Tag: Accepting Christ

“He is thy Lord, worship thou Him”

September 22, 1957

The 45th Psalm, Psalm 45, here’s a man of God so delighted with God and his relation to Him. It doesn’t say David wrote it, but I think I can smell David’s garments. Here, we sense David’s presence. Whoever it was, he was a great worshiper. And he says, My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. That’s introductory, then he turns to God Himself, and says, Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into thy lips: therefore God hath blessed thee for ever. Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness; and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things. Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre. Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad. Kings’ daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir. Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house; So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord; and worship thou him.

Here’s the truth upon which we build. Simply this, that God made everything for a purpose, and the purpose in making man was to have somebody capable, properly and sufficiently to worship Him. To satisfy His own heart, but that man fell by sin, and now is failing to carry out the creative purpose. He is like a cloud without water that gives no rain. Like a sun that gives no heat, or a star that gives no light, or a tree that no longer gives any fruit, or a bird that no longer sings, or a harp that’s silent and no longer gives off music. Now, that is the thesis which I’m developing. And I want to go on from there and talk about worship tonight. He is thy Lord, worship thou Him.

Now here is something that we want to settle and that is that God wants us to worship Him. The devil would like to tell us, or our own unbelieving mind, that God does not particularly want us to worship Him. It’s we owe it to Him, but that God isn’t concern. But the truth is that God wants us to worship Him. We’re not unwanted children. God wants us to worship Him, I repeat. Why else would it be when Adam had sinned and broken his fellowship, and the heart of Adam had become unstringed and the voice of Adam had died in his throat. Why was it that when God came in the cool of the day to talk with Adam, He couldn’t find him and cried Adam, where art thou? It was God seeking worship from an Adam that had sinned. And our Lord in Luke 4 says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve. It is not only desired that we worship God, but that He has commanded us to do it. And if you noticed in the Psalm 45 here, “so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty.” God finds something in us. It is something that He put there, but it’s there.

My friends, unbelief is of several kinds, or rather, there are several phases or facets to unbelief. And one of them is that we don’t think we’re as bad as God says we are. That’s one. And if we don’t have faith in God’s Word concerning our badness, we’ll never repent. Then there is another facet of faith. It is this, that we don’t believe that we’re as dear to God as He says we are. And we don’t believe that we’re as precious nor that he desires us as much as He says He does.

If everybody listening to me tonight, and myself included, could suddenly have a baptism of pure, cheerful belief that God wanted me, and that God wanted me to worship Him, and that God wanted me to pray and admire Him and praise Him, it could transform this Christian fellowship and change us overnight into the most radiantly, happy people on the North American continent. So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty, and He is thy Lord, so worship thou Him.

And it’s written in 2 Thessalonians about when the King shall come and Jesus shall come to be glorified in His saints and admired in all that believe. That is, that God is admired, not the people admired, but God is admired. And then, more than these proof texts that I have given is, and more convincing, the whole import and substance of the New Testament, of the Bible, of all the Bible is, that God made us to worship Him. And when we are not worshiping Him, we’re failing in the purpose for which we were created; that we’re stars without light and sun without heat and clouds without water and birds without song and harps without music. We simply are failing, and falling short.

But I want to be very clear about this, and I want to say now, that we cannot worship Him as we will. The One who made us to worship Him, also has decreed how we shall worship Him. We cannot worship God as we will. God does not accept just any kind of worship. He accepts worship only when it is pure, and when it is indited, to use the scriptural term by the Holy Ghost. You see, God has rejected almost all the worship of mankind in our present condition. Though God wants us to worship Him, and commands us to, and asks us to, and obviously was anxious and hurt when Adam failed to worship Him. Yet nevertheless, God condemns and rejects almost all the worship of mankind for reasons which I’m going to show you now. Let us break up the worship of man. They rejected worship, the worship that God won’t receive. Let us break it up into Cain worship, and Samaritan worship, and pagan worship, and nature worship, for there are at least those four kinds of worship that are abroad in the earth and God rejects all of them.

There’s Cain’s worship. You know well what that was. I assume you are a Bible reader and you know that while Abel offered unto God the sacrifice of blood, Cain offered no sacrifice of blood. He came with a bloodless sacrifice and offered flowers and fruit and of the growth of the Earth to the Lord. And this attempted worship rested upon three errors. It rested upon a mistaken impression of the kind of God, God is. Cain was born of fallen parents, and Cain had never heard the voice of the God in the garden. And when Cain came to worship God, he came to a god other than God, he came to a god of his own imagination.

And then, the second error is, that man occupies a relation to God, other than what he does. You see, a lot of religious people are mistaken. They assume that we humans, as humans, that we occupy a relation to God which we do not occupy. They think we are God’s children. And we talk about “O God and Father of mankind,” when the Bible does not teach that God is the father of mankind.

Then, the third error is, that sin is less serious than it is in fact, so that Cain made all of these mistakes. He thought God was a different kind of God from what He is. He thought he was a different kind of man from what he was. And he thought sin was less vicious and serious than God said it was. So, he came cheerfully bringing his sacrifice and offered God worship, which we simply call Cain worship. It was the worship without atonement. So, always keep this in mind. That while God says, “He is thy Lord, worship thou Him,” and while He calls, “where art thou, and while He commands we must worship Him in spirit and in truth, He bluntly and summarily rejects worship that is not founded upon redeeming blood.

And then there’s Samaritan worship. You know about the Samaritans, how under Omri and Ahab and others, the city of Sameria became a religious center. And Jerusalem was rejected as the place. God said, “in this temple, in this place I will put my Name and there you shall come, and there you shall, I shall reveal myself and turn this way and hear,” said Solomon, from Thy place in heaven, O God then forgive.” And the temple in Jerusalem was set up as the place where men should worship. But the Samaritans were heretics, and they were heretics in the right sense of the word, because heretical doesn’t always mean that we are false.

A man can be a heretic and not teach anything particularly false. Did you know that? A heretic is not necessarily one who teaches, say that there is no Trinity, or that God did not create the earth, or that there is no judgment. They are heretics too. But heresy doesn’t mean to teach wrong. The very word “heretic” means one who picks and chooses. So that the Samaritans were heretics in that they chose certain parts of the Bible, the Old Testament. They had the Pentateuch and they said, Now, we accept the Pentateuch, but we reject David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and 1 & 2 Kings and the Song of Solomon, and they named all of the rest of the Scripture except the Pentateuch and they said, we believe and then they did some translating. Did you know, you can translate anything and prove what you’re out to prove. Anybody can do that. All you have to do is to say, I know the Greek and I know the Hebrew and after that, they’re on their own.

