Tag: God's Love

Tozer Talks

The Voice of God’s Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 31, 1953

Strangely enough, we go back to the book of Jeremiah for the first text on this series. In the book of Jeremiah, the thirty-first chapter, verse three, the Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

So, I begin tonight a series of sermons to be called Voices That Entreat Us. And I wonder why it should be necessary for the voice of entreaty to be heard at all in the earth. It can only be because we are out of the way. The world we inhabit is a lost world. There are reasons to believe that the earth itself upon which we ride is a lost planet. Hints of this are found through the entire Bible, and I believe that through the anointed intellect, such traces, such evidence, may be found also in nature.

Back in the book of Genesis, God said about the planet, cursed be the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee, until thou return unto the ground, for out of the ground was thou taken. Thus thou art, and unto thus shalt thou return.

Now, why were these words ever spoken? I believe that they were spoken to describe the planet upon which we ride. It is a lost planet. I quote from the writings of the world’s profoundest intellect.

I believe that it might be generally conceded that the profoundest mind that ever set a pen to paper was the Apostle Paul. Quoting from the Williams translation, that is the British Williams translation, these words from the book of Romans, the eighth chapter. This world of nature was condemned to be without meaning, not by its own will, but by the will of Him who condemned it, in the hope that not only mankind, but this world of nature also, might be set free from bondage to decay, to enter the glorious liberty of the sons of God. For to this day, as we know, the whole world of nature cries out in pain like a woman in childbirth.

Now, this world of nature was condemned to be without meaning. That is vanity. And it’s strange that the very words that the philosophers like to use are used here by the sacred writer, that nature is without meaning. And not only mankind, but this world of nature is to be set free from bondage to decay. It is a sick, fallen planet upon which we ride.

Now, worse than this, the inhabitants of this planet are also lost. The Bible declares this very plainly. But for any whom I doubt it, does it seem reasonable to you that beings like us should be given each one his little turn at bat, just one time, beings like us? There is a theology, or a color of theology, a pattern of theology, that squirms uneasily as soon as you say anything good about mankind. They’re prepared to say that you’re liberal, or a modernist, or a borderline liberal, at least, if you say anything good about mankind.

My brethren, except for sin, it would be very difficult to overpraise human beings. When you consider what we are, and what we know, and what we can do, our memories, imaginations, artistic abilities, and all that we have as human beings, when you consider it, you can’t justly and properly sell mankind short.

Sin, God knows, is like a cancer in the heart. It ruins the man and damns him at last. But man is not all sin. Man was made in the image of God, and while sin has ruined him, and condemned him to death forever, unless he be redeemed through the blood of Jesus. Yet mankind is a being only one degree removed from the angels, and in some ways, superior indeed to the angels themselves.

And does it seem reasonable to you, if this were not a lost world, that such a being as man, such a being as a Shakespeare, or a Churchill, or an Edison, or any of the great writers, or artists, or engineers of the world, should it seem, does it seem reasonable to you that each one of them should, like a little kid, be given his one little turn at bat, and then told to sit down while the ages roll on?

Does it seem reasonable to you that a being so godlike as man is, should take all of this marvelous equipment of his toward the grave? That he should carry his memory, his brilliant imagination, his artistic creative powers, and all that we know that makes a man a man, that he should carry it toward the grave? That God should waste his time on such a being as he made man to be, and say, I’m just fooling around with a man, I’m just making this marvelous creature just for a day, I’m just having some fun, it doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

Does it seem reasonable to you that this being should consistently live beneath his own ideals, that he should everlastingly be beneath what he knows he ought to be, and always be frustrated by living below his own ideals, and should be doomed to go to the grave, frustrated and disappointed at last, never having attained his ideals? It does not seem reasonable to me. And that he should dream of a shining world, and yet not know the way there. Lord, we know not whither thou art going, how can we know the way? No truer words were ever uttered by any man than that we don’t know the way there.

That shining world of which men have dreamed, that every man secretly believes is somewhere there before him, is nevertheless lost to that man, or he is lost to it, so that the human race is a lost race. That is only reason talking now, but sacred revelation declares plainly that the inhabitants of the earth are lost. They’re lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe, which came upon them somewhere back there and is still upon them.

