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“The Valley of Dry Bones”

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The Valley of Dry Bones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 13, 1958

Quite a number of years ago, I got a sermon on the Valley of Dry Bones, an evangelistic sermon, and I preached it around over the country. I wouldn’t re-preach it here, but more recently I have been reading through Ezekiel, very carefully reading, and I saw a new thing in this chapter which doesn’t touch my previous sermon any, but it’s something different. I want to bring it to you tonight, and I particularly want to bring it, at the beginning of this missionary convention, to you, to the people of this church.

Let’s look at it together. Suppose you turn to Ezekiel 37 and suppose that we just read that together. Then if the sermon doesn’t turn out to be anything, at least we’ll have gotten the Word. Ezekiel 37, verses 1 to 10, don’t read beyond ten, and you come to that, and they stood on their feet an exceeding great army. There’s where we close.

The hand of the Lord, everybody, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of a valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about, and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and behold, they were very dry, and he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered and said, O Lord God, thou knowest.

Again, he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus said the Lord God unto these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So, I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone, and when I beheld, O the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, and there was no breath in them.

Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, Son of man, and say to the wind, thus said the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these things, that they may live. So, I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, and exceeding great army.

Father, we pray that Thou will take this old story and make it live in us today. Use it as a lever. Use it, we pray Thee, as a trumpet call. Use it as a signal light, we beseech Thee that we here, may tonight, get in communication with the same Spirit who uttered these words and caused them to be written. Breathe indeed, O Breath, upon us, for Christ’s sake, amen.

Now, the only fair thing to say would be that this prophecy is yet to be fulfilled. The restoration and salvation of Israel as a nation is yet in God’s agenda. He will yet bring it to pass. But its spiritual principles apply universally.

This is what so many of our brethren don’t see, that while a prophecy may have fulfillment somewhere historically yet out ahead, and while it may be pinpointed for accuracy as the prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ’s life were, the principles that underlie any prophecy apply anywhere, so with the Old Testament teachings. That is why Jesus, our Lord, and the Apostles did not hesitate freely to use the Old Testament in their teaching in the New.

Though they used prophecy and passages which the sharp-eyed expositor would say doesn’t belong to us, they used them freely. Apparently, they didn’t know they didn’t belong to us. They saw something that these expositors don’t see. They saw that God is the same God whatever dispensation he’s in, or whatever dispensation we’re in, and that whatever is a spiritual truth anywhere is always a spiritual truth anywhere.

Therefore, Christ and the apostles could, quote I say, freely from the prophecies of the Old Testament, or from Job, or from Proverbs, or from the Pentateuch, and applying it to the present kingdom of God, the church of Christ now, without in any wise apologizing, because they saw spiritual principles underlying.

Now, let’s look at this valley of dry bones. I went over it the other day on my knees, literally on my knees, and I had several versions propped around me, and I went from one to the other trying to see this picture again, and in seeing it I saw some things I hadn’t seen before. We’re all familiar with it. It was a kind of vision or a picture in the Spirit, for the man of God says, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones.

Now, I submit that that passage, being carried out in the Spirit of the Lord, makes this very difficult to find out whether this actually was a fact, a historic fact, or whether it was a vision, whether he was seeing something that would be. But, whichever, it doesn’t make any difference because this is God speaking and putting it before us is a kind of object lesson. And what he saw there was a valley. A valley, obviously a dry valley, and it was filled with bones. The bones must have been rather toward the center of the valley because the prophet was told to walk around them. He walked around them as Nehemiah once walked around Jerusalem.

God always wants his people to walk around the thing and look it over. I have been told, don’t pay any attention to circumstances. If you do, you don’t have faith. Just look at God. And I have had people pray and then say, Now, don’t pay any attention to symptoms. Just look to God. But God always wants us to take in the facts. God believes in a certain realism, and I do. I feel that until we have informed ourselves, our inspiration is very likely to be no more than emotion.

But when we have informed ourselves, have walked around Jerusalem and seen its tragic condition, or walked around the bones there in the valley, and to a Jew that was a terrible thing. And he walked around these bones, when the Bible says it’s almost comical if it was not in a very serious setting. And behold, they were very dry. That means, of course, that they were not the hard bone with the animal matter still in them.

But you’ve seen bones, no doubt. If you’re a countryman or have ever been much in the country, you’ve run onto bones that have been there so long that all the animal matter had gone out of it. Nothing was left but calcium and some other minerals that make up bones, and they’d all become porous. You’ve seen it, all porous. You used to see the skull of a beast lying, and we boys would kick it around, pick it up, light almost as a feather, and porous, so completely dry, that the only way to describe it is, behold, they were very dry.

And God said to the man, Ezekiel, can these bones live? Now, never in the experience of the man Ezekiel had there ever been a bone live. And of course, the answer would be no, but Ezekiel was a man of God. He had seen heaven opened, and he had seen the glory of God, and he had had the hand of the Lord laid on him until he felt it. And he had heard the word of the Lord whispering to him so clearly that he got every word of it. And Ezekiel, therefore, was, so to speak, not going to be caught unawares. So, he didn’t reply.

You remember when Jesus was on earth, He used to ask questions. And after His disciples had been with Him a while, at least if I’d been with Him a while, I’m sure I’d caught on that when the Lord was going to open up some new vest of truth, He turned and quietly asked a question. And He wanted to see who could get it, who was alert and awake there, ready to hear. He’d turn and say, Peter. And Peter would blunder out an answer, sometimes right, mostly wrong.

And this man of God was too spiritual a man, too sighted a man, to answer yes or no. If he’d answered yes, it would have been presumption. If he’d answered no, it would have been unbelief. So, he simply said, I’ll hand thee answer the question back. O Lord God, thou knowest.

Well, God said, thank you, Ezekiel. That warms my heart. Now I’ll tell you what to do. You begin to preach. In the beginning was the Word. Begin to preach. He upholds all things by the word of His power. He sent His Word and healed them. And when God speaks, there’s life and creative power in that word. So, he said, Ezekiel, you preach. And Ezekiel began to preach the Word of the Lord. And as he preached, there was a great rattling, and lo, bone came to his bone.

