Or see the second chapter.
Let me read a few verses, beginning with
verse 14.
Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring
her nests, and speak comfortably unto her.
And I will give her her vineyards from
thence, and the valley of Acre for a
door of hope.
And she shall sing there, as in the
days of her youth, and as in the
day when she came up out of the
land of Egypt.
And it shall be at that day, that
thou shalt call me Ishii, and shalt call
me no more Baelon.
For I will take away the names of
Baelon out of her mouth, and they shall
no more be remembered by their name.
And in that day will I make a
covenant for them, with the beasts of the
field, with the fowls of heaven, and with
the creeping things of the ground.
And I will bring the sword and the
battle out of the earth, and will make
them lie down safely.
And I will betroth thee me forever.
Yea, I will betroth thee unto me in
righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and
in mercies.
And I will even betroth thee unto me
in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord.
It shall come to pass in that day,
I will hear the heavens, and they shall
hear the earth.
And the earth shall hear the corn, and
the wine, and the oil, and the church
as real.
And I will sow her unto me in
the earth, and I will have mercy upon
her, mercy.
And I will say to them that were
not my people, thou art my people.
And they shall say, thou art my God.
Now I have one verse here that I
want to accent a little.
And I will give her the valley of
April, for a door of hope.
And she shall sing there as in the
days.
Now I'm to talk about the door of
hope, and where it's likely to be found.
And I'll begin by reminding you that mankind
has always been a builder.
Long before history recorded the deeds of man
with ink, man himself recorded them in stone.
There have been all kinds and grades of
buildings, from the Simpton hut to the most
elaborate cathedral, or the great tall sky-touching
buildings of modern civilization.
But we are not to allow the complexity
and size of the buildings to blind us
to the fact that a building is, after
all, a very simple thing.
It has a wall, and a floor, and
a roof, and a door.
Now that's about it.
Everything after that, extra added on.
But if you have the walls, and the
floor, and the roof, and the door, in
and out, you have a building.
And of all the parts of any building,
the part that has been the most has
always been the door.
The door has worked itself into human language.
You'll find it in poetry, in art, and
even in music.
And you will find it in figures of
speech everywhere.
The idea of the door, even our Lord
said, I am the door.
If he by me of any man enter,
he shall go in and out and find
pasture.
And we read all through the Bible about
the door, and we find the door appearing
every place, I say, in literature, language, everywhere.
The door seems to be the most important,
or at least the most attractive part.
And I suppose that we could easily understand
why.
Because the door is the blessing, and then
it protects you after you're in there.
And when we walk away from our homes
and see our loved ones for the last
time for years, in some cases, it's always
framed in the door that we remember them.
And when they come in the door, again,
that we see them when they come to
greet us.
So the door has fascinated mankind, and has
given itself a language and a meaning that
no other part of any building could have,
unless it were that not even the foundation
can compete with the door for popularity in
wide usage.
I was thinking about doors when I thought
I'd give this message this morning, and I
thought of some of the evil doors there
are in the world.
I have been in prisons, I have never
been incarcerated for a crime, but I have
been in prisons, numbers of them, and I
think one of the most chilling sounds to
be found anywhere on earth is the creaking
sound of a prison door closing, the great
lock being turned.
And the prison door is distressing.
And there's the door to the mausoleum, and
you may have your own list of doors.
Maybe somewhere at some time, some terrifying door,
that open door that closed and shut you
in, or that opened and let somebody or
something come out of which you were.
So there are evil doors, but there are
also blessed doors.
I wondered, as I thought about this, what
the political orator would say if they took
away the cottage doors, for they love to
talk about the vine-covered cottage door and
the rose door.
Well, it is beautiful, and I don't mind
telling you poor city victims that a little
cottage circled against the side of a hill
with flowers growing around it is a heaven
on earth compared with the finest apartment building
that ever was in the face of God's
patient earth.
So you may not like me for that.
Some of you were born in the city,
and you've never been in a house or
an apartment, and that's too bad, but a
cottage is a lovely place.
It may not have all the modern conveniences,
but it's beautiful, and the nice part about
the average country cottage is it's been lived
in by the same people.
Nowadays, your apartment has been lived in, and
you wouldn't want to know by how many
or who they were.
