I've had an odd experience this morning.
I meant to preach a sermon and somehow
I can't get away from talking, of all
things, about sparrows.
Three times in the Word we have some
very wonderful things said about sparrows.
And so I, if I was going to
say it at all, it ought to be
out here in the hillside with the trees
and the birds and the mosquitoes.
Here I am in a regular congregation like
this and yet I feel like saying a
word from this direction.
The Bible refers to nature many, many times
now.
The Lord used many illustrations from that field.
You have to watch these Bible scholars, though.
I prepared a sermon on the spider taketh
hold with her hands and is in king's
palaces.
Then I learned from the Bible scholars it
wasn't a spider at all, it was a
lizard.
So I had to throw away all my
spiders and start working on lizards.
I never have got up a sermon on
lizards yet and don't think I ever will.
John Stott is quite a bird watcher.
He, some time ago, announced as he takes
to consider the fowls of the air and
he said that means watch birds.
Well, that sounds like a bird watcher for
you.
And he's on a vacation now, I think,
and he says one thing he wants to
do, catch up with his bird watching.
I grew up in the hills, and I
mean way back in the hills, and I
remember that mama always sent me up that
little old dirt road to the little bitty
grocery store with about a dozen eggs in
the basket.
We traded in eggs in those days and
chickens and anything.
And I was told, she said, now if
there's any money over, if eggs had gone
up, it was over, you can buy candy
with what's left.
I went up there just practically praying that
the price of eggs would go up.
But if we had candy, it was just
stick candy, very ordinary looking candy, but that
was, that beat all the fancy stuff I've
eaten in the last few years.
And Arm and Hammer soda had a bird
card in every box in those days.
And I started collecting them, and that started
the fever, the bird fever.
And I got a bird guide, and my
father didn't see much sense in a thing
like that, and birds were plentiful and didn't
buy a book about it.
But then that led on to binoculars, one
thing after another.
Now I've got all the paraphernalia and still
listening to the birds.
But there's always been something about the sparrow.
Of course you have plenty of English sparrows.
They're everywhere.
They're town birds.
They don't care for the country, and they
have some of the characteristics of town folks.
You know, a country boy can learn town
ways, but a town boy just can't learn
country ways.
You've got to be born there and grow
up to know anything about that.
Well, we read in the Word of God,
our Lord tells us that two sparrows are
sold for a farthing, and five sparrows for
two farthings.
Now if you pay two farthings, you get
a bargain.
You get an odd bird.
You get an odd sparrow.
And what in this world is more inconspicuous
and apparently more unimportant than an odd sparrow
of all things?
And yet our Lord uses it to say
that God knows when the odd sparrow falls.
Think about the odd sparrow.
There are other kinds, of course, but the
one I like most is not the white
-throat, although he sings, starts off, some of
the bird lovers think that it's the first
few notes of the wedding march lifted several
octaves.
And it does have that sort of similarity.
And then the song sparrow who sings all
day long.
But my favorite is always the field sparrow,
because when I was a boy working in
that hot field with corn or cotton or
whatever it might be, the other birds all
stopped.
But the odder it got, the better the
field sparrow liked it.
And he sang for me all day long.
I developed an appreciation for him.
But here we have the odd sparrow.
God cares for what seems unimportant.
The hairs of your head are numbered, the
lilies of the field.
God knows what the stock is in his
store.
He knows what's on every shelf in the
story, the store of the universe, and he
never loses anything.
Nothing disappears.
And the cynic says, well, so what?
You see sparrows lying dead.
What's that got to do with God and
caring about us when we get into trouble?
That sounds very cynical, but it says God
knows about it.
No matter what happens, even the smallest detail
never escapes his notice.
Nothing ever goes out of existence anyhow.
They move around and change appearance and change
form.
You burn a stick of wood in the
fireplace and some of it goes up in
smoke and some of it remains in the
ashes, but everything's around somewhere.
And they just change form.
The whole world does like that.
And I read that my tears, Psalm 56,
8, are in God's bottle.
Did you know God's in the bottling business
and that he's keeping bottles of your tears?
