In this sermon, the preacher discusses the existence of another world beyond what we can see. He emphasizes that many people choose to ignore or avoid thinking about this reality, but there will come a time when everyone will be confronted with it. The preacher then reflects on the power and beauty of hymns, particularly those written by poets like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, which he believes capture the essence of this other world. Finally, the preacher briefly mentions the passage from Isaiah 6, where the prophet sees the Lord sitting on His throne and the seraphim praising Him. The sermon encourages listeners to remember that there is a spiritual realm that is just as real, if not more so, than the physical world we inhabit.

Tonight I want to read the first four verses only of Isaiah 6. Here the king Uzziah died. I saw also the Lord sitting upon the throne. He rose high and lifted up. And his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphim. Some had six wings. With twain he covered his face. With twain he covered his feet. And with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another and said, Holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the Jews had the voice of him that cried. And the house was filled with smoke. Since tonight, we are not going to talk about Isaiah and his cleansing and his missionary call, but rather about these seraphim. I will not read any further than that. In this chapter, we look through an open window into another world we inhabit. We have become so used to this homey, plain, workaday world, we forget or are likely to forget that there is another world impinging upon this one. A world that is as real, more real, for it's lasting and eternal. More real than this world. And in this chapter and a few other places in the Bible, we look in on that world and we are forced to see and acknowledge that that world does exist. All the calamities that have ever been visited upon the world, without any doubt, are the human spirit to this world and its ways is the worst. The things, of material things, temporal things, things that are and then cease to be, that this has become a tyranny. No oriental monarch ever ruled his cowering nation with any more cruel tyranny than things, visible things, audible, tangible things, rule mankind. This, I say, is the worst calamity of all. That then, made in the image of God, coming from another world, as a kind of guest, to dwell a while in this world and then to go away. That that royal, from another world, should accept this temporal passing as its final home and gear itself down to it, judge itself by adopting its ways, collaborate with its inhabitants, and give itself up to the enjoyment. I repeat, that there never has been any world, ever visited any world as bad as this. That we who are made from many worlds should accept this one as our ultimate home. That we who are meant to commune with angels and archangels and seraphim and, of course, first of all, last and always with the God who made them all, that we should settle down here as a dove or wild eagle of the air coming to hatch in the barnyard with the common hens. This, I say, is the worst of anything that has ever been in the world. Now, the reality of that other world comes sometimes. I believe this. I keep repeating it because I think that in doing so, I am not only telling the truth, but I am close to you, or very close to my hearers wherever they might be. The reality of this invisible world compared to our world and real, this world of spirits, this world of angels and seraphim and cherubim, the reality of this world comes to us sometimes. Even in this century of noise and confusion, we still have times when alone we feel the essence of it. We know that it exists. Maybe it's only for a moment that we have such a feeling, only for a little time that it exists. But those times do come. Man was made in the image of God and is a fallen star, a fallen beast that has left his place in the celestial world and has plummeted down like a falling star and is all but forgotten the place from which he came. But that reality does come in upon us occasionally. It comes to us sometimes in the night season when we're all by ourselves. The devil does everything that is devilishly possible to keep us from ever getting by ourselves. He's invented what we glibly call means of communication, telegraph, radio, television. And the result of that is that we are rarely alone now. It seems that we have now made it possible for a man to stand on the other side of the world and speak in a well-modulated, low voice and be on this side of the world. And we preen our feathers like a powder pigeon and strut about saying, look what we have done, behold what we have created. But I think that history will probably reveal that when we invented the means of communication, making it possible for a bad singer to be heard on the other side of the earth, simply in a local place which he was mercifully confined to before, or when we made it possible for an evil-minded man to speak to the devil in pride, to step to a little machine like this and make himself heard around the world, I think we will reshuffle our conclusions in the day of Christ. And I'm quite certain that our feathers will come down and we'll, instead of strutting like the bantam rooster, we'll say, well, we made a great mistake. God made a man not very far, blocked at the most, and we sought out many inventions and made it possible for a man's voice to be heard. And now we can do devilment faster and further and bother more people and injure more nerves and harm more people and destroy blessed solitude more perfectly than we could in the old days when the best you could