I'm here to tell you that
unless you give up your bad friends and
your friends whose influence is against you, you
will never make good as a Christian.
Some of you are speaking to Baptists and
the Holy Ghost and flirting around with people
that are bitterly bad for you and hard
on your spiritual life.
Now, you either give them up or you'll
be a poor half-Christian for the rest
of your life.
A young fellow will come to the altar
and bawl his way through to us, and
then you'll go back and the next day
or two you'll find him out with the
same half-saved or un-saved fellows he
ran around with before, all girls.
And then he'll be coming to church fewer
and fewer times a year, and you can't
find him.
If he had cut bad company the night
he was converted, he'd have grown like a
cedar in Lebanon, but he stayed with bad
company.
Now, amend your ways and your doings.
There are some of you here, girls, that
are trying to get filled with the Holy
Ghost.
When I see you come down here, I
feel for you.
I am not as hard as I look.
I've just got a 14, nearly 15 now.
And I feel for you, girls, and I'd
like to see some of you kids get
marvelously filled with the Holy Ghost.
Later on you'll get married, and you'll have
a family, and you'll have a home.
And what it'll mean to you if you
get right now these great big fellows.
I wouldn't embarrass him by mentioning, but one
of the big fellows down here, only 16
years old, as handsome as a statue.
I'm interested in those kids.
I've really had six sons, and I love
young men, young boys.
I'd like to see you young fellows come
out from behind that brush and come out
clean and scrape your heels at the door
of the kingdom and come in clean.
I'd like to see that happen.
But unless you're willing to give up your
shady friends, you'll stay in the shadows.
You'll never come in.
And then your secret habit.
I'm only going to ask you one thing.
I know right here this is the spot
where we all lick our lips and drool
and say, Now, what's he going to say?
Something sexually?
No.
I have never been led of God to
preach any of these to-men-only sermons,
or to get intimate.
I never do that.
I don't think God wants me to, and
I always get embarrassed, and people always do,
and only the borderline sex maniacs enjoy it.
So I'm only going to ask you a
question and then drop it.
And that is, would you dare have your
secret habit publicized?
Would you dare let Brother Kopp know your
secret habit?
Would you dare tell the man who prayed
here tonight?
Would you dare let my happy camp know
how you live in secret?
That's all I want to ask you.
Now, if you wouldn't, then amend your ways
and your doings, because you'll never get saved
until you do.
And if you're a Christian and your secret
habits won't stand the light, you'll never get
baptized with the Holy Ghost until they will.
Jesus said these things were not done in
a corner, and there's transparency about a spiritual
life.
They are perfectly transparent.
They are ready to be, and everybody knows
their habits.
How about yours?
And in your past life, now, are all
your sins forsaken and confessed and forgiven, and
are all the wrongs eroded that you know
about?
Now, I want to put a little note,
a bracket in here, so that I keep
the devil from taking advantage.
Because there are those who are teaching the
keep-confessing doctrine.
Always be confessing.
Run around confessing.
Just let your mouth drip with confession.
And no matter what, just keep confessing all
the time.
That's the way to stay blessed.
To me, that would be like taking medicine
three times a day to stay well.
Let me explain what I mean.
What has been sinned by the blood of
Christ need not be confessed to man.
If the blood of Christ has taken it
away, have you any?
Except where it has been, the sin has
been an injury to another person.
And if your sin has injured somebody, and
by confessing your sin you can lift the
injury and heal it, then you're morally bound
to confess that sin in order to heal
up the injury which your sin caused.
But your confession need only be made to
the one against whom you had sinned.
The idea of public confession, a man gets
up and says in public, I want to
confess, and about that time the canker chip
comes out, I want to confess that I
had a fight with my wife.
And he's relieving his own conscience by embarrassing
his wife to death.
That kind of thing is just plain ignorance,
and it ought to be taken out here
and buried deep or put in a septic
tank.
It doesn't belong in the kingdom of God.
Unless you have sinned against a man, you
needn't confess your sin to that man.
Now, Brother Sneed somewhere in the audience, he
told me he would be, and suppose that
I say some unpleasant or nasty thing about
Brother Sneed, and later on I get under
conviction and I go to Brother Jones and
confess it.
How silly.
The thing for me to do is go
to the man I wronged, Brother Sneed, and
I said a nasty, cruel thing about you.
Please forgive me.
You only need to seek the forgiveness of
the one you've wronged.
So cruel confession must be made.
It is always made against God.
David sinned against Bathsheba, he sinned against Israel,
he sinned against Uriah's wife, and he sinned
against Uriah.