Now the difficulty before, you see, had been that they had lain there so long that the beasts had eaten everything off of them. And then the rodents had finished what the big beasts had left. And then the ants and the bugs had eaten what the little rodents missed. And then the microbes had rotted away what the insects had missed. And then they had been tugged and pulled by the jackals and lions. They’d been tugged and pulled till the bone was not to its bone. They were all mixed up.

And I used to preach about that as a picture of a sinner. And I think it is a pretty good picture of a sinner. It’s a picture of some churches. Bone isn’t to his bone. Everything’s confusion. We’re all mixed up. Big bone here, fastened to a little bone. And they don’t match. But when the word of God began to sound, bone came to his bone.

Now it’s hard to keep from thinking of this humorously because it was an odd and a strange sight. But all the little bones went where the little people were. And all the big ones where the big people were. And everybody got back to where he’d originally been.

And then that wasn’t enough. There they were. There they were, lying dry. Bones where bones belong. But they were still dry and dead. And the man of God went on preaching. And as he preached, he saw flesh begin to build up over those bones. Then skin began to pull up over the flesh. And he went on preaching and said, O Breath, breathe on these. It took the Holy Spirit to finish the work. And when the Holy Spirit had breathed on it, theologically sound, that’s getting your bones together. That’s theology.

And you know my friends, I can’t resist saying, though that’s not part of this sermon, that’s part of the other one. But I can’t resist saying that that’s the trouble with a lot of our churches that we’ve got our bones together and we spend a lifetime keeping our bones in the right places. theological bones, that is. We’re theologically sound. Bone gets to its bone. And we have men who spend a lifetime matching bones. And seeing that this text belongs with this text and this marginal reference here belongs here. And they write books and write hot magazine articles and all the rest. Getting bone to his bone.

But you know you can have a church that’s got its bones all right. And its bone is on bone and everything is all right. And God himself couldn’t improve it as far as its theology is concerned. And yet it can be just as dead as a graveyard. And it was. But slowly the flesh built up. But that wasn’t enough. They were lying there still dead.

And God said, oh, you preach a little more now. Preach a little deeper life this time now. Preach, O Breath of God, come and breathe. And when the Holy Ghost came and breathed on their theology and breathed on their organization then they stood up a great army and began to march.

Now that’s the principle. There it lies. That’s good anywhere. Old Testament, New Testament anywhere that’s good. Just as good in Vietnam. Just as good in India as it is in Chicago, around the world, the way God works. But I want you to know, here note; hear what God commanded Ezekiel to do, and this is really the sermon. What God commanded Ezekiel to do. He commanded Ezekiel to do an unusual thing, but that’s not enough. And then He commanded him to do an absurd thing and then commanded him to do an impossible thing. And these three things, these three adjectives, unusual, absurd, and impossible that lay before the man Ezekiel.

And here we are coming into our 36th missionary convention. And there’s no use to hide behind and say let’s not talk about it. We’ll talk up a depression. We won’t talk up any depression. We will just say that we’re having a recession. And we will also say that this church has undergone some tremendous blows in the last two years such as we never dreamed could happen to us in losses. Nobody got mad and walked out but they moved out. Moved away.

And when I see them, they run and grab me as if I was their long-lost cousin but they’re gone. This town or that town or somewhere else and we lost them by the scores. Somebody says well that church is in a mess of dry bones over there. It could be. But I’ve got a cure for it and I’m going to lay it before you tonight and I’m going to challenge you if you’re still challengeable. Now if you aren’t challengeable, I’d like to have you come around one at a time shake my hand and tell me so because I won’t waste my time on people that aren’t challengeable. But he said do the unusual thing.

Now mostly, God’s work follows a common pattern. You can get on to the way God works pretty well, usually you can, because God being God and God having a nature that dictates His, to use an awful word. I don’t like methodology, his methods of doing things. God is very likely to do two things in the same way and a third thing the same way he did the two. God’s work usually, is usual, if you know what I mean. But unusual conditions require unusual acts and Ezekiel faced the unusual.

Here was a valley full of human bones and they’d been lying there unblessed and unburied and un-coffined and unhealed. And they’d been lying there so long that they were so dead that, and so mixed up, literally mixed up, bone on bone, all mixed up, churned by the passing of time. It looked hopeless and yet God commanded this man Ezekiel after seeing if he was His man. If Ezekiel had flunked God’s test when God said, Ezekiel, can these bones live, that was his test.

You may be getting a test this week. I hope you don’t flunk it. God doesn’t say, now, next week, we’ll have a test and here’s what we’ll cover. God just slips in and gives a test as He did to Abraham and many another one, and they don’t know they’re being tested. Some of you may be tested this week by some little word one of these missionaries will say or some paragraph some sentence uttered by Dr. Alan Fleece. It’ll be your test. I only hope you’re alert and awake. I only hope that you won’t be asleep at the time, or mentally in a state of suspension.

So, this was an unusual thing and now it’s a great weakness on the part of religious people that we get used to the usual and we accept it as all-inclusive, and we expect God whenever He does anything to do it the way we had seen Him do it before.

I was talking to that great English evangelist Stephen Olford in New York City last week; we had lunch together. And he said, you know the trouble with us evangelists is, he took himself in on it, he said, we try to transplant a work of God from one country to another. He said it’s been done this way in Korea. It’s been done this way in England. It’s been done this way in Ireland Then they come from Ireland or England, and they try to superinduce that same kind of revival in America and it rarely works. I’ve never known it to work.

He’s one of England’s greatest evangelists and yet he admits, he said there’s no use. We were discussing a great Irish preacher that Thomas here could tell stories about him as I can and as most everybody can that ever heard of him, Brother Nicholson. He was the great evangelist in Ireland. But in this country, things didn’t go so well. You can’t enter an unusual situation and do the usual thing, and yet, we expect God always to work the usual way, and we reject whatever varies from it.

Now, this is one of the afflictions of advancing years. This is one of the afflictions of a society that starts to get old. The Christian Missionary Alliance is now an old society. We’re up in the 80s. Now, I learned in New York at the board meeting last week that we have to have 20 replacements, 20 new missionaries each year to hold our own. The reason for that is that our missionary society is old enough now so, that retirements and deaths and illnesses are so many that it averages out 20 a year. Just to keep our own, we’d have to send out 21 missionaries every year if we were going to even increase one a year. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. People do get old. Missionaries get old. They get old and have to come home because they’re sick and weary or else they just downright die.