So, they translated the old Pentateuch in a manner that made Samaria the place of worship. And they said, here is Samaria, the place of worship. And of course, they were hostile to the Jews who said, no, no, our fathers worshiped in Jerusalem. God gave them this hill Moriah. And here on this hill, this hill, David took this Zion Hill, and there he made the temple, or Solomon, his son built the temple, and there is the place where people should worship. There, Christ came. They said, no, no, we’re to worship in Samaria. And but yet, they accepted the Pentateuch. They accepted as much as the Bible, the Bible as they want.

Now, I don’t think that I will have to spell it out and mark it in red ink for you to see how much heresy there is these days, believing what we want to believe, emphasizing what we want to emphasize, and following along in one path, but rejecting another, doing one thing but refusing another; and thus become heretics in that were pickers and choosers among the truths of God. And that is Samaritan worship.

And then, there’s pagan worship. It would take a five-foot shelf of books for me to attempt, even if I were able to do it. I could do it the way the rest of them do, to take a course of reading for a year, and then write the book. They all do that. But, I could go back if I wanted to and search into the worship of the early Egyptians. In fact, I do have their books, the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the Upanishads and the writings of Zoroaster, and Buddha; you know he didn’t write, others wrote for him, and the Laws of Manu and all the rest. If we wanted to do it, we could make a case and preach for two weeks if anybody would listen about the worship of the pagans, the heathen worship. Paul talks about it. And Paul hasn’t a kind thing to say about it. He condemns it outright and downright, and says, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imagination. Their foolish heart was darkened. And down they went from God to man, and from man to bird, from bird to beast, from beast, to fishing, to creeping things that wriggled on the earth. That was man’s terrible trip downward in his worship.

And then there is nature worship, I admit and frankly say to you that I have more sympathy with this than I do liberalism. But at the same time, it won’t do, for nature worship is but the poetry of religion. You know, religion does have a lot of poetry in it, and it properly does have and should have. We sang a lot of poetry tonight didn’t we, a lot of poetry. And most everybody smiles and shrugs and says, oh, I’m no poet. I don’t care for poetry, but they do. They do. You get a fellow excited and let him tell you something he’s seen. And instantaneously he’ll fall into metaphors and similes and figures of speech. He’s a poet and they say, he doesn’t know it. And we’re all poets. We’re all poets and religion brings poetry out more than any any other occupation that the mind can be engaged in. And there’s a lot that is very beautiful about religion. There is a high enjoyment in the contemplation of the Divine and sublime. And the concentration of the mind upon beauty always brings a high sense of enjoyment.

Well, that’s nature worship. And some mistake this nature worship, this rapt feeling, for true worship. You remember that Emerson said, and Emerson was no Christian; Emerson said that he once he had on occasion walking across a field at night after a rain, with the sun shining on the little puddles of water all over the meadow. He had suddenly been, his mind had been elevated to a place of such happiness that he was full of fear. He said, I was so happy, I was afraid. He was simply a pagan poet is all. And a lot of, a whole lot of worship that’s going on these days is nothing else but pagan poetry, nature worship. Some mistake the music of religion as true worship, because music elevates the mind. Music raises the heart to near rapture. Music can lift our feelings to ecstasy. Music has a purifying, a purging effect upon us. So that it’s possible to fall into a happy and elevated state of mind with a vague notion about God and imagine that we’re worshiping God when we’re doing nothing of the sort. We are simply enjoying; it is that which God put in us in which even sin hasn’t been able yet to kill. I don’t think there’s any poetry in hell. I can’t think there’s any poetry in hell. I can’t believe that among the terrible sewage of the moral world there’s going to be anybody break into similes and metaphors. And I can’t conceive of anyone breaking into song in that terrible hell. We read about it in heaven because it belongs there. But as far as I know my Bible, we never hear about it in hell. We hear about conversation in hell, but we don’t hear about song because there’s no song there. There’s no poetry there. There’s no music there. But there’s plenty of it on Earth; even among the unsaved persons, because they were once made in the image of God.

And so while they have lost God from their mind, they still appreciate the sublime. Certain men have written books; Edmund Burke wrote a book on the sublime. Another fellow with an odd name that sounds like watch, an old Latin, wrote a great book on the sublime. And there’s much that’s sublime in the world and beautiful. For beauty, you know, the sublimity, is beauty of the mind in contradistinction to, to use a long word, beauty of the eye and the ear.

Music is the beauty that the ear recognizes. And certain other beautiful things the eye recognize. But when the heart hears nothing and sees nothing, but only feels, then it’s the music of the heart. It is beauty within the spirit. And so, we can have that and still not worship God at all, or be accepted of God. I repeat that we can be nature lovers and nature worshipers, and music worshipers and poetry worshipers and pagan worshipers and Samaritan pickers and choosers and Cain worshipers without blood. And God Almighty sternly rejected all and says, I’ll have nothing to do with it. And Jesus our Lord said God is Spirit and they that worship Him must, now, I want you to see that word, that imperative there. God is Spirit and they that worship Him “must.” The word “must” clears away all mist of obscurity, and takes worship out of the hands of men.

You know, man wants to worship God, but he wants to worship God the way he wants to worship God. So did Cain. So did the Samaritans, and so have they down the years, and God rejected it all. And our Lord Jesus said, God is Spirit and they that worship Him “must.” Now, there’s your imperative. There is no tolerance. There is no broad spirit. There is the sharp, pinpointing effect, so that the every man in his own way policy is completely rejected.

I thought I would like to read in your hearing. Now, don’t brace yourself and say I wish I had stood and stayed home. because it won’t be long. I think there are only eight or nine lines. I picked this out because I said I’d like to have these friends of mine know what I’m talking about, when I talk about the worship that God rejects, the worship that God doesn’t receive; the every man in his own way kind of work. Now, here it is at its purest. This is written by Edwin Markham.

Edwin Markham was a western man and he’s American. He’s dead now. He wrote, “The Man with the Hoe” and Lincoln, and a few other great poems. But when he started talking about God, he talked just like Cain, and just like the Samaritans, and just like everybody else who hasn’t been renewed by the Holy Ghost. Here’s what he said, I choose this as symbolic of, or typical or rather, typical of the whole world of poetry. I have big books of religious poetry that goes way back into the beginning when men first began to write poetry about his gods and it comes down the years.