Velma Daniels, who's a newspaper religious writer down
in Florida, told me some time ago she
got overexposed in a TV studio to the
bright lights and her eyes gave her trouble.
And she went to the eye doctor and
he said, you know what the best formula
for the eyes is in the world?
No.
He said tears.
We don't know how to make them, but
that's the best formula of all because God
made it.
And sometimes you learn your best lessons and
see your best visions through the tears.
Nothing goes out of business.
We're fearfully made after all.
I've never seen you.
You've never seen me.
We see each other walking around with a
suit of clothes on, but we look in
each other's eyes, the windows, and that's the
nearest you ever get.
Your eyes can't see.
You see with your eyes.
There's something behind all this little apparatus.
And when it goes out of business one
of these days, they bury it, but they
don't bury you for keeps because you're going
to live forever.
And your ears don't hear.
You hear with your ears.
Your tongue can't talk.
You talk with your tongue.
You could take your tongue out and lay
it on the table.
What would it talk about?
You do the talking.
And when that little tenement that you've been
living in these years goes to pieces or
an automobile and puts it out of business
or something, and they lay it away, what
happens to the tenant when the tenement is
disposed of?
Well, the Christian goes to be with Jesus.
And that ought to be enough for the
present.
There'll be a lot more discovered later on.
But remember, friend, that we're fearfully and wonderfully
made.
And I spend a lot of time wondering
about those dear ones.
And you do too.
The Bible doesn't tell us an awful lot
about the Christian between death and the resurrection.
What does he look like?
The old body's in the grave.
He doesn't have the resurrection body.
And folks say, well, what form of manifestation
does he take?
Well, I'm not getting into all that, but
God will take care of it.
I guarantee you that.
Well, we know our loved ones over there.
Well, you don't think we'll have less sense
over there than we've got over here.
I expect to know them.
And I think that we won't all be
like eggs in a crate or just alike.
I think that the peculiarities of personality to
some extent, no doubt, will be manifest.
And remember that he's not the God of
the dead.
He's the God of the living.
And all live unto him.
Nobody's dead in the sight of God.
Everybody's alive as far as he's concerned.
That ought to cheer us up.
And we are waiting for the final restoration.
And there won't be any odd pieces.
Everybody's going to be somewhere.
Every knee shall bow first.
And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord to the glory of God the Father.
That's not universal salvation.
But everybody will be accounted for.
They'll all have to recognize that Jesus is
Lord.
And whoever's lost, that's for the garbage heap
and where the worm dies not and the
fire is not quenched, but accounted for, not
non-existent.
I have a wonderful friend, great Presbyterian brother
David Petty in Greensboro.
We get together every little while.
The other day he just laid something down
the table when I was eating at his
house.
It's from Hilarion Belong, the writer who probably
is not a Christian at all.
But this unbeliever, speaking of hell, said, oh,
we laughed today at it.
We make our wry remarks about it.
We use it as a byword.
But he said, between here and there, there's
a great gulf.
If we could see over it, there would
be millions and millions and millions of faces
and not a smile on one of them.
That moved me somewhat.
And yet, from an unbeliever, that's a strange
but true comment, it seems to me.
Does God care for the fallen spade?
Does God care for you when the mishap
comes?
And then there's the lonely sparrow.
The psalmist wished in Psalm 102, 7, said,
I'm like a sparrow alone on the housetop.
Now, when the sparrow's alone up there, probably
the nest has been destroyed or the mate
has been killed.
And when sometimes in your life there comes
that day when the nest has been destroyed
and the mate killed, you know what this
means.
I know what this means.
I walk down these streets and many times
I see two going along.
I assume man and wife, and I say,
well, they still have each other.
And then I sort of grip that hand
as though reaching out for one that isn't
there.
But I know that, as I've told you
before, I haven't lost her because I know
where she is.
But Holmes, Robert G.
Lee, oh, when my dear one passed away,
that great preacher wrote a great long two
-page letter to me.
And he used to say at the latter
part of his life, I'm not going home
now, I'm just going back to Memphis.
So Saturday I'll be leaving not for home,
I'll just be leaving for Greensboro.
And so here's the sparrow on the housetop.