And he said, O God, against thee, the
only, have I sinned.
He realized that after all, all sin is
against God.
So we must go to God with confession
of sins and make cruel confession to him,
and if we can make reparations, make them.
If we can't, don't grieve people's hearts by
telling them things.
For instance, there are those who say you're
walking down the street or driving down the
street with a brother, and his brother says
or does something you don't like, and you
entertain a thought about it, and you say,
I don't like that fellow's way of talking,
or his English is bad, or he's ignorant,
or I don't like him.
And then later on you get under conviction
and you have to run to that fellow
and tell him that.
How unutterably silly.
You didn't wrong him, you wronged yourself.
Don't go to him and tell him that
you thought he was a bum.
He didn't know that.
It was in you.
You were the fellow that thought.
You have that bum complex inside of you.
Tell God about that if you want to.
How abundantly that's fair.
Now, my relations to others.
And then your ways and your doings.
I'm down here at the altar now, and
I'm saying, O God, why can't I get
what I see others have?
Why can't I get through?
Well, how about it?
Do you have feelings in your heart?
And have you caused any hurt?
And is there anything doubtful in your relationship
to people?
And people are living with the life that
isn't theirs.
And some are common law, and some are
unknown to the public, generally carrying on things.
I'm not going to rub it in now.
I'm just going to ask, how about it?
You can come down 50 times here till
your elbows go clear through these brand-new
waters.
And when you're finished, you go right back
to your town or where you came from.
You don't even have to worry.
Now, a few other little matters.
And that would be, order your life so
as to give God a chance and to
give your soul a chance to breathe.
Many people just suffocate their souls by a
world of external things.
They have Life magazine, which is the moron's
billboard.
And they have television, and they have radio,
and they have sports, and they have it
all.
Now, neither radio, television, billboard, nor Life magazine
in and of themselves may be evil.
But for the time we've given attention to
all of that, we're starved inside of our
souls.
We've starved ourselves.
We've suffocated ourselves.
I don't think any more television than the
average man.
I think that it should be called smell
-o-vation, because it reaches to heaven.
But I'm not going to say you can't
have a sec.
But I'm going to say that if you
get a sec in your home, you're putting
yourself under frightful sensations to starve your soul
and feed your funny bones.
You'll get a funny bone as big as
a dinosaur's thigh, and your core will shrink,
all hurting you
as a pup.
That if you do not give your soul
air and get the weight of blankets off
of it, you'll die.
You've got to give your soul, and you
can't feed it on yards of newspaper and
inches of Bible and hope to get away
with it.
You can't spend five minutes in prayer and
hours watching television and get away with it.
It'll tear you, brother.
It'll shrink you up.
It'll narrow you down.
You'll be like an old frozen potato in
the spring.
Wrinkled and limp, and you may be on
the local board at home because they haven't
got men enough to go around.
You on the board, you're suffocated.
You've committed spiritual suicide.
Now, another thing.
Begin to lay a little bit of discipline
on your life.
And people are like the coats that run
through the woods or over the meadows.
They just won't be disciplined.
They go to church when they feel like
it.
They pray if they feel like it.
They give their money if they feel like
it.
They just will not lay discipline upon themselves.
There isn't a phase of human life anywhere
that you can live like that and succeed.
The businessman must discipline his hours and his
business.
The athlete must discipline his body.
The musician must discipline his fingers.
And his cop, this big little fellow over
here that plays the piano.
Why, you think he got like that or
he's in comic strip?
He got like that, punishing himself hours and
hours and hours until he feels it and
his fingers just know where to go.
Mine don't know where to go.
They haven't been educated, you see.
All they know is to bend around a
knife and fork or tap a typewriter.
But that's because they've been educated to those
things.
But it took a little discipline when I
was first handling a knife and fork.
No doubt I filled many a block of
mesh that appeared as in my lap.
You've got to discipline yourself, brethren.
Some of you never make good in the
Christian life because you're too sloppy spiritually.
You're all over the place.
You're all baggy and out of place.
You're going to have to lay some discipline
on your soul and say, Now, Jesus, show
me how I can pull my life together
and pull it in and narrow down a
bit and put an edge on it.
You know what you do when you hold
a razor?
You make it narrower than it was before.
People say, You're too narrow.
A razor could be accused of being narrow.
And then you take it and strop it.
That's to make it still narrower.
Why?
To get an edge on it.
And every successful man is a man who
has disciplined himself and pulled his life down
and made it one instead of a half
a dozen things.
Take gunpowder, for instance.
You can take a spoonful of gunpowder and
lay it down here.