But it also tells this glorious fact that this lost race has not been given up. There is a voice that is calling them, there is a voice that is entreating them, there are voices that are entreating them. As the shepherd went everywhere searching for his sheep, as the woman in the parable went everywhere searching for her coin, so there is a voice, there are voices that entreat us, that call us back. If we were not lost, there would be no voices behind us saying, this is the way, walk ye in it. If we were not far from home, there would be no father’s voice calling us back home. I say that we have not been given up.

That is plain from the book of Genesis, where when Adam fled from the face of God among the trees of the garden, the sound of God’s gentle voice was heard saying, Adam, where art thou? And that voice has never died out. The echo of that voice is sounding down through the years and has never ceased to reverberate and echo and re-echo from peak to peak and from generation to generation and from race to race and continent to continent and off to islands and back to continent again. All down the years, Adam, where art thou? Now there are many voices I say, but it’s only really one voice.

Did you hear about that little two-and-a-half-year-old girl that was lost in the woods over in Michigan? I think it was only last week and there were bears loose there and some of those bears that were known to be man-eaters. And for a couple of days or longer, this little, was she two and a half years old, girl that was lost there. You hear about that every once in a while, a little one slipping away from a picnicking party and getting lost.

And they organized parties; whose back of that? Who does it? Is it not the throbbing distraught heart of the father and the mother? Who is it that organizes these parties to hover overhead with helicopters, to send out sound trucks, to organize soldiers and boy scouts and friendly neighbors, always calling, calling, calling, calling, calling in a soothing voice, always calling.

It may be the voice of a soldier here, it may be the voice of a boy scout around there, it may be the voice of a friendly neighbor over there, it may be a sound truck from the highway there, it may be a helicopter from up here, but always it’s the same voice, it’s the father’s voice. Though there may be a dozen or two dozen voices calling, oh, they’re only inflections of one voice. They’re simply the overtones and undertones of the same loving father’s voice that’s organized it, that’s backed it, and whose distraught heart is calling for his lost child.

So, there are many voices calling us, calling this lost planet, calling the inhabitants of this lost planet, and there are many voices, but it’s all one voice. And whether it be the voice of God’s love, or the voice of Jesus’ blood, or the voice of conscience, or the voice of the dead, or the voice of the living, or the voice of the lost, or the voice of the saved, whatever the voice may be, it’s all the inflection of the same voice. It’s all one voice. It’s a distraught heart of God seeking his lost race, calling them any way that he can call them, calling them from above or from below, calling them from around the bend, or down the road, or beside the river, or on the plateau, calling them, but always calling them; the voice of God as in treating us.

Ladies and gentlemen, with everything inside of my beating heart, chastened and criticized by everything inside of my mind, I believe in the voice of God sounding in his world, calling men. The planet’s lost, lost to such a degree that the holy writer says that it’s lost its meaning, it’s full of vanity. And even the world around us is so lost that it is crying like a woman in travail, waiting as it were to be born back into the liberty of the sons of God and saved from decay and corruption. The race that inhabits it, the human race, is lost, and always this voice of God is sounding, always it’s sounding.

Now I speak tonight of the voice of God’s love, and I repeat that when it’s all been said, all the voices are the voices of God’s love, whether it be the voice of conscience, whether it be the voice of fear, the voice of the pastor, the voice of the traveling evangelist, the voice of the teacher, the voice of the Sunday school superintendent, or the friendly neighbor that may be a Christian, whether it be the voice of reason or whatever it be, it’s all one voice. It is the distraught, heavy-hearted voice of God calling his lost race back. Now he says here, yea, I have appeared of old unto you, saying, yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee.

The voice of the love of God is calling a lost race, and we members in particular, can hear that voice tonight if we would listen. Now let me say a few things about the love of God that you probably won’t hear anywhere else that you go, at least rarely will you hear it said, but let me point out that God being who he is, God must love Himself first with a pure and blameless and perfect love.

Now don’t go out and say Mr. Tozer didn’t mean that. That’s just exactly what I meant, that God being God, not being a creature but being an uncreated being, deriving from nobody, owing nothing to anybody, and being himself underived and uncreated, this holy God who is Himself the fountain of all the love there is, must love Himself forever with pure and perfect love.

This is the holy and blameless love which the three persons of the Trinity feel for each other. The Father for the Son, the Son for the Father, the Father and the Son for the Spirit, the Spirit for the Father and the Son. Divine Trinity in perfect and blameless and proper love, love each other with poured out devotion. Three fountains pouring into each other out of the same boundless, shoreless, depthless sea, bottomless, that is the eternal, infinite God.