And like that grand old spiritual that the
black saints have given to us, sometimes I
feel like a motherless child.
Oh, that's a tremendous thing there.
I remember down in Florida, one night they
brought out the kids from a children's school
and the little folks sang.
And that's a song I can't quote it
here, but I'm glad I belong to the
family of God.
And in that family of God, there aren't
any orphans.
And because God has made arrangement about all
that.
They asked me over to Travis Avenue, that
great Baptist church in Fort Worth some years
ago for a conference.
And when I got there, some of the
folks came to me and said, there's one
thing we'd like for you to talk about.
Now they seem to have everything.
We had our first meeting in the country
club and it looked like they didn't lack
a thing in this world.
Pretty well fixed, most of them.
But they said, talk to us about loneliness.
Do you realize that with all our amusements
and all our entertainment today, we've got more
lonesome folks than we ever had on the
face of the earth?
They've got plenty, but that doesn't meet the
need.
Well, like little Amy lying in the hospital
and she was kind of unhappy that day.
Little Annie said, why don't you pray?
She said, how would God know it's me?
And he said, put your arms out on
the counterpane and say, Lord, I'm the little
girl with her arms out on the counterpane.
That might identify you.
Oh, did you ever feel that way sometime
when trouble comes and hits hard?
Well, God's got trillions of stars to look
after and billions of people.
How can he ever take time out to
think about me?
Well, it's because he's omnipotent and omniscient and
omnipresent.
And those big long words mean that he's
everywhere, knows everything, and can do anything he
wants to.
And you can leave all that with him.
Just settle this one question in your head.
Is God infinite?
If he's infinite, then you don't put any
stops anywhere because God's infinite.
And that's what the odd sparrow means.
And my Lord, when he was on earth,
I've wondered so much about the fact that
he didn't mix with the upper crust much.
Why didn't he go to Rome and Alexandria
and Athens and say, I'm the son of
God?
Why did he start in this poor little
country, no bigger than New Jersey over there
across the sea?
And why did he, when he had only
40 days left to stay after he came
back from the grave, wouldn't you have thought,
then he would have gone and said, I'm
back.
I'm the only person who ever died and
came back and I'm here.
No, all he does is comfort a poor
weeping woman at a sepulchre, have dinner with
some lonesome Emmaus disciples, and tell some poor
fishermen, those disciples, that fish don't out and
caught nothing.
That's one fish tale, I believe.
And tell them how to fish.
Lord, couldn't you have used your time, those
40 days, at something else?
No, no.
That leads me to believe that he's interested
in the little things that I do and
the little things that you do.
And there's a place for it in the
economy of God.
After the resurrection, just went about as usual
in many ways, and yet not as usual.
I'm glad his eyes on the sparrow.
I know he watches me, Ethel Waters used
to sing that in the Billy Graham meetings.
Oh, she blessed her soul.
She'd sometimes sing it, I was on the
little bitty sparrow.
Well, she wasn't little bitty herself, but somehow,
somehow we said, I don't care.
She knew what she was saying.
My, what a spirit she had.
And then finally, Psalm 84, 3, tells about
the sparrow that builds in the temple.
And that is a refreshing thought.
The temple of the Lord.
Now, God dwells not in temples made with
hands, but the psalmist said here, I want
to abide, I want to stay in the
temple of God.
The heart of man still longs for a
hiding place.
Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to
thy bosom fly.
Rock of ages cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in thee.
He that dwelleth in the secret place of
the most high shall abide under the shadow
of the almighty.
You're never, you can't hide from God.
That's for sure.
Except in one place, you can hide from
God when you're in God.
That's when he's your home, when you're homed
in God.
I think of the mother of Augustine who
wanted to go with him on a trip
and she was old.
He said, mother, you mustn't go.
It's a long trip and you might not
make it.
You might die away from home.
And she said, no, my life is hid
with Christ in God and I'm homed in
God.
And when your home's God, you can't die
away from home.
That does me a lot of good because
I'm a lonely, poor mortal for eight years
now, wandering around over the country and staying
in motels.