Now here we have an American who lived in the 20th century, and who was brought up where a church’s steeples were everywhere were jumping up into the clouds and where church bells could be heard every morning. And here’s what this fellow wrote about his search for God. And this indicates what the human mind can do even surrounded by Bibles and church bells. He said, I made a pilgrimage to find the God. Now, this is an American talking, mind you, when I say that, every man in his own way. Every time our dear friend in the White House who has an occasion to mention religion, he’s always careful to grovel before everybody and say, now it’s every man in his own way remember, every man in his own way.

God bless him. He’s a good man. But he’s in a tight spot there. So it’s every man in his own way worship. That’s the religion of Washington and I suppose most everywhere else. I made a pilgrimage to find the God he said. And I listened for His voice at holy tombs. I might comment here, if you will allow, that it seems an odd place to go to hear God. When he was looking for the God he says and he listened for his voice at holy tombs. I don’t know where there is any holy tombs and there’s nobody in a tomb that could say anything. I think you’d get less conversation in a tomb than anywhere else, but we’ll pass that up. I searched for the print of his immortal feet in dust of broken altars, yet turned back with empty heart.

Now, this is typical of about 1000 poems that have been written by more or less frustrated old, frustrated women, and men who came up to Kadesh-Barnea and wouldn’t cross over. People who came to the altar and wouldn’t die. So they write themselves plaintive poems about how they searched for what they call “the God.” But he says now it always turns out this way. I could finish the last lines of these poems It always turns out this way. But he says, “on the homework road, a great light came upon me, and I heard God’s voice singing in a nestling lark.” In the first place, nestling larks don’t sing. But in the second place, in the second place, he said he heard God singing like a bird. And then he said, I felt his sweet wonder and a swaying rose and received his blessing from a wayside well, and looked on his beauty in a lover’s face, saw his bright hand send signals from the sun.

Now, there you have it Brethren. Now, that wasn’t no crazy man. And that was no medicine man from New Guinea. Here’s a man whose poetry is in every anthology. He writes among the minor poets of the world. And he goes out looking for God, the God, he said. And he searches for him the first place in graveyards. He didn’t find him there, and he looked at broken alters. He didn’t find him there. Then, on the way back he hears a bird singing and says, that God. And he sees a happy face lover holding hands with his girlfriend and says that’s God. And he sees a rose waving in the wind. He says, that’s God. And so he comes home and writes himself a poem.

Now that, my dear friends is what you call nature worship. That’s finding God everywhere, and incidentally, finding God nowhere. For that is Cain worship. That is the worship without blood. That’s worship without knowledge. Jesus said, they that worship Him must, and He settled forever, that He’s going to tell us how we should worship God. And here’s a man who said, God formed the living flame and He gave the reasoning mind, then only He may claim the worship of mankind. So that instead of our worshipping God every man after his own fashion, now remember, there’s only one way to worship Him. I am the way, the truth and the life, and no man cometh unto the Father but by Me. And so instead of being kindly and charitable by allowing an idea to stand that God accepts worship from anybody, anywhere; I’m injuring, jeopardizing the future of the man that I allow to get away with that.

And I could not possibly be a politician. I could not. When they met in Chicago here,  the Democrats met in Chicago, they had different preachers open with prayer every day you know. And I confessed in my heart, curled up in scorn when I heard these preachers pray. They were so afraid that they were going to insult a Jew or make the Mohammedan feel bad, that they picked as carefully as though they were walking among men for fear they’d hurt somebody’s feelings and mention Jesus in their prayers.

But, when they got out to San Francisco in the Cow Barn, and they asked a Presbyterian preacher to pray, I could, I think I was lying down listening to the radio, listen to a rebroadcast at night, and I was dumbfounded with joy. That Presbyterian preacher ended, “this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” You Jews can take it, you Mohammedens can take it, you atheists can take it, you pussy-footers and every man in his own way, you can take it says the Presbyterian preacher, “this I ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. And I’d never make a politician never. Because, if I have to scratch the back of every Samaritan, I can’t do it. And if I have to scratch Cain’s back and say, “you’ll make it too boy.” And if I have to pick up the nature lover and the music and poetry lover thinking is worshiping God because He feels good inside, and pat him on the back and say it’s all right with you, I would be violating my commission as a child of God and a prophet of the Most High.

So, I could never stand and deliver a whole speech. I’d get something in there about the blood and the Redeemer. I’d do like Isaac Watts did when he tried to put the Psalms into meter. He would just get into a Psalm where there wasn’t anything about Jesus, he’d put a verse in. Remember that?  You would always have a stanza in there before he would get through? Well, amen.

And now, God is Spirit and they that worship Him must. And these altars of Baal, these churches where they pray in the spirit of Jesus, and in the spirit of good, and in the name of the great all father, and in the name of brotherhood. They even pray in the name of brotherhood. Well, it’s too bad. And hear now the truth, the Truth Himself. The Truth Himself incarnated says, God is Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.  A worshipper must submit to truth, or you can’t worship God. He can write poems and he can get elevations of thought when he sees a sunrise. He can hear the fledgling lark sing, and fledgling larks don’t sing. And he can do all sorts of things, but he can’t worship God acceptably. Because to do so means that he’s got to submit to the truth about God.  As God is who He says He is, and God is what He says He is. And he’s got to admit that Christ is who He says He is, and what He says He is. And he’s got to admit the truth about himself that he’s as bad a sinner as God says he is. And he has to admit the truth of atonement, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses and delivers from that sin. And he has to come God’s way. He must have been renewed after the image of Him that created Him. Only the renewed man can worship God acceptably. Only the redeemed man can worship God acceptably.

So, these people who have churches, and pray in the name of the all good and the all father, I’d rather go out and walk in the park with my New Testament than attend them. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I can find my God, not the god in a rose, but I could find the God who sits enthroned on high and by His side sits One whose name is Jesus, having all power in heaven and in earth. I could commune with God walking out on the street, rather than worshiping at an altar of Baal. A Man must have been renewed. He must have had an infusion of the Spirit of Truth.

