“A Journey into the Heart of God”
Message #1 of #10 in “Attributes of God Series
Colossians 3:1-3
I want to take one text. And while I hope to preach the Word from all over, this one text is sorta going to be, is going to sound the note and set the key for this series which begins tonight. Colossians, the third chapter, the first three verses. If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead and your life is hid, with Christ, in God. Those eight words, divided into twos, would make a good sermon for anybody. I give it to you free. Anybody that wants that can have that as a sermon. It’s the Lord’s Word, but I’ve just pointed out your life is hid, with Christ, in God. And I then want to limit that to this: with Christ, in God.
I’ll tell you what I want to do. Nobody hesitates to quote D.L. Moody. Nobody hesitates to quote Andrew Murray. Any preacher that can and wants to quote Spurgeon. With acceptance. Anyone can quote R.A. Torrey and quote Dr. Ironside and everybody says, That’s all right. Now what I want to do over these coming nights, is to go way back for help to a book written 600 years ago, and quote a few things from that book and weave it into the message that I am preaching about this journey into the heart of God; with Christ, in God.
This was written by a very saintly woman. I’m not much of believer in women preachers. I never heard one that helped me any. And this is not a plea. I like men preachers. And I even like books written by men. But a man ought not to be so stubborn, that he is his own worst enemy. And so if a woman writes a book, a little tiny book you can carry around your side pocket, and it lives 600 years, I conclude that, if it’s helpful, I ought to humble myself and read it. So, I want to quote what this little lady said about the Trinity. She said, Suddenly, the Trinity filled my heart with joy, and I understood that so it shall be in heaven without end.
Here you see my friends, is a step up from this utilitarian heaven that most people want to go to where they’ll have everything right. Split-level, two cars, and fountain and swimming pool and golden streets. She saw that heaven would be heaven because the Trinity will fill our hearts with joy without end in heaven. For the Trinity is God and God is the Trinity. And the Trinity is our maker and keeper; and the Trinity is our everlasting love and everlasting joy and bliss by our Lord Jesus Christ. And where Jesus appeareth, the Blessed Trinity is understood.
Here, my brethren, is what we must get into our heads and hearts, that Jesus Christ is the full, complete manifestation of the Trinity. And he that has seen the Father, he said, has seen me. And He has set forth the glory of the Triune God; all of God there is. So that where Jesus appeareth, God is. And where Jesus is glorified, God is. And where Jesus is love, God is.
Our scripture confirmation of this, I wouldn’t quote anybody unless there were scripture that would confirm it. No man has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us. And His love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit. There you have the Father and the Son, or the Father and the Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. There you have the Trinity. And whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God. That’s 1 John 4:12-16. John 17:20-23, Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.
Do you believe on Jesus Christ through the word of the Apostles? Do you? Do you believe on Jesus Christ through the word of the apostles? If you do, then Jesus said distinctly here, I’m praying for you. That they all may be one as Thou Father art in Me and I in Thee that they may be one in us. I in them and Thou in Me.
Now, another man said, some of you heard my little book review on the radio yesterday; and that man prayed this prayer, he said, O God, who art the Truth, make me one with Thee in everlasting love. It wearieth me often to read and hear many things, but in Thee is all that I would have and can desire. Now, when the church will find that out, we will come out of our doldrums. As soon as the church finds out that salvation is not a lifeboat only; that it is not an insurance policy against Hell only, but that it is a gateway into God and that God is all that we would have and can desire. And to quote again, Julian, she said, I saw that God is to us everything that is good and comfortable. She said, He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, and claspeth us and all encloseth us for tender Love that he may never leave us, being to us all that is good.
That is all I want to quote, but I start there and I point out to you, that Christianity is a gateway into God. And then when you get into God, with Christ, in God, then you’re on a journey into infinity, into infinitude. And that there is no limit, there is no place to stop. There isn’t one work and a second work or a third word, and that’s it. But there is numberless experiences and spiritual epochs and crises that can take place in your life; going on and journeying out into the heart of God in Christ.
Now, God is infinite. I’d like to talk a little about that. That’s the hardest thought that I will bring to you in any of this. In any of these sermons in this series, the hardest thought that I will ask you to grasp is that God is infinite. Now, you cannot understand what infinite means, but don’t let it bother you. I don’t understand it and I’m trying to preach about it.