And these three upspringing fountains always pouring up and mingling with each other in perfection of bliss and love. This is the love of God for His own holy self. And God being what He is, God is Himself the only being He can love directly. There is nobody else that mingles with those three fountains. No other creature, not an archangel, nor a seraphim, nor a cherub, nor a man. Everything else that God loves and everybody else that God loves, He loves for His own sake. He loves Himself as the Father loves the Son and the Son, the Father and the Father, and the Son, the Spirit and the Spirit, the Father and the Son, without referring that love to any other being, for God is God.

But when it comes to creatures, that perfect love cannot fall directly upon any man. It must come to God mediated through God Himself. God must find something of Himself there in order that He might love it. For God can only love Himself and that which is like Himself.

Do you hear me? God can only love Himself. And God being what He is cannot love anything unlike Himself. If God should love anything unlike Himself, it would be equivalent to a pure and holy woman loving a gangster. God must love that which is equal to Himself and like Himself. And so, when God looks at the mute creation that the writer here, the translator calls the world of nature, He loves it because it reveals to Him something of His own Godhead and glory and power and shows something of His own wisdom.

So, when God looks on His sun and His moon and all the stars that He has made, and His lakes and His rivers and His mountains and His seas, God loves them because they remind Him of His own wisdom and power and Godhead that gave them being. And when God looks at the seraphim and the cherubim and the holy angels before the throne, He loves them because they remind Him of His own holiness. They’re holy angels and their holiness is derived from God. And God loves in them that which came from Himself. God loves them because they’re holy beings. And He can properly and with moral propriety, He can love holy angels because they’re reminding Him of Himself. And when God looks at a man, He loves in them, the fallen relic of His own image.

Now here again, there’s going to be people that nobody’s ever said it to me in person, but they’ve written me and abused me and said that I am a liberal. And I insist I don’t have education enough to be a modernist, but they say now that he’s a liberal. I’m not a liberal, I’m a Bible believer.

And the Scripture says that God made man in His own image. And when Jesus Christ was incarnated, He was incarnated in the body of a man without embarrassment and without change. Why could it be so? It was so because that man was an image of the God that created him said and said, let’s make man in Our image.

But fallen man has another element there, a foreign element that has crept in. It is sin. It’s the sting of the serpent that stung his bloodstream there in the garden, and that’s sin. So that man, made in the image of God, is now a dying man, sick unto death, because sin, like the poison of the adder, has gotten into his flowing moral veins. But extract that sin and take it out and you have the image of God again. And Jesus Christ was the image of God because He was a man without sin.

There’s no modernism there, no liberalism there, just Bible there. And the man who denies that fallen man bears upon him something of the fallen ruined Reich of what he once was is no true friend of the Bible. He is himself guilty of taking liberties with the Holy Scriptures.

And when God looks on a sinner and loves the sinner, never while the stars burn in their silence can it be said that God loves the sin in the sinner. Never can it be said that the Holy God loves an unholy thing, and yet God loves sinners. Why does He love sinners? He loves them for that which He sees in them of His lost and fallen image. For God can never love anything but Himself directly, and He loves everything else for His own sake.

So, you’re loved of God, friend, but you’re loved of God for Jesus’ sake. You’re loved of God, but you’re loved of God for the sake of the Holy Son, Jesus, who is the Godhead incarnate, who is the second person of the Godhead incarnated. And God sees in Jesus Christ what you would have been. That is, He sees in His perfect humanity, not His deity. You and I never can be divine in that sense.

So, God loves lost men. Loves them not because He excuses their sin, loves them not because He’s careless, loves them not because He’s morally lax, but loves them because He once stood and said, let us make man in Our image.

Let’s put it like this. A man and woman meet, fall in love and marry. They have a son, and they kid each other and play about that boy, and each one says it looks like the other, and then they change it around and say it looks like this one and then looks like that one, and they have a lot of fun, but that’s their boy. And they try to see each other in that boy.

Then he grows up, and the hour comes when he breaks with society, chooses to go outside the law and become an outlaw. He drinks, he gambles, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he murders. He’s a fugitive from justice. He becomes snarlingly vicious and cruel, becomes a killer, cold-eyed in his own right. Mercifully, the father dies, and then the boy is caught and thrown into prison. The mother goes to see him. No hope, no chance. A thousand witnesses, fingerprints everywhere, evidence of every kind, direct and circumstantial. They’ll get him. He’s finished. Half a dozen murders, he’ll pay for them.

