Anybody who thinks being a Christian is dry
and dull and dead and dreary ought to
be here in this meeting tonight, it seems
to me.
We are having a time.
I think about that dear brother down in
my country who got into an exciting meeting
one night and the next morning he went
back to the service.
They asked him to lead in prayer and
he never had come down the mountain top
from the evening before.
He said, Lord, we just certainly had a
wonderful time last night.
We do thank you for that service.
And then he waxed eloquent and said, Lord,
you just ought to have been there.
Well, the Lord has been here and he
is here.
Now, I was here two years ago.
They let me come back every two years.
They figure it takes about that long for
me to get up to more sermons for
the next time.
But I can remember, I told it two
years ago, I can remember the first Founders
Week here when they had R.A. Torrey,
James M.
Gray, Gracia Machen, and William Jennings Bryan on
the program.
That was a Founders Conference, I tell you.
And I've been coming back in one way
or another ever since I liked this place.
We don't stand for cheap Christianity here.
We believe salvation is free, but it's not
cheap, because God is Son, because the Son
is life.
And if you mean business, it will cost
you everything you have.
We've got a lot of cheap preaching today
in some quarters.
I heard of a preacher back in the
days when haircuts were 50 cents apiece.
A barber in the congregation said, I'll cut
your hair and I'll take it out and
preach on you, you don't have to pay
me.
The preacher said, I'll have you to know
I don't have any 50 cent sermons.
That's all right.
The barber said, I'll come several times.
We don't believe in marking the prices down
around this place.
I breezed in in 1922 from the Deep
South.
I didn't even apply for admission.
I just arrived one afternoon.
They had me up before the superintendent of
men a little later because I had an
extra beat in my piano playing.
But I tell you, the superintendent of men
was a wise man.
He didn't bang the table and say, Don't
you touch that piano.
They had evening vespers, and he said, Why
don't you go down tonight and play for
vespers?
After he'd given me a nice little talk
about some of the errors of the kind
of playing I was doing.
So he took me down and I marched
into that meeting with my head thrown back
like Napoleon crossing the Alps.
I tell you, I was on victory side.
He knew how to treat a young fellow
who didn't mean any harm, didn't know much.
I not only didn't know anything, I didn't
even suspect anything.
But they were patient with me then.
They've been patient with me ever since.
I appreciate all that.
Oh, this meeting's blessed my soul already.
Tomorrow, the Lord willing, I'm not going to
try to preach a sermon.
I just want to talk to you out
of my heart about six months of heartbreak
and bereavement and sorrow that I've been through.
I trust that I may be able, under
the hand of God, to comfort others to
some extent that the comfort wherewith I myself
have been comforted of God.
This dear lady sang right to my heart
tonight, Jesus is all you need.
I sort of wish she'd sing that again
tomorrow, maybe work it in some way.
Because my subject's now thee alone I seek.
I'm 72 years old, and it took me
a long time to learn some things.
You learn some things in the dark that
you never learn in the daylight.
I know there are many troubled souls today,
and I wrote a book during all this
trouble.
Go, I walk through the valley.
It's coming out later on.
You made a reference to that, too, walking
through the valley, in that precious song.
Thank you so much for it.
The New Testament begins the former treatise that
I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus
began, both to do and to teach.
There's an old spiritual that says, My Lord's
a-workin' all the time.
He didn't come down here just to say
something, he came to do something.
He was a worker.
My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.
I must work the works of him that
sent me.
The night cometh when no man can work.
He came to finish a work, and he
came to begin a work.
There is a finished work of Christ, and
there's an unfinished work of Christ.
He came to die for our sins, and
to give his life a ransom for many.
And when he died, he said, It's finished.
Once in the end of the world hath
he appeared to put away sin by the
sacrifice of himself.
For Christ also at once suffered for sins,
that just for the unjust that he might
bring us to God, being put to death
in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.
Many years ago a teenager on a holiday,
when the family was away and with nothing
to do, went into the library and upset
a basket of pamphlets, and selected a tract
on the finished work of Christ, and read
it later in a halo, and wrote still
much later, There dawned upon me the joyous
conviction that since the whole work was finished,
and the whole debt paid on the cross,
there was nothing for me to do but
fall on my knees and accept the Savior,
and praise him forevermore.