Infinite means so much that nobody can grasp it. But reason nevertheless kneels and acknowledges that God is infinite. But as near as we can make out what we mean by infinite, we mean that God knows no limits and no bounds and no end; that what God is, He is without boundaries. And all that God is, He is without bound or limits.
Now we’ve got to eliminate all careless speech here. Because you know, you and I talk about unlimited wealth, and there’s no such thing as unlimited wealth. You can count it. We talk about boundless energy, which I don’t feel as if I have at the moment. But, there’s no such thing as boundless energy. You can measure a man’s energy. And we talk about somebody taking infinite pains. An artist takes infinite pains with his picture. But, he doesn’t take infinite pains. He just takes pretty good pains. He does the best he can and throws up his hands and says it isn’t right yet, but I’ll have to let it go.
That’s what we call infinite pains. But that’s a misuse of the word infinite. And misuse of the word boundless and unlimited, because the word boundless, unlimited and infinite, they all mean the same thing. And they describe God and they don’t describe anything but God. They do not describe space, nor time, nor matter, nor motion, or energy, nor creatures, nor sands, nor stars. All of that can be measured. Because you see, measurement is a way created things have of accounting for themselves.
Weight, for instance, that’s how things account for themselves to intelligence for the gravitational pull of the earth. You know how much you weigh and some of you wish you didn’t, but it’s the gravitational pull. We call that weight. And that’s how your body accounts to you for your condition. And then we have distance, space between heavenly bodies. That’s distance. Then we have length. The extension of a body into space. That’s length.
And we have various other ways of measuring things, because everything is relative you know and it’s just in part and it’s limited. You can always measure a thing. We know how big the sun is. We know how big the moon is. We know how much the earth weighs. We know how much the sun weighs. We know how much many other heavenly bodies weigh. We know how much approximately there is in the ocean. We know how deep it is, we can measure it because you know, even though it seems to be boundless, it really isn’t boundless at all. It always has a bound. You start in Liverpool and start traveling this direction on the Queen Mary or the United States, and when you get out of sight or land, you’d say, “why this ocean is boundless.” But, you wait a while and the happy old lady that stands out on Bedlow Island down in the southern part of Manhattan, you’ll see her and she’ll be a bound for you. That’s as far as the ocean goes. And so, you go up river and get off.
So there’s nothing boundless but God. There is nothing that it is infinite but God. Because you see, God is self-existent and absolute, and everything else is contingent and relative. Everything is relative. There’s nothing very big and nothing very wise and nothing very wonderful. It’s all relatively so. It is God that knows no degrees. The poet says one God, one Majesty, there is no God but Thee, unbounded, unextended unity.
For a long time, I wondered why he said, unbounded, unextended unity. That was the great hymn writer Faber. I wondered why he said it; unextended. God doesn’t extend into space. God contains space. It was CS Lewis who said, if you could think of a sheet of paper infinitely extended in all directions, and you were to take a pencil and make a line one inch long on it, that would be time. When you started to push your pencil, that’s the beginning of time. And when you lifted off the paper, that’s the end of time, and all around it, infinitely extended in all directions is God. That’s a good illustration.
Now, if there was a point where God stopped, then God wouldn’t be perfect. You see, for instance, if God knew almost everything, but not quite everything, then God wouldn’t be perfect in knowledge. Isn’t that right? His understanding wouldn’t be infinite as it says, in 147th Psalm. If God knew almost everything, let us take all it can be known, everything that can be known, past, present and future, spiritual, psychic, and physical everywhere throughout the universe. And let’s say God knows all about that except one percent. He knows 99% of all it can be known. Well, I’d be embarrassed to go to heaven and look into the face of a god that didn’t know everything. He has to know it all, or I can’t worship Him, because I can’t worship that, which is not perfect. And so God has to know all there is, or else, I can’t worship Him.
And then when it comes to say, power. If God had all the power there is except a little bit, and somebody else had a little bit of power hoarded that God couldn’t get to, then we couldn’t worship God. We couldn’t say that this God is an infinite power, because He wouldn’t be of infinite power. He’d just be close to it. But, falling short of it a little bit, He wouldn’t be quite God. He would be short of infinite. And while He would be more powerful than any other being, and perhaps even more powerful than all the beings in the universe lumped together. He still would have a defect and therefore, He couldn’t be God. For our God is perfect; and perfect in knowledge and perfect in power.
