I want to choose one verse from that
long and full-weight chapter of John.
It is verse 45.
Because I tell you the truth, you believe
me.
Now that's all there is to the verse.
Because I tell you the truth, you believe
me.
Now there is a strange verse, and I
am not going to let it get by
without examining it.
I believe that the Church is a philosopher.
That is, I think that we ought to
know not only what God said and what
he meant.
And I think that we should tie up
what he said and what he meant, so
that everything falls into a pattern.
I declare, whereas I am not supposed to
do, whereby this is true, that I think
the Bible repeated.
It was constructed out by quoting a verse
that says something, and then quoting another verse
that says the same thing, and then two
others that say the same thing, and then
two others that say the same thing has
gone by.
And all you've discovered is that God said
something.
Now, what I was going to know is
what he meant.
And I recommend that manner of Bible study.
I think that we ought to go into
the Bible and find out what it means.
For the generation that only knows what God
said will be followed by a generation that
doesn't believe what God said.
For the generation of Christians that knows not
only what God said, but what he meant
when he said it, and how it ties
in with everything, with the whole pattern of
life, would be a Christian philosopher.
I suppose somebody would say to me now,
Mr. Koger, you're about to come out in
favor of Christian philosophy.
Well, by that I mean that the children
of God should have a hold of God.
Paul spoke against science, falsely so called, and
he spoke against philosophy as the vain philosophy,
and yet Paul has been reckoned by men,
who are supposed to know as one of
the six greatest thinkers of all time.
One of the six greatest thinkers of all
time.
Except Paul was among them.
So that Paul would have cancelled, in fact,
denied the place of deep thought, and of
penetration and an understanding.
So I want to inquire what Jesus meant
by this.
Now the first impulse of any fairly intelligent
person, because I've told you the truth, you
believe me not, the first impulse is to
reject it as unsound.
Christians wouldn't reject it because of who said
it.
The truth said it, and therefore if you
didn't understand it, you'd still accept it.
Not only do we accept it because he
said it, but we accept it because while
on first impression it looks to be further
meditation concerns the soundness of this passage.
Now why is it a hard verse, and
why does it seem to be upside down
in contrary case?
For the reason that normally it could get,
it is reversed in every other department of
life.
Everywhere else in the world where humans contact
the problems of creation, exactly the opposite is
true.
And it can be said, you believe anything,
you believe it.
But here alone it is said, you do
not believe it because it is true.
Now that's a strange when you don't believe
it, and the reason for not believing it
is that it is true.
Now that verse is true in spiritual context,
and it isn't true any place else.
Because that is always in secret truth, and
in all things earthly they value the truth,
and they trust the truth.
So what is the fact, and then they
conform to the fact, or they change the
fact, or that's the further they're in.
For instance a scientist.
The true scientist is busy discovering facts.
That's his job.
The true scientist hasn't any opinions, he just
has facts.
He doesn't advance any opinions, as soon as
he advances an opinion, and it's any more
of a philosopher.
And he ought to keep his mouth shut,
or else not, or else he's just that.
That's all science can do, knowledge and classify
it.
And another man can take it, for instance,
and do something with it.
For instance, the scientist learns who he is.
But it takes somebody else besides a scientist
to determine that by thinking he had him
was enough noise and boom, was it?
So it was not the scientist that determined
that the atom bomb should be a part
of warfare, it was somebody else that determined
it only deals with facts.
But they always want the facts.
You have the electric light, because men were
not satisfied with truth when it came down
to electricity.
And so is every other thing we have
in the realm of science.
So wait a minute.
I call upon your brain a little bit.
Sorry, and I apologize.
But shake your head real hard and stir
up some of those cells that have lain
there until they're in danger of atrophy.
And let me point out to you, my
friends, here, that Jesus said, you believe me
not, because I tell you the truth, the
truth.
In human nature, a great moral derangement.
A great derangement exists in human nature.
