The Doctrine of Christ

The Doctrine of Christ THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST
By C. M. Pullias The Doctrine of Christ is a very profound subject. It is a very specific one. There is nothing that can be substituted for it. The church of which we spoke last night, that had its birthday in Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, had for its charter members the apostles. From the second chapter of Acts we learned that that church continued “steadfastly” in the apostles” doctrine. Friends, that is the panacea for all our ills. That is the balm for all our aches. That is the tonic for our souls, and whenever the church wanders from it, it shall sink, it shall come to an end. It can live upon nothing else, and therefore has no right to have anything whatever to do with any other doctrine than the doctrine of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I have marveled at the success that attended that church, in the city of Jerusalem, and seemingly without education in the main, without money to any great extent, and yet they moved out, and in less than forty years they had carried the doctrine of Jesus Christ all over the civilized world. They never had an aeroplane, they had not the telephone nor a telegraph— they had no radio, they had no steam rail carsj nor electric cars, nor steamships to ply the waters. They went on foot, and yet, in that age, traveled that way and covered the civilized world in less than forty years, until Paul wrote, “That every creature under heaven has heard the gospel.” Yes, their sound went unto all the earth and their words unto the end of the world. It has been a problem in these times—and which we will discuss—as to how we can reach the masses, and there is a constant cry going up, “If you will give us as many as a hundred thousand dollars, why, then we will crown Christ Lord of All,” then “we will take the world for Christ.” They had no money and they could not rely upon their earthly success. Neither can we.

I have read with interest Acts of Apostles, that short oratorical book of twenty-eight chapters, and I have noted with care that they relied solely and only upon the Word of God for success. I know that Peter had the power to take Tabitha by the hand and command her to rise, and she did. I know that they could raise the dead and open the eyes of the blind and otherwise perform miracles, but everywhere you read the story of their labors; their success turned upon their preaching, upon their teaching—the Apostles’ Doctrine was their theme. They continued in it, they abode in it, they stayed in it, one day with another. They never used it as a bee uses its hive, to run in and out of, in fair and foul weather. They got on the inside of it, they stayed in it, they remained in it, and never one time did they depart from it; and therefore we hear the gospel of Christ going into every home, and into every place, until, “There is not a creature,” said Paul, “under heaven, but has heard the doctrine.” But now, I want to point out this fact to you, that we are mistaken. We think if we had a fine church building, and if we had automobiles, and various mod-ern facilities, and aids and helps, and organizations, and we have about organized it until we choke it to death. What men and women need to learn tonight is what the apostles’ doctrine is, to pick it up, to get in it, to preach every day, everywhere, to pick it up, to get in it, to preach it every day, everywhere, to everybody, and stop at that.

I read in the third chapter of Acts of Apostles: To show you the financial standing of this remarkable little church in their very beginning, when Peter and John were going into the temple, to the house of prayer, and a man who was crippled in his feet, had never walked a step in his life, above forty years of age, reached out his bony fingers for an aim of Peter and John; and Peter said, “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

Brethren, I want to tell you the principle in that: God does not want us to give anything that we do not have—but just such as I have I give it to you, and if the church here, as anyone else, would give just such as it has, why, then they would move on to higher ground, and would soon sweep the earth from ocean to ocean and from pole to pole. But just let me supplement that just a minute. There are lots of people in the church today who do not have anything, because they are not economical, because they are not thrifty, because they do not save; they spend it for chewing gum and tobacco and candy and Coca Cola', and everything, and the result is they have nothing left for the Lord.