And if God had goodness, but there was one spot in God, that wasn’t good, then He wouldn’t be our God and Father. If God had love, but didn’t have all the love, just ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the love, or even higher percentage of the love than that, God still wouldn’t be God. God to be God must be infinite in all that He is. He must have no bound, and no limit, no stopping place, no point beyond which you can’t go, but that when you think of God or anything about God, you have to think infinitely about God.
Some of you people have charley horses in your head for two weeks after trying to follow this, and I don’t know about what I’ll have myself. But brother, it’s a mighty good cure for this little cheap God that we’ve got around here now in modern fundamentalism. This little cheap God, that you can pal around with “the man upstairs” there and the fellow that helps you win baseball games and all that. That god, my brother, He isn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He isn’t the God that laid the bound, that made the heaven and the earth. He’s some other god.
You know, we can create gods just the same as the heathen can. We educated Americans, imagine that it takes a heathen to make a god. You know, you can make a God out of silver or gold or wood or stone. Or, you can make it out of your own imagination. And the god that’s being worshipped in many places, is simply a god of imagination. He’s not the true God. He’s not the infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, infinitely boundless, perfect God. He’s not that God, but he’s something short of that. And so, Christianity is decaying and going down into the gutter. Because the God of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible all together. That is, we fall short of it. I don’t mean to say that we do not pray to God. I mean to say that we pray to a God short and what He ought to be. So, we’ve got to think of God as being the Perfect One.
Now, there’s a lot I’d like to say about God and a lot I want to say about Him, the Divine Godhead and the Trinity. And I want to give you a little shock here now by saying this: that God takes pleasure in Himself and rejoices in His own perfection . I want you to hear that, and don’t say, now Mr. Tozer didn’t mean that, or don’t come and argue, because it won’t do any good. I’ve prayed and thought and searched and read the Word too long to ever take this back. God takes pleasure in Himself; and He rejoices in His own perfection. The Divine Trinity is glad in Himself. God delights in His works.
You remember that when God created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein and man upon the earth, that while God was busy creating things and creatures, it kept saying, and God saw it all and lo, it was good. Then when God created man in His own image, God looked and behold, and said, “it’s very good.” God rejoiced in His works. He was glad in what He had done. And when we come to redemption, my friends, redemption is not a heavy work for God. God didn’t find himself in a fix like John Foster Dulles and have to rush off somewhere and try to straighten himself out and get right with the angels and get His foreign policy straightened out with the archangels.
God did what He did joyfully, my brethren. He did what He did joyfully. He made the heaven and the earth joyfully. That’s why the flowers look up and smile, and the birds sing and the sun shines, and the sky is blue, and the rivers trickle down to the sea. God made the creation and it was, He loved what he did. He took pleasure in Himself and took pleasure in His own perfections and in the perfection of his work.
Then, when it comes to redemption I repeat, that this was not a heavy task laid upon God by moral necessity. God wanted to do this. There was no moral necessity on God to redeem mankind. He didn’t have to send His Son Jesus Christ to die for mankind. He sent Him, but at the same time, Jesus said He did it voluntarily. He said, I came of myself. He did it of Himself. God was willing. It was the happy willingness of God.
A mother doesn’t have to get up and feed her baby at two in the morning. There’s no law compelling her to do it. The law would probably would compel her to take some care a little tyke, but she doesn’t have to give him that loving care that she does. She wants to do it. She does it because she likes to do it. I used to do it for our little fellas, and I enjoyed doing it. I don’t think I would now, because I don’t get up with the alacrity that I used to when I was twenty, two or three, but a mother or a father, they do what they do, because they love to do it.
Now I’d like to have you know, that this awesome, eternal, invisible, infinite, all-wise, omniscient God, the God of our fathers, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the God we call, Our Father which art in heaven. While He is boundless and infinite, He can’t be weighed nor measured. You can’t apply distance to Him nor time nor space, for He made it all and contains it all in His own heart. And while He rises above it all, at the same time, this God is a friendly, congenial God, and He delights in Himself. The Father delights in the Son. This is my beloved Son, in whom my soul is well pleased. And the Son delighted in the Father and said, I thank Thee Father, Lord of heaven and earth. And certainly the Holy Ghost delights in the Father and the Son.