He was Hudson Taylor.
A lot of dear people are trying to
finish something that's already been finished.
You don't have to add anything to Calvary.
All your tears and prayers and good works
and high resolves cannot supplement what was wrought
out there.
Could my tears forever flow?
Could my zeal no respite know?
These for sin cannot atone, thou must say,
thou alone.
Sin has been dealt with, and it's a
finished work.
Once for all, O sinner, receive it.
Once for all, O brother, believe it.
Cling to the cross, the burden will fall.
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.
But there's an unfinished work of Christ, and
he's still at it.
It's the greatest piece of unfinished business in
all history.
The book of the New Testament is sometimes
called the Acts of the Apostles and sometimes
the Acts of the Holy Spirit.
It's certainly the Acts of Jesus Christ.
It's a continuation of that unfinished work begun
in Luke.
You remember when he went back to the
old hometown to preach, he read the scripture,
the spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he hath anointed me to preach the
gospel to the poor.
He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty them that are bruised, to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord.
In other words, I've come to minister to
the brokenhearted and the bound and the blind
and the bruised.
And he's still at it.
You remember that when John the Baptist was
in jail, he sent a delegation to ask
of our Lord, art thou he that should
come, or do we look for another?
Now, that was a big drop for John
the Baptist.
One thing to stand on Jordan and give
it, and another thing to stay in jail
and take it.
And the picture had changed.
That rugged preacher in his leather suit and
living on grasshopper salad on Jordan, facing that
motive to call to repentance, and I'm so
glad my Lord didn't send him a cute
little tract on how to be happy in
jail.
Instead of that, on the very day that
John the Baptist said the poorest thing he
ever said about my Lord, my Lord said
the best thing he ever said about John
the Baptist.
That's just like my Lord.
And then he said, go back and tell
him that I'm running on schedule.
The blind received their sight, and the lame
walked, the lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard,
the dead were raised up, and the poor
have the gospel preached to them.
And then he followed it with what I
like to call the forgotten beatitude.
Now, we know the other beatitude, but here's
one that nobody seems to know.
Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended
in me.
Blessed is the man who doesn't get upset
by the way I run my business.
That's what the Lord has said.
My dear wife, the sweet little lady who
traveled this country for 33 years with me,
went home to heaven last September 2nd, passed
away at 3.15 in the morning, and
I preached at 11 a.m. I didn't
know whether I could or not, but by
the grace of God I did, and I
had prepared a message on this very text,
not knowing the circumstances under which I would
use it.
But oh, could anything be more appropriate?
When trouble comes, we sometimes want to bombard
heaven with, why, why, why, why did this
have to happen to me?
Lord, why did you have to take her
when I'm getting old and need companionship as
never before?
Why?
Like Martha, you're tempted to say, If thou
hadst been him, a brother had not died.
But my Lord spoke back to my soul
and said, I'm not finished with you yet,
remember.
I'm making disciples, and you're my disciple, and
I'm working on you.
I'm not just saving sinners, I'm trying to
make saints out of sinners.
There's instantaneous sanctification and there's progressive sanctification.
There's position and there's condition.
And you are a saint, but you're becoming
a saint, too.
You're a being and a becoming, and I'm
not finished.
And this is part of my unfinished work,
and I'm not finished with her either.
There's more to come, thank God.
Down in Charleston, South Carolina, two years ago,
when we were in meetings at that old
First Baptist Church, I snapped a picture of
her out there on the walker front, and
then it didn't finish the roll.
And for a year and a half, that
film roll lay in the darkness of the
camera.
And a few weeks ago, I thought of
it, and I had the roll developed.
And there she came out again, and it
impressed me more than almost any other picture.
And then this thought came to me.
That just as that roll has lain for
a year and a half in the darkness
of that camera, just so her dear body
lies in a quaint little Quaker graveyard in
North Carolina.
But one of these days, the great photographer
is going to turn negatives into positives.
Thank God.
And this marvel will put on immortality and
corruptible, will put on incorruption, and death will
be swallowed up in victory.
And I'm having a rough time waiting until
that picture.
That's part of the unfinished work.
But I'm thinking about the unfinished work of
evangelization.
A lot of dear people are puzzled today.
They're saying, Lord, what's happened?
There are more pagans today than ever.
The world isn't being converted.