do was shout across the street. But the devil sees to it that we seldom get alone. But when a man really gets alone, he senses sometimes that this is it. He looks around at everything, but this isn't it. He says to himself now, I like it, and it's all right. And there are many arguments in favor of it, but there's something in me that tells me this isn't it. There's something else. We stand at the grave of some loved one whom we have just said, to whom we've just said, and we know that this isn't it. We know that there is some other world than the one we see. We see what's invisible, and the reality of that world breaks in upon us. Most people deal with it by abruptly and refusing to think about it at all. But one of these times, the reality of the other world will be present before every one of us. There will be a time when the terrifyingly sudden breaking off will take place, and then whether we're right or whether we're wrong, whether we're in or whether we're out of the kingdom, we'll know. There's a knowledge that's not faith anymore, but a knowledge that is reality, visible, tangible, audible. We'll know that there's another world beside the world in which the Christian is one who's dedicated himself to God to inhabit another world. And that's why we get called the names, we get called psalm singers. But I don't know anything nicer than to be called a psalm singer. I love the psalms now if I could just sing, and I would most happily go down the street and have men whisper behind their hand and say, look at that old bald-headed psalm singer going. It's a lovely thing to be. I can't think of anything better than to be called a psalm singer. I picked up a book the other day. I forget what it's called, one of those infinite numbers of anthologies of poetry that are abroad. This one was held by two of the Roosevelt, that is, two of the Theodore Roosevelt family. And I sat there and leafed them over a poem, some I remembered, some I hadn't seen before. And they were stirring and they were good, they were about this and that and this. And I read a while and I thought, now he's good, this poet's good, that's finely said, that's good, that's well said. And then I read the hymn book and I began to read the hymns. Hymns of Watts and Montgomery and Wesley and the rest of them. And I said, oh brother, these other fellows here in the first little anthology, they were good all right, but they didn't have it. This is it. This is it. When Wesley opens his mother's scripture into four rhyming lines, that's it. When Isaac Watts sits down and opens heaven and shows a dozen lines, God and the angels and the Holy Ghost and redemption and the blood of the Lamb and salvation, that's it. And I say to myself, these others there, they're just, they're just tinkerers. They hang around the edges. They're simply butterflies. But the writers of the psalms and the writers of the hymns, they had it. They were in touch with another world. They were in a solid, lasting world that is the kingdom. Now Isaiah saw that world. He said that it was the year that King Uzziah died that he had this vision. He wrote this, I suppose, many years later, by the fact that it was the year that King Uzziah died. Isaiah and Uzziah were relatives. Some say that. And Isaiah was quite familiar around the court of his cousin Uzziah. And he being a relative and having entree to the court of the king and being a genius and man and a poet in his own right with almost feminine refinement and a fright mind, he must have been a very popular figure around the court. And Uzziah, because he had nothing to be jealous about, jealous of his young friend and made a lot of him. And he leaned hard on the king. He was an idealist. Part of the sermon was, if God would forgive me, and you will, I'll say it anyway, that if you go through your Bible, you'll see young men hanging on older men. And then when the old fellow got the call home, why, the young fellow was apple plucked off the bough. He had nowhere to go. There was Joshua. He hung on to Moses. He clung to him. He was a parasitic, hanging on to Moses. And then one day, Moses suddenly left him and went away. And I suppose that Joshua was in despair. But God says, if he's dead, rise and go. And he found out that he didn't need Moses at all. And there was Elijah. There were Elijah and Elisha. Elisha was hanging on to the old man. Elijah clinging to him. And then suddenly, Elijah leaped into a firey cab and went off to glory. And the man, younger prophet, was without any help or now, no. And suddenly his faith rose and he said, where's the Lord God of Elijah? And he became a prophet in his own right. When you come to the New Testament, you will find young fellows hanging around the old apostles. And suddenly the old apostles were no more. And the young fellow had to get his... They tell us back in the Old Testament that when the mother eagle feels that the babies have feathered out enough and grown up and are able to go out on their own, she deals with them in her own way. Now, she doesn't read a book. She's tied on how to win friends and feather out your brood. She does what nature tells her and she just reaches down with those great claws of hers. She picks up the inside of the nest and throws it wide. And in the little tumble, they had wings and they'd been flapping them but they thought they were simply there for fun, to make a bit of noise. They didn't know what they were for but now they know what they're for. And they begin to flap madly. And I suppose that like an automobile where one wheel is stronger than the other and it runs crooked, I suppose that many of them will flap one wing more strongly than the other and finally they catch on. But they catch on the hard way. Mama