Then when it came to the Incarnation; the Incarnation wasn’t something that God, Jesus Christ did gritting His teeth and saying, I hate this thing. I wish I could get out of it. He came to the womb of the Virgin Mary and some of the dear old theologians, they said he abhorred. Notice that “he abhorred not the Virgin’s womb” Did you ever notice that expression, in one of our hymns? He abhored not the Virgin’s womb. The writer thought about this and said, Now, he was writing a beautiful hymn and said, wait a minute here. The word the womb of a creature? How can the everlasting, eternal, infinite God whom space cannot contain, wouldn’t it be a humiliation? Then he smiled and said, no, He abhorred not the Virgin’s womb. He wrote it and we’ve been singing it for centuries. That at the incarnation of Jesus Christ in mortal flesh, was not a heavy thing that Jesus had to do. The second person of the Trinity, the Everlasting Son, the Eternal Word made Himself flesh joyously, joyously. And so, when the angels sang about the Incarnation, they sang joyously about it.
And then salvation. Notice that in the 15th of Luke, that when Jesus Christ saves a man, He carries him on His shoulders and what’s the word there, the verb? Rejoicing, rejoicing, He does it rejoicing. He comes home rejoicing. And the same will be with the Consummation in that Great Day we’ll speak about a little later.
Now, God is not only pleased with Himself, and delighted with his own perfections, and happy in His work of creating and redeeming, but He is also enthusiastic. There’s an enthusiasm in the Godhead. And I want you to see my friends, that in creation, there is enthusiasm. If there wasn’t enthusiasm, it will run down shortly. Look at energy for instance. Why when you stop to think of, when you stop to think of what you are made out of, and what everything is made out of. Made out of atoms and atoms are made out of protons and neurons and electrons. And you can’t keep them still, not a second. They dash in all directions at tremendous speeds. And the heavenly bodies move the same way. The old Greeks called the movement that they made as they pass through space, the music of the spheres. I don’t think they missed it by very much at all.
And I’ve quoted before several years ago, but I hadn’t thought of it but that comes to my mind now. I think you ought to hear it again. And we ought to hear this every once in a while. The man who said from harmony, from heavenly harmony, this universal frame began, when nature underneath a heap of jarring atoms lay and could not heave her head. The tuneful voice was heard on high, arise you more than dead. And then cold and hot and moist and dry together to their stations leaked and music’s power obeyed. From harmony to harmony through all the compass of the notes it ran, the diapason closing full in man. I believe that, that God is saying when He created things, and that the motion and speed and the hurrying bodies as they move about, and the working of little creatures in the earth, the earth worms to make the soil soft and the working of the sun on the earth. All this is God joyously working in His creation. It’s seen in creation, it’s seen in light.
Did you ever stop to think of what it would be like if there was no light, if there wasn’t any light anywhere? If there wasn’t any light, nobody had any light. If God Almighty where to put a lead sack around all the heavenly bodies, and suddenly shut out all the light there is, I wouldn’t want to be alive. I’d want to turn myself off like a bulb and cease to be and ask God please to annihilate me, and I don’t believe in annihilation.
But, light and speed and color and sound. Some people are afraid of color. They think that spirituality consists in being, just being, just being drab. You know, drab like I’m dressed tonight. They think that spirituality, just being drab. My brother and sister, God made color. And He made all kinds of colors and He made all shades of colors. Look at the sunset. What is that? Just something scientific? You can’t fool me. You think that God made that lovely, beautiful thing out there and splash the sky with old rose and cerise and blue and white, and that God wasn’t smiling when He did that. You tell me that that’s just an accident of nature scientifically explained? Oh, you’re got too much learning for your own good. Go empty your head and get your heart filled and you’ll be better off, because I believe God made the sunset. How do I know? I know because the Holy Ghost wrote 150 Psalms. And in the 150 Psalms, He celebrates the wonders of God’s creation.