And I'll spread it out on a rock
and attach a match to it.
And there'll be a little anemic puff.
And a bit of fire.
And in a second it's out and gone
and no harm done.
A bug hanging from the mouth of it
didn't even feel the weight of it or
feel the heat of it.
Just a puff and it's over with.
But put that in a brass shaft and
put a lead bullet in.
And put it in the breech of a
gun and pull back the hammer and pull
the trigger and you can bring down a
buffalo with it.
The same powder that just went pfff and
did nothing will bring down a blue buffalo
if you concentrate it.
And that's why some of you don't get
anywhere.
You don't read your Bible regularly.
You don't pray regularly.
You go to church when it's nice weather
or when there isn't something else to do.
When you take your vacation, instead of coming
back Saturday so you'll be home for Sunday,
you come back late Sunday night so you'll
be home for work Monday, showing which is
the important thing in your life.
Is that right, brother?
Sure they go away and say Sunday night.
Get back late Saturday night and be at
your place.
Discipline yourself.
Some of you will get a blister the
first while back, but you'll get over that
and bless your heart.
I sometimes say, I don't know, I don't
know whether these people appreciate or know how
much time I put in my sermons or
how much, and I say, well, this ought
to be easy.
I've got this sermon.
This is easy.
It's long, towards a week, and I pull
it together usually late in the week with
my other work.
And I say to myself, well, this ought
to be easy.
And I jot down some notes.
And the first thing I do, and laboring
and wearing myself out and laboring, and I
say to my wife, I just, getting that
sermon out is like having a child.
It's more out of my heart.
And she says, nobody knows that, so you
might just as well take it easy.
That's her advice.
And I say, well, maybe she's right, and
the next week I try it, and it
just won't work.
I have, from the time I was 18,
now 18 years old, laid upon myself the
discipline of sermon preparation.
It may not be any good, but that's
only because I have faith.
And everything else is the same.
If you don't discipline your life and pull
it together and concentrate, you'll never get anywhere.
You didn't want to hear that, did you?
You wanted to hear three steps into the
rest of life.
This is easy, this is easy, this is
easy.
Isn't that cute?
And you say, isn't that just delightful?
Now, I want to point out to you,
friends, that carelessness is a curse.
And many of you come down here to
the altar, and thank God you do, and
I hope you'll be down here tonight.
And you get some help, and then you
go away, and you're careless.
You know, carelessness in the Christian life, we're
just the same as carelessness in raising a
child, or carelessness in running a farm.
You know little Fanny Crosby, who was the
author of so many of our fine hymns?
Did you know she was blind from the
time she was three weeks old?
Do you know how she got blind?
A careless nurse laid a cloth that was
fiery hot on her eyes.
Carelessly blinded Fanny Crosby.
And she made good in spite of it,
but how much better she could have seen.
In the little town where I used to
preach long years ago, a man got an
infection in one of his eyes, and he
went totally blind.
The doctor said, that eye is done, it'll
never see again, and we'd better take it
out, because if we don't remove it, the
other one may get it, and he'll be
totally blind.
Well, he said, all right, you can take
it out.
So they put him under ether, and carelessly
took out his good eye.
That happened on Green Street in Morgantown, West
Virginia.
That is, he lived there.
Veterans, that's unpardonable.
A doctor ought to have his license taken
away and barred forever from practice.
Who would blame the man because he didn't
have brains enough to check on which eye
was the right eye to take out.
Careless nurse and a navigator can put the
ship on the rock.
Careless nurse and an airplane pilot can smash
you standing at the mountain.
And carelessness in your Christian life can ruin
you.
Then, I will say this.
Be serious-minded.
It's a sad hour, brethren, when our clowns
and comedians get more pay than our President.
Serious-minded, President Eisenhower.
With the weight of the world on his
big shoulders.
Gets less money and has fewer hairs than
Bob Hope.
And for my money, you can have Bob
Hope wrapped up in cellophane.
You can have him.
For him, it's delightful.
And I don't mind that at all.
I don't mean we should go around looking
as if we just returned from the funeral
of the whole family.
But I do mean that we're living in
a world that doesn't take anything serious, seriously.
And takes things that aren't serious, seriously.
There's a lack of the wrong things.
And there's a lot of that in the
church.
And among the people of God.
So that banter and joshing and nonsense and
funny stories take away all the blessing from
your heart.
I've seen this in my own church.
I tell them this every once in a
while.
Remember, everything I'm telling you now, I preach
to my own people first.
And I have seen, I've seen them do
that.
They'd have a nice meeting and the presence
of God would come down.