The mother looks through the bars, and there’s her boy standing now, full-grown, the man. Can she love his outlawry? Does she love his gangsterism? Does she love his cold-eyed cruelty? Does she love his murders? Does she love his robberies? No, she hates them with everything in her good heart.

But when he stands up there needing to shave a little bit, she sees the man’s no longer with her. And she says, God, if he’d only been a good boy, he was the spitting image of his father. When I first met his dad, that’s what he looked like, and she pours her heart out in tears. She loves the boy, but she doesn’t love one thing in him that made him an outlaw. She loves an image of a man she once loved and gave herself to, and promised to follow till death did separate.

God looks down at the human race and sees us in our awful sin. The deeds of the flesh are seventeen in number, according to Paul, the works of the flesh, and that’s only the beginning. It would take several sheets of paper to write down the sins man has been capable of and has done and is doing, and God looks. And you think that God loves jealousy, deception, lying, gluttony, uncleanness, impurity, outlawries, cruelty.

Do you think God loves sinners, carelessly, foolishly, loves them and says, I don’t care, I love them anyway. I don’t think it for a second. I think He loves them because He sees in them the image of what Adam was and what Christ is, and loves them for Adam’s sake, but loves them now redemptively for Jesus’ sake, who was incarnated of the Virgin Mary and became a man without sin.

So, the voice of God’s love is sounding. I say you won’t hear that probably in very many places, but it’s so true it needs to be told again. It will deliver us from pride. Let no man go out and strut down the street and say, I’m a fundamentalist, God loves me.

Careful, Sonny, our sins have violated and lost to you every right you ever had to be loved by God. But God sees that you are of the loins of the man who once stood up on the earth, and looked about for a helpmeet for him, made in the image of God and wasn’t ashamed of him. And He sees an image of the Man who went to the tree and died between heaven and earth, His only begotten Son. And He loves you for other reasons than yourself. Therefore, humble yourself, it’ll pay. Thank God for the love that comes to you, mediated through the man Christ Jesus. That everlasting love that is everlasting, not in its object, but is everlasting in its own quality.

Now God must love and will love man until hell has erased the last trace of the remaining image. Men are lost now, don’t forget it, but they’re still loved of God, because the blackest man, the deepest man, is still dear to God for Jesus’ sake.mJesus who died on the tree for that very lost black man. I mean black morally, not racially, in his skin. I have loved you with an everlasting love, says God.

I say that love is everlasting not because of its object, but it’s everlasting because it’s the everlasting God that loves. God no longer loves the devil. There was a day when God loved the devil as He now loves the angels and archangels, because He saw in the devil traces and proofs of His own wisdom.

Thou art the covering cherub. I have made thee so. I have set thee to guard the stones of fire. Thy wisdom and beauty were created in thee in the day thou wast created. God loved that being because it was an image, not an image of Himself in the sense man is, but a reflection of what God could do and an evidence of His artistry, His moral artistry and His omniscient skills.

The devil sinned, and the devil sinned in a way not quite like man sinned. He sinned in some way that erased forever everything of which God could be proud and in which God could rest, so that God no longer loves the devil. He sent no redeemer for him. There isn’t anything in Satan that could remind God of himself.

The last trace of that which might have reminded God of himself has been washed out in the filthy bilge water of iniquity while the centuries have added to centuries. So, God no longer loves the devil.

Now I confess to you, friends, this is speculation, and I want to brand it speculation right here. What I shall say in the next minute is speculation, and if you don’t agree with me, let’s not fall out over it. These are the things I’ll stand by. This is speculation.

I believe the time will come when God will no longer love lost men. I believe that God now loves lost men, all lost men, lost men in prisons and penitentiaries and insane asylums, lost men in saloons and houses of ill-faith. God loves lost men because the last trace has not been erased, and he still remembers them and remembers His Son on the tree that has a body like theirs. He still remembers that the Second Being, Person of the Divine Being, was incarnated in a Man who has a body like that man without sin. The day will come, let him that is holy be getting holier still, and let him that is filthy be getting filthier still. So says the Bible.