Some don’t believe that we ought to love God’s creation, they don’t. There’s a woman who wrote in England years ago and she says that soulish and if we love anything that God made, that soulish, and we lose it in the Great Day. That we ought to trim ourselves right down and walk around, I suppose looking like the inside of a black dog’s mouth, dark and gloomy and rather sinister. The fact is my friends, that God made the colors.
Now, the devil didn’t make the colors. The devil of course, gets people to use them, but he didn’t make them. God made the colors. He made the light and the light gave us the colors. Put the light of the sun through a prism and it will break up into its seven major or seven primary colors and then out of those primary colors, you get all colors you have. Now, I don’t believe that a woman ought to, a Christian woman, ought to try to look like a Christmas tree. I don’t think that. But I don’t think there’s any harm in wearing colors. Now, some of you dear old ladies won’t like me for this and you’ll want to paddle me good and say, what’s happening to the old man. Is he breaking up? No, I’m not breaking up. I always believed this. I always believe in colors. I like to see color. I’d like to see it everywhere. God made it all. And so, God’s enthusiastic about it.
I find enthusiasm in the Godhead. I see enthusiasm and energy. We used to say back there, I used to preach about this and us it for an illustration. I say, if you take a glass of water, there are atoms enough in a glass of water to blow up a whole city. And that sounded rather extreme. But, one day a little fellow, a little sawed off fellow with a sharp nose, gave the order and some men flew over Hiroshima and dropped a bomb about as big as a glass of water and blew the city to bits and killed 120,000 people. Just atoms. Just the little atoms. That’s all it was. It didn’t happen to be H2O or something else, but just atoms.
So, I tell you with so much energy in the world, and so much ability to come back and make good after you have killed a thing, out in my state of Pennsylvania, the money greedy dogs have gone out there and here’s what they’ve done. They have gone and bought up the coal rights in certain sections of the state. Beautiful hills that I grew up to see and love. Beautiful, sun-kissed hills, sometimes misty blue in the setting of the sun. And I would see them there, and I as a boy, loved them. And the creeks or cricks as we call them that ran below and the little runs and ran out to the rivers and down to the sea.
It was all very beautiful to me, that I went back to my old place here a few years ago and I found that these money hungry fellows had sold out the coal rights. And you know what they did? They didn’t dig a hole and go back after the coal. They took bulldozers and drag the top off of the earth; trees, grass everything to get down to the coal and lifted the coal out. And the result was, thousands and thousands of acres, whole hills that used to go up with their green to meet heaven’s blue, lay gashed like one vast grave that hadn’t been filled in. And the state of Pennsylvania said you got to fill it all in or we’ll fine you $300. And they looked at each other and grinned and said would cost us several thousand to fill it in. So, here’s your $300 and they left it as it was.
And I went away grief-stricken to see my beautiful hills, now great, ugly sandpits; and I went back in a few more years. You know what nature had done? Dear old, busy, enthusiastic and fun-loving joyous Mother Nature, did you know what she did? I don’t know where she got the seed, and I don’t know where she got anything, but I know she began to draw a green veil over that ugly gash. And now if you’d go back this summer, I think by this time or certainly by next summer, it will have cured itself. God Almighty put in nature the ability, when evil man, loving money would, would take bulldozers and steam shovels and gouge great ugly holes in God’s lovely creation, God gave Mother Nature ability to go right back and in a few years pull a curtain of green over it and start the trees again and now you can see nature.
You see, she’s busy, she’s enthusiastic, but there’s no she. It’s God my brethren. It’s God. We ought to stop thinking like a scientist and think like a psalmist. We’ll get right with God when we think like a psalmist and an apostle and stop thinking like a technician or mechanic. That’s our trouble, we think like mechanics. We say nature did this, and of course I’ve used the expression but I am explaining by nature, I mean God, enthusiastic over His work. So, there is God working with color and sound and bodies in space out there traveling around. Man can make them travel 25,000 miles an hour, but they’re poor, little old creeping oxcarts compared with the speed God gets out of them. Some of those heavenly bodies, the way they go.