But there's an intensity of the presence of
God sometimes that'll bring the tears.
God's presence moves down.
And they'll have an evening like that when
it just seems as if God was so
near he could touch them.
And then they will go on and have
a soda afterwards.
Now, a soda is a perfectly harmless thing
to have, I suppose.
And a hamburger, too.
I hope they have one after church tonight.
But the point is, they sit and josh
each other.
And giggle and tell stories and fool.
Until by the time they're ready to go
home and go to bed, they haven't a
trace of the glory left in their souls.
They've foolishly stopped.
Somebody was telling me about a man who
used to teach at NIA.
I don't know his name.
He's dead and gone, I think, off to
be with the Lord now.
This man on the grounds here was telling
me about him as a teacher.
I believe it was this fellow, the little
man, Joshua.
And he said that when church was over,
that man immediately went out and went home.
He wouldn't dissipate the blessing of his soul.
They called him a mystic.
You get called a lot of things, but
just grin, it's all right.
But the main thing is to cultivate a
serious mind.
For American people are glissandoing themselves to hell.
When we perish as a nation, which, God
forbid, but when we perish as a nation,
it won't be because our boys aren't the
toughest fighters in the world.
It won't be because our geniuses, our scientists
can't beat the whole round.
They're doing well at producing material.
When we perish, it'll be like France from
internal moral corruption.
The finest poachers in Europe went down corrupt
like a house of cards, because they were
rotten internally.
They had laughed themselves and sexed themselves into
weakness.
And Americans are on their way there fast.
Guffaw, guffaw, everlastingly having to laugh about everything.
I laugh a lot.
I tease my kids until it's awful.
And I think a sense of humor is
a blessed way to relax, and I'm not
against it.
I'd be foolish to say so, because I
have a reputation of having a sense of
humor.
But I can say this, the old boy's
not going to get me down.
I know preachers that had a sense of
humor, and they cultivated it at the expense
of their spiritual life, and the result was,
towards the end, they were simply pulpit clowns.
I'm not going to be a pulpit clown,
so help me God.
So I don't guarantee that something will pop
out the side of my head somewhere that'll
get you laughing, because I just can't help
it.
But they're not going to cultivate.
I say we should cultivate serious mindedness.
That's about all I want to say, except
this one last word.
Set yourself to do a serious reading of
the scriptures, and reverently read your name into
the scriptures.
If you will take the Bible and read
it, and read your name into it, you'll
be amazed at what it'll do for you.
It's going to a very hard place.
I went to the scriptures.
As you may know, my initials are a
W, but I was named after a storekeeper
up at Lagos, Pennsylvania.
They were friends of my mother's and father's,
and they named the boy after the man,
and the girl, my sister Mildred, after the
wife.
I sound foolish, and I wouldn't do it
if you were around, but I go to
my niece.
And every citizen, Israel or Jacob or you,
I put my name in there.
And oh, brother, how it works.
God gets near to you somehow.
He says, Fear not, and I put my
name in, all three of them.
For thou, and I put my name in,
shalt not be ashamed.
Neither be thou, and I put my name
in, confounded.
For thou, and I put my name in,
shalt not be put to shame.
And go on down the line.
Then I come to this one.
No weapon that is formed against thee, and
that thee is a pronoun, and that gets
my three names.
No weapon that is formed against thee shall
prosper.
And every tongue that shall rise against thee
in judgment.
Now, that's a little trick I do.
I recommend it.
Put yourself in there.
You say, the school where I went to,
they didn't recommend that.
Well, I recommend it, and I think it's
a fine thing, because that makes it personal.
Nowadays they have the word, personalize.
That's personalizing the scriptures.
You'll be astonished what it will do for
you.
Now, we've added a little altar service, and
I've been instructing the Seekers in a manner
that I would instruct and do constantly instruct
people.
Now, no death-bed stories have been told,
and I have not claimed to be omnipotent
or omniscient or have traveled widely.
And I have no pictures to show you.
But I've just told you how you can
get into the kingdom of God if you're
out, and how you can get away on
up into the steeple if you're in.
Now, if you'll listen to me and obey
God and do what your inner heart prompts
you to do, we can have such an
outpouring as you haven't heard for a long
time.
But if you don't want to do it,
then I've done my part anyhow.
Maybe I didn't pray enough, but outside that,
I've done all I know to do.
So what about it now, young man?
What about it?
Fellas, I'd like to see all of you
big, muscular, good-looking guys.
There is a good-looking God can't sanctify
because you're good-looking.
Paul Rager said it was hard for God
to sanctify a good-looking man.