But the cottage has been lived in, and
it used to be a part of the
landscape.
I think it was Emerson who said that
when the sun arose in the morning, that
the sun was shining upon the buildings, and
that the landscape took in the building as
though it were a part of it Well,
a cottage, with its simple door, is taken
in as a part of nature.
And when you look at it, you think
that it is as truly a part of
nature as the very flowers that grow around
it and grow behind it.
So there's the cottage door, and then there's
the school door, and the church door.
To a great many people, the old church
door is a lovely sight.
The door that swings open early on the
Sunday, and closes again only after the last
straggler has said goodbye and has gone his
way.
So the church door, and I suppose that
if I wanted to do it, that I
could skim over all the wide ranges of
man's living and find many of them.
But I read here this morning about the
door of hope, and I will give them,
or give her, the value of a door
of hope.
And we have here not only the charming
figure of a door, but we have added
on to it for intensification the beautiful word
hope.
So we have a door of hope.
And a well-grounded and future happiness is
what hope is said to be.
Now God built this door of hope, and
I hope that I might lay before you
this morning a few thoughts about this door,
this door which God has built.
And yet I wonder how I describe that
which is beyond all power of description.
As I get older, I feel less keen
to want to preach than I used to.
Not that I do not love to preach,
and I think I'd die if I had
to quit it, but that it's fair.
The effort to say that which cannot be
said, the effort to express the end, to
describe that which defies all human speech, that's
what weighs upon me.
So when I think about the door that
God has built in the Valley of Acre
for the poor suffering sons of men, how
am I going to describe it?
Leonardo da Vinci, the great artist who painted
The Last Supper, they say that he painted
that, and painted and finished it.
There was only a bit that he couldn't
get finished.
He painted the sulky, solemn, dishonest face of
Judas, and he felt that.
He painted the feminine face of John, and
that was all right, and the great rough
face of Peter, and he thought he'd done
well on that.
All other parts of the picture he seemed
to feel he had done well.
It would indeed be a masterpiece, but that
one face he could paint.
How could he work himself up?
How could he whip up his genius to
a white heat that he might be able
to paint in that face that was like
no other face that ever has been or
will be world without end?
That he waited for I don't know how
many days or weeks or months, and always
he'd come up to it, and then grown
in despair, and maybe tomorrow, then the next
day would come up to it, and still
he didn't feel that he could paint it,
and so at last, in just a pulse
of despair, he just painted it and walked
away.
He said, that's not it, but how could
I ever hope to paint it?
How could I be able to condense into
that expansive canvas all the beauty and the
charm and the patience and the pity that
belonged in that face?
So I suppose I must go on talking
about the door of hope.
All this tells me that I never can
hope to do it any credit because this
door was different from any other door.
Over in the city of Akron, Ohio, Seiberling,
who was the head of the Seiberling Rubber
Company, I suppose you've ridden around on his
top.
Seiberling had so much money, he didn't know
what to do with it a few years
ago, so he decided to build himself a
mansion.
But do you suppose American rocks were good
enough?
Not for that man.
You suppose that the carpets made in America
were good enough?
He had money.
So he sent to Europe, various parts of
the old country, and there he got the
stones to build his building, and the entablature
went over his doors, and there he got
the very slate for the roof, and then
when he came to finish it, not American
-made thing was in the whole building.
The carpet was made in, I suppose, Persia,
and the walls came from somewhere else, and
the whole building had been imported.
I lived in that city a while, but
I never had a look at that building.
I was kind of ashamed of the man
who was ashamed of the very rocks of
his own land.
So I never went.
It must have been something to see, that
hypocritical make-believe that was brought from all
over the world and built there in an
eastern city.
Now, this building, this door of which we
speak, came also, but it came down in
the heart of the master builder, the one
who became later the carpenter of Nazareth.
He took all the materials out of his
own heart to build this building.
It was love and mercy and grace and
kindness and goodness and compassion, and all the
tender, loving mercy that was in the heart
of God went into this building, this temple.
And so the door of hope is surrounded
by the forget-me-nots and the life
everlasting and all the charms and the beauties
that the soul put into it.
This is the door of hope, a well
-grounded anticipation of future happiness.
And now, where does he put it so
the sons of men can find it?
Well, he placed it, says the Bible, in
a valley of acorn.