And why did God say go out there and say, now get going fast. I don’t know, just God was just happy in His creation. That’s all. He looked, and lo, it was very good. This infinite God was enjoying Himself; somebody is having a good time in heaven and earth and sea and sky. Somebody is painting the sky, old rose and cerise and blue and pink and white. Somebody is making trees to grow where only gashes grew a year ago. Somebody is causing the ice to melt out of the river, and the fish to swim and the birds to sing and lay their blue eggs and build a nest and hatch their young. Somebody is running the universe. And I believe I know who it is. I believe it’s the Eternal Father, strong to save, whose power rules the restless wave. I believe that it’s the Trinity. That it is Our Father who art in heaven, Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. God is having a good time His world.
And so, let us not think anymore of God as being heavy browed and gloomy. I repeat, that when God made the heaven and earth, they sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. There wasn’t a funeral at the creation of the world, there was an anthem, and all the creations sang; and at the Incarnation they sang. I know some of these textualists, they shut you right up. They put a clammy, pasty, pall over your happy mouth and say, now the angels didn’t sing, “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” According to the Greek, it says they said, “Peace on earth, goodwill to men.” But all you have to do is read that brother. You can’t read that without getting happy. If something begins to move in you. You get a rhythm. You get music in your heart! Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, they said. That was singing. There was singing at the Incarnation.
And then, at the resurrection there was singing. I will sing among my brethren said Jesus in the Psalm, and when He rose from the dead, it doesn’t tell us in the New, but it foretells it in the Old, that one of the first things Jesus did was to sing. And one of the last things He did before He went up to die, was to sing a hymn along with his brethren. And I’d loved to have heard that hymn. And you know, you’ll indentify it. It is found in the Psalms. I don’t know which one.
And think about the Rapture. Did you ever stopped to think about the Rapture? Now, some of you have got so far from prophecy. You’ve been scared out and intimidated and chased down the alley until you don’t believe in the coming of the Lord anymore. The pre-tribulationist and the post-tribulationist and the amillennialist and what have you, have all scared a lot of you people and scared me. I still believe Jesus Christ is coming back to the world He made and died for. I still believe He’s coming back and His feet will stand on that day where they stood once on the Mount of Olives. Do you believe that. I believe He’s coming back.
Now I’ll admit that I don’t go with everything I see in the Scofield notes. And I’ll admit that I don’t go along with everything that everybody puts on a chart and stands up with a long stick and says, now, this is this and that’s that and the other thing is the other thing. That’s carrying it too far brother. I don’t want to know more than Isaiah. I’ll be satisfied if I’m just a shade under Isaiah. But not more than Isaiah. So I’m not going to, I’m not trying to know more than Daniel and Isaiah and John on the isle of Patmos. Yeah, well, I knew John was somewhere but I’m getting tired and forgot where he was.
Well brethren, I believe He’s coming back again. You know, everybody knows how to die, but have you ever stopped to think you’ll be all mixed up when you come to the Rapture. You know, it’s going to be something that has never happened before. And lots of people have died. Old Jacob pulled his feet into bed with him and leaned on his staff and gave up the ghost and slept with his fathers. That was a dear, quaint old way they had and doing in those days. They slept with their fathers. Everybody slept with Grandpa. And there they lay, all row on row, sleeping together. And that’s the way they died. They knew how to die. You know how to die. You just lie down and when it gets so that you can’t live, you die.
And so, we’re not too much worried about dying, but the Rapture. I tell you that that’s a hard one. What’s going to happen? Here you are sleeping out here Dear Mrs. Deet sleeping over here, Brother Wood and Brother Moore, all out here and Brother Gately and all of these that we’ve known during the years. They lie sleeping all around. And if the Lord tarry, why, you and I will join them. We’ll go. We can’t live forever, down here I mean. And you’ll die.
But then, coming up out of there; getting up out of there. And if you’re walking around on the street and the Lord; you hear the sound of a trumpet that’s louder than the horn of a diesel engine and you recognize the timber isn’t earthly at all. It’s heavenly, and it isn’t even the music of the spheres. It’s the music of the voice of Jesus, the Son of God. And suddenly you’re transformed. You won’t know what to do. You know, you won’t know how to act. You can’t find out anywhere. When they are going to be presented before the Queen, they know how to curtsey. You know that I couldn’t do it, I’d fall apart, but they do it. They curtsey and they know how to approach kings and queens and presidents and all other VIPs. But nobody’s told us what to do when we get over yonder.