Now, that doesn’t happen to a young society for the first 25 years of a missionary society, scarcely anybody dies unless they die as they did in our African fields of malaria. They don’t die or retire because they’re very young like a ball club. Some ball clubs I’ve been reading; I never attend the games, but sometimes I’ll read the sports page, and they say, well, Brooklyn is old. Brooklyn won’t make it because they’ve got too many old men on the team, and by old men they mean men your age, not 45 and 6, and they don’t mean old fellas like me. They mean fellas in their 30s, middle 30s. And they say they’re old.

Well, my brethren, a missionary society can do the same thing. It can get old and begin to die and retire. And churches can do the same. This church is about 36 about 38 years old now, and that means we’ve literally buried a generation of our people, literally buried a generation of our people, and we who are left of the older generation, that’s those of you whose silver hair or grey or white hair, I mean black hair has turned to silver. You’ve gotten used to things being done a certain way, and that you have equated with the Bible; and Dr. Simpson and John Wesley and everybody to a point where to vary from that is to be unbiblical and unspiritual.

Now that can become a dangerous thing. Churches die that way, my brother. Churches die that way. That’s why it’s always good to keep putting young blood into a church, getting young people in positions; getting people who see from a different angle. We tend to go to church and sit down and look at the same, from the same direction.

Now there’s some of you that have never occupied a different seat in the last 15 years. You sit in the same part of the church except on those rare occasions when your seat has been taken. Some of you have never seen the left side of my face yet. You sit on the right side, and you have come, you have come to feel that that’s the religious thing to do, and you have equated that with spirituality and New Testament doctrine.

Well, that’s what we call getting in a rut, and you know what a rut is, brother, it’s a circular grave. It is a grave in which you walk around until you beat it down until finally you can’t see over. And when you can’t see over, they usually retire. But it’s too we don’t retire before we get so far down in. That’s our problem now, rejecting what is not usual and fearing the unusual.  And yet, here was God calling a man to do that which positively was not usual. The usual thing to do would be to bury those old bones, but the Holy Ghost had another plan. He wanted to resuscitate them, resurrect them, put flesh on them, skin on them, breathe in them, and have them start all over again, when the devil thought he had them.

Then the second thing was getting worse all the way. It was absurd there’s no question about it. This was an absurd thing, and yet I learned from reading church history that oftentimes God causes men to do things that seem ridiculous, they just don’t check, you know. We have rules in every society and church. We have rules in the Alliance that they’ve got to be a certain age and have a certain number of children. If you have more than a certain number of children, you can’t go. But I’m glad we still have spirituality enough to wink and break our rules when they get in our way.

We did it last week. Here was a fine young couple. They were going to one of our fields; they were all set to go. She was brilliant and he was just bordering on something unusual. We were going to send them; they had two babies and then they got a letter up at headquarters and said there’s another one on the way. What are we going to do? Does this mean that we won’t get to the field. Does this mean now that we’re sunk? And those men had enough spirituality to break the rules and appoint them to the field with three kids.

Now that looked absurd, I know. It does to send folks out there with a family so big that the mother has little else to do but to look after them. But I believe God was in that instance. It’s the same with age. We had an age, thirty years, and nobody goes out over thirty. It’s strange how we do, twist and wiggle calendars when people get up around. We want them on the field and God has honored it. The absurd thing: send anybody beyond thirty to a mission field looks ridiculous because after you’ve talked English for thirty years, your tongue is so Englishized and Americanized that it’s pretty hard to get it twisted around any other language. Yet, some of our greatest missionaries have gone out there when they were above thirty. We break our rules and thank God we still have spirituality enough to do absurd things now.

And then I remember some years ago, a woman applied to the Alliance to get out on the field, and they turned her down. She’s too old. I think she was forty some at the time. They always said, we can’t send old people to the field. And they supplied around here and there. Nobody wanted her, so she went anyhow. I forget that woman’s name. She went down to South America. Brother Thomas no doubt knows who that was, but she went down to South America. And though she was what would be called, middle aged, she got that language. And when I knew her, she was quite an old lady. And she’d had twenty or some years down there of wonderful fruitful service.

It’s absurd to send anybody to a mission field after a certain age, but sometimes the Holy Ghost says to some man, can these bones live. And if you’re a Bible student you tell God. But you know, if you’re a theologian, you tell God off right there, yes or no. You can tell, you know where the text is.

But if you’re a prophet you’ll listen and wait for God to tell you. And Ezekiel was a prophet, so he didn’t try to pin God down to the King James Version. He said O Lord God, you know I don’t know about these bones. You’ve been around longer than I have, God, the Heart from eternity, Thou knowest. And God says, yes, they can live if you will work with me, preach. So, sometimes God does absurd things.

I mentioned this morning about that man fifty-five or six years old that had a bad heart and diabetes, and his friend said, retire. And he said, I’ll retire. And he put on four more wheels and more and more tires and went on. That was Jaffrey.

And you will find God doing these things right along, absurd things. But what is an absurdity? It is that which doesn’t fit in with our pattern of thinking. But God says the gospel itself is absurd. He says the gospel itself is foolishness unto men. And all these modern intellectuals that are trying to show how reasonable the gospel is don’t know what the gospel is. The gospel is one of the most unreasonable things in the world, and yet in God, from God’s standpoint, it’s perfectly reasonable, but seen from our fallen world it’s an unreasonable thing. And those wise intellectual Greeks, they laughed at it. They said it’s foolishness. And the Jews with the theologians, stumbled over it, but Christ said it’s the power of God and the wisdom of God to them that believe. There’s nothing absurd about it but just looks that way.

Now, here we are 36 years, we’ve been around here. I have not been, but this church has been, and we’ve gone through the ringer. Somebody says, all right now, what are we going to do? We’re going to do unusual things this year, and we’re even going to do absurd things, and things that the world will look at us and say what a bunch of fools those alliance people are. That’s the best news I could possibly hear then, the impossible.