Well, beloved, he never started out to convert
the world.
He's taking out a people for his name.
And God's not out saving civilization.
Civilization is not going to be saved.
I used to say civilization is going to
the dogs.
I quit saying that out of respect for
dogs.
There are people tonight doing plenty of things
beneath the dignity of any dog.
I heard of a hog that got hold
of some liquor in the swill somewhere and
got drunk and called the hogs together later
and said, if you'll excuse me for acting
like a man, I never will do it
again.
Oh, there's an unfinished work, and he's still
at it.
Now, there's a twofold character to that work.
He came to do and to teach.
Notice, beloved, he came first to do.
Some people teach and don't do, and their
talk gets ahead of their walk, and their
tongues get ahead of their feet.
Dr. Dale said Jesus did not come to
preach the gospel, but that there might be,
first of all, a gospel to preach.
When he hung on the cross, they said,
let him come down from the cross, and
we'll believe him.
That's what the world is saying today.
We're not saved by how he walked in
Galilee.
We're saved by what he wrought on God
that day.
The world would take him without the cross,
but a crossless Christ would mean no more
than a Christless cross.
The world is saying, give us the teacher,
give us the example, give us the paragon,
but not the propitiation.
We don't want the scandal.
We don't want the reproach of the old
rugged cross.
We must deal first with what he did
on the cross, and then learn what he
has to teach.
Come unto me, and I'll give you rest.
But in the very next verse, learn of
me, and you will find rest.
I thought he was going to give it
to us.
It's both.
It's an obtainment and it's an attainment.
We have rest through what he did, and
attainment as we follow what he teaches.
Of course, the cross is vertical and it's
horizontal.
There's the God to man and man to
God relationship, and there's the man to man
relationship.
And you're not ready for the horizontal until
you've done something about the vertical.
We're hearing a lot today about right wing
and left wing.
One of our greatest black preachers today says,
I don't belong to the right wing nor
the left wing.
They're both flapping on the same old bird.
Ah, you are ready for this outreach only
when you're rightly related to God.
Then he gives us two commissions, preach the
gospel to every creature, make disciples.
You notice we're taught to do something.
All over the country, I read the great
commission in churches, and after I finish, I
leave out two words on purpose.
You'd be surprised how few people ever notice
that I left them out and don't know
what they were when I asked what words
did I leave out.
I always leave out on purpose the two
words to observe.
Teaching them not all things commanded, indeed we
must teach that, but our business is not
just the dissemination of information.
Teaching them to do it, to observe all
things commanded.
A lot of Bible teaching today reminds me
of swimming lessons on dry land.
You never learn how to swim on dry
land.
You must make the plunge.
Thy word is a light to my path,
but that light's not to look at but
to walk in.
You stand out on a sunny day and
stare at the sun, and the very sun
that gives you light will take away what
light you have.
It'll blind you, and it's possible to be
blinded by an excess of light.
John McNeill, famous preacher of a generation ago,
speaking on the man whom our Lord sent
to wash off the clay that the Savior
had put on his eyes.
He said, Some of you have had the
mud applied, and you've had the mud applied,
and you've had the mud applied, and you've
never done anything about it.
You've never done the next thing and the
next thing, and that mud has caked and
hardened, and you're blinder than ever.
Our Lord's work for us in redemption is
a finished work, but his work in and
through us is an unfinished work.
We are his representatives, we are his witnesses.
He didn't say bear witness, he said be
witnesses.
We are to proclaim his finished work, we
are to perform the unfinished work.
Back to that Nazareth sermon again, he said,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
he hath sent me, and then as my
Father hath sent me, even so send I
you.
There was the anointing of the Spirit for
his work, and there must be the anointing
of the Spirit for our work.
We're all his missionaries, whether across the sea
or across the street, and every Christian is
supposed to be in full-time Christian service.
Aren't you supposed to live for the Lord
and serve him every hour of the day,
every day of the week, every week of
the month, every month of the year?
What's that but full-time Christian service?
We're all in it, or we ought to
be, abiding in his finished work, anointed for
the unfinished work, abounding in the unfinished work.
1 Corinthians 15 deals with the finished work,
death and resurrection.
But how does it end?
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable,
always abounding in that unfinished work of the
Lord, forasmuch as you know your labor is
not in vain in the Lord.