I want to tell you that God will hold us accountable for not having anything, but he will not hold us ac-countable for not doing something we are not able to do, “What I have I will give you, that is all.” In my years of experience as a preacher I have learned that men are mighty liberal with what they don't have, “If I had so and so I would do so and so,” and I have my misgivings and my doubts, because what they have they do not use in harmony with what they would do if they had so and so. There is a reason for this. It is universally agreed, without reference to religious tenets and dogmas, that God must be with man to accomplish in this world, and that God must be with the church, or else it can never succeed. I believe it might be well to say that little Joseph, after twenty-two years of absence from home, came out the hero in the case, when he was the Prime Minister of the richest land m all the world. The Bible says they sold him into envy, in Egypt, but God was with him. What can man do without God- - nothing, nothing, and that system of education, or any other thing you might mention, that drives God out of the heart, and out of the home, and out of the lives of men and women, is a failure. Men and women cannot succeed without God. And if God be for us, who can be against us? The. question rings out from every page of Holy Writ, and tonight, my friends, I tell you if God is not with us in Abilene, we cannot do anything—we had just as well fold our tent and go home.

I read this encouraging; statement: “Great is He who is in you, even he who is in the worid." If we can have God to live this week with us, and feed us, and fight our battles for us, and deliver us from evil, that long; shall we succeed: but when we depart from God then we can go no further. There is a reason—I offer this suggestion, and I am stepping now upon ground that is common to all religions. It is an acknowledged proposition, one that is received univer-sally, that God must be with men. I read, when Paul was at his first trial, “And all men forsook him,” and from the magnanimity of his soul, thrust him into prison, and he prayed God not to lay it to their charge, “notwithstanding God stood with me.”

I read about the time that Christ sat about the table, and delivered that wonderful lesson, in John 14, 15, 16, and then concluded with that remarkable prayer, John 17. And when the matter had gone into the late hours of the night, and when one of the disciples said, “Lord, how is it that you have manifested yourself to us and not to the world?” He said, “The world does not love me—you love me, and therefore I will come to you, and I will take up my abode with you, and my Father will come to you and take up his abode,” and lest they failed to get his meaning, he said, “He that hath my commandments and keep- eth them is he that loves me”; so then that church that does not abide in the commandments of God and keep his commandments is not regarded in that passage as loving God. But let me read you another passage from the second Letter of the Beloved John, beginning with verse 9: “Whosoever transgresseth and abideth not in the doctrine of God." The man that transgresses, the man that goes beyond the doctrine of Christ, has not God—And therefore that early church, that first church, continued steadfastly in the-apostles’ doctrine. To the extent then that any church departs from that—to that extent then it ceases to be a church of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is, however, a succession. We succeed then only through the word of the seed, and the word of God is the seed. Outside of that, independent of that, there is no succession, and whenever we depart from the doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ our chain of succession is broken and beyond repair—we never return to it.

There are so many people in the world that do not like doctrinal sermons. I have'been told a number of times, by certain preachers, that “I don’t like to hear him preach, because he preaches doctrinal sermons,” and to be frank with you tonight I would be ashamed of myself if I did not. I don’t know how you think of it. But I am not going to try to find out. It looks like that we might just point out a few lessons to you: First, this—that the idea is, if a man believes a thing, that faith will save him; but he ought to remember that the power to save a man is not in the act of believing, it is in what he believes. That is the reason Paul preached the word; that is why that church continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine. The power to save is what a man believes. If it is not, then I may not believe rightly. The Bible says if he does not believe in God he shall be damned.

There is that established rule of faith, and the Bible says, “We must contend earnestly for the faith.”

I was asked once to participate in a meeting, and they wanted me to take my turn in the little town in which I lived, and they wanted me to agree not to preach anything doctrinal. I said, “Well, I will not do that, but I will agree not to preach anything except that which I can read out of the Bible without comment; but I would not preach for any house, or any meeting, or any church, or any congregation beneath the canopy of heaven that would not let me preach what the Bible teaches. I told those parties that day that the Bible said every scripture inspired of God is doctrinal and just as long- as God permitted me to live and this poor stammering mouth of mine was allowed to speak, I expected to use at least one passage of the scripture in every sermon I preached, and I could not, therefore, make any such agreement.

I wonder if it would not be well to give a quotation or two to show you how the Bible speaks of it: “Teach thou the things which become the sound doctrine.”