And the other night when the preacher and
his wife brought me up to that, when
she said, there ought to be a special
medal in heaven for traveling preachers who have
to live in motels and go in and
turn the door, nobody there, stare at the
wall, wake up in the middle of the
night and the old, it's human to say,
what would happen to me if I went
on in a situation like this?
And a thousand folks can come to you.
But somehow, beloved, out of all this in
the past eight years has become the richest
period of my life.
I wrote that little book that nearly every
other person has bought, I think, though I
walked through the valley.
And they call me and they write to
me from everywhere saying we buried our son,
I buried my wife, we've lost this one,
that one, and so on.
And your little book, somebody gave us your
little book, or I've got your little book.
And sometimes I'm, I sit down and get
kind of low sometimes, of course you never
do, but I get a little low sometimes.
I feel like the last rose of summer
in a hailstorm sometimes.
And about the time that I do, why
some time ago I was sitting in my
room and I wasn't in the best position,
the phone rang, and some dear brother at
the other side of the country went to
all the long-distance trouble to call me
up and said, doesn't have anything to ask
of you in particular, just wanted to tell
you, you've been a blessing.
Brother, that's the best paycheck a preacher ever
gets.
That's the best paycheck anybody ever gets.
Does anybody, you don't have to be a
preacher, does anybody tell you you've been a
blessing?
You ought to be.
Everybody can be a blessing, that's one vocation
that's open to all of us.
And we can get into it.
But you cannot rest in God until you
nest in God.
Two words in the Bible that keep reminding
me, abide, abide, abide.
That means you settle down.
Don't go running just when you get in
the jam.
He's gracious and loves you and he'll help
you then, but it'll mean a lot more
if you just stay there.
Abide in the secret place of the Most
High and the others dwell.
Abide, dwell, put some, stay with it there.
It doesn't mean you've got to be a
recluse or a hermit.
The sparrow doesn't stay in the nest all
the time, goes about his business, but the
Savior is not only our Savior, he's our
sustenance.
And we must feed upon him, and he'll
meet every need.
Sidney Lanier lived down in the last days
of his life, dying of tuberculosis near Brunswick,
Georgia.
I had meetings there some time ago in
the First Baptist Church and across, across the
marshes, had a great meeting ground, old-fashioned
Methodist campground.
And the tree out here where Lanier sat
and wrote his wonderful poems about the marsh
hen secretly builds her nest on the watery
sod.
I'll build me a nest on the greatness
of God.
That's a mighty good place to stay.
And you think of Mr. Penny, the great
millionaire, when he was very ill.
You've heard it, you've read it, we've all
read it dozens and dozens of times, and
I'd like to read it again.
And then he heard some, some of the
saints singing down below his room in the
hospital.
Got up and put his robe on, went
down there, and they were saying, be not
dismayed, whate'er be done, God will take
care of you.
That did him more good than all the
pills he'd been taking all those weeks at
the hospital.
Oh, it's a good thing to remember with
Madame Guillaume.
To me remains nor place nor time.
My country is in every clime.
I can be calm and free from care
on any shore since God is there.
And you have learned in whatever state you
are to be content.
Romans 828 doesn't say we understand how all
things work together for God.
Doesn't say that.
Understand it or not, it says we know
it.
Now can you quit worrying about understanding it
and get around to knowing it?
Understand it or not, I don't understand how
a black cow can eat green grass and
give white milk, but I still like ice
cream.
I'm not putting it all together.
I know a few things and I can
enjoy them.
Oh, God's greatness flows around our incompleteness, around
our restlessness, his rest.
And I recall that, well, the other day
I was in New Orleans Baptist Seminary for
some days, and along with the others who
came up to shake my hand was one
of the faculty, a dear man of God.
Sometimes we get on Bible conferences together, but
I didn't know the latest.
And I preached on why, and I want
to talk about that one time here.
Not that I can explain why, but thank
God there is a word in the book
that it's all wrapped up in one great
big why in this book.
My God, my God, why?
Thou shalt forsake.
And he said, it did me not a
good considering the fix I'm in.
Well, I didn't know what kind of a
fix he was in.
He'd been away holding a meeting, and some
fiend broke into his home and murdered his
wife.