There's always the danger that the work of
the Lord will become impersonal and big business.
It's just a matter of one person telling
another person about another person.
You remember when Andrew brought Peter to Jesus,
I like to say it, he brought him
to Jesus.
Just three people involved in that.
It's personal.
I never get much excited over a missionary
program somehow.
I can go to sleep listening to almost
any kind of a program of that sort,
but a missionary person will keep me awake.
That makes a difference.
When I was a pastor years ago of
a country church, I went to one of
our denominational meetings one day, and no matter
what denomination, you don't need to tell anybody,
but some of our denominational meetings can be
mighty dry.
And that one was, they read reports all
morning, and every report got a little drier
than the report before.
I felt like the little boy in church,
bored to death, and the preacher never would
quit.
And he asked his mother, what's the flag
up there in the pulpit with the stars
in it?
She said, that's the service flag for those
that have died in the service.
He said, the morning service or the evening
service?
Well, I felt like that.
And finally noon came.
I thought it never would, but it did.
And I walked around in the woods just
to get the taste out of my mouth.
And then they came back in for more
reports in the afternoon.
And then some brother read an appendix to
the last report, and I was in favor
of an appendectomy right away.
Then all at once a sure enough missionary
got in.
He didn't look much, but he began to
talk about how he had fought mosquitoes and
liquor and the devil and built little churches
in a neglected part of the country and
how homes had been reunited and lives had
been made over and drunkards had been converted.
And as he told the story, he breathed
a breath of life into it, and that
meeting became a living thing.
He did not present a mere program.
He personalized the program.
You are called upon to personalize in your
own life and experience the program, the unfinished
work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You see, it begins with a person, it
ends with a person.
All authority is given unto me.
I'm with you unto the end of the
age.
We're in it, too.
Go ye, lo, I am with you.
Evangelism is to Christianity what veins are to
our bodies.
You can clip Christianity anywhere and it will
bleed evangelism.
Evangelism is vascular.
It's our business.
Talk about majoring on evangelism, you might as
well talk about a doctor majoring on healing.
That's our business.
Our Lord said, He that gathereth not with
me scattereth abroad.
There is no such thing as an inactive
church member.
If you're not drawing people to Jesus by
your very inactivity, you're driving people away from
Jesus.
He that gathereth not scattereth abroad.
We sing Jesus paid it all, but remember
what the next word is?
All to him.
We are debtors to the Greek and the
barbarian, to the wise and the unwise.
We owe it to him and we owe
it to them to get the gospel out,
to pray it out and take it out
and send it out by person and by
prayer and by provision and by proxy.
Get it out.
During the Second World War, you remember how
Hitler's Air Force went over London again and
again and that little handful of the RAF
rose to meet them and Churchill said, Never
did so many owe so much to so
few.
When I think of lost millions and how
few real Christians there are today, I feel
like saying never did so few owe so
much to so many as we do now.
Now, just because it's a finished work doesn't
mean we just celebrate it and enjoy it.
James Anthony Froud criticized Hudson Taylor for a
do-nothing attitude.
He said this talk about everything being done
already and finished sets a premium on indolence.
Well, Froud should have checked on the life
of Hudson Taylor.
Nobody ever accused Hudson Taylor of being indolent.
There never was a more prodigious laborer for
Jesus Christ than Hudson Taylor.
And Paul, whoever believed and preached more the
finished work of Christ than whoever labored more
in the unfinished work of Christ.
It's the only answer to this situation today.
Everybody's talking about the situation now.
We're not going to meet it by holding
conferences about it.
There are symposiums aplenty, but there are symposiums
where we pool our ignorance and that's not
going to solve the problem.
If panel discussions could have saved the world,
it would have been saved a long time
ago.
If committee meetings would have done it, it
would have been saved.
I heard some time ago how they got
worried in a certain place about overlapping committees.
Too many committees.
Guess what they did?
They appointed another committee to study the overlapping
committees.
We're not going to meet the situation that
way.
We're not going to meet it by being
critical of it, just that.
Now there's a place for pulpit condemnation of
sin, personal and national.
And we need prophets.
We don't have, I was going to say
India, and maybe I'd better leave it at
that, to call state and church to repentance.