I have heard some doctrinal preachers make a joke and suggest certain things about the Bible. “It does not look to me like there is anything grave about it.” A thing of gravity, thing of sincerity—that is the way the books says it, and showing therefore no corruptness.” That is the way the Bible states it. “In all gravity. Just look yonder at that open grave, and they are standing by it with hearts so light that they are not touched by its darkness. Just think of such a one .as that—and here preaching the word of God and the doctrine of Christ, or any part of it; and that gravity that does not cause us to be serious and sincere and thoughtful.

Paul, talking to Titus, said this: He said, in talking about elders: “You select elders who are sound in the faith and abide by sound doctrine, to convince the gainsayers.” Yes, I suggest to you further—that he said to the young preacher then. He said: “Take heed to yourselves.” And that is a mighty fine set of words, and I believe if we would clean up about our back doors and brush the cobwebs from our brains and purify our lives, then we might go out with effect and tell the story of Jesus Christ; but as long as we go out and preach one thing and look to another, it looks like to me that kind of thing will fail. He said, “Take heed to yourselves and to the doctrine, for it wil save you and them that hear you.” That is the way he said it.

Yet, my friends we don't like doctrinal sermons. Suppose we were to reach a righteous version, we would not have that word “Doctrinal.” It has got a rasping sound to it. No, there are certain religious institutions on earth that won’t allow men to preach a doctrinal sermon except occasionally—and 365 days out of the year, if I get it, is what the Bible says.

Now, listen friends, the inspired apostle came again and said: “Mark them that are causing divisions and occasions for stumbling, contrary to the doctrine which you have learned and avoid them, for they that are such serve not the Lord . . . and by their fair and smooth speech they beguile the hearts of the innocent.” Writing to that part of the church—the Philippian church, he said: “There are many who walk.” “I say to you, as I did before, they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose God is their belly, who mind earthly things.” And yet they failed to catch the significance of that.

Suppose a man comes here with another doctrine that is different from the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ? What are you going to do with him—what relation are you going to bear to him? What would you say to him; will you take him into your arms and warm him into your lives, until he has planted the seed of corruptness, until it will ooze out everywhere, and the body of the Lord Jesus Christ is split into a thousand pieces, by the factions and schisms about what the Bible contained, or did not contain, and say that the reason is that we can’t understand the Bible alike, that it is subterfuge and deceptive? That is not true that we can’t understand the Bible alike. If we understand it at all we understand it alike. The first book I ever studied was the old blue-back speller. I wore that book out. I went through it from the fly-leaf until I learned my A B C’s—just as I did the Bible here. They can’t understand the Bible alike. Yes, incompatibility, it finally reaches that, and yet the same thing in the Bible. These letters we learned—they were formed into words of monosylables, and then into words of two syllables, until we got to words of five or six syllables. It is the same proposition. I studied grammar once, and it gave a rule like this: It said: “a sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought,” whether it is in the Bible or in the Almanac. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is in the Bible or not, we just know there is a sentence.

“Father, from whence did these things come.” Where did this book come from? Where did this denomination come from? Where did this doctrine arise, something that was not put in the book? I read a little story one time, in the “Life of Christ,” a little parable: “They sowed the seed of the destruction of man and when the fruit came there were the tares and they said “must or must not we sow good seeds in the fields; from whence then.." And he went on to say that, “After they slept the Devil sowed the tares in the wheat,” and they didn’t know the difference in the tares and the wheat until the fruit came.” Do you get the idea? You would have to make the very finest professional diagnosis to tell the difference in the tares and the wheat, but it was not done. Now, can you tell the difference in the gympsom weed and the wheat in the field, or the cockle burrs; but when it came to this question, it was so near like the wheat that they didn’t see any harm or any difference in it, and it bore fruit after a while.