Somebody prayed somewhere tonight, I heard in one of the meetings. Somebody prayed and said that if the Holy Ghost doesn’t do these things, it will be wood, hay and stubble, and he’s certainly right, wood, hay and stubble. My worship will never reach higher than the top of my own head. And the God in heaven will refuse it as He refused the worship of Cain. For the effort to worship, Cain’s effort to worship, though created to worship God, sin has made it impossible for me to know how to worship God, except truth enlightens me. And I have in my hand, the book that enlightens Me. Here is the light that lighteth every man that will read it. And Jesus Christ is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and the light of the human heart and the light of the Book harmonize, and when the eyes of the soul look to the Book of God, into the Living Word of God, then we know the truth, and we can worship God in truth. And we can worship God in Spirit, for remember that in the Old Testament, no priest could offer a sacrifice until he had been anointed with oil. He had to be anointed with oil, symbolic of the Spirit of God. No man can worship out of his own heart. Let him search among the flowers. Let him search among birds nests, in tombs, and wherever he chooses to worship God. He cannot worship out of his own heart. Only the Holy Ghost can worship God acceptably. And He must in us, reflect back the glory of God. The Spirit comes down to us and reflects back to God. And if it does not reach our hearts, there’s no reflecting back and no worship.

Oh, how big and broad and comprehensive and wonderful the work of Christ is. That’s why I can’t have too much sympathy for the kind of Christianity that makes it out that the gospel is to save a fellow from smoking. Well, I think so too.  If anybody is smoking, he’s on fire, and I think that they ought to put that out. Or, that it saves a man from drinking, and I think that any man that will take into his stomach what will knock the brains out of his head ought to quit that. So, I don’t believe in drinking either. But my friends, is that all Christianity is, to keep me from some bad habits; so I won’t play the ponies, beat my wife, or lie to my mother in law? Of course, regeneration will clean that up. Of course, the new birth will make a man right. But the purpose of God in redemption is to restore us again to the divine imperative of worship, so that we can hear God say again, so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty, Psalm 45. For He is thy Lord, worship thou Him. We’re to be worshipers, my friend. The Methodists conquered the world with their joyous religion because they were worshipers. When they ceased to be worshipers, their religion ceased to have the same effect and power that it used to have. But how big and broad and comprehensive it is. God wants you to be regenerated in order that you might be capable of worship. In all these succeeding nights, I want to tell you what worship is. I want to tell you how worship is admiration, how worship is adoration, how worship is fascination.

But I’ll close tonight. I read in your hearing about that man who looked for God everywhere and didn’t find the print of His immortal feet among the broken altars for the simple reason, God isn’t running around there. And there’s a whole lot more like it,  but it all goes the same way. But listen to this man, Glory be to God the Father. Glory be to God the Son. Glory be to God the Spirit, great Jehovah three in One. Glory, Glory while eternal ages run. He knew who he was worshipping, didn’t he? He knew how. He knew why. Glory be to Him who loved us, washed us from each spot and stain. Glory be to Him you bought us and made us kings with him to reign. Glory, Glory to the Lamb that once was slain. Who wrote that? Wesley didn’t write that. Horatio Bonar wrote that, the Scotch preacher. Glory, blessing, praise eternal thus the choir of angels sings, honor, riches, power, dominion, thus His praised creation brings; glory, glory, glory to the King of Kings. There’s worship. He knew what it was all about.

They that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth. And when you begin to talk about the Lamb that was slain and the blood that was shed, and God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, then you’re living in truth. You’re worshiping in truth. And when the Spirit of God takes over, we worship in Spirit. So we worship in spirit and in truth.

Oh, friends, God created you to worship Him. And when fundamentalism lost her power to worship, she invented religious claptrap to make her happy. And that’s why I have hated it, and preached against it and condemned it, all down these years. And they’re coming around to my position now by the dozens and scores who used to be afraid to say they’ll open their mouths, or used to be afraid to stand against this claptrap. Ventriloquists with wooden dummies on their knee and wood on top of their necks, worshiping God supposedly. Worshiping God and claiming to serve the Lord. And having the only joy they have is the joy that is of the flesh. And Elvis Presley is a happier man after he gets through with a number, and a lot of Christians are after they work themselves up for half an hour. You don’t have to do it Brother.

The well of the Holy Ghost is an effervescing artesian well and you don’t have to prime the pump. They that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth. And the silver waters of the Holy Ghost flooding up out of the redeemed and cleansed heart of a worshipping man is as sweet and beautiful to God as the loveliest diamond that studs a throne.  We need to learn how to worship. I’m going down to Norfolk, Virginia one of these times, not too long. I will be gone a short time, but I’m down there for two days, and they tell me that the Intervarsity from three states are going to converge on Norfolk. And you know what they are coming for? We want you to teach us to worship.

Oh, brother, God will never bless me for that, that is, He will never reward me for that, because I have a theory God doesn’t reward you for doing something you like to do. And I’ll never get any reward for going down there and preaching about something I love to do. But to talk to young college people about worshiping God, what archangel wouldn’t want to do that. What cherabim before the throne wouldn’t envy me. The happy task of trying to turn our young people away from nonsense, to worship the living God. So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty, for He is thy Lord, worship thou Him.

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“What Do We Mean by Accepting Christ?”

Sunday, November 27, 1955
When we are young and inexperienced, we are inclined to believe that there are many things that are important, that a number of things matter. But as experience comes to us, whether it’s in our youth or whether it takes years to give it to us, we finally find out that there are only a few things that are matters of life and death. Thank God for that, otherwise we’d all go crazy. But there are only a few things that really matter.
For instance, to let you know what I mean by, really matter, or that are matters of life and death, think of a compass on a sea journey. Think of a ship starting to fly the Atlantic or go on the surface to cross the Atlantic, or across the Pacific without a compass, without an instrument to tell which way they’re traveling. Chances would be very strong that that ship or that airplane, would fly in circle or sail in a circle until they were either on a rock, or on a sandbar somewhere, or until the fuel had been used up and they were hopelessly lost. It would be a matter of life and death to have a compass to be able to tell direction.

And think also of the guide in the desert, a man crossing the Gobi or the Sahara Desert, or even one or two of the deserts in our own Southwest. A foolhardy person starting across the desert without water and without a guide, could make it all right for a few miles. But that he had water and the guide would be matters of life or death.

To start out carelessly across the ocean without a compass, or across the desert without a guide would not be a reckless, but rather amiable thing to do, a gamble to take, a chance to take. There would be no gamble, no chance; it would either be right or be dead. When you deal with such serious matters as crossing the ocean or crossing the desert, you cannot be careless, or either be right or be dead. You’d either provide yourself with a guide, or provide yourself with a compass or both, when needed, or it is certain death.