But I've gone to meetings where all I
heard was a blistering, blasting, biting, burning tirade
on the times, and I knew they were
bad when I went to the meeting, and
I knew they were worse when I came
out of the meeting.
But that's not the approach to the situation.
And we certainly are not going to meet
it by conformity to it.
There's a dangerous tendency today, even in evangelical
circles, to get with it and borrow the
techniques and terminology of the world on the
excuse that the end justifies the means, forgetting
that the means determines the end.
You don't have to dress like and talk
like and sing like the world in order
to reach it for Jesus Christ.
You don't have to look like a clown
to witness to a circus.
When I was a pastor in Charleston, South
Carolina, I preached just about every Saturday night
the rescue mission.
I didn't dress like a bum to go
down there.
Even the bums wouldn't have appreciated that.
There is an obsession going around today, for
instance, that the idiom of Isaac Watts does
not speak today, and so we have to
switch from hymns to hootenannies.
Well, it's an insert to the intelligence of
the young people of this country.
They're still studying Shakespeare in the old idiom.
Pre-med students are still studying medicine in
a very difficult idiom.
Law students are still reading law in the
same old idiom.
And if we're not going to meet the
situation by conferences about it and by being
critical of it and by conformity to it,
then how?
By just being Christians in it.
I passed by a church some time ago
that had on the bulletin board, Why Not
Just Be Christians?
I titled one of my books just that.
That's enough.
I heard of a church some time ago
that had the sign in front of it,
Jesus Only, and they had a storm one
night and blew out the first three letters
and left us only.
That's what we've got in a lot of
churches today.
It's not Jesus Only, it's just us only.
We don't need anything new today half so
much as we need something so old it'd
be new to somebody today.
We talk about the old-time religion.
I don't care for the term necessarily, because
the infinitudes of God never put him in
the past tense.
He's the great I Am, he's the eternal
contemporary.
But if you want to use old-fashioned,
the sun is old-fashioned, but without it
men grow up in darkness, there's no substitute.
Air is old-fashioned, but without it men
gasp and die, there's no substitute.
Water is old-fashioned, but without it men
go mad, there's no substitute.
Jesus talked about the simplest things, bread and
salt and water.
Some years ago there was a power failure
in upper New York State, you read about
it, and all night several million people sat
there just waiting for the sun to come
up next morning.
Rather old-fashioned, don't you think?
And then they had more smog than usual
some time ago in L.A., and a
meteorologist said only a sweep of wind will
clear up the situation, and there sat several
million more just waiting for the wind to
blow.
Dreadfully old-fashioned, don't you think?
And they had a drought out in the
Midwest, and the agricultural expert said, there's only
one thing we'll need, and that's rain.
There sat several million more waiting for it
to rain.
Dreadfully old-fashioned.
Thank God I'm dreadfully old-fashioned today in
my preaching, because we know what the remedy
is and we stand for it here.
James Reston said the other day, the craziest
notion that's hit this country in a long
time is the shortage of gas, beef, and
a lot of other things that are bad
for the American people.
What America really needs is more shortages.
It's not our shortages, but our surpluses that
are hurting us.
Too much gas, too much booze, too much
money, too much noise, and too much newsprint
are our problem.
We need to cut down, slow up, stay
at home, run around the block, eat vegetable
soup, call up old friends, read a book
once in a while.
Americans have always been able to handle austerity
and even adversity.
Prosperity is what's been doing us in.
Well, it might cure us of bragging about
how sophisticated we are if we have some
trouble.
Actually, we're the most gullible generation that ever
has come along.
We've bought more gold bricks and been sold
more white elephants and Indian crabs since Adam,
why, even Quixotec was a failure.
We got all excited today about pollution and
then we built new cars to burn more
gas and then ran out of gas.
The prize boo-boo of the season.
Somebody said we ought to learn how to
ride camels.
I can get along on one drink of
water a day, but that wouldn't work because
the Arabs own all the camels.
So we need to get back to simplicity
and austerity.
Christianity thrives on it.
The Church is rich when she's poor and
poor when she's rich.
Laodicea was and is rich and increased with
goods.
She's secure in danger, but endangered by security.
Adversity would be good for the Church.
Material poverty won't kill the Church.
Popularity will do it.
Prosperity will do it.
Christianity started out with one who had no
place to lay his head.