Now, that's something to come home to.
Explain it?
I can't.
I don't know how to, I don't know
why, and I couldn't tell him why, of
course, but thank God he knew the Lord.
And in an hour like that, it's a
mighty good thing to be homed in God.
And when you're homed with him, yours is
the forgotten beatitude, because my dear one went
to heaven at 2.15 Sunday morning, and
I preached at 11, and I didn't know
whether I could or not, but I did.
You've heard me tell it maybe before.
John the Baptist in jail, and sending, of
all things, a delegation to Jesus.
Are you the one, or do we start
looking for somebody else?
Now, that was a low mark for John
the Baptist, a man who had stood on
the banks of the Jordan.
Behold, the Lamb of God, that rugged man
with his camel's hair, garments, and his grasshopper
salad that he lived on.
What a character.
And yet now he's in the dumps, he's
in jail, and it's one thing to stand
on Jordan and give it, and another thing
to stay in jail and take it.
And he couldn't take it very well.
Jesus didn't ball him out.
He didn't ball out old Simon Peter for
denying him.
He just asked him, do you love me?
He didn't ask him, do you love sheep?
Ron Dunn, my dear friend, this coming young
preacher, said when my dad and mother, dad
loved, mother loved cats, but dad couldn't stand
cats.
But he said after mother died and went
to heaven.
One night we were all in front of
the fireplace talking, and the old cat came
in, tail up in the air, very happy,
came around, rubbed up against every one of
us.
When he got to dad, guess what dad
did?
Picked him up, held him on his lap,
and stroked him all during the rest of
the conversation.
Said dad still wasn't fond of cats, but
mother had been fond of cats, and dad
loved mother.
Jesus said if you love me, you'll love
the sheep.
You try to work up a love for
this miserable, these wolves today, some of them,
apart from that you won't get very far.
But Jesus said, go tell him, go tell
John the Baptist that I'm running on schedule.
Blind are seeing, deaf are hearing, lame are
walking, poor are having the gospel preached, and
then the forgotten beatitude, nobody ever knows this
one.
Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended
in me.
Blessed is the man who never gets upset
by the way I run my business.
Now if God's business involves something you can't
figure out, and you say, Lord, you must
have been looking the other way, where were
you?
No, no.
Claim the forgotten beatitude.
It'll work.
And then after all this, I had two
years in my life when I couldn't sleep.
I don't know how I lived, and nervous,
exhausted, and depressed, and I hadn't learned what
Martin Lloyd Jones, being a doctor and a
preacher both, and speaking from both standpoints, said,
don't let yourself talk to you, you talk
to yourself.
That's a terrific thing.
The old Adam in you, you start raising
all these awful questions.
Stand up and say in the name of
Jesus Christ, sit down.
I'm going to live it whether I feel
it or not.
Something will happen.
Then, and my doctor, after I was left
alone, he gave me a bottle of Valium
and said, brother, if you can't sleep, take
this.
Well, I said, now, Lord, I'm not going
to become a Valiumite.
I'm not getting hooked on that stuff.
I threw my bottle away, and I said,
if I'm going to preach, I've got to
sleep.
And thank the Lord I've been sleeping.
Sometimes it's the other way now.
Like that old boy out in the country,
the country I came from, went to the
doctor and said, I'm having trouble sleeping.
The doctor said, how does it work?
I said, I do all right in the
night and pretty well in the afternoon, but
it seemed like in the morning I'd just
roll and talk.
So, so I just want to tell you,
thank God it works.
Thank God it works.
If you're alone on the housetop, you feel
like it.
You don't know where to go.
People come and some of them don't say
the right things.
And all alone with the pillow wet with
tears in the middle of the night, you
can't tell folks they've got enough burdens of
their own.
Thank God the watchman of the universe never
goes to sleep.
He's night and day on the job.
And I'm like the old bishop who read
that he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber
nor sleep.
Read that in the middle of the night
and he looked and said, Lord, if you're
sitting up, I'm going to bed.
Good night.
So all the way my Savior leads me,
what have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt his tender mercy, who through
life has been my guide?