doesn't touch them. She says to them, you're not your eagles. So she pulls the nest out from under them. And it's up to them then to fish for themselves or fly for themselves. No one of them has ever been killed I suppose since the history of the world began. Because the God who made eagles and told eagles to lay eggs and hatch them had to handle them. And when those two eaglets there in the nest were getting too testified and too much tied to their mothers feathers, she just pulls the nest out from under them. And so they flap and by the time they've landed somewhere or they can fly, bless you, and they look at each other and wink and say, they had it in them. But they did all right. They had it in them but they didn't know it. And so God sometimes has to pull the nest out of us. And the people that we thought were indispensable and that we simply had to have them, God pulls them out of some place. And here we are and for the first month or so we're, we're in, we can't be consoled, what's that word? Anyhow, we can't be consoled. And nobody can make us feel good. We feel that we have lost everything. We haven't lost anything, God is among us. So here was the young fellow Isaiah. God had a big job for him but Isaiah had been hanging on the, and one day God reached down and took Isaiah out of there. I hope he took him to heaven. He was a Jew and he had access to the things that would have prepared him when he went there. But anyway, he suddenly went out from under Isaiah. And Isaiah must have been, he must have been for one trembling moment terrified. How could he live? How could Israel hold together? How could the world stand? The king was dead. And Isaiah stood in tearless grief and looked down on the royal face. The royal lips drew any decrees. And the royal eyes did not stare terror into any of his subjects. And the royal hand was a scepter. And the royal head had no crown on it now. But he lay cold and pale and quiet. And all his kingly and royal parts had all disappeared. And they were just a dead man's clay. And if you dragged him out and laid him alongside of another dead man younger from the field who'd spent his time raising potatoes, a stranger that had never seen either one of them wouldn't know which was king and which was peasant. And Isaiah was beyond consolation. And then he did a wise thing. He did the thing I recommend every one of you do on your level. He raised them from the looking on a dead king. And he fastened them upon the living king of kings. And after that Isaiah was a new man. He looked upon this king of kings high and lifted up with his train filling the temple. And he had this wondrous vision. Now I think it is necessary right here that I should say a little word in favor of kings. I was born in the United States. I never knew what it was to say his majesty. I remember one time years ago I was up in Ottawa, Ontario. I hope I remember where I was because I'm leaving it. But there was a Dutchman up there, bald-headed Alliance missionary who had been in Africa for years but was back now. And he had gone to Canada and had taken one of the big Alliance churches there in Canada and was pastored Ottawa. There was a guest speaker. And my Pennsylvania Dutch friend who spoke like a hillbilly and bless him his dear and a wild one. And he rose with Canadian dignity. He prayed for the king and all his counselors. I don't like to laugh in church but it came close to it there. Imagine a Dutchman from the hills of Pennsylvania praying for the king and all his counselors. He did it all right but I'm not it would be strange to me if I were to go to Canada I'd pray for the queen god bless her good looking little heart. I'd pray for the queen because I belong to the republic that is a democratic republic republican democracy and keep very high here. And these are the days when kings are dime a dozen. You can buy a king almost anywhere. In New York I suppose you'd find lots of royal blood running elevators. Maybe there are some in Chicago. But tell us now we've got so democratic and so republican and we have so completely absorbed the notion that every man is equal to every other man. They're even telling us now that the whole king idea in the Bible is a carryover from the old feudal days and the old king days and that it hasn't any part in our time at all. But the idea of God sitting on a throne and rule is drawn from an ideology that is dead and defeated and gone with the wind. And so there is no idea of God being a sovereign king. But I'd like to say a little word here in favor of kings. I'm not in favor of any king that ever lived particularly, but in favor of the kingly idea. Well, here it is, my brethren. It is simply this, that under God a king is nothing in himself. He is a symbol of the dignity of the people. Now that's all. When God set the king over a nation, God doesn't elevate a man and richer or his brain any finer or his bones any stronger or his flesh any more firm. He simply takes him and anoints him and puts him over a nation to stand there in his weakness as a symbol of the whole nation and the freedom and prosperity and happiness of the people in his royal dignity. And any king that is worth a crown on his head would never feel restful on his throne to not know that his nation was a prosperous people. But the common man and woman, the common boy and girl on the sidewalk were a happy people. So it's not a bad idea at all. It is the dignity of the people with a crown on it for a little while. He dies and they put the crown on another. It remains the dignity, the symbol of the dignity of the people. And so when we elevate that to its level, we find that God does not hesitate to call himself a king. Jehovah's a great king, he says about