He said, take up a cross and follow
me.
We're not on a picnic, we're on the
pilgrimage.
We're not out for a frolic, we're out
for a fight.
We're not out on an excursion, we're out
for execution, death itself, and sin in the
world.
All that will live godly in Christ Jesus
shall suffer persecution.
How much have you ever suffered?
He says all.
He doesn't say most, he doesn't say some.
Let's go to him without the camp bearing
his reproach.
In fellowship of his sufferings must we be
carried to the skies on flowery beds of
ease, while others fought to win the prize
and sailed through bloody seas.
If we told the truth today, we'd say
I would be carried to the skies on
flowery beds of ease.
Though others fought to win the prize, I'm
not so hard to please.
That would be the truth, with altogether too
many.
That old straight gate's never been widened, and
the narrow way's never been broadened, and if
you've got a popular brand of Christianity, you've
got the wrong kind.
When my Lord was a baby in Simeon,
held him in his hands, he said, This
child shall be for a sign that shall
be spoken against.
And when the Jews came to hear Paul
in Rome, they said, All we know about
your religion is that everywhere they're talking against
it.
That's a strange note, don't you think?
And yet it turned the world upside down.
This old concept of a Christian as being
a pilgrim and a stranger making his way
through an unfriendly world, not a citizen of
earth trying to get to heaven, but a
citizen of heaven trying to get through this
world.
That's out of style.
Now you have the Madison Avenue, hail, fellow,
well-met, back-slapping preacher that everybody calls
by his first name.
We could use some austerity today, and some
severity, and some adversity, and some discipline.
Some of us lived through one depression.
Back of that, we grew up so poor
that what are now necessities were luxuries.
I remember going to high school fresh from
the country.
They put me with a city fellow who
had high-priced ties.
He hung his on the right side of
the dresser, and I hung mine on the
left.
I noticed immediately there was some disparity between
the appearance of the neckties.
I had an inferiority complex for several days
until I got in the library and read
those lines, because what do we do where
hot and gray and fair, only one thing
matters.
A man's a man for all that, if
he's an honest man.
I went out with my head high, never
dropped it again.
I wasn't going to be tied down by
neckties.
It's not what's around your neck that matters,
it's what's on the inside of the necktie
that matters most of all.
This present national crisis may be America's last
chance to turn to God.
Our biggest business is the unfinished work of
Christ, and the very desperation of these times
may afford the greatest opportunity we've ever had.
But I still remember that A.
W.
Tozer said, the popular notion that the first
obligation of the Church is to spread the
gospel to the uttermost part of the earth
is false.
The first obligation is to be spiritually worthy
to spread it.
Our Lord said, Go ye, but he first
said, Carry ye.
We're trying to stir up half-hearted Church
members today to do what they don't want
to do anyhow, and it'll just produce more
Church members like them.
We already have too many of the kind
most of them are.
So far below the New Testament standard, you'd
have to backslide to be in fellowship.
We need more Christian Christians.
Alexander the Great had before him one day
an A.
W.
O.
L.
soldier, and the great Greek looked down on
him and asked, What's your name?
He said, My name's Alexander.
And he stared at him and said, What
did you say your name is?
My name is Alexander.
The great Greek said, Either change your way
of living or change your name.
I believe Jesus Christ is saying to a
lot of Church members today, Change your way
of living or take down your sign.
I've said this all over the country.
It's not popular.
The first step toward the evangelizing of the
world is the Christianizing of the Church.
When our joy is restored and our spirit
renewed, then we will teach transgressors God's ways
and sinners will be converted to him.
I'm amazed today at the fact that although
we have Bible study and deeper life conferences
and evangelistic conferences and stewardship conferences and prophecy
conferences, almost nowhere do I hear the Church
being called to repentance, which is the very
last thing the Lord said to the Church
in the New Testament.
We have so-called revivals, which usually drives
for more Church members.
The professing Church today is swinging all the
way from Rigor Mortis to St. Vitus.
Half of the crowd look like they're on
their way to a funeral, and the other
half like they're on their way to a
frolic.
And we're headed neither for a funeral nor
a frolic, but for a feast.
Our Lord always used the right word.
Half are freezing and half are frying.
I read in Revelation about a sea of
glass mingled with fire.
We've got some preachers that are all glass
and some all fire.