This door in a valley.
I have seen beautiful valleys in my time.
I have gone down the valley, the Ohio
Valley.
There's the Ohio Valley and the Susquehanna Valley.
There are very many lovely valleys.
And if religion, that is, if some religion
had been man-made, we'd have found some
grassy valley where some lovely water meandered softly
through down to the sea.
But the Bible says that God set the
valley or the door of hope in the
valley of acorn.
Now, you know about the valley of acorn.
It was Nacchan, the man who stole the
golden wedge and troubled Israel.
And they put him to death, him and
his family, and heaped great stones there to
tell of sin and disobedience and dishonesty and
lust, covetousness, and then God Almighty's punishment upon
it all.
And there the man who troubled Israel lies,
I suppose, still today under the shifting sands
and silt of time.
But there are the rocks in that valley
to tell of a man but who would
disobey for the sake of a little advantage.
And they named that valley the valley of
acorn, the valley of trouble and distress.
And there were no green grass and no
charming flowers.
There were soft, blasted trees and serpents and
vultures, and all that the heart hates and
would run from, all the valley of trouble.
And yet there in the valley of trouble
said, God is the door of hope, and
I will give her the door of hope
in her very despair.
And in the very place of trouble, I
will place a door there through which she
can go to well-grounded expectations of happiness
to come.
It's necessary to talk a little about Israel
and why God said this about her.
Do you remember that Israel had sinned against
God, and he had a bride that had
betrayed him.
And he said how she was no good,
and he didn't even want to call her
his bride.
And he turned his face away from her,
but he couldn't kill her.
So he said, all right, there will be
a day when after she has found that
this one with whom she's taken up is
not the right one, she'll come back.
And when she comes back, I will allure
her and I will comfort her comfortably in
the wilderness.
And I will give her her vineyards from
here and the valley of Acre for a
door of hope.
And she, as she used to sing as
in the days of her youth.
Now what could that mean but that this
woman had backslidden, she had turned away from
God, this Israel, and had walked away and
had taken up with Balaam and the gods
of the nations round about.
And God would not endure that, so he
punished her.
And he turned away from her far and
wide over the face of the earth.
And we might point out that Israel is
still today scattered throughout the whole wide world
because she would not be true to God.
And if she got her deserts along with
the rest of us sinners, God would never
restore her to himself again.
But he says that his love is too
big for him.
And so he will bring her back.
And he will give her a valley and
a door in a valley.
It will not be the beautiful green valley
of the Shenandoah.
It will be the blasted, sandy, stirring hot,
serpent-infested valley of Achan, the valley of
Achor, the valley of...
Now, how can we apply that to our
own hearts, my brethren?
We can apply it by remembering that we're
with temptations.
And it isn't uncommon to find God's people
forgetting him temporarily, breaking their fellowship and losing
the sense of his love and getting so
into this, or the rearing of a family,
or their ambitions, that they put God, as
it were, aside a little.
They turn to Baal or to some other
god or goddess.
And for a while, they strike a certain
compromise.
And in moments of stillness, they may remember
those happier hours when first they knew the
Lord.
They may soon cover that over and manage
somehow to quiet their hearts away.
And God says that that kind of people
are not going to come back too easily.
They may have a valley that isn't a
pleasant valley.
It will be a valley of Achor, a
valley of trouble, just as Israel will go
in in prophetic times in days to come
into the furnace of affliction.
And oh, the terror of Achor, when the
judgments of God fall upon her then, God
says, I will set a door there.
You will find anticipation of happiness.
You will find redemption there.
You will find the door that's sprinkled with
the blood of Jesus.
You will find a door that has a
knocker that can be manipulated.
A child or the weakest, sickest person and
yet with a sound that wakes all heaven.
For when God hears anyone, he always listens
and comes and responds to the knock.
You'll find that door there.
Now it could be whom I am now
preaching that have allowed your heart to be
all covered over with the dark, ugly, since
a world innocent sin.
It could be that some of you don't
pray as much as you used to pray.
It could be that box so eagerly hasn't
been opened for several days or maybe several
weeks.
It could be with which you tumbled out
of bed in the morning and smiled and
said, it's Sunday.
Maybe that has given place now to a
cold go, but you go because you feel
you should and the family wants you to
and you're keeping up the appearance, but in
that deep heart of yours something is wrong.