Now this was impossible, medical science; no science of any sort, anywhere, could ever have gotten those bones back on their feet. And the greater the work and the nearer to being impossible, the more pleasure God has in doing it apparently. The history of the church is replete with impossibilities, literally replete with impossibilities, God simply fills His history with impossibilities, because you know, ultimately the work of God is creative. Here was nothing. Here was nothing and God spake and there was something. And then here was darkness upon the face of the deep, and a voice said, let there be light, and instantly there was light possible. But there was light impossible.

There was light, and here was a maiden. They don’t know how old; some say fourteen or fifteen. I would judge she’d be older. I would think that the little Mary was older. I’d say she’s nineteen maybe. And she was there praying, looking up to her heavenly father and a voice said, Mary, don’t be afraid. I’ve come to tell you something you’re going to have a son, and she was shocked. She said, oh no, oh no, impossible. This is impossible. And God said in effect, don’t say it’s impossible. Behold, the Holy One, the Mighty One, the Spirit, trust God.

So, Jesus was born, and Elizabeth so old, and God appeared to her and appeared to the old man first, that you’re going to have a son. He said, how will I know these things are so? What a stupid thing to say for a creature, but that’s what he said, how will I know these things are so. And Gabriel leaned back on his dignity and said, I am Gabriel, why should you be asking me how can it be? You’ll be struck dumb until the baby is born and never opened his mouth again until the baby was born. And they named him when they said, what are we going to name him? He opened his mouth and said, John, and everybody said he’s seen a vision. And this is God.

Well, the whole Bible is full of impossibilities and God is the God of impossibilities. But I want to point out something else to you here. It is that on the part of Ezekiel, God can do the unusual and the absurd and the impossible, but on the part of Ezekiel, there had to be clear hearing and deep humility and raw courage and great faith. Now there’s a sermon if anybody wants it. You can have it. It’s not copyrighted.

But on the part of Ezekiel there had to be clear hearing When you’re expecting to hear a thing you don’t have to have such good hearing, if you’re expecting to hear it. Your decibel count can be very low, and you’ll still hear it, because you’re expecting to hear it. But when you’re not expecting to hear a thing, it takes a pretty sharp ear to get it. And Ezekiel had that kind of ear. He’d been in the presence of God and seen God lifted up and had heard God speak until his ears were tuned to hear God’s voice. And he had to know it was God’s voice and not some other voice, because there are all kinds of voices Paul said in the world. It had to be clear hearing and there had to be deep humility.

I’ve been struck as I read the Old Testament, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. I’ve been reading it devotionally again and going through it and I’ve got this. I go through my Bible that way all the time. But this time, I’ve been through Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and it’s amazed me how God has humbled most of his servants. He’s made them do things that look kind of ridiculous. And this was that ridiculous thing.

Now, if He had placed before Ezekiel a great congregation of men and said, Ezekiel, preach the Word to them, that would have been proper. Nobody would have been humbled. It would have been alright. But He took him before these bones and said, Ezekiel, preach. The bones there, wasn’t even an ear there. The ears had been chewed off long ago, dried away. And it took a lot of humility on the part of this man of God to do something that that was just plain silly, but he did it. And when he did it, God took over. It takes clear hearing and then deep humility to obey God.

Think of Elijah when God said to him, go down by the creek Cherith, and he preached and said there will be no rain. And God said go down by the creek and I’ll give you water from the creek. And pretty soon, the water began to dry up. Elijah had preached himself out of water for he had said there will be no rain, and the creek had to have rain to keep going. And the thing had to keep going to give water to the prophet and here was the prophet. What a confusion he was in. He wouldn’t have passed if he’d had to make a report to the Superintendent. It would have been a pretty bad report.

Why he would have said, excuse me, Mr. Superintendent, but this is an awful report. I said there would be no rain and God said you drink water, and now I have no water. And when he went down the last time and saw a red lizard sunning himself, for where the water had been, he looked up to Him and said, God, what about this? God said, Elijah, you’re too big. I’m trying to make you little, to use you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. And this Elijah took his humbling, and then later on here this great, bony mountaineer from the heights of mountains, God said to him, go over to a certain village and a widow woman will feed thee.

Now, some people don’t mind living off a widow woman, but brother, you get out among the country people, and you won’t find them wanting to live off a widow woman. And I’m sure Elijah being the kind of man he was, was deeply humbled by having to go and ask for a crust from a widow woman. God made him do it. He made him do it.

I’ve always been so independent about financial things that rather than take a dime too much, I’d toss it back with a red face at a fellow. But you know, before I die, God may have to make me swallow all that. It could be I’ll be out with my hat and my wife. I don’t know, but I do know that God wants to take all of the pride out of you and he took it all out of the man Ezekiel.

Then he had to have a lot of raw courage. It doesn’t take very much courage to do what everybody’s doing. You know, a lot of these preachers and evangelists go around over the country, and they have learned the public pulse. They know how to approach the public. They just know about how much they’ll get in a given place. And they say they’re living by faith, and they’re not living by faith at all. They’re living by expectation based upon knowledge. That’s what it is literally. A fellow says, oh, I have no salary. I trust the Lord, but he takes his offerings when he goes to a town. He calls the right people.

When I go into a town, I wouldn’t call a soul, because I’ve got too much pride. But these brethren, they don’t. And so, they go in and they call somebody, and they say it’s faith. It’s not faith if I come back into Chicago, if I were to leave here and come back and call up Chase. And he’d come to the airport to get me take me out for five-dollar dinner, that wouldn’t be faith. That would be crust. And a lot of people, a lot of preachers just live on sheer crust. They’ve got no pride, just crust.

But it takes an awful lot of courage to do things when there’s no example and nobody around you can count on. You know, a preacher can beat his Bible till he breaks the binding declaring that he’s trusting God, amen, all the time. He’s got it figured out. He knows how much he’ll get, about how much, if it doesn’t rain of course. If it rains it ruins the offering, but he’ll make that up the next time. And we’ve figured out the public, and we run according to what we know the public will do, and then we call that faith. It’s not faith. I say it’s expectation based upon observation.

But Ezekiel hadn’t anything to observe. Nobody had ever done this before. Here was a man, talk about original. This fellow had to be original, because nobody else had ever been there before, except rats. And it took raw courage, I tell you, to do what God told him to do, without a single example or a friend or anybody anywhere. It took great faith. He had to expect an awful lot of God. No religious tricks would work here, you know. We learn religious tricks. I won’t use them. If I know that I’m using them, I won’t use them. But I see them everywhere.