And therefore the day will come when lost man will no longer be loved by God Almighty. For God, I repeat, cannot love anything directly. He must love everything for His own sake if He continues to be God. And when a man has sold himself out to sin and the transfiguring power of iniquity has wrought to make him to be a devil and not a man, God will no longer love the lost man. So let us not imagine for a second that God will be pining over hell and grieving in His heart over a lost man in hell. It cannot be true.

God grieves over lost men now because man can still pray and believe and hope and dream and imagine and aspire, and there’s still something that reminds Him of the Man who died on the tree. But when that is all gone, there will be nothing left for God to pour out His love upon. There will be no one to receive that love, and therefore the love of God, though it’s everlasting in its source, will not light anymore upon fallen men.

And hell, wherever hell is, filled with lost men and the devil and lost beings, shall roll on through the cavernous recesses of some underground world forever and ever and ever, and there will be no love lost in heaven and no grief in the heart of the man Christ Jesus. For God can only love that which is like Himself and reminds Him of Himself.

Now, let me point out to you, brethren, that wherever there is love, there’s bound to be goodwill. Nobody ever willed anything bad about anybody they loved. Sometimes a man will kill a woman because she looked at another man. He says, I loved her so that I killed her. The big billy goat, it was lust that led him to kill her. He wanted her for himself, and he was too much of a billy goat to allow himself ever to dream that anybody else could dare have that woman. So he killed her, not out of love for her, for altogether other reasons.

No, love never kills anybody. Love never wills ill nor evil to anybody, never. It’s impossible. Love can’t do it. Love can no more do it than light can be darkness or God can be unclean. Love must always have goodwill, and God is inflamed with goodwill. He’s inflamed with goodwill. That means that whether God is near or far, and he’s always near and always far, but however we think of him, God’s always inflamed and thinking about us.

My friend Bob Battles, who wishes he’d been my son, but I’d have had to been married at 13 to have arranged it. But my friend Bob Battles, who loves me very much, and I him, he was in California with us where I got this cold that I have now, in California incidentally. I’m getting better since I came to Chicago, but Bob and I were out there together, and we were walking along, Bob said, well, it’s 10 o’clock back in Orlando, 10 o’clock back in Orlando, and my five boys are all in bed, and Olive, that’s his wife, Olive is presiding all alone over the mass.

My boys, he said, we walked along. I grinned to myself. He was inflamed with goodwill. He was busy, you know, running around carrying a portfolio, you know, and being chairman of this, and he was awfully busy, but he was all inflamed with goodwill. If anything, if just let a phone call come through and say, I got to have you, he’d have hopped on a plane without saying goodbye.

Love always has goodwill with it. Love always is full of goodwill, and the love of God is no different, and when the angels sang their song or uttered their marvelous chant, it was goodwill to men. I know some translators say to men of goodwill, goodwill to men, the will of God is good toward us brethren. Be sure of that.

It’s basic, it’s basic, you must believe that, that goodwill is in the heart of God for you. Now, that’s very hard to believe. It’s hard to believe because our moral conscience doesn’t agree with it.mWe love each other because they’re good things we love in each other. We say, oh, he’s got such a sense of humor, I love the fellow. Well, that’s loving somebody for some assignable reason.

A young man will come in and say, one young Texan called me, Wilkins Wynn, he says his name. He used to come here to church, you know, a good Baptist boy that went to church here while he was attending Moody. He called me one day. He was always so spiritual and always talking about the Lord. You couldn’t get him to talk about anything else.

One day he called me. He said, brother Tozer, he said, you know that song that says that, that, that I love thee so I know not how my transport to control. I said, yes. Well, he said, I have found a girl and that just exactly described my feeling toward her. And he said, what do you suppose I ought to do? I love her so I know not how my transport to control. I said, Wilkins, there’s only one thing to do and I recommend it. And he did.

Now they have nice, he’s, he’s pastor of a Baptist church down in Texas and they got a nice little boy. Well, that you see, don’t you, that, that, uh, that love is like that. And, and there’s, there’s the, the yearning. And, uh, he, he loved this woman because there, there were reasons for it. He talked to me afterward.

My, she must’ve been a paragon of beauty. To say nothing to be so intelligent that Einstein better watch out. Formed like the Venus de Milo. And she had all that. And he loved her for that reason. You know, you know, he, he, he’d had it. That’s all. He had it. She wasn’t like that. I suppose she’s very lovely young, probably good looking young lady, but then he’d had it. That’s all. He was that way.