Not that derangement that deals with scientific facts
or business facts or, you know, a doctor
must know, but in the realm of morals
and spiritual things, there exists a great moral
derangement.
And it is caused by the basic disorder
of all disorders that we call sin.
Didn't you notice these are the great words
of the Bible are short words?
All the great words are short words.
When God would tell us about what is
wrong with us, he said it's the sin
in our ears.
The disorder of all disorders.
And it makes us unwilling to hear it
speaking straight.
Men are willing, kind of nature, scientific tools,
tools that have to do with engineering and
doctors and all the rest, but they're not
engineers, spiritual tools.
And let me break it down for you.
The spiritual tools that Jesus gave and that
men did not believe have been personed by
nature.
Nobody wants to know what kind of person
he is by nature.
We always want to think well.
Back in the old times, men went to
a phrenologist.
A phrenologist would always feel your head.
I don't know if it was that far
back, but I remember when phrenology was just
going out with a kind of a little
sister because, of course, they had no real
relation to each other.
But it was on its way out when
I was growing up, and I studied it.
And some people, it's not as difficult as
with others.
But anyway, I can read you what the
phrenologists say about this stuff.
High forward, cogitation.
High up here, sublimity.
Forward, over the head.
And that means you've got a room for
sublimity in there.
And thick through here, bad sense.
Well, that's phrenology.
And we like to go to a phrenologist
to see an old boy who used to
shake out his long beard.
And back in the day, in the past,
little phrenologist.
His wife would kick him around until he
began to feel inferior, and he went to
a phrenologist.
The phrenologist said, you should have been a
phrenologist.
He'd elbowed people off the sidewalk.
I went to a lecture one time.
He lectured on phrenology, a young fellow.
And he looked me over and he said,
you should have been either a chemist or
a corporation lawyer.
He said, you've got an analytical mind.
I had a hard time getting over that
fact, you know.
It made me proud.
And I felt good to believe that I
had an analytical mind.
But I felt good to think at least
I had one.
Now, we're right when we are.
But the truth tells us what we are.
And that's why we resist the truth.
Nobody wants to die as God says he
is.
And Jesus told Peter he'd deny him before
morning.
Peter said, I'll not deny him.
No man believes that he's as bad as
God says he is.
And the prophet, the man in the faith,
he said, you'll murder him.
He said, his life's proven to a dog.
But he would do such a thing.
And he went straight home and put a
pillow on his master's face.
He didn't know how bad he was.
And he wouldn't believe what the prophet of
God told him.
Peter wouldn't believe that he was as bad
as Jesus.
That's why we resist truth.
We don't resist scientific truth.
Go to a shoe shop, the man made
it.
You don't resist that because you want a
comfortable shoe.
But that doesn't take away from your self
-love.
You can have a big foot and you'll
still love yourself with big feet.
But when you go to the Lord Jesus
Christ and look at him and say, you're
bad.
And you say, well, maybe.
But not bad as that.
Jesus said, I tell you the truth and
that's why you will not believe something in
you that resists knowing the truth about yourself.
When?
When we resist the truth ignoring what kind
of people have been in our past practice.
Nobody wants to believe that he is said
to be, nor that he has done as
bad as they said he did.
No brother, if you did it, you can
excuse it.
But if that same thing occurs in somebody
else, it's amazing how you can condemn it.
But if you condemn in another, you permit
in yourself.
Because there's a arrangement there that we call
sin, a disorder perception that permits us to
excuse in ourselves that which we would condemn
in another.
There are people walking around that are guilty
now of crimes and sins, that if somebody
else was guilty of the same thing, they'd
put them in jail.
But if you turned on them, and said
you ought to go to jail, they'd turn
white and knock you down.
They don't believe it about themselves, nobody else.
That's why what Jesus means when he said,
I tell you the truth and you'll believe
me not.
I tell you your pulse, and you'll accept
that.
I tell you your temperature, and you'll accept
that.
I tell you the size of your shoe,
and you'll accept that.