And you don't have the joy, the wells
of salvation don't spring up anymore.
It's only with great effort that you can
get even a bit of water to the
surface of your heart.
Now what are you going to do?
Are you going to think I ever was
anywhere in the first place?
And I have proved that a man can't
live this Christian life anyway.
Are you going there?
No, I beg you, don't open the door
of despair.
I cannot describe what is in there because
I have never been myself into that, through
that door, but I beg of you, don't
enter the door of despair.
Don't look into that dark cave filled with
dead men and the vile and evil memories,
but rather remember that God said I will
allure her.
I will allure her.
Who?
This backslidden bride, this woman who has been
untrue, this person who has claimed the arms
of God, the Father Almighty, and has taken
up with worldly means.
Now we have no bail.
I wouldn't know where to look for bail
if I were to worship him.
I might find some relics of bail at
the Field Museum, I don't know, Museum of
Natural History.
I might find it there.
I wouldn't know where to go to find
a false god in America because we are
part of civilization that doesn't any longer worship
idols.
But my brethren, you can find gods that
woo your heart away from prayer and you
don't have to go to some heathen village
where they worship a stone.
No.
It's in Chicago and they are the business
man's gods and the school child's gods and
the gods of the houses of the scholar
and the gods of the traveler and the
gods of the show people and the gods
of the writers and artists and builders.
We have lots of them.
You can't take them up in your hand
and carry them, but they're there.
Whatever it is you have to bail to,
bail, means, Lord, you're the master of my
life.
You, you have absorbed my affection.
You temporarily are away from God.
And we call that an idol, and it
is an idol.
Turn away from us completely and say I'll
have nothing more to do.
They've proved they're no good.
No.
God never uses, use that about people.
They say the man never was any good.
They say a man had a family of
six children and four or five of them
were old and was no good.
God never uses the word no good in
the sense that we do.
When God says no good body is morally
worthy of salvation.
And therefore we're not good.
And Jesus said no man is good, only
God.
So in that sense nobody's any good.
But when we use the word and talk
about a young man and say he's no
good, we mean he's beyond.
We mean that there is no hope for
him.
But God never means that.
And when God never says he's no good,
meaning that he's, he's impossible to do anything
with him.
God says I will allure him.
I will allure him.
And I will call her back into the
wilderness.
Not into the city, not into the palace,
but into the wilderness.
And there I will set for her a
door of hope in the valley of Asia.
So there is a door of hope for
you there.
And it is a door, I say, the
materials were taken out of the heart of
God.
God's infinite mercy and his great grace and
his kindness beyond description, and his tenderness to
God himself, these are the materials out of
which the door of hope is made.
Speaking to a discouraged person.
I don't often preach about backsliding here.
I don't think I've preached about backsliding.
I think it's been years and years about
the question that I don't.
We don't believe in it.
And we so try to teach that the
people will be, will stay up very much
on an even keel.
If we never have a keeping revival, if
we never have any visitation that can get
into the papers in the world, at least
we're not backsliding all the time.
We're so walking with God as to keep
a rather even keel, and that's what I
mean by like, but.
Even the best of churches sometimes, and the
best of people, and the best of families,
and their difficulties.
So now it's not only for our backslidings,
but there are other valleys of despair.
Sicknesses, for instance.
Some people just seem to be born to
be sick, don't they?
And not neurotic, not that.
There's just something else goes wrong, and then
something else goes wrong, and the two things
that have gone wrong have no relation to
each other.
One didn't cause that, but one thing will
go wrong, and then another, and I say
some people have illness, either in their home
or in their own part of the year
round.
That can get mighty discouraging, mighty discouraging.
But do you know why?
God will put a door of hope in
that home where there's illness, or where there
are incurables, and you will find there a
door that will enable you, says God, to
sing as you used to sing, and she
shall sing there as in the days of
old.
Now, she'll begin even to call God Ishii,
and say, he's, you know, my friends, that
there are some things you'll never learn unless
you get sick.
Now, this sounds like heresy in the church,
because I should suppose that the average alive
preacher would take the position that you oughtn't
to get sick and you'd be right away.
But I can't follow along there quite, because
I remember that David said, before I was
a slave, but since that I have returned
unto the Lord.