The cold dignity needs to be mingled with
wild emotionalism, and both of them changed into
a proper balance.
What we need is just a return to
normal New Testament Christianity, and that means conviction
of sin and confession of sin.
It means reconciliation, getting right with people.
It means restitution.
It means separation from the world, and that's
almost gone out in some circles.
It means submission to the Lordship of Jesus
Christ, and it means being filled with the
Holy Spirit.
We've let extremism and wildfire about the Holy
Spirit scare us away from a true emphasis
on the Holy Spirit.
And the greatest energy crisis today is not
a gasoline emergency.
It's right in the Church.
We've operated in the energy of the flesh,
and look where we are.
The Holy Spirit went out of business.
A lot of churches never know the difference.
This preaching is not popular.
I marvel that I have any preaching to
do.
The devil told me if I preached like
this I'd starve, and from the way I
look, some people may think the devil is
right, but I'm getting along all right, thank
you.
Five out of seven churches, my Lord said,
repent.
Most of our churches can be found in
these five categories.
I've not been in many Smyrnas in Philadelphia
lately.
I've been to Ephesus without its first love.
I've been to Pergamum and Thyatira with plenty
of Balaam and Jezebel.
I've been to Sardis, and I was reminded
that a mortician can make a dead man
look better than when he was alive.
I've been to Laodicea, and I've remembered that
our Lord prefers a cold church to a
warm church, because he said so.
Rather you were cold or hot, but not
lukewarm.
The only two churches that didn't need a
revival were Smyrna and Philadelphia, and they were
poor and persecuted.
It may be that we're entering a period
of distress that will produce Smyrnas.
And our Lord, in Revelation 3.18, and
I really, as many times as I've read
it, didn't observe this until the other day,
he tells the church what it needs most,
and three times he uses, as it stands
in our King James, that thou mayest.
By gold tried in the fire, that thou
mayest be rich.
By white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed.
And anoint thine eyes with thyself, that thou
mayest see.
What the church needs above everything else is
to be rich, not get rich.
Be rich.
We are rich, if we only knew it.
And our Lord, who became poor for our
sakes, that we through his poverty might be
rich.
We need to be clothed in his righteousness
alone that the shame of our spirits or
nakedness may not appear.
And we need to anoint our eyes with
thyself that we may see, because sight is
more important than light.
All the light in the world won't do
a blind man any good.
We need sight.
Buy of me.
When you say, how can I buy if
I don't have anything?
Oh, every one that thirsteth, come to the
waters.
He that hath no money, come ye buy
and eat.
Ye come, buy wine and milk without money
and without price.
And then I counsel thee to buy of
me gold raiment.
I say, how will I buy if I
don't have anything?
You have one thing, you have yourself.
That's about all you have, but you can
give him that.
Have you ever given him that?
The Macedonians first gave themselves self-service substance.
You positively cannot pay God off with service
and substance if you haven't given him yourself.
That's the last thing he gets from some
of us.
You can graduate from Rudy Bible Institute and
still not give the Lord yourself.
You can be a successful preacher, as the
world measures success without having given the Lord
yourself.
You can give service and work hard in
a church.
And you can give your goods to the
poor and never give yourself.
A little boy who had no money on
Sunday morning wrote on a piece of paper,
I give myself and put it on the
collection plate.
And that was the biggest offering they had
that Sunday morning.
I know this is a select gathering of
good people.
Thank God for it.
But you will understand when I ask you
from the bottom of my heart, are you
dead certain and sure, dear friend, young, middle
-aged and old tonight, that you have put
yourself on God's collection plate.
And only those who have done business with
Jesus Christ on the basis of his finished
work are ready to do business for Jesus
Christ in his unfinished work.
I want to go further with this as
it were tomorrow, God willing.
I think sometimes we talk too much out
of our heads and not out of our
hearts.
I've never heard from as many troubled people
in all my life.
Somehow since word got around that I've been
going through a valley.
And I know there are plenty of people
here now that may be hiding the back
of a smile, an aching heart.
Won't you pray for me tomorrow in this
meeting?
And somehow when we get to that blessed
place where we can sing it, and God
forgive me for the times I've sung it
and lied.
Once earthly joy I craved, so peace and
rest.
Now thee alone I seek.
Just give what's best.
God bless you.