Now, when we come to our relation to our Lord Jesus Christ, we come to one of those matters, which in a supreme degree, is a matter of life or death. And you and I cannot afford to be careless about it. You cannot say, well, I’ll take a gamble on it. You don’t take a gamble on deserts. You either have a guide and plenty of water, or you die. You’re not gambling, you’re committing suicide. You don’t start across the trackless waste of an ocean without a compass. And say, I’ll gamble it. You’re not gambling, you’re committing suicide. And my relation to Jesus Christ is a matter of life or death to me.

Now, the average person takes it for granted, as we can take it for granted if we’ve been instructed even a little bit in Sunday school to think that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Now, we take that for granted as a matter of fact. It is declared in the Word. It is declared in so many words in one of the books of Timothy by Paul, the man of God. And it is declared in other words adding up to the same thing all through the New Testament. So, we can afford to take that for granted.

We also take for granted, if we’ve been reared in gospel churches, that we are saved by Christ alone, without works, and without merit. We can afford to take that for granted, for that also is taught all through the Scriptures, that it is by faith in Christ alone that we are saved. But now, the question that bothers me is, how do I know that I have come into a saving relation to Christ? How do I know that?
Now, this is a matter of life or death; that Christ came into the world to save sinners, is a matter of record. We don’t have to have that proved. It needs no investigation. No further word need to be said on it. For the person already knows it. Oh, he may patiently listen to it a thousand times being told to those that don’t know it. But that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners is true. And yet, the world is not saved and there are millions that are not saved right in America. And you will pass, and did pass, on your way to church, hundreds, who are not saved, and you will pass still more hundreds as you go home that are not saved. So the fact that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners is not your compass, and it’s not your water, and it’s not your guide. It is simply a fact upon which we can reckon. But it doesn’t save us.

And now on this matter I say, it’s either be right or be lost. Somebody says, Well, I’ve gone to a certain church all my life and I’ve been brought up in that and I’ve been confirmed, baptized and all the rest, and I’m going to take a chance. You’re not taking a chance. If your relation to Jesus Christ isn’t a saving relation, then you’re without a guide, or compass or water, and it’s suicide. It is not a chance. It’s not a gamble you take. It’s not one chance in 10,000, it’s no chances in ten times 10,000. You have no chance. It’s either be right or be dead, to be right, or be lost.

Now, if I go to an average man, an honest Christian brother, saved and a good Bible teacher, and right and perfectly right in what he tells me, I would say, how can I come into a saving relation to Jesus Christ? I believe that He came into the world to save sinners. I’ve accepted that fact He is the Savior of the world. I believe that He saves alone without works and without character, or any good that I have done. I believe that. Could my tears forever flow and my zeal no respite know, these for sin could not atone, He must save, and He alone. I believe that.

But, how can I come into saving relation to Jesus Christ so that it works with me? For there are millions that believe this that are not converted at all, and are on their road to hell. And there are men sitting now, and will sit through the rest of this day and half the night in saloons, bleary-eyed, weeping into their beer, that can tell you John 3:16 glibly and can recite passages of Scripture about Christ being the Savior of the world. And if they’re in a tender moment, they may even weep as they talk to me about it, but they’re lost. And the drunkard shall not have his place in the kingdom of God. And so would other kinds of sinners.

Now, you will get one of three answers or all three answers. And if you came to me, you’ll get the same. So, this is not a criticism of anybody. This is simply a statement. You will get the same answer from me, and you’ll get the same answer from Billy Graham or the humblest little preacher that the world has never heard of. You would get the same answer wherever you went to anybody, because it’s true. They would say to you, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” That’s Acts 16:31. Nobody can tell you anything else. D.L. Moody couldn’t and Paul couldn’t. In fact, Paul said that. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. So, that’s the answer you would get
or you would get this answer, receive Christ as your Savior. And the verse back of that would be John 1:12, “as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on His name.” So you have in John 1:12, both believing and receiving.

But, you’re likely also to get a third answer, and this third answer is the one that I’m going to question today, and the one that I’m going to talk about. And I don’t want to make God responsible for anything I do, because if God will be merciful enough and gracious enough to do a few little things through me, I’ll be so star-eyed with gratitude and thankfulness, that God will never hear the last of it I think, while I’m able to speak and life and thought and being last. But I will say this, that in prayer last week, nobody around there, and I was kneeling by my couch upstairs, my little day bed there that I sometimes rest on when I get worn out, and that a multitude of people come and sit in on and tell me their woes. Well, I was kneeling there with my open Bible and doing a little repenting on my own accord, my own. And this came to me so clearly that I just wrote down a few notes and said, now this I will talk to the people about. So, I will say this to you friends that maybe I’ll introduce some things here that God didn’t say to me and if I do, then of course you’ll have to find your way out the best you can. I’d rather hear a sermon that I knew a man who had got his outline on his knees, than to know that he’d got it somewhere else. And if there’s any value there, while you have it.

But now, this third thing is this. You would go to the average person and say, now I know that Christ came into the world to save sinners. And I know that He saves by Himself alone without works, or merit, by faith. But how can I come into saving relation to Christ so that it works in me and that it works for me, and that I am safe? They would tell you believe or receive or both. And then they might tell you this third one, and that is, “accept” Christ.

Now, you may be very greatly surprised as I myself was, when I ran this thing down and found that this expression “accept Christ” does not occur in the Bible. It is not found in the New Testament anywhere. I didn’t think it was, for I could not recall any place where it was used. And so I went to the trouble of looking it up in Strong’s exhaustive analytical concordance. And by the word exhaustive they mean, they don’t skip a word. There’s no possibility of it getting by. It’s an old work and the editors have worked on it until there isn’t a mistake, so that the word accept does not occur in the Bible. It occurs in this sense, where it says He’s no acceptor of persons and so on. But it never says, accept Jesus Christ, nowhere in the Bible, in any verse that I know about. If there’s a verse there, I’ve missed it, and so have the scholars who got together the exhaustive concordance we call the Strong’s.

Now, isn’t that strange that it is not found in the Bible, and yet it has become the catchword. Everywhere men are going and saying, “accept Jesus Christ.” Have you accepted Him? Do you accept Him. Will you accept Him? Now, well intentioned people do this and I’ve done it myself a thousand times I suppose. But do you know that it does not occur in the Bible at all, the word “accept.” And I suppose that it does, the English word “accept” does cover a thought that we’re not too far off, because receive and accept are somewhat the same, but not the same. The difference is very great. If they had been the same, then where the word “receive” occurs, the word, accept, would have occurred somewhere, but it doesn’t. The word accept, acceptance and acceptor does occur in Scripture, but never in connection with believing on Christ, or receiving Christ, or being saved.