You remember that passage in the Old Testament,
my brethren, and it's twice repeated.
I think that David meant ill.
I'm quite sure he did.
And I have known instances of people who
got sick, and while they were laid aside,
they got a chance to discover a door
of hope.
They were too busy to see up to
that time.
They didn't need any hope, thank you.
But after a long siege, when they became
ill, then they began to see there wasn't
much in this life after all.
And they found there a door of hope,
and they began to say, and they found
God to be to them all that he'd
wanted to be all that time, and couldn't.
Illness visits your home more frequently than you
think it should.
Don't look at the illness, but look for
the door of hope, because God puts it
there, founded in atonement, and covered by the
blood of the Lamb.
And then there are disappointments that come to
people all down the line.
I've had people come to me and talk
to me about their losses, about their shattering
disappointments.
There's always too a way to react when
you find yourself suddenly in the...
In this case, I'm assuming you're not to
blame.
I'm assuming this is not the result of
any wandering from the presence of God.
I'm assuming it's simply in the course of
life, things come to us as we go
along.
And here we have shattered disappointments and losses,
and they all add up and weave themselves
into a camel's hair shirt which we must
wear, which we're bound to wear and can't
escape wearing.
Trouble and difficulty and heartache.
Now, what are we going to do?
How are we going to react to these
heartaches and losses?
We often sigh a long sigh of surrender
and say, all right for some people, some
happy people to live the Christian life, for
people that have no trouble, but me, I'm
born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,
and there's no use for me.
Some people are born, says the discouraged man,
for the bright flower-covered valleys to sit
beside the slow-moving river and watch it
bear its driftwood out to the sea.
But not me.
The only stream around here is a jerky
little inadequate muddy stream, and the only birds
are vultures.
The only living things that grow are weeds
and briars.
That's my life.
Again, I quote the text, I will allure
her and bring her into the wilderness, and
I will give her her vineyards from thence
and the valley door of hope, and I
say that right beside you, if you will
believe it, there is a beginning of something
better.
Right where you are.
During the war times, they used to have
a phrase, I never liked one of the
words, never used it in my life, except
now I'm going to use it, the word
worsen.
I never liked the word worsen.
And they would say about a situation on
the field, it will probably worsen before it
gets better.
Now, I'd like to tell you that you
don't have to adopt that.
Things may be about as bad as you
think they can get, but don't say to
yourself they'll probably worsen because right beside you
is the door of hope.
Right beside you is the door of hope.
Believe it.
You can enter into something new and grand
and wonderful that your most vivid, bridled imagination
couldn't picture 20 minutes ago.
If you will only dare to believe it
here.
Old fellow Jacob, he wasn't too old then,
he lived quite a long while after that,
but he certainly wasn't a boy.
He ran away to get away from death.
He threatened murder by his brother, his angry
brother Esau.
And he went into the wilderness, the waste,
howling wilderness.
Now there was a fellow who was no
good.
You tell me anything good up to that
time.
He was no good!
And yet there's nobody that's no good in
that sense of the word.
So God had lured Jacob.
He couldn't talk to Jacob as long as
Mama was there because Mama wanted to know
everything Jacob was doing.
Old boy, call that an Oedipus complex now
I guess, your mother fixation.
My old Ulysses says he's tied to his
mother's apron string.
That doesn't sound learned, but that certainly was
close to it.
And Jacob was that way.
And he, God couldn't long as he was
at home, was, Jacob do this, Jacob do
that, Jacob come here son, come here honey.
And Jacob was always being thumbed at by
his mother.
And God looked down and said, I see
something in Jacob not even his mother knows
is there.
Send him his mother won't believe is there.
And it's my business to get out of
Jacob that which his mother won't believe is
in Jacob.
Bring out in Jacob that which his mother
doesn't know is there.
So poor Jacob sleeping on a rock, tipped
it up and leaned to sleep.
And while he slept there appeared a ladder
so tall that it stood on the earth
and its top reached the sky and angels
ascending and descending that ladder.
And in the valley of despair a door
was opened and Jacob entered through.
He didn't go in very far but he
got inside.
Twenty years later to him the second time
and he went on further and explored the
riches of the palace of peace.