And you're just a good-looking, you're in
your own world.
All right, I'd like to see you down
here pouring yourself out before God tonight and
amending your life, and you young women, amending
your ways, driving some stakes in.
David said, "...a nail in a sure place."
You want to gulp your blessing like the
Pennsylvania Railroad engines you take on water on
the run.
Lower a scoop and go right on, gulp
it, and arrive at the station all blessed
up.
That isn't the way God said it.
He says, "...amend your ways, drive some nails
in, drive some stakes in, make some vows,
discipline yourself, pull yourself together, promise to obey."
It isn't so dramatic, but it works.
We're going to have an altar invitation here,
and we're going to ask every half-saved
fellow to come down to the altar here.
In the 7th chapter of Jeremiah, the first
seven verses, the word that came to Jeremiah
from the Lord, saying, "...stand in the gate
of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this
word, and say, Hear the word of the
Lord, all you Judah, that enter in at
these gates to worship the Lord."
That's just the Lord of Hosts, the God
of Israel.
"...amend your ways, and your doings, and I
will cause you to dwell in his place.
Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The
temple of the Lord, the temple of the
Lord, the temple of the Lord are these.
For if ye poorly amend your ways and
your doings, if ye poorly execute judgment between
a man and his neighbor, if ye oppress
not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow,
and shed not innocent blood in this place,
neither walk after the God through your heart,
then will I cause you to dwell in
this place, in the land that I gave
to your fathers, forever and ever."
Now, I don't, or at least I have
not been going to the altar to help
people here, because I'm pretty well dehydrated when
I get through preaching.
Until I get about a quart of liquid
into me again, I'm not able to do
much.
I thought I'd want to talk tonight rather
than preach a regular sermon.
I thought I'd like to talk to people
at the altar.
And I will take the words of Jeremiah
here and show what the Holy Spirit says
to teachers.
Now, for tonight I'm not speaking to anybody
but teachers, but I am fully convinced that
there are many listening to me, many listening
to me, who are on the verge of
a new, satisfying spiritual experience.
And I'm convinced that there are Christians, that
is, borderline people who belong to churches but
have never had the experience of renewal we
call the New Birth, and they are just
about ready to come through.
So, I'm going to put it around like
this.
As if you were one of those dissatisfied
Christians, or a sinner, an unsaved person not
yet renewed by grace, and I'm going to
tell you how you can be, either one
or all or both or all three.
Now, we have here in Jeremiah a kind,
loving God.
For always remember, God is kind and loving
even when he sends people to hell.
Always God is kind, he can never be
anything else.
He is not willing that any should perish,
and he is not willing that any should
be weak or barren or disappointed.
If you are weak or barren or disappointed
as a perfect Christian, or if you are
a sinner and you are on your way
to perish, remember you are what you are
out of the will of God, not according
to the will of God.
God doesn't will it.
And here in Jeremiah 7, God is showing
the way out of danger, and he's showing
the way into the land of Jerusalem.
This land he called it so lovingly, and
he says frankly that it is by a
thorough amendment of life.
Amendment, as you know, an amendment or to
amend is to correct, and it is to
improve by alteration.
That's a simple dictionary definition, and so he
says, if you want to continue to dwell
in this land, if you want to know
me in power and protection and safety again
as your fathers did, then thoroughly correct your
life.
Change your life, because I'm not satisfied with
the way it is now.
Change it.
Amend it.
Now, that'll disappoint some of you, who thought
I had a capsule that I could give
you, which if you took with a glass
of water it would end all your spiritual
trouble.
But people like that, I haven't much to
say to them except may God have mercy
on you, because the Bible is a very
practical book and very easy to understand in
all things pertaining to our salvation.
It's possible that many of you are very
near to a revival.
I don't like to use the word revival,
because this man who is in the house
of his friend is still bleeding, so I'd
like to let him go to hell at
least before he can.
So I've gone around for synonyms, and after
all, I come back to revival and say
that some of you are standing on the
verge of revival, some of you are standing
on the verge of salvation.
You're like a dusty, weary man who's traveled
all day, and now he stands beside the
banks of a clear, sparkling stream, and he's
tempted, oh, how he's tempted to plunge in.
But he just can't quite make up his
mind.
And if I can, by anything I say
tonight, be that which propels you, the detonator
that sets off the little cat there that
will plunge you in, I'll go back and
sleep well tonight, knowing that I've, in the
will of God, been able to help you
a little bit.
Now, I say that some of you are
out of the kingdom of God, but you're
just out a little distance, and you can
perish as quickly five inches out of the
kingdom as you can five million miles.