And by one measure, the length of the
river, or the width of the river, and
then you'll build a bridge that long.
All of you conform to truth except one
of the spiritual, and there you resist, because
there is where the moral disorder lies.
And nobody wants to believe the status before
God.
That's why we have so many crackpots and
old maid mercifiers and sob sister religions, and
behold the companions that have come.
And here they are, swarming about, telling us
how good we are, and everything.
And they are liars, and when they tell
us we're all right, they're liars like unto
him who is the father of lies.
And I don't want anybody messing around with
me telling me how good I am, because
if he tells me I'm a good man,
he'll jeopardize my soul.
I want to know the truth.
But in order to do that, I have
to reverse her and trust God to help
me and give the Holy Ghost a chance,
because it isn't so by nature.
Everybody's mad when he's told that he believes,
and his status before God is not as
safe as good status.
But before God, he's not on good writing.
I have a weakness for buying books of
religious poetry.
I don't know why as much as I
pay against religious poetry.
So thanks to them up there.
And most of them are simply awful, that's
all.
I wonder why they ever got written.
And having got written, they got free.
But there they are.
And I could give you a whole world
of them all built on the same sheet.
It is this.
God the Father is so tender and broad
-minded, and his love is so great and
so deep, and he is so powerful that
he sees not as he sees, and therefore
he condemns a man, but he goes right
into the kingdom of God, and he's all
right.
He follows her to the jail and the
murderer to the gallows, and he dies, and
the Lord says, he's my poorest, spoiled boy.
He dips him in the river, and he's
all right.
That's all poetic nonsense.
You remember, don't you, that old Abu Ben
Adam once, and you know him, Abu Ben
Adam, may his tribe increase and bless me,
his truth.
He's got a whole nation that's descended scattered
throughout the world.
Well, Abu woke one night from a deep
dream of people standing in the room writing
in there with a quill and a book
of prose.
And much speech had made Abu Ben Adam
what are you doing?
He said, I'm writing in here the name
of them that love the Lord.
Abu was curious.
He said, my, no.
He said, I'm sorry, you didn't hear.
Well, Abu said, okay, and shrugged and said,
write me down as one who loves the
Lord.
So the next night he even came back
in the same angelic pose standing in the
same room with the same book.
I didn't know that he was doing a
litany tonight before, but there he was writing
in the book.
And lo, Abu's name led all the rest.
He didn't love these fellow men and so
he was in the book of life above
all the rest.
But in crunching the book as an image
it ought to be with a pair of
hairy ears on top to identify it.
Alejandro says, silly thing, why did Dwight ever
let him write that?
Silly thing.
Yet we have a whole world of that,
a world of it.
Will not believe in what God has said
about their status, that they're lost and ruined
and alienated and God's an unbridgeable gulf bigged
only by the cross of Calvary.
That's why people don't believe.
I tell you the truth and that's why
you don't believe it.
It's true and that's why you don't believe
it.
You're dedicated to the comfortable life.
And there are churches dedicated to the comfortable
life.
Nasty as it may sound, there are preachers
dedicated to the comfortable life.
Neither by a direct statement or a sort
of indirection they leave the impression to the
audience that they're a wonderful bunch of people
and all the adjustments here and there and
they go by with a screwdriver and give
them an adjustment here and listen and say,
I think it's a little tighter there, and
over here there's just a little more there.
But now you're in a is all right
in your Father's house.
Dedicated to the comfortable life.
Jesus said, I'm telling you the truth about
this stuff.
And you won't believe what I tell you
because it is true and for the very
reason.
You go to a shoemaker, he'll measure your
foot and stretch your foot.
You want truth in the church, you don't
want truth when it comes to souls.
Because the one's physical and the other's moral.
And the great human heart, the great cancerous
disorder of the soul makes us unwilling to
believe the truth about ourselves.
And we don't want to believe the truth
about the final disposition of sinning persons and
we don't want to believe the truth about
the way out of our troubles.