You hear people say: “I don’t see any difference to amount to anything.” Well, maybe not. “I don’t see any harm in it.” Well, maybe not. The reason is because some do not use their eyes. The Bible tells us “that all men are blind.” That man who exercises himself, has read and studied upon it, until it is like the tree watered from the well —until it is fruit for themselves. Of course we are not expecting him to see anything, because he is blind, but the man who has studied it and learned and understands it, and believes it and obeys it, puts it into practical use, with his eyes open —he is not near-sighted, he is not blind, and he can see the difference in the tares and the wheat. But just let us turn our attention back to another thought here: That they not only continued in the Apostles’ Doctrine, but they continued “steadfastly” in the Apostles’ Doctrine. “Steadfastly,” that is the way the Bible puts it. To continue in a thing is to get in it and remain in it and never get out of it, and to continue steadfastly in it. That word “steadfastly” has a synonym in the Holy Scriptures, and that is “patience,” and we have the idea that a man must be patient. The basis of that is and by that we mean in modern parlance, that the one-plus treatment is square, and I am not alarmed or agitated—I don’t care if corn is one dollar a grain and I have neither corn nor money—and I need “patience.” I tell you you must have steadfastness, get in there and stay there—when the sun does not shine, when you are sick and when you are well; and that might help some of the Sunday morning headaches you have. Lots of our folks where I am from have Sunday morning headaches, and get up about eleven o’clock or afterwards, but the man who can’t serve God, is too busy—he is in and out, he will not do it. But I quote: “They continued steadfastly.” And there was somebody once said, “To stand to the rack, fodder, or no fodder.”

I know lots of brethren that will stand all right, as long as everything is all right, until a shadow falls, and then they quit—there are lots of them. And that kind of religion is not worth the snap of a finger, when there is no persecution when everybody looks alike to them. They stood there day in and day out, steadfastly to the Apostles’ Doctrine, and when the storm of perse-cution broke in upon them, some of them were beaten, some were murdered, but they still stand and take their medicine. Yes, indeed, that is what we want—that is what we mean that the church in those days stood steadfastly for it. They succeeded because God was with those thf^t stood in his teaching, that believed in it, those that remember it and love and obey him. God is with them fighting their battles for them. And if he is with us who can be against us? But when we come to think about that just a little bit more, we have this kind of an idea: “Brethren, be steadfast bountiful in the 'work of the Lord. Inasmuch as you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain”

“Temperance,” “Patience,” that is the same word, But I want to say another thing to you, and that is this: That when you read about the Doctrine of the Apostles, there, is never an “s” put to it. You know the “s” means plural, but when you read about the Doctrine of God, or the Doctrine of Christ, or the Holy Spirit, there is not one in the Bible.

Sometimes you hear a brother talking about the teachings of Christ. The Bible don’t talk that way about it, and since the Bible never says “teachings,” or “doctrines,” we had better never say it either. Just let us learn about the things in the Bible, and if it rs impossible for us to do that, then perhaps we had better look closer and see if there is not something that the Bible does not contain. But the word does occur in the plural in the Bible, for the apostle says: “If you be dead with Christ of the world; where.....
Now, there is where you have your “doctrines,” that is where they' all came from. One body, one spirit, one faith, one God. one Doctrme—the Doctrine of the Apostles—the word of Jesus Christ; and therefore when you read the doctrines of men you have the plural. How many do you suppose there are? I do not know. I never expect to take the time to enum erate them. I don’t care anything about it. I would just as soon have the doctime of old Balaam, or the doctrine of Nicholas, or old. But we cannot live without the Doctrine of Christ.

I tell you that the religion that comes from men and originates from man we run down and trace it, but that which came from the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, we cannot live upon anything else except the gospel of Christ—the Doctrine of Paul, from the first letter—because Christ is the author of your faith, that is, He is the living God.

Doctrines of men. You hear folks talking about my doctrine, and your doctrine. Well, I haven’t any. When I was younger I might not have seen it as I do now, but now I want to tell you that I haven’t any, and I would be ashamed if I had, in my present mind, but I am trying to present to you the Doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ, just holding up that one point and magnifying it and dweling on it; because, I will tell you, when you live in the church of Christ, corruption ceases to be, and the only way the church of Christ can ever be revived and marched out with triumphant zeal against the doctrines of men, is to trace the Doctrine of the Living Christ—to get in it, to stay in it and be in it, day in and day out.