People use religious tricks, you know, just how to lower their voice at the right moment, just what to say, just when to introduce a certain story. It’s worked before and of course it’ll work here but there weren’t any religious tricks among those bones there was nothing you could do; no psychology, no positive thinking, no calling in the mayor to make the opening speech. That’s the way we do now. We call in the mayor to make the opening speech, and then the chairman gets up and says the mayor sends his regrets that he was not able to be here, but he sent so-and-so. And then some alderman makes the speech and we’ve seen that happen so often.

But nobody could work any gag like that here. It was either God or complete defeat for a man to stand up there and practice preaching a sermon to a pile of bones without a precedent, without a friend, without anybody even to say, amen. Nobody to help him there. He stood preaching to bones. That took raw courage, and he had to depend on God an awful lot. Listen to me, in the beginning of a missionary society or denomination, the leaders are thrown back upon God by the hostility of the public and by the fact that they’ve had a spiritual experience. And the public throws them back on God then, when they go on and get organized and get going according to the rules of the game and get their little black books of regulations.

Then instead of turning to God, they turn to gimmicks. It’s happened in every denomination. You say, is it happening in the Alliance? Don’t look at me. Of course it is. I used to call a night of prayer and get through to God, and now we turn to gimmicks here and there. Ezekiel hadn’t a gimmick, not one. Nothing would work there; psychology, how can you work psychology on a bone?

Psychology, by the very definition of the term, has to have the mind and soul. There’s no soul there, no mind there, no place for a mind—bones. But the text I used the last two Sunday nights I preached here was the text, but wisdom is justified of her children, and I can use it again. Here all this looked ridiculous, and all this was a humbling of a great man, but it was justified in the outcome. Lo, they stood up on their feet, a great army.

Now, what I want to know tonight is, are you hearing anything? Have you been hearing anything, or must I make the application? Ezekiel is speaking to us here in this church now. Out of the past, Ezekiel is alive again speaking to us out of the past. Or better, the God of Ezekiel is speaking to us out of the eternal present and is saying, I’m the God of Ezekiel. I’m the God of Elijah. I’m the God of Daniel. I’m the God of the impossible. I’m the God of miracles.

Now, are we going to sit down and nurse our wound? Lick them, and each look at the other and shake a mournful head or are we going to look to God and go ahead. I believe we’re going to go ahead. And I call you, I call you to go ahead. I don’t mean I’m preaching to bones; I well know better. But I’m saying there are principles here that apply to this church, this thirty-sixth anniversary, thirty-sixth convention and we ought to apply it. As soon as you hear somebody say oh but wait.

But you say, wait a minute, the Lord God of Ezekiel is here. The Lord God of Ezekiel and there never was a bone so dry that the breath of the Holy Ghost won’t wake it up. And there never was a life so empty that the Holy Ghost can’t fill it. And there never was a life so impure that the Holy Ghost can’t cleanse it. And there never was a church that fought tough enough, that if they stuck together and prayed and obeyed God, God wouldn’t bring them out to victory. And He’ll do it for us. Not only this convention, but for the future that lies just before us.

So, let’s not worry. Let’s make our pledges. Let’s plunge in. Let’s do the absurd thing. Let’s do the impossible thing. For God Almighty specializes in impossibilities, and who are we but the children of God. And if we’re indwelt by the mighty Christ who commanded the waves to be still and the winds to be silent, He’ll carry us through. And if anybody tries to put a purple wreath around your neck, you toss that wreath away and say, I’m not wearing graveyard wreaths. I’m believing God and that the God who started us here 37 or so years ago, hasn’t left us yet, and He’s with us and we’re going forward, not back. Amen?

All right I want to ask our district superintendent who carries this work on his heart along with all other, to come down here. We’re going to stand. I’m going to ask our brother Thomas to lead us in prayer and to pray that God will so fill us with hope and faith and courage and expectation, that we’ll stand up and march, a great army.

Let us stand.

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“God’s Word Manifested Through Preaching“

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“God’s Word Manifested Through Preaching”

February 9, 1958

The book of Titus, the book of Titus, Titus 1. I been reading just from the introduction, really, Paul. Paul, he says he is a servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ. Then he refers to the faith of God’s elect and the truth which leads to godliness, and the hope of eternal life which God that cannot lie promised before the world began and made known in time. Promised in eternity and made known in time and has manifested His word now. This will be the message for the morning.

A little prepositional phrase tagged on here, it could have ended, but hath in due times manifested His Word, and put a period there and ended it, but he didn’t. He added “through preaching” and then explained that this preaching was committed to Him according to the commandment of God, our Savior. So, I want to talk a little bit about this. And have prayed and hoped that it will be helpful to us all. These two great truths we dealt with last week that the plan of God to redeem mankind was rocked out in eternity. It was planned in eternity and worked out in time and delivered in time, but was made manifest, that is, proclaimed, declared in due time, then through preaching.

Now, I don’t think in all my years I ever felt the weight of a thing quite like this, those two words before–through preaching. And I thought of the condescension of God that He should use these words at all, that they should be here, that there should be any reason for their being here. How remarkably sure of Himself God must be, to entrust such a perfect plan to such an imperfect medium. This perfect plan, the plan of God drawn up between the persons of the Godhead before the world was; a perfect plan to recover man from his lost condition, to reclaim him after his fall, to reinstate him after his disgraceful expulsion, and to give him eternal life, and at last, immortality.

This was not an easy thing, the laws of God being what they are, and God being who He is, and His nature being what it is. This was not an easy thing, but it was more involved here than things political. Things involved here were moral, and they had to do with the structure of the universe. They had to do with the very foundations upon which rests the heavens and the earth and all things visible and invisible, and to work out a plan to lay its blueprints, and then build according to those blueprints, and then unveil the structure. It took God to do it. It took God to do it and God did it; and He did it in a manner infinitely perfect and excellent as might be expected of God. Infinitely perfect and excellent beyond all the power of language to describe. That’s the perfection of the plan. And now he makes this known, wonder of wonders, he makes this known through preaching, one of the most imperfect of mediums.