But then to get just inside and though
like the wonder the sun is gone down
from darkness to the rest of stone still
in my dreams I'd be near my God
to thee.
That's where that song came from, this imagery
of Jacob's troubles.
I knew a good man years ago, a
good man, a praying man, a tender man.
He told me about an experience.
He said he and his wife had only
a little boy, maybe three or four or
five years old and of course their whole
was centered upon this little lad and he
was growing more deeply into their affections every
hour that he lived.
And then the day came when this little
boy got sick.
They hadn't been Christians.
He said they had just been careless livers.
He said the day came when they took
that little boy out and buried him and
he and his wife came back alone, back
to the house that had been made noisy
by a five-year-old.
Socks and little shoes and little short trousers
and little shirts lay around to remind them.
And they said, do you suppose we can
go back?
And he said, well, we'll try it.
We'll go back.
He won't be there and he'll never be
back.
But we'll have to live.
He said, we can't die with him.
We're going to have to get adjusted somehow.
They took each other's hands and walked back.
And they opened the door and went in.
And these children around your home, you know
that you don't clear up the evidences of
their being around for six months.
There's always something there, something you find.
They sat down and they looked around and
everything was there but the boy.
And they sat down on the door.
And this apologetic but firm man said, I
am the sheriff.
I have come to tell you that you
are, where your business is up will be
up for sale.
You're bankrupt.
You're done.
You're finished.
And he said, that came before we'd hardly
had time to sit from our boy's funeral.
Now we were bankrupt.
Now, we not only had lost our boy
but we had lost everything.
And I knew the circumstances and I knew
the very home where the boy had lived
would have to go.
He said, I decided what I'd do about
it.
He said, I knew where there was a
revolver in my room and so he decided
I'd go to the bathroom, take my gun,
go to the bathroom, shut the door and
get out of despair.
He said, my wife read my mind and
I know how you feel.
But she said, all is not lost.
Did you ever think, honey, that if we'd
pray maybe God would help us?
Well, he said, no.
Well, she said, listen, I don't pray either
and I've been as bad as you.
But she said, in this darkness, in this
bitterness, God.
So these two poor pagans, without much instruction,
dropped to their knees and lifted up their
hands and faces to God and began to
pray.
And they were both converted.
That was years before the hour that this
man was telling me about it.
But there was still tension as he talked.
He was now in a high key position
where he could reach many men for God.
Longness of those dual losses had been drained
away from their hearts and the pure waters
of joy were flowing now.
All because a woman, badly instructed, without much
truth, but with a little faith, said to
her husband, I believe we'll find a door
if we look.
And even in our valley of bitterness, and
they in their ignorance found that door that
night.
Go thou and do likewise.
If there's trouble in the home, don't you
give up.
So give her a door of hope in
the valley of despair.
If there's trouble in that business, give up.
If your nerves have gone until you're afraid,
the breakdown may be just around the corner,
don't you give up.
And don't you give up no matter what.
For God says there's a door if you'll
only believe.
The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all
sin.
The spirit and the bride say come and
let him that heareth snooze, whoever will, let
him come.
And come unto me, all ye that labor
and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, for I am
meek and lowly in heart.
And ye shall find rest unto your souls.
So let's stop and say, now it looks
as if I was no place to go
from here.
All right.
Straight ahead, there's the door, a door of
hope that God has opened for the poor
dying sons of men.
Enter and you'll find all hope and all
your anticipations of happiness and good.
Shall we pray?
God and Father of our Lord Jesus, we
thank thee this hour.
Thou has not left, thou has not allowed
us to wander into the serpent infested valley
and left us there.
But thou has delured us and wooed us
and even there has placed the door.
Wherever we are, there's a way out and
a way in from that spot.
Thou has so arranged it in thy grace.
Thou has sent thy son Jesus to die,
to rise, to live, to plead, to be
for us, advocate above as Savior by the
throne of love.
While he's there and we are here, the
Lord is within touch.
We bless thee.
We will not despair.
We will not give up.
We will not surrender to the sins of
the enemy.
We will dare to believe that with every
temptation thou wilt make a way.
Thou wilt turn our tin into silver and
our silver into gold.
Thou wilt give us the garments of praise
for the garments of heaviness.
Bless thou the word spoken this morning.
We ask it of Jesus Christ, our Lord.