And I point out to you tonight that
unbelief is of two kinds.
Unbelief is a refusal to believe what God
says about us.
That's first, first part of unbelief.
Jesus said, not all faith is the same
faith.
And it divides up two, three, four, five,
ten times.
But there's only one saving faith.
And to believe savingly on Jesus Christ with
that divinely given saving faith, you must have
previously what God said about Him.
Now, it is what God said about the
sinner.
The sinner who
has hope of salvation.
The sinner who has no hope of salvation.
The who has no hope of salvation.
The sinner who has hope of salvation.
The sinner who has no hope of salvation.
The who no hope of salvation.
The has hope of
salvation.
The sinner who has no hope of The
sinner who has no hope of salvation.
The sinner who has no hope of of
has no of salvation.
The sinner who has no hope of salvation.
The has no hope The Bocker
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You see, everybody goes where he belongs.
Judas went to his own place.
God tossed Judas into the vacuity and emptiness
of space, and Judas gravitated along with instinct.
He went right where he belonged.
Everything goes where it belongs.
Judas went to hell because he belonged in
hell.
Judas couldn't go to hell because he belonged
in heaven.
The man who belongs in hell couldn't be,
couldn't be in freedom in the kingdom of
God.
The man who belongs in heaven couldn't be
sent to hell, because everything goes where nature
goes, where gravitational pull takes it.
Not all the justifications God could ever give
a man could admit him in hell.
He must also be a renewal so that
his nature belongs there.
With what he's reached and taught and how
to act and all the rest, like a
chimpanzee in a zoo, everybody belongs in heaven,
if he belongs in heaven, he's going there.
And if he's going there, it's because he
belongs there.
So don't be sick of this.
Some old fellow, long dead, put water on
your sweet little head when you were too
little to know anything about it.
It didn't help you.
Say, am I a Baptist?
Well, I don't know, really.
Doesn't make any sense.
But I only know this.
You can plunge a man into seventy feet
of water and hold him until he's in
a bubble.
And he doesn't say, well, he's been renewed
by the Holy Ghost.
No form of baptism will save a man.
Sprinkle him with immersion with all the things,
unless he's been renewed by the Holy Ghost.
So when I say a man's saved, I
mean that man's been renewed.
The division of justification from regeneration has been
a woeful thing in our day.
And you tell people, now, you're king of
your state, you belong in heaven, but you
forget to tell them, if you haven't a
corresponding change of nature that fits you for
heaven, you're going to go to heaven.
God doesn't juggle the books to get a
sinner into heaven.
He doesn't juggle the books to get a
sinner out of hell.
You go to heaven not only because the
book says you go to heaven, but you
go there because you're in heaven.
What is that with the, when you sing
a chorus or something, sing sometimes you're born
down and you might be born up.
You came to earth and you might go
to heaven.
That isn't exactly the way I said it,
but it's true.
Now, I say that nobody can save ten
years of peace about each other.
That's why I can't go along with a
lapel pattern.
You're a piece of lapel.
A soft little pattern.
You make everybody feel good.
And people think of churches if they feel
good.
Boy, I've been in churches where you couldn't
feel good, feel anything wrong with you.
Couldn't.
I used to have a new boy Richard.
He was a self-educated man, but he
was one of the most penetrating, terrible preachers
I ever listened to in all his life.
He was a great preacher.
He had a great voice.
Remember, he always talked quietly.
All he used to do was explain the
mathematical problems on his talk to children.
There was a quietness, but I sat there
and all the text didn't.
Well, he talked to me about my eyes.
Church is not a good place to go
to feel good if you've got a good
preacher and you want to know God.
You can feel good afterwards, but at the
time you may feel anything but good, all
being to the man who specializes in making
people feel good.
Yesterday over at WMDI, I talked a whole
half hour on making people feel good.
But I based it upon truth, upon what
he had done and what he said and
what he promised, and based the whole thing
on scripture.