Well, you see, we love people for what they are. And when somebody comes and says to a sinner, God loves you and is inflamed with goodwill for you. He’s inclined to say, I don’t believe it. Why? Because he’s measuring the love of God by his own love.

And he says, I know better. God is the moral God. The Bible says He is. God can’t love me. I’m a low-grade center. I’ve lied.mI’ve cheated. I’ve stolen. There isn’t a sin. I haven’t committed either overtly or in my heart. I’m worse than my friends know. I’m worse than my wife knows, worse than anybody knows. And God can’t love me.

But you see, he’s right. And he’s wrong. He’s wrong because he fails to see that God doesn’t love him directly for his sin’s sake. God loves him for His own sake. And therefore, God can love anybody no matter how sinful for His own sake, for His Son’s sake.

But you know, that takes some theology to make people see that they don’t see it. They imagine God loves them because they’re good. Some little old bespectacled fellow, you know, that never did anything worse in his life but drink a half glass of Coke, you know, and that uses perfect English and always puts his shoes away at night, makes his bed in the morning, helps his mama with the dishes. He believes God loves him, the big sissy. Because he says, well, mama loves me. And the teacher says that I’m the best student she ever had. And therefore, I can see how God could love me and I’m going to be a fundamentalist.

Better watch it, better watch it there, my boy. Because God doesn’t love you for the fact that you make the bed and never cause your mama a minute’s trouble in all your life. He loves you for another reason altogether. He loves you because He sees even in you, if not some trace of manhood, then some trace of womanhood, he sees in you that which once walked in the garden but got into sin and was poisoned and bitten with the virus of iniquity, lost and ruined by the fall and on your way to hell.

And He loves you for His own sake and not for your sake. But the man who’s such a sinner and knows it is inclined to doubt God’s love because he judges God love by man’s love. That’s never any way to judge love. God’s love is unique in the universe. And God loves us for His own sake.

Now, my brethren, where there’s love, there’s not only goodwill. Where there’s love, there’s yearning, yearning. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee. And always drawing us toward the object, He draws us toward Himself, a lost race in a lost world.

And from God there is a clear call. And there isn’t anything that can stand in the way, not character, reputation, past, nothing can stand in the way except our own sins. From God there’s a clear call to consider Him. Will you stop and consider Him? There are so many things now in the world that we just can’t consider anymore the serious things. There are just too many things in the world.

But God calls you to stop and consider. Won’t you think on God now? Think on God. This God whose love is everlasting. This holy God who loves Himself and loves you for His own sake. Give attention to God. And He calls you to believe about Him. Start believing what the Bible teaches. Believe what I’m telling you. Believe what you’ve heard other men say. Believe what we sing in our hymn books. Believe what we read in our Bibles. Believe what the church teaches. That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Believe that. Start believing it. He calls you to that. And He calls you to turn to Him. He calls you to turn around, turn to Him, and to begin to make a moral about-face, and stop things, and change things. And to throw yourself on his mercy.

Will you do it? No defense. Don’t come into court with a lawyer. Don’t come into court with a lot of alibis. Don’t come into court with a lot of witnesses for your character witnesses to tell God how good you are. Come as the prodigal came back home. He didn’t bring a lot of character witnesses.

Can you imagine if that prodigal had been like that? Like some people. He’d have gone back to the father’s house. He’d have stopped and had his dirty old pants pressed somewhere down the road. And he’d have brought along a couple of fellas to tell his father that that smell that he detected on his garments was just a flower that had been in the far country, and it was rare. And there wasn’t anything to get worried about. It smelled like pig but it wasn’t pig.

He’d have had his story, but he didn’t. He didn’t try anything like that. He didn’t bring any character witnesses with him to tell his father that he was a better boy than he thought. He said to himself, my father will remember me the way I used to be. And I know my father and I know that as long as I look like him and look like Ma, my father will never stop loving me. So, I’m going to throw everything, I’m going to risk everything on one shot. I’m going to go home and say, Father, I have sinned.

And you know, it worked. It worked. And it was the only thing that would work. It worked. He said, Father, I have sinned. The old man who’s getting old and lumpy and full of lime, you know, and couldn’t get around much anymore and his heart bothered him.