Let me state this to you: God came to Christ, and Christ came to the apostles, and the Holy Spirit came unto the apostles, who gave it to the world, and there-fore. it is called the Doctrine of the apostles, and therefore if God gave it to Christ, it is the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, (but not “Doctrines.”) There is a marked difference; but there is another time when that word is used in the plural. Reading in the New Testament Paul said: “Go and doctrines of devils.” Do you know, my friends, that the devil will find out what you want to do? And it is strange to me that the smartest men on earth will tell us what we want to do; that we do not appreciate a man who has not courage enough and backbone enough, to stand up and tell us before our teeth that there are things we will have to do or die. We will get mad at him.

Paul said, “Am I your enemy because I tell you the truth?” Like old Nathan, when he came to David with adultery—the breaking up of the home, the foulest crime that could be committed, and old Nathan pointed his finger in his face and said, “Thou art the man.”
To think of the man or woman that will tell us of our sins, because our only hope of redemption is just here. Wouldn’t it be fine, then, to just turn everything loose except that. Satan will teach you anything and never complain of anything you undertake except the Bible.

Doctrines of men—Doctrines of devils; but the Doc-trine of God, the Doctrine of the apostles, the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit—one thing, just one thing. From whence, then, did the tares come? Here is the trouble: There has a seed been planted. Then how is that? It is what they have been taught. Then here comes someone with something that is not in the Bible. That is the thing that divided the people, that /formed the party; that is the thing that severed the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then they pick up this blessed old Book, and therefore insult God, and dishonor thinking people by translating the original language.

If it became necessary that I translate again the original language, I would have suspicions to start with. Who made this Bible—“God;” who made the revised Bible—the best scholars in the world, and here am I. I don’t know anything about Greek. I may know the first word in the Greek alphabet, and then I have got the Doctrine, and have to come here and retranslate it from Alpha to Omega. Why? I have got a doctrine to sustain and support, and the English Bible doesn’t do it. I have mighty little confidence in this sort of thing. And do you suppose that God would go to all this pains, and trouble, and expense, of giving his word to the world and not give it in the language that they understand and know? And some little fellow, with a head about as big as a cocoanut, coming along and translating it. Yes, he has got to retranslate it. Now, what do you think about that? But just get the idea that here is the church of Jesus Christ, that the book tells us that Christ is the husband and the church the wife; in the 5th chapter of Ephesians it says; “We are bone of his bone, we are flesh of his flesh.” And the husband is the head of the wife. And so Christ is the head of the church, and as the wife must be in subjection to her husband, so must the church be in subjection to Christ. Of course he was not telling you about multiplism—he was talking about the rule they must maintain in force whether men abided by it or not. But here comes now the church, producing an organ-ization, but giving rise to a party born of Jesus Christ, and he had nothing to do with it. I don’t wonder then that I read in the Bible about adultery, and about fornication; that I read about whoredom, that I read about Pilus—not from a physical standpoint altogether, but universally, all through the Bible, almost —the spiritual relationship all around us—the church of Christ. Men crop in and teach things, and the first thing you know here’s a party in the church, and Jesus had nothing to do with it.

You will allow me to speak plainly. This is my first opportunity to preach to the people in this wonderful city.and it may be my last one; but friends you must allow me to speak freely. Suppose a man and his wife are in your town, and that woman should give birth to an offspring with which her husband had nothing to do? What would you think of it? There is your story, your relationship; there is what the Bible says about it; and one of. the churches to which Jesus wrote in Revelations warned him against that woman, Jezebel and he called him before he finished this doctrine.

There are various institutions and various societies and various organizations in this world, that never came from the doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ, and here is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ coquetting with those things. Old Balaam’s doctrine, the doctrine of compromise. God said to his people: “You shall not be numbered with the nations—you must be a separate nation, therefore you must maintain your separate nation from the nations of the world. And old Balaam went over to curse his own people, but God would not let him do it—but he told Balaam to get some of the women, some of the best, that could come as quick as possible, and invite them over, and they did, and they were soon marrying one another and mixing together, and the Lord took a hand in it, and twenty- four of them died, and the Book calls it fornication.