Why is preaching imperfect? Because language is involved. And wherever language is involved, there’s imperfection; always there must be imperfection for the simple reason that language is fluid, it changes. Language tends to localize itself and mean in one place what it does to a particular word, and mean in one place, what it does not mean in another. I mean in one locality. And even the nations that use the same language, use different words to mean the same thing. As for instance, such a simple thing as you get into an elevator in America and into a lift in England. You ask the conductor if this is the right train in America, and you ask a guard in England I understand. That’s a simple illustration only. And it doesn’t affect anything very profound, but language does become profound and highly significant, tremendously so when it deals with religion and the soul of man.

And this perfect, infinitely excellent plan of God was entrusted to the imperfect medium of preaching. Preaching which uses language I say, which the speaker himself may not always understand fully, and which the hearer may not understand fully. And which the hearer having been brought up in one area or locality, may mean by a word one thing and here may mean another. And so, they make no contact. They fail to do what they say now, communicate. And then, because of the many languages all over the world, our missionaries tell us rather heartbreaking as well as humorous stories of their effort to get ideas across, efforts that simply cannot be gotten across.

I remember when my older brother was in China when he was a young fellow. He came back and told us smilingly about how he’d gone into a department store and asked to buy a cow when what he wanted was some garment or other, what a sailor might want, a handkerchief maybe. But he had had a wrong inflection, or wrong tone, and so what he asked for in a dry goods store was a cow. And that’s only one of the 1000s of changes and odd angles and facets of meaning. It is not only between languages, but within languages.

And so He committed the eternal hope of mankind for recovery and reclamation and reinstatement and eternal life and immortality. He committed it to the imperfect medium of preaching. And it’s imperfect because language is involved. And it’s imperfect because preachers are involved. And preachers are men and hence faulty and defective. Paul recognized this in 1 Corinthians 1:21 when he said it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

Paul knew very well that for one man to stand up on a raised platform and address other men and talk about things he couldn’t see and refer to historical incidents which there was no proof for and to offer gifts which he could not, you could not weigh nor measure and to talk about the unseen things and demand they be seen, and unheard things, and insist they ought to be heard. He knew this was a foolish thing to do. And yet he said it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. And while we do not underrate the printed Word, we say that God hath said here in 1 Corinthians 1:21, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save people, and in Titus 1:2 that in due time He manifested His plan through preaching.

Well, what a noble army they have been. I have a great big book on the history of preaching which I have lent to brother Milton Moore. And now I’m almost sorry I did because thinking over this, I’d like to have checked just this thought over again. The great men who’ve stood up in the earth with all their imperfection using an imperfect, fluid medium such as language. They have moved generations and changed the course of history. Think of the man Noah way back there before the flood, who for a long, long time, probably the longest pastorate any man ever held, 120 years while the ark was in preparation.

This man was a preacher of righteousness. Where he got his text I don’t know. Whether he read it or whether he memorized it or whether it was extemporary, I don’t know. I don’t know what type of preacher he was, but I know that he was a preacher of righteousness. And certainly, this old man of God back there before the flood, you say he didn’t win many, and not many were saved, no, but what he did was this. No, he didn’t win many back there, but he did deliver his soul and delivered God Almighty from any remote shred of accountability for those who heard him. If there is such a thing you know as God sending a man to a place and say, now, you go and preach to these people and don’t expect converts. You won’t get them. Don’t expect results. You won’t have them. But I want them to know a prophet has been among them. He told that to Ezekiel the man of God. Now there’s such a thing, Noah was that kind of preacher. And in hell today, in hell today, those anti-diluvian ones are deeper and more tragically, terribly and eternally responsible because Noah preached to them.

And then there’s the prophets, the old men of God, they were not students in pastor’s studies, these prophets of the Old Testament. They were mostly great, rough fellows who with the exception of one or two, a priest and another one a courtier, Isaiah. But mostly they were rough fellows that God had laid His hand on as He did on a Billy Nicholson or Billy Bray in later times. And they stood up and declared the Word and declared it roughly and coarsely and they struck out, and in their striking sometimes they hit posts, and they hit people that weren’t guilty, but they struck hard, these mighty prophets of God. And God loved their sermons, and He had given them the sermons to begin with, and then had them recorded so we have the prophets, major and minor, giving us the sermons that were preached. And how those sermons must have changed man. And yet God said, I raised my prophets up and sent them and stretched out My hands and you wouldn’t hear. And so, God delivered Himself and the prophets delivered themselves.

And we come to the New Testament and we see first of all, Jesus, a preacher, and we see those apostles who went about preaching, and those disciples in Acts 8:4, which says that because of the persecution that had arisen about Steven, they went everywhere preaching. I don’t know what kind of preaching it was, but it was effective. They went everywhere preaching that Christ had died, and now lives and is at the right hand of God. And then in post-biblical times, we have the great preachers down the years, the silver-tongued preachers. In later times, 12, 13, 14, 1500s we have Johannes Tauler, that great German orator who went about all over Germany preaching Jesus Christ and preparing the ground for the Reformation.

In Spain, a little later we have Molinas who went about preaching that you could get to know God yourself, that you could, that you could pray in your heart and God would hear you; that you didn’t have to pray through beads and forms and stated times, but anytime you lifted your heart to God through Jesus Christ, God would hear you. He later paid with his life for teaching such doctrines as that, because it made it tough for the priests. The hold the priests head on men was, that priest had to be around or you couldn’t pray, or you had to pray according to His prescription. But Molinas said God will prescribe for you son, go ahead and pray. So, the Spanish Inquisition put him in prison. Shortly afterward, he died and historians think he was poisoned, but nobody can prove it. The judgment day will reveal it. But, Molinas was a preacher known all over Spain, and now known all over the world.

And there was Richard Rolle, one of my friends. God, in His great mercy, allows such things to happen in heaven, and I am not so completely overcome with a sense of my own inferiority that I’ll be afraid to speak, I want to hunt up Richard Rolle. I want to hunt up the man who gave up his monastery and walked out of it, took a guitar bless you, a guitar, an instrument we kind of look down in our day, usually, I guess, because the way it’s been abused. But he took a guitar and went all over England preaching, preaching the love of God in Christ Jesus the Lord. And he said, if you let the love of God come into your heart, it’ll fill you with sweetness and fragrance and song. He went everywhere preaching. And I didn’t know until I looked it up recently, but I could have suspected it, that before he died he got in trouble, because he wrote himself a good stiff book in which he denied that the Pope had the authority he claimed he had. And he managed to die in his bed. But think of that preacher and what he did for England.