Now, this easy acceptance has been fatal to millions of people. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Isn’t it strange Brethren, that everybody is yelling about revival, and you can’t get among a bunch of preachers until somebody says, “let’s have a revival,” and they have a prayer meeting for revival. And we’re all saying the same thing. And you would always get agreement among the brethren, the ministers everywhere of all denominations, that the church is in a low state. All last week, Vance Havner said he took it for granted that we needed a revival and brother, he was right. And he’s right not only here, but all throughout fundamental circles. But here is the odd thing. Nobody ever stopped to question and say, well, maybe the reason we need a revival is that we didn’t get started right. Maybe this whole doctrine of accepting Christ is wrong. It’s certainly not biblical. It’s not found in the Bible. And yet it is the catch word. It’s the thing people say. And it’s in the books, and it’s in the tracts, and it’s in the mouths of the soul winners. Would you accept Christ? Bow your head and accept Christ.

Well, it’s my opinion, that tens of thousands of people, if not millions, have been brought into some kind of religious experience by accepting Christ, and they’ve not been saved. It has not brought them into saving relation to Christ. And the result is, they are acting like religious sinners, instead of like born again believers. And that’s why we need the revival. That’s why everybody says, what’s the matter with us? We’re dead, we’re dead. Perhaps one reason is that we have thought we accepted Christ, or have accepted Christ and nothing came of it.

Now, the whole attitude here is wrong about accepting Christ, because it makes Christ stand hat in hand, waiting on our judgment. He stands respectfully, with hat in hand before the desk, and we’re hiring Him. And we look Him over and read a few verses and say, “I wonder if I should accept Him or not. What do you think Mabel. Do you think that we ought to accept Him;” and so, poor Christ stands hat in hand, tossing His hat from one hand to the other hand and wringing it, looking for a job, and He is to be accepted.

And here’s stands the proud, Adamic sinner, rotten as the devil, and filled with leprosy and cancer, but he is judging whether he will accept Christ or not. The Christ that holds the worlds in His hand, the Jesus that made the heaven and earth and all things that are there in; through Whom and by Whom and for Whom all things are created and were created for His glory, they are, and do exist. And it is He that holds the stars, the seven stars in His hand and He is the Lord and head over all things to the church. And at His Word, the graves shall give up their dead. And the dead shall come forth alive forevermore. At His Word, the fire shall burst loose and burn up the earth and the heavens and stars and planets shall be swept away like a garment. He is the one that does it.

And yet here He stands, and we little, upright clothespins, we animated clothespins that we are, but that’s what we look like, and that’s what we are. We from our little place, we look at Him, this glorious, tall, mighty Jesus Christ. And we decide whether we accept Him or not. How grotesque can it be? And yet, that’s what it is, as though He were applying to us, and instead of we applying to Him, No my Brother. The question ought not to be whether I’ll accept Him. The question needs to be whether He will accept me. But We will accept me. That we know and we don’t have to worry or disturb our minds about that. And him that comes to me, I will in no wise cast out. But the idea that I make him stand, and I render a verdict, whether He’s worthy of my acceptance or not, is a frightful calamy. And it’s libelous, and we ought to get rid of it.
And then He does this thing. It permits us to accept Christ by an impulse of the mind or the emotions. It allows us to gulp twice, and feel a wave of feeling over us, and say, “Well, I have accepted Christ.” I have accepted Christ. A woman goes out onto the lot where several hundred children are playing and she comes back and says, “Do you know that there were seventy children who accepted Christ out there. I went over where the kids were playing in the park and seventy children accepted Christ.”

A preacher sits with some other preachers in a hotel dining room and he says, “oh, soul winning is easy.” And I’ve seen an ad in the paper incidentally recently that says, “at last soul winning made easy. Buy my book. Well, there’s this preacher who says soul winning isn’t hard. And somebody said, I find it hard. He said, it’s simple if you know how to go about it. He said, Do you want me to show you how soul winning is easy, how I can win the soul. He said, Yes, I’d like to see you do it. Well, I said to the waiter, waiter, waiter came over. He said, Are you a Christian? He said, No, sir. He said would you like to be? Yes, sir. Well, all right, then would you accept Christ? Well, yes. All right, bow your head a minute. The waiter stood there thinking about his tip, and the fellow said, “now Lord, here’s a man that accepts Thee and he takes Thee now as his Savior. Amen. He shook his hand and the waiter walked away just the same as he’d come and the preacher said, “see how easy it is. It’s a simple matter. He had accepted Christ.” Now, I hope the waiter had better sense than the Reverend, because if he didn’t. He is damned. You can’t afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to be dead. When it’s a matter of a compass on an ocean or a guide on a desert; and when it’s a matter of my saving relation to Jesus Christ, I can’t afford to be wrong. When my life depends upon it, I can’t afford to go to a careless doctor.

We had a doctor when we first came to Chicago. He listened to your heart by putting his ear on your chest. He never used instruments, never used any of the modern scientific developments. He just stuck his ear on your chest. He looked at your forehead and tell you that you had high blood pressure. You can’t afford to fall into the hands of a quack when your life is at stake. You can’t afford to be wrong; to be wrong is to be dead.

Well, there’s so much of this that I think that we need to rise against it, and the old church of Christ needs to get up and ask God for fresh air and oxygen and courage, and analyze this and get it before the people as Finney used to do. We accept Christ on a lot by some lady walking up and say, “Sonny, would you like to accept Christ?” Why, He could have said anything. He would have accepted Buddha, Zoroasterism or Father Divine in order to get rid of her. And painlessly and at no cost and no inconvenience. That’s the trick of the day. Get them converted with no cost and no inconvenience.

Now, that might have worked like that in Israel, say, Israel in Egypt. Suppose that Moses had said to Israel, “Do you accept the blood on the doorpost? And they would have said “yes, we accept the blood.” Alright, goodbye and we’ll be seeing you. And they could have stayed right in Egypt, slaves for the rest of their lives. But their accepting the blood of the Passover meant that they stood awake all night, girded, ready, shoes on their feet, staff in their hands, eating the food of the Passover, ready to go. And when the trumpet blasts sang sweet and clear, they rose and started for the Red Sea. And when they got to the Red Sea, a miracle happened; it opened up and they went out never to return. Their acceptance had feet under it. Their acceptance gave them the guts to do something. They went forth and did something!