And assuming that my heroes were born again
for that kind of thing, I don't know
what I'd go for.
But this false consolation makes me think I've
only got a pimple when I get it,
makes me think that I'm only going for
a walk when I'm going out to die.
Now, to think about ourselves, we've got to
hear, what is it?
It's not the appraisal of science.
And when you read the Reader's Digest, you
immediately attend to the I.T. section.
Find out how much you know.
That's the appraisal of some kind of a
science.
Not the finding of the psychoanalyst.
Come on the couch, let him realize, I
know what I'd do, I'd go down the
street.
But that's not the finding of the psychoanalyst.
Not the appraisal of science.
Not the opinion of your acquaintances.
Watch out for your acquaintances.
Too many nice things about yourself.
They want to live with you.
Maybe even they want to get something out
of you.
They'll never quite tell you the truth.
As I used to say, your best friend
won't tell you.
And that's the same thing about moral and
spiritual questions.
Don't you wait for your most prejudiced friend.
I couldn't pray to pray half of it.
But Lord, deliver me from my friends, and
I'll take care of my enemies myself.
You can pray the first half, Lord, deliver
me from my friends.
Because your friends will have you believe you're
bigger than you are, better than you are,
more useful than you are, holier than you
are, pioneer than you are.
So what you need to hear, not the
opinion of your friends.
When you get under conviction, don't run to
some comforting friend that'll pat your back and
say you're all right, you're just nervous.
I think upset is the term they use
now.
It's a general covering kind of a vulnerable
carnality.
A little blow, a cold talk, you know,
feeling like Vesuvius that should not be heard
outside a borough room, and then excused on
the grounds that I was upset.
No, the opinion you must have here is
not an opinion at all.
It's God's judgment on your life.
It's what God thinks about you.
Have you heard it?
You know what it is.
What God thinks about you.
And understand, that doesn't say you're strange as
you may be.
You can know what God thinks about flesh
and plunge into hell in the end.
You can know what God thought about him.
Satan knows what God thinks about him.
Hitler knows what God thinks about him.
You can know that isn't faith.
That isn't the faith of faith.
Believe in what God thinks about you.
But it is absolutely essential to the faith
in what Christ said about him.
Until I believe what God said about me,
I never can believe what God said about
his son.
And I am saved by believing in his
faith.
But I can't believe in his son until
I have believed God's judgment about myself.
I told you I'd work on your mind
a little, and some things to think about.
But there is a philosophy of it.
That's the reason for it.
That's why I said it.
And that's why I felt in life.
That's why it's only true in this.
Nobody cares if a foot loose, or if
a leech is 18 or 14 or three
feet long.
Nobody cares about that.
It doesn't mean anything.
You don't lose faith.
Nobody cares whether it's over the 42 cross.
It doesn't matter.
Nobody cares if the sun is 793 million
miles away and 330 miles an hour, sea
level, the speed of light 286,000 miles
per second.
Nobody cares.
It doesn't mean anything.
Nobody loses faith.
Nobody suffers knowing that.
It doesn't mean anything.
So when they tell me that it's 186
,000 miles per second, I say, so what?
I don't care.
It's all right with me.
I see this sonic barrier at 730-some
miles an hour up a little way.
It's OK with me.
But when somebody says to you, Thou art
the man, thou art a guy, the soul
that's in a bag, you're bagged, you're covered
up, you've learned to live with yourself.
It's your bag.
That bothers me.
Not by nature, but that's what we must
give.
And that's why there's so little conviction in
the world, and that's because there's so little
conviction in salvation.
So through real conversion, from the day when
men preached until hell and fire could be
felt by the trembling sinner, conversions were dramatic
and transforming.
Nowadays, these are the scriptures, led in the
back way by a mark and a test.
And I think a lot of people, because
they never really believe, they can quote Biblically
all the things that God says.
Does that mean you, Junior?
Yes.
Really you?
Yes.