And later on when the preachers came to England after the Reformation, they found soil, pretty-well prepared. And there was Luther, we’ll skip Luther because everybody knows about him. And there was John Knox, that mighty Scotchman who preached with a burr, but who was such a frightful, such a terrible and terrifying preacher that Bloody Mary said she feared him, feared him worse than she feared the armies of Egypt. She feared his prayers, to say nothing of his sermons.

Yes, there’s been a lot of them. But they are the stars of the first magnitude. Think of the thousands of little stars that barely shine, that takes a whole Milky Way of them to make a little light, but they’re there and they’ve got some light. Thank God for every one of them. And I thank God for every one of them today in this city, big and little, poor and good that are standing up to declare the Word. For God has made His Word known through preaching. Now, that’s the condescension of God.

And then, think of the mighty obligation of the preacher. Think of the weighty, enormous, crushing obligation that rests upon a man who stands to declare the Truth, anywhere, at any time. Why? Two reasons. One is that he is the messenger of the Most High God and he comes clothed with the authority of the Most High God with a message from the Most High God. No secret document ever carried in any portfolio by any ambassador, top secret though it might be from one country to another, can even compare with the seriousness and weight of the message carried by the simplest, poorest preacher that stands today to preach to a little flock. And the future of millions of moral beings lies in the hand of the preacher. It always has. You say millions? Aren’t you getting a bit exaggerated? No. Suppose that a little unheard of Methodist preacher, say, up in Wisconsin that nobody will ever hear of but his own superintendent and hundreds of people who might hear him. Suppose he wins one man to God. Suppose that man wins another. And suppose then that man wins another. The next man wins two and somebody else wins three or ten. Multiply it and see how by multiplying it runs into hundreds of thousands.

Paul saved one, two to Christ, and the man, each of those two won two more and each of those two more, won two more. All you have to do is take a pencil and sit down and figure it out, you’ll see that the conversion of one person will run into hundreds of 1000s in the course of years.

So, the future of millions of moral beings lie in our hands, the hands of the man who stands up to preach the Word. The teacher who stands up before his class to declare the Word, that’s a form of preaching too. Don’t rule it out. It is a form of preaching. It’s giving the Word, teaching the word, instructing man, exhorting men; inspiring men and women and young people. If you could only know. I wonder if we will know. If you could only know who it was way back down there, what Swede or German or Scotsman or Englishman, or maybe even some other country we’re not thinking of now, that a man got up lazy one morning, head aching and said to himself, I don’t think I’ll pray today as much. I think I’ll kind of rest and so he puttered around the house, and before long the Spirit of God began to move him, and he said, I’ve got to pray. And he got on his knees and began to pray. And as he prayed, the light of God came to him. He went out that night maybe and preached, or the next Sunday, and somebody is a result of his hearing God’s voice and got converted. And the conversion of that person resulted in the conversion of one of your ancestors. And the conversion of that ancestor resulted in the conversion of one of your less-remote, and so down to you, and you now are a Christian, and your home Christian, because somebody back there didn’t fail God. Think of it.

But how can, how can preachers be what they are sometimes? I’ve said and I’ve gotten in trouble for saying, but I kind of thrive on it. I don’t mind it too much anymore. But I say that if a man is lazy, the best place in the world to indulge his talents is the ministry, because nobody checks up on him. He can sleep until noon. And if he gets a phone call at 10 o’clock, he can get up and try to sound alert. But, how can a man from whose head God has laid His hands ever be lazy when you consider the condescension of God; that He made His perfect plan, made through the imperfect medium of preaching. And with the mighty obligation that lies on the man of God, how can he be lazy? How can you be careless, and yet men are? How can he be cowardly? And how can it be covetous?

When George Fox came to England, he had one category for all ministers. He called them priests. And he had one place to put them, as far down in the pit as he could shove them; putting his hand on their bald head and push it. And I read his writings years ago, and I thought, oh, George has been rough on people. But George knew to whom he was speaking. He knew. He saw them. He saw them stand up drunk and had to have choirboys to hold them up so they could deliver their sermon. He saw how careless and utterly worldly they were, and how they cared for the pulpit, only as a man cares for a bench in a factory, as a means of making a living. So, I’m not going to be too hard on George. He may have pushed a fellow in the face that didn’t have it coming, but that was just an accident mostly. They had it coming.

Well, think how could a man be cowardly when he considers that God has given him the message to deliver however poor he might be and however few might hear him, he’s given a message. And when you think that message carries with it such tremendous obligation from God, how can a man be cowardly and back up and say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, and back out on his message, back out on the Truth. Now, if he is honestly wrong, he ought to apologize. The preacher is not above apology. And of course, as a Christian man he ought to apologize if he’s hurt anybody. But never be afraid.

And then, the covetous man. I don’t understand the covetous man, the man who allows the offer of the board, so much money, so long, determine whether he will preach or not. I don’t understand it, but how terrible it is. Listen to this, I want to read it to you.  Son of man, I’ve made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel. Therefore, hear the word of My mouth and give them warning from Me. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand. And again, send a man, when a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block for him, he shall die because thou hast not given him warning. He shall die in his sins, but his blood will I require at thine hand. Think how terrible this is. And yet, we can dare to think these holy thoughts and mingle them with money and popularity and what people think and what they’ll say.

Well then, next is the overwhelming responsibility of the hearer. The condescension of God that He should make His Word known through preaching and the mighty obligation that lays on the preacher; and the overwhelming responsibility it lays upon the hearer. What puts the hearer under such obligation? The source of the message for one thing. God said this, the Most High God, son of man, I said this, go tell them I said this, the God in whose hand you’re held, and the God out of whose hand you’ll tumble into hell, or in whose hand you’ll rise to heaven. Son of man, go tell them I saith. Think of this message itself, a message of the eternal deliverance with approaching death and judgment. This is the terrible, wonderful, glorious, all inspiring message which the simplest, humblest preacher; that he gets up and humbly gives a little interpretation of John 3:16. Maybe he’s never gone any further than that. Maybe that’s as far as he’s gone, but he does his best with the elementary things of the gospel. But he’s God’s man anyhow.  And it puts the preacher, he puts the hearer under obligation.