But sir, he jumped around there like a 21-year-old. He gave orders here and gave orders there and gave orders there and pretty soon that boy was all fixed up and bathed in the finest bath salts, perfumed and dressed in good shoes on his feet and a ring on his finger, the seal of his father’s approval. They were all sitting around thanking the father and shouting the praises of this dad who loved his boy.

The elder brother stuck a sulking sour face in the door and went away and sulked behind the barn. They sent out for him, and he said, can you imagine it? Treating my wicked brother like this and I’ve always been a good boy. You know that story too well. He was pleading his own character, and the boy had none to plead.

So, throw yourself on his mercy. That’s the safest place. No man ever dies when he throws himself on the mercy of God. Was it John Bunyan, that wicked, doubly wicked man who got under conviction and wished he was a dog? He said, there goes a dog. Oh, I wish I was that dog, and then I could die and be no more. But I’ve got to die and rise to judgment. I wish I were a dog. And God didn’t change him into a dog, but he kept conviction on his soul and he went on praying.

So, one time he said, all right, God, you said that if I’d confess, you’d forgive me and I’m going to stand on that promise. And if I sink down to hell, I’ll sink on a promise. You can’t go to hell on a promise, brother. It doesn’t go down. That’s all. It goes the other way.

So, John Bunyan became the great John Bunyan by the grace of God because he couldn’t die on a promise. He couldn’t perish on a promise. The great German silk weaver wrote, Thou hidden love of God, whose height, whose depth unfathomed no man knows. I see from far thy beauteous light, inly I sigh for thy repose. My heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee.

Do you tonight catch glimpses of the beauteous love of God, hidden to the world, but there so beautiful? And is there something in you that’s like a pain? He says, O God, O God, I am pained, and I never can be anything else but pained until it find, my heart finds rest in thee. Thy secret voice invites me still, the sweetness of thy yoke to prove. And fain I would, but though my will seem fixed, yet wide my passion drove. Yet hindrances strew all the way, I aim at thee yet go astray.

Does that describe you? You hear the secret voice inviting you still. And you want to, but you can’t. And you seem to want to, but yet your passions rove like a stray dog. Hindrances are all the way along. You aim to do right, and yet you go astray. Each moment draw from earth away my heart that lowly waits thy call. Speak to my inmost soul and say, I am thy love, thy God, thy all. To feel thy power, to hear thy voice, to taste thy love be all my choice.

Would you say that tonight? Would you ask Him to draw your heart from earth away and let you hear that call as you wait lowly before Him? Speak to your inmost soul and tell you once more, I am your love, I am your God, I am your all? Would you do it? Would you want to do it? Do you? Will you do it?

O Love of God, so strong, so tender. It’s the voice of God’s love that I hear tonight entreating me and entreating you. Let’s not trample on it. You can’t, can you?

Do you find it morally possible to turn on such love and say, God, I don’t care. I’ve got sins out there I’ve got to go do. I have my iniquities planned and I’m going to go do them. You can’t, can you? Surely not. Over the voice of God’s love that entreats you, that mighty love that’s equal to God Himself entreating you home, back to the Father’s house, back to the cross, back to the fountain that was opened.

Will you come? Will you come? Will you half-saved Christians tonight? Come. Oh, your heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee. You’ll never find rest, Christian, half-saved Christian, worldly Christian. You’ll never find rest till you find it in God’s heart.

Won’t you come this evening? Voices that entreat us. And this voice of God’s love is the first and the loudest. And all the others, though real, grow out of this great voice of God’s love. Let us pray.

Father, we feel so deeply tonight and so keenly thy wonderful love for us. We feel as if we’d like to go down and stand in a seat and then get up and walk down the aisle and say, I do. Here I come, Lord. Thou art my love, my God, my all. As though we would like to feel as though we were coming all over again.

But, Lord, we’re already here, so we can’t come where we’ve already been. But, oh, we pray Thee for the lost. We pray Thee for the half-saved. Pray Thee for the confused and the puzzled and the bewildered and the wandering. O Love of God, so rich, so free, so measureless, so strong.

We beseech Thee that Thou would give ears to our hearers tonight, that they may hear that Voice and follow until at last they find Thee, their everything, their all. And old things pass away and all becomes new, and sins go down under the washings of the blood. And everything becomes new in Christ Jesus.

Grant it, Father, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

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“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.

Tags Attibutes, God's Love