Well, you think you ought to be in
hell?
Yes.
And if you really mean that, you won't
stand and look with a grin on your
face.
That'll cut deep.
As for my God, in times gone by,
in penitence, so deep, so writhing, so rimming,
but I think going to the electric chair
at a gala wouldn't have been much worse.
You've got to believe what God says about
you before you can what God says about
his Son.
But it's too easy to believe the truth
concerning yourself, that you were born wrong, you're
here wrong, you're going wrong.
God is not your Father, there's no hope
for you, and all of a sudden he
won't cover your food essentially for you.
It's easy to believe that about yourself.
It's easy to believe enough to tell God's
prayer that's true about you.
Then the world, wonderful, wonderful truth, you begin
to see Jesus come to life before you.
Oh, then Jesus, Christ in the manger, Christ
in the door, Christ at the throne, and
your faith will begin to mount and to
strengthen itself, and you'll put your trust in
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Far too few people are ever filled with
the Holy Ghost, because Christians don't care about
them either.
They don't believe it.
They think they can make it all right
and excuse a bad temper on the grounds
that they're an Irish grandfather.
They excuse tightness on the grounds of their
frugality, lust on the grounds that they're a
Red Rite, abnormalities and perversions on the grounds
they studied in college, that that was natural.
And Christians excuse things that they never can
get filled with the Holy Ghost, never.
Until a man believes what God says about
his natural heart as a Christian, he'll be
filled with the Holy Ghost.
He never can become a victorious Christian.
Defend yourself, stagger along, get on the best
you can, and you'll never be victorious.
You'll have awful, terrible, dying hours.
You can do as bad as God says
you are as a Christian.
And if you need not only justification and
the renewal of the Church, but if you
need almighty purgation by the Holy Ghost, then
that purgation will come.
But it will never come until you reach
that place.
Now, we're thrown back upon Jesus Christ, and
that's what we've got to do.
Throw us back on the cross.
Will you?
Do you?
As you heard, do you hear God's judgment
about you?
And do you accept?
Do you really believe it?
Now, think a little bit.
Let it get hold of you.
Here's this.
Oh, what a lovely lady she is.
Married to the first and only fellow he
ever went with.
Three or four nice children.
Great children.
Marvellous.
But the Holy Ghost said, listen, little lady,
you're a kid.
Before the law started, before public opinion, you're
a mother of the year.
Oh, you're wonderful.
You're as bright as your husband is.
But in the eyes of the Holy Ghost,
you're a proud, self-righteous, evil woman.
Can't get people to accept that.
But I tell you the truth, and they
don't want to hear it.
That's why we're where we are.
Oh, my friends, let's pray that God will
bring conviction on us, to send conviction back.
Religion becomes so popular now that it's shown
in theatres, sung over radios and bar and
dance.
One more of their music, one more form
of entertainment.
We're fundamentalists, evangelicals.
We won't believe the truth about ourselves.
We won't believe the kind of folks we
are.
So we have a world of religion, but
we have very little power, very little conviction,
very little penitence, very little power.
I jest to assume thee a Roman Catholic,
doing penance by walking on uncooked beans, punishing
the soles of my feet for the sins
of mine.
I jest to assume thee a Catholic, doing
penance by walking on uncooked beans.
I'm an evangelical in name, but didn't believe
half what God said about me.
Oh, let's open wide our hearts and legs
to comfort and consolation, the chief and child.
Don't seek to be happy, seek to be
whole.
Don't seek to feel good, seek to be
good and let God take care of the
feeling.
Don't seek for comfort, seek for consolation and
let God spin you and do what he
wants to.
I don't even repeat what Paul wrote in
the great American Evangelist once said.
He talked something like this, never heard anything
like that.
He was always talking about how bad we
are and on the way out, a young
fellow took his hand and said, I'm a
persecuting preacher and you've insulted me, and later
replied, well, you got off easy, God has
told that before, but it fits here.
So let God speak.