Oh, yes, the book tells them of the doctrine of Balaam, and the church says: “We have to do so and so and mix up with so and so.” In that event, let the church of Christ stand over here and the others over there. There are not but two things to it—one is the church of God and the other is the other side. The conquest is to fight over it, not for a day, but for a year, and I decided long ago, as a member of the church of Jesus Christ, and I expect to give everything I have, my bones, muscles, my time and money, to the ad-vancement of the obligation and the proposition of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. I haven’t time for anything else.

I just' wonder how that might apply in these modern times or church here,—the body of the Lord Jesus Christ going out with somebody else. That thing of adultery is received in our journals— it is published everywhere, but people in the time of Christ practiced it a long time. No, not a woman’s fi-delity to her husband or her faithfulness. Do you re-member when we stood there, and I said, with all my heart, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God”—We took him in our hands and said we would be loyal and faithful unto death, and “I know that my Lord will never leave nor forsake me, but I am constantly in dread of this evil world, lest I be lured, lest I be tempted to go astray.” “He gave himself to me, he went to the Cross and carried my sins there. First, he came down and gave me consent, and he was so tender and so sacred, “and it hurts my heart to see the recklessness and the infidelity and unfaithfulness between married people today, because, if for no other reason, it is threatening the home and the church and society; but it is a thrust at the Lord Jesus Christ, who took the sacred relation that exists between him and his? You can’t do it, my friends, you must abide in the Apostles’ doctrine.

I want to point out just another thing or two, because we do not want to speak too long here: We are two thousand years this side of the apostles. We mention what history is doing—since the day Jesus stood yonder, on the heights and delivered that sermon on that memorable day. The stream of flood and time has borne us on, until we are nearly two thousand years removed. We are far away in the deep-tangled wildwood, in the theological brush, and T want to ask what are we to do? You hear people say, “What am I to do”? Look at this man—here’s another, a scholar, smart, and here’s another, and yet he says, “What will I do”? I’ll tell you what to do— pay no attention to either of them. Go back yonder and sit down at the feet of the apostles and get your lesson again. Get your Jacob-staff, get your level and find your beginning, and undertake to run that line there, and if you lose it again, go back and get on the old trail and try it over. It does not matter how good a surveyor a man is, how well equipped, or about the accuracy of his instruments, unless he can find the beginning corner he can do nothing. Going out here to find a tract of land, unless he can find a beginning, what account is a compass or a Jacob-staff, or his ability to calculate every mile and acre, and the width and length of it? Not a bit on earth. Let’s go back yonder to the beginning, where we ought to go. Let’s there make our start in the established corner of the city of Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, and when we come down the stream so far, all entangled in the wilderness, and have lost our way, let us go back yonder where we know the ground and start all over again. What do you say about that?

Christ said once, “We are all as sheep, going astray.” You can take a pig and carry him away from home, before his eyes are open, and turn him loose, and he will go home; but you take a lamb.away from its mother, just a few yards away, and it cannot go back; put it on a flat rock and it will starve to death out there. But let Jesus take us by the hand and lead us out of it. I tell you, my friends, pay no attention to what men say about it. Go back and see what Peter tells you, and John, and James, inspired of Him who knew whereof he spoke.

Away back in the wilderness a man is lost, and we go looking about for him and find a knot on a tree. There has been a scar there. The old surveyor went and ran this line, one hundred years ago he did that, and that is just as good as any. Do you reckon anybody would pay a dollar on that? Why, an old woodpecker might have peocked on that tree; an old Indian might have scalped it with his tomahawk, before our forefathers ever saw this country. And yet you will take a guess at it, and you would not put a dime of your good money in it; and yet you lose, but your money is not worth anything.