Remember one thing my brethren, nobody’s done with a sermon even when the benediction has been pronounced. Nobody. Nobody’s finished with a sermon when the preacher said, and now lastly, amen. Nobody. Nobody’s finished with the sermon. They here may sleep and some do. And they hear me scorn and some do. The hearer may resist, and some do and reject, and others do. But he will face his responsibility, certainly, surely, in that Great Day. He’ll face his responsibility. Do you realize you’re children of eternity? Do you realize that you’re not born to die once down here? You’re forever. You will rise again in heaven or hell, and you’ll face up to things.

I don’t know how they do it now; and if this doesn’t conform to what you younger men know about the services. Why, you’ll believe that I’m accurate anyhow, because I remember this very well. They did it with that first World War. They took young rookies in around 21. I think they didn’t take in at that time, take anybody in under 21. And the young men went in at 21 and I saw them. There they would come out of the woods, out of the factories, out of the coal mines, out of the offices.

I remember washing dishes alongside of a professor of chemistry and university. And I was, I don’t know what. But there he was, we were washing dishes together, he and I back and forth. Well, they took them, all sorts. And some of them of course, being Americans, when some sergeant told them what to do, they said, you and who else? America, you know, that’s American. And then they’d be taken in and they would say, now, line up here and they would all line up. And then an officer with some kind of affairs here on his shoulder to give it the punch, would stand up and read what they called the Articles of War.

The Articles of War, I don’t remember, I think I couldn’t recite a phrase of it, but what it meant in essence was this, your country is now at war with an enemy. And whatever you do from here on will be considered as having been done in time of war. And any crime you commit in the Army of the United States, under war conditions, is stepped up in its intensity and its degree of guilt and the punishment that much the greater, Articles of War. And when a young fellow who wasn’t used to being pushed around, fought back. They said, have you heard the Articles of War? If he said no, they said, all right, come on, they took him over and let him read the Articles of War. If he’d heard it, he went to the guardhouse. It depends on whether we have or haven’t heard.

So, there’s an awful lot that this illustrates. Let me read again from this same chapter. Listen to this. Yet, son of man, if thou warn the wicked, and he turns not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but thou hast delivered thy soul. He’s heard the Articles of War. He knows how serious it is now. He’s not an innocent Dani in the valley there stark naked. He’s now a man who’s been in some major illuminated. He knows how serious the charge of God is. And he shall die in his iniquity. And over here, nevertheless, if thou warn the righteous man, that the righteous sin not, and he doth not sin, he shall surely live because he’s warned. Also, thou hast delivered thy soul.

There you have the two sides of the same mighty coin. The preacher with his obligation to tell and the hearer with his obligation to hear. Think of the overwhelming responsibility of the hearer. Not the hearer of Billy Graham, or Paul Reese, or Robert G. Lee, or any of the great preachers, but the obligation to hear the simplest preacher that preaches today and Chicago United mission, or Pacific Garden, or any hall, storefront hall down the avenue. The simplest man who gets up under the anointing of God and dares to tell the whole truth, he lays an overwhelming obligation upon the hearer to do something about it.

So I say, God have mercy on us all. God have mercy on a preacher who fails. God have mercy on that son of man, that prophet called of God who thinks more of his home and his car and his salary and his comforts than he does of the souls of men. God have mercy on that cowardly man who edits out the offensive things out of the doctrine for fear some hierarchy will rebuke him or he’ll get a reputation for not being sound.

Any of you young men who are going to be preachers, let me tell, you can live down reputations that have killed some people if you’ll just want to do it. They’ll say first, you don’t believe in eternal security, therefore, it’s too bad for you. Later on, they’ll forget that. Or they won’t know whether you do or not. Or, they’ll say that you don’t believe in dispensationalism, and they’ll give you the cold shoulder for a while. And the Holy Ghost comes on you and you get blessed and you bless people and the people begin to demand you. And then those that are trying to stand in your way, they can’t stand in your way anymore. And so, they accept you, pat your back and say, well, I don’t see it quite with you, but okay. You don’t have to be afraid in America. Now, there are some places that I suppose it would be dangerous to stand for all the Truth, but certainly not in the United States. We’ve got enough of the blood of our Puritan ancestors in us yet and enough of the blood of the rebel in us that we don’t have to be afraid.

Well, God have mercy on us preachers, and the preachers who fail. I think of the time I’ve wasted and the time I’ve used wrongly. I’m not looking forward to the coming of Christ with as much hilarity as some people do. I’ve heard sermons preached by men cold as ice, but they were trying to show with what great joy they’d meet Him. I hope they do. But I don’t look forward to His coming personally with anything like assurance. When I consider as a man called of God when I was 17 years old, and I’ve had all these years and how much of it I’ve wasted. And what a poor wretch of a preacher I am compared with; what I could have been if I had obeyed God.

Son of man, says the Holy Ghost, I’ll require his blood at your hands. And then, God have mercy on the hearers who ignore, who take for granted, who like a skillful batter have learned to hit every offering the pitcher makes. They’re used to him now. They know every curve. And they can hit him every time. And after you have preached to people long enough, they either get right with God and get blessed, or else they learn all your curves. And they stand up there and bat them back to you. Nothing gets passed. God help such hearers who ignore, who toss every offering back to you and who refuse to be affected by it.

I can’t get over this statement I quoted the other day about my brother here who said some people won’t let you help them, this terrible thing. Some people just won’t let you help them and no matter who comes, they won’t let you help them. Son of Man preach to them. Either they will or they won’t, but whether they will or they won’t, you’re free. And if they will, then they’ll be delivered. If they won’t, then they shall die in their sin. How terrible, both for the man who speaks and the man who hears. God help us all. You teachers help us all. It’s more than standing up before a few squirming people. It’s holding holy things in our hands. And we’ll all have to give account in the day of Jesus Christ. God help us all. Amen.