And suddenly, you’re walking down the street and you’re somebody else, and you look at yourself, no more warts, no more wrinkles, and feel your face, no more hollow holes and feel head and hair. It didn’t used to be, and you’re glorified and you look away and see the Son of God and you’re like Him. And you won’t know what to do. The people lying in their graves, what will they do? Did you know that I know what they’ll do.
I mentioned this one time, and where did I mention this? The trouble of getting around so much is you forget where you have been. And I mentioned it somewhere and a man came up afterward and I said, we were going to sing, sing arise and sing ye that dwell in dust. That’s what it said, rise and sing ye the dwell in dust. For the earth shall cast forth her dead. And a man came to me and said I heard a sermon, a great sermon preached one time called, “Singing Dust, Singing Dust,” that the dead who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise, and they’ll sing, and it will be singing dust.
Well, there’s going to be singing at the Rapture. And there’s going to be singing at the Consummation, and that Great Day, Thou art worthy to take the Book and to open the seals thereof for Thou was slain and hast redeemed us. That’s the theme of the new song. The theme of the new song isn’t, I am. The theme of the new song is “Thou art.” Do you notice the difference? When you leave the old hymnody of Wesley and Montgomery and Watts and the rest of them, it was Thou art, Thou art, Thou art O God, Thou art. Then when you get down to the modern hymns of the modern era, the modern fundamentalist it’s, I am, I am, I am, I am. It makes me sick to my stomach. All this, I “aming.”
Well, I know we can testify and we have a right to and occasionally a good hymn of testimony is all right too. But, we’ve overdone it as we have over done almost everything else we’ve ever done anything about, we’ve overdone it. So, we’ve overdone this I am, I am stuff.
My brethren, let me say to you that the joy of the Lord, the joy of the Lord is a song of the ransomed is going to be, Thou art, Thou art worthy O God. They said to take the books. Thou hast redeemed us to God and has made us kings and priests and we shall reign on the earth. And I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000s and 1000s of 1000s. And you put on a blackboard how many that is and I will buy a dinner. I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the beasts and the elders and the number of them was 10,000. Isn’t it strange that men are made, actually made. They have got such timber and I when I say timber, I mean timber here. They’ve got such timber in their head, that instead of getting happy over this, they solemnly try to figure out who these deacons were and these elders and beasts and these creatures. And they write books on who they were and what they looked like. Isn’t that strange? How dumb can a scholar get? I don’t know about these creatures here. See me five minutes after the Rapture and I’ll tell you about it. But now, I just have to take it by faith. Thou hast made us kings and priests, and he said all these creatures saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Not, “look at me, I’m wonderful, I’m happy, happy, happy, happy!” No, the Lamb, the Lamb is worthy. So that’s the Consummation.
Well, my brethren, the infinite Godhead invites us into Himself to share in all the intimacies of the Trinity. And Christ is the way in. Did you know the moon is geared this way toward the earth; relative to the earth. It’s geared this way. It turns, and the Earth turns. But, they turn in such a way, that we only see one side of the moon, we never see the other They’re hoping to go around and see the other side. I’m not interested. It’s the dark side. But, we see only one side of the moon. And I thought, the Eternal God is so vast, so infinite, extends out so far into infinitude that I can’t hope to know all about God and all there is about God.
But God has a man-ward side just as the moon has an earth-ward side and always keeps that smiling, yellow face turned earth-ward. So God has a man-ward side and always keeps that turned man-ward; and that side is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s man-ward face, God’s man-ward side. Jesus is the way God sees us. He always looks down and sees us in Jesus Christ. And then, we go back to my quotation, where Jesus appeareth, the Blessed Trinity is understood.
Now, I close and I want to ask some questions. Are you contented with nominal Christianity? If you are, I have nothing for you. Are you contented with popular Christianity that runs on the authority and popularity of big shots? If you are, I have nothing for you. Are you content with elementary Christianity, with the beginnings, the elementary beginnings of things? If you are, all I’ve got for you, is to exhort you earnestly to press on toward perfection. But if you’re not satisfied with nominal Christianity and popular Christianity and the first beginnings of things, and you want to know God, the Triune God for yourself, why, pray for me and I’ll be preaching on these subjects.