Now, suppose the prodigal son had had a man come to him and found him lying there, all rags and smell, an old sow lying over there and an old pig lying over here and a litter of little pigs laying over there and they’re all piled up keeping warm. And here’s this fellow, lay on his arm nibbling on a carob seed. And the fellow comes up and says, I have good news for you. Your father will forgive you if you’ll accept it. Will you accept it? He looks up and says yep, I’ll accept it. Do you accept it? Yes! Do you accept your father’s saving word? Yes, I do. Alright, goodbye. Hope to see you again, and leave him lying there in the gutter or in with the hogs. But, it didn’t happen like that. The fellow got to thinking, and he said to himself, if I’m going to get out of this hog pen and get back among respectable people, I must rise and go to my father. Do you know what the next line is? So he arose and went. Remember that? So, he arose and went. Acceptance to the Jews meant strict obedience from that moment on, and acceptance to the prodigal son, meant repentance in line with his acceptance.

Now, I’m going to use the words “accept” because I don’t object too much to them. I know the word, accept and acceptance and accepting. I know they’re not biblical, but yet I know, as I’ve said, they do come close to being a synonym for receive. But I want to tell you what it means to accept Christ. Then, I want you to search your own heart and say, “I have I accepted Christ? Ever? Do I accept Christ? Have I accepted Him at all?

I want to give you a definition for accepting Christ. To accept Christ in anything like a saving relationship, is to have an attachment to the person of Christ that is revolutionary, complete and exclusive, and I’ll explain what I mean. It’s an attachment to the person of Christ. I want you to get that. It is not getting in with the crowd that you’d like. It’s not getting the social fellowship of some nice fellow that gives you a thrill when you touch his hand. It’s not getting with the gang that put on their, what do you call them, and go out and play baseball Tuesday evening. Oh, they can do that harmlessly enough God knows. And isn’t getting out with a picnic or going on a hike; Oh, they can do that. We have those kind of activities for our youth here, and I believe in them. But that’s not what accepting Christ means. That can happen, that can happen among the Unitarians and the Jews and the unbelievers and the literary societies. That isn’t accepting Christ. That’s simply getting in with a religious group who may be no better off than you are.

Accepting Christ is an attachment to the person of Christ that is revolutionary, in that it reverses the life and transforms it completely. It’s an attachment to the person of Christ; it’s complete, in that it leaves no part of the life unaffected, in that exempts no area of the life of the total man, the man’s total being. To accept Christ means an exclusive attachment to Jesus Christ, meaning that Christ is not one of several interests. But, He is the one, exclusive attachment, as the sun is the exclusive attachment of the earth. And the earth revolves around the sun, and the sun is its center and the core of its being in the hub of its activity, and the life and light and heat and hope of the earth.

So, Jesus Christ is the Son of Righteousness, and to become a Christian means to come into His orbit and begin to revolve around Him exclusively. Not around Him today, and around another sun tomorrow, and around a third one the next day, and then back to Jesus again. Not partly around Him, but it means to revolve around Him completely, exclusively. And all other relationships, and you will have other relationships. It’s an impossibility in a complex world such as God has created, that I can have only one relationship. I have many relationships. You’re a man, forty years old, you give your heart to Jesus, you’re converted, you’re a married man with children, you’re a citizen, you have a job, you have a number of relationships. You have relationship to your wife as a husband, to your children as a father, to your country as a citizen, to your employer as an employee, and to the government as a taxpayer. You have numbers of relationships. You’re a cousin to this one and an uncle to that one and so on.

So, you have other relationships except Jesus Christ, but He is the exclusive one to Whom you attach yourself. And all these other relationships are conditioned and determined by your one relationship to Jesus Christ the Lord. The earth has relationships to other beings besides the sun, because the moon revolves around the earth. But if the moon quit tomorrow, the earth would still go right on revolving around the sun. There are planetoids and other heavenly, little heavenly bodies that fly around, and some come down to the earth. They call them falling stars, and they’re hunks of metal that come down and burn up. And sometimes they go and bury themselves in the earth–meteorites. You all read about them. Some of you have seen them.

Alright, the earth has relationships to other beings beside the sun, but it has no exclusive relationship to any other being beside the sun. The sun is the source and center and magnetic heart of its exclusive life. And all these others are incidental. This may sound awfully harsh and cruel, but Jesus Christ said it and said it in words harsher than mine. That if you have attachments that are central and more exclusive than the attachment you have to Jesus, you’re not a Christian at all. If you have a new wife, and that wife to you is the sun and hope and dream and all you’re looking for. Now she may be everything you think she is. But if she clouds the face of Jesus, then you are not a Christian. And you’re not a Christian if any relationship you have to your government, to your job, to your wife or husband, to your children, to your aunts or uncles, to anybody anywhere, is more exclusive than the attachment you have to Jesus. You’ll have these other relationships, but they are incidental to the one, exclusive relationship, Jesus Christ the Lord. To accept Christ then, is to attach myself to His holy person, to live or die forever. And He is first and last in all, and all other relationships are conditioned and determined and colored by my one, exclusive relation to Him.

Now, to accept Christ then is, would you like to put these down? I wish some of you would put them down and pray over them. Accepting Christ is, accept His friends as your friends from that moment on. When you accept Christ, you accept His friends as your friends. And if you’re in an area where He has no friends, you’ll befriend him except for the one friend that sticketh closer than a brother; and you will not compromise your life nor your talk nor anything when you are not. Can you imagine an American as some of our Americans have done, go to Europe and start condemning their country and toting up to the land where they are, Oh, brother, an American out of the borders of these United States of America should be just as much an American as anywhere.

They said there was an orator in the time of Henry Ward Beecher who went to England. And he was under such an inferiority complex. This was a little new country, and England was old and had tradition, and had the poets and the great writers and artists. And so, he felt so inferior, this great orator, he reflected on his own country and apologized for America, and talked them up and talked America down. And then Henry Ward Beecher went over, you remember. You’ve no doubt read his sermon that he preached there in that great hall where there was jumping, shouting Englishman around about him. They were jumping and shouting. Don’t think they weren’t brother. And he had to fight his way through, and he delivered a lecture that will stand in the annals of time as being one of the most magnificent things ever uttered by the voice of a man. Never for a split second did he talk America down. Never for one breath, or one syllable did he talk America down in order to to talk England up. He only appealed to English fair play when they start to yell. He’d say, you Englishmen are Englishmen; you believe in fair play. Listen while I talk. And then he tore into them. And he came away from there with the respect of every Englishman of the blood, and with the thanks and respect and gratitude of his own native land.