Let me illustrate a little more: Here’s a stream, with a spring, that comes down out of the mountain, two miles, approximately, back yonder is where that stream comes out of the mountain, over the pebbled course, and the water at the source is as pure as moult- en silver, but it has come down through the fields, and the filth, and the surplus water has been flowing off in it, and stock drinking out of it, and every man or boy or girl that could get a bathing suit has been bathing in it and a man in the woods is thirsty—would he stick his axe in a stump and put his head down and drink out of it? Why, he would not do it? It would have turtles in it, and snakes in it, and wiggletails in it. It is absolutely unfit to drink, his health would become impaired by it. And I know that woodmen get mighty thirsty. You can put me to work and I will get thirsty mighty quick.

I have been out on a hunting and fishing trip, but I could never understand the psychology of it. Do you reckon that a woodman would drink that filthy and muddy water? No, he would stick his axe in that stump and go back up yonder and drink out of that spring from the hill, out of the mountainside, before it is contaminated. And here am I, two thousand years this side of the apostles, with all the filth that is creeping in, the doctrines of men, and the Bible, and yet I have to have something to drink and I will stick my nose in and drink. No, no—my soul is worth too much to me to do it, whether it is to anyone else or not; therefore I will turn away, I will reject' it and go back yonder and sit down by the apostles and let them tell me the story. It is not a reformation, it is a restoration—going back to the apostles of the Lord, with Jesus Christ, telling sinners what to do, to do what they told them to do, teaching the churches to do what they told the churches to do. There’s your safety, your tonic, there’s your life, there’s your soul-saver.

Wouldn’t it be great for you to go back there and get that lesson, the apostles’ doctrine.

I want to tell you just a little story before I am done, not to make it laughable, but because it illustrates what I want: Over in the hills of Tennessee there was a man who was said to have a herd of hogs, who had lost his voice, but he had taught' those hogs to come there to their feed, by taking an ear of corn and knocking on the railing, and they soon learned their dinner bell, and every time he knocked they would come to their feed. One day there were two men passing through the woods. One of them was a stranger and the other was familiar with the situation. The stranger saw those hogs and they had pricked their ears and were running as hard as they could go—some this way, and some yonder and some another way, and he said, “Wait, what in the world is the matter with those hogs? And the other man replied, “Why, the man wtio feeds them has lost his voice, he cannot call the hogs, and therefore he has taught them, by knocking on a rail with an ear of corn, to come to their feed, and therefore every time a woodpecker lights on an old snag and goes to pecking, they run to him.” And you know today, my friends, the world is afflicted with theological woodpeckers, just knocking on those old snags, and here they go helter skelter, for him to feed them. Do you think that is in keeping with the Bible? Listen to me: “Ye go hence and... just to and fro and carried about with every doctrine, by the craft of men and their cunningness, whereby they lie in wait to receive you.

You let a man come into your community, and he thinks he has what everybody should have—He ought to have his head examined. Oh, yes, he has a subject, and nobody has ever heard that subject and everybody talks about it, and “I am the originator of it.” Well, a man ought to be examined when he feels that he is the first one that ever had it. And therefore I am not ashamed to talk to you about that which is old. There is nothing in the New Testament that is too new to drag into the pulpit, or that is -n the Bible that is too old. There is our feed, there is our ice cream, there in our water—there in our meat and drink, to the end that it is not everyone that speaks to me. “Oh, Lord, let me enter in the kingdom of heaven."

Read Acts of Apostles and find out what a sinner must do, what shall the church do? Read those letters and find out the apostles’ doctrines. You may not care much for it, friends, tonight,—In health, in sunshine, with the flowers blooming all around but there will be a day when it will be different, when the shadows will fall on your home, and in your hearts sometime—when there will be a bunch of crepe at the front door to tell the observers of the mysterious passing of him; there will be a mortal bier, pallid lips, a heart that stopped beating, passed into that..... hieroglyphics that mortals cannot fancy: Involuntarily you will turn to the Bible, and there find its sweet consolation and comfort. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. He rest'oreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art With me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” May God bless you and keep you under the shadow of his wing—he wants to do it—will you not let him do it.