And yet I find people that are such cowards, that when they were in the crowd, who don’t believe in the Son of God, or who live so as to disgrace the holy name of Jesus, they allow themselves to go that way. Are you a Christian? You are not! A Christian is one who has accepted Jesus friends as his friends and Jesus enemies as his enemies by an exclusive attachment to the person of Christ. And if they’re Christ’s enemies, they’re my enemies, and I ask no quarter from them. And if they’re Jesus’ friends, they’re my friends. I don’t care what color they are, or what denomination they belong to. It means to accept His ways as your ways. You’re not looking in the magazine to find out. You’re not going on and listen to the radio panel discussion to know how to live. You’re not reading books to know how to live. You’ve taken His ways as your ways. You’ve taken His Sermon on the Mount as your guide for your life. You’ve taken His apostolic words as your words; His ways shall be my way.

Oh, God bless little Ruth. Isn’t that a wonderful thing what she said? She said, wither thou goest, I will go, and where thou dwellest, I will dwell, and where thou dies, there will I die. And there will I be buried. And God forbid that anything should separate me from you. That’s approximately what she said and wasn’t it beautiful? No wonder every second parent names their baby Ruth. That beautiful story made Naomi and Ruth two beautiful, loved names, because it was an attachment. It was an attachment. She said I live where you live, I’ll die where you die and I’ll be buried where you’re buried, and God in heaven forbid we ever separate. Brethren, that’s what I mean. His ways are my ways.

To accept Christ means that I accept His rejection as my rejection. And whoever rejects Him rejects me. And I mean, to accept Christ means that I accept His cross as my cross. And I accept His life as my life. Back from the dead I come and up into a different kind of life. The kind of life He lived. It means that I accept His future as my future. When a woman stands up alongside of a man she accepts his future. He may be called to Germany. He may be sent to some city where she wouldn’t ever want to live, but she’s accepted his future as her future. Exclusive attachment, leaving all others, they say.

Exclusive attachment, that’s what it means to accept Christ. If the preachers would tell people that, we’d have fewer converts, but when we got them, they’d never backslide. They’d stick. But as long as we say to them, will you accept Christ? Gulp, yes, I accept Christ. Alright now, here’s a tract. And he thinks he’s in; he’s not in at all. He thinks that he will get the benefit of Jesus’ saving grace by saying, I accept Christ, but he will not be a disciple. He will not carry the cross. He will not inconvenience himself. He will not turn his back on the world. He will not accept Christ enemies. He does not go among Christ friends. He does not take Christ ways. And still, he thinks he’s a convert. We preachers will stand before what the Plymouth Brethren call the Bema, the judgment seat of Christ, and tell a holy Savior why we betrayed his people that way.

Well, this is to receive Christ, Brother. This is to believe on Christ. This is to accept Christ. I don’t say now, you shouldn’t go out and you ever use the word accept, provided you know what it means. For it means to believe in and receive Christ as my Savior, but in to do it, it means an exclusive attachment to the person of Christ that makes His friends my friends, His enemies my enemies, His ways, my ways, His cross my cross, His Life my life, and His future my future. And if things should turn out in this country, that it should be dangerous to follow Jesus, my future is His future. And whatever they do to Jesus, I’ll go along; they’ll do it to me.

In light of that, how many of us are Christians? These dear young people, I never see a young kid never, boy or girl, but what I feel all good inside. Mine are growing up now and, I love young people, love them. Maybe that’s the reason I can still preach to them, even if I’m 180 years old. I feel like it. But I love them, and I don’t want to betray them. And I don’t want to see them betrayed. I’m spiritually indignant when I see them being betrayed. Cheated and made little fools of by people who don’t know what discipleship means. This it is to believe in Christ, my young friends. Are you a believer in Christ then? This it means to accept Christ. And have you, and do you accept Christ, and have you accepted? This it is to receive Christ, and have you received and do you receive? It means more than this, but it means nothing less than this.

And all the great evangelists that ever have touched the world to bring revival; now there have been evangelists that don’t bring revival, just evangelism. But all the revivalists, such as Edwards and Finney, and others like him, all have come back to this thing. They said the church is being betrayed by having a Christianity made too easy. And we have a whole host of people who think they’re converted, when all they’ve done is join a religious group. And when people began to see that, deacons and elders and board members and teachers and Sunday school teachers and superintendents and preachers that thought, for half a lifetime, they were converted, came under terrible, blinding conviction. And down on their faces they went before God and got converted. And then the revival is on.

So this is the thing that matters my friends, your relation to Jesus. Have you accepted him really? If you have not, then there’s no gamble, no chance, no 90/10 chance, no 50/50 chance, no chance at all. It is either be right about it, or be dead. Be right about it, or be lost.

Now if this is true, and I think it is true. In closing this, moral sanity requires that we settle this first of all, it requires it. My God it requires it. If I thought I had a cancer eating at me, nothing else would be important. Somebody would say, how about that pair of shoes you’re going to buy? What do I care about a pair of shoes? What about that vacation you were planning for next summer? I don’t care. I may not be here next summer. What about that insurance you’re going to take out? You can’t take out insurance against cancer. Nothing would matter, but that I’d settled it and found out if I did have, and if I did have, could it be helped. Some things are matters of life and death. If to be careless, is to be dead.

So, my dear friends, we Christians ought to settle this. Are we Christians indeed? Have we yet formed an exclusive attachment to the person of Jesus Christ that’s greater and more binding and more beautiful than the attachment of a bride to her new husband that excludes everything else? Alright, if we have, then thank God we can get up and say, Tis done, the great transactions done. I am my Lord’s and He is mine. He drew me in, I followed on charmed to confess the Voice Divine. But if we can’t say it, then all we dare do is to sing that song that our holiness friends make fun of. Isaac Watts wrote it. Do I Love the Lord or No? And a lot of friends make fun of that song and laugh at it. No serious-minded man will laugh at another man who stands under the wide expanse of heaven with death three jumps ahead of him and says, My God, do I really love Thee or not?

You better ask yourself that question today. And I ask you, please don’t go out of here and forget this message. Don’t go out of here and stand on your reputation and the fact you joined the church twenty years ago and that you’ve been a member. Don’t stand on that. Look up and say Jesus, do I love Thee or no. In the light of all this, am I truly a Christian? If you are, your happy heart will soon be assured. If you’re not, you can be, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. He’ll receive you to His heart and you’ll receive Him to your heart, and by an exclusive attachment to His person forever, His personality passes into yours, and yours into His. And there’s an identification with Jesus in His death and His resurrection and His life at the right hand of God. You can go out knowing that you’ve been saved.

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