himself. And he means simply that the prosperity and freedom and happiness of his creatures bring glory to God. And the glory of God as it's drawn from his kingly prerogative is in the prosperity and happiness and joy of his people. So that when God calls himself a king he is not, it doesn't mean that the Bible is a poor little narrow book yielding to an etiology. It means that there is a kingly thought, a kingly idea that the human race is noble. Apart from sin, God made it to be a noble thing. He draws his dignity from the nobility of his people. And so the nobility that belongs to the man with the crown is borrowed piece by piece from the subject over which he reigns. But it's just reversed when we come to the great king. All of his subjects throughout all of his dominions, from river to the ends of the earth, from star to star, from heavens deep, they draw their glory from the king himself. And God sitting upon his throne can only take that his people are a happy people and a free people and a prosperous people. And the freer we are, the prosperous we are. And the more spiritually elated we are, the more glorified God who is also the great king. Now, you will notice that in the king idea the people are free. I freely admit, lest someone think I don't know it or come to me afterward to set me straight, that because men have sinned, kings have rarely known how royal they were. They have rarely known it. They have liked to play with human heads as men play with balls down the alley like knocking pinpins. And that's the curse of the king idea because men have been sinful, but as God gave, it means the freedom and the prosperity and the happiness of a people symbolized by the man who wears the crown. Now, in the kingdom of God there's that. I want to make that plain for you. That in God's kingdom there is no conscript angel. There is nobody that God has summoned and says, they fought at the seventh gate there in the New Jerusalem. You will be traitor to your country or you will have broken the military law or whatnot. No, nobody ever there ever gets called there. You never see one angel saying, do not get your papers yet. What's your classification? God never, never drafts all God Almighty's world in the moral world. That is the kingdom that is ruled by him. There isn't one being doing anything to do. And in all God's wide domain there isn't an angel nor a seraphim nor an archangel, but he's happy to do him and wouldn't do anything else if he had it offered to him. The only creatures that there otherwise were the angels that sinned and the human race. And they got themselves into bondage. They wanted to be free and they became bound. And instead of freedom we got bondage. My dear friends, the will of God is freedom. The will of God is as broad as the air to the sparrow. The will of them boundless and shoreless as the ocean to the minnow. And it's only in the will of God that we find freedom. As soon as we leave the angels that sin or like the devil, we come down onto the level of bondage. And then we punch the clock in and out, shoulders and worry about the cops. Then we know that we can't do what we want to do and we're forced to do things that we That's what sin did to the human race. The seventh chapter of Romans is one long-grown, one long-grown ingestion of what it is not to be free. To be a man who wants to do good and can't. To be a man who doesn't want to do evil and yet is forced to do evil. Sin has brought us into bondage. But in the kingdom of God there is no bondage. There is complete freedom. We can make a case for the doctrine that you cannot have morality unless you have freedom. There is a good subtlety underneath this that you cannot have even the idea of morality unless you also have freedom. For justice is a human will. That human will can be neither good nor bad. That human will cannot do righteousness as long as it is coerced into it. It is driven through anything it's not doing it freely and therefore it is not doing it morally. I think the devil must have freedom. I don't want to raise any pity for him because I doubt whether he would return any pity to us. The devil is the devil. He has taken abandoned souls. And I do not find anywhere in the Bible where it ever says God loves him or ever did love him and I don't find anywhere where really. And the words of Jesus that tells us to love our enemies never told us to love the devil, never told us to pity the devil. And yet, and yet I can't help but wonder if the devil must not have some bad moments. Down here with handcuffs, that's his business. He has handcuffs and leg irons. And he likes to bind everybody and get them ready for hell. And then somebody, one turns to the Lord Jesus Christ and then he sets up his communistic propaganda and he shouts abroad, oh yes, you're free. You've gotten the change of religion on you. You've given up the freedom of the world and you've become one of these narrow Christians. You don't smoke and stink up a room anymore the way you used to do. And you don't cuss and swear the way you used to do. And you don't run around and raise the devil the way you used to do. You're not free anymore. It means that we don't have him anymore. We don't have his collar on our neck. We don't have his leg irons on our ankle. That's what it means. I think it must give him a bad time. And I think I can drum up enough pity even to pity poor old Clutie when I think. You see somebody here who served the devil, Mel Crowder, say, who has served the devil for a great many years, and one day he comes and he's on quick blow. Jesus Christ breaks from him all the leg irons and all the neck bands and all the rest on his knees and serves God with tears and joy and kisses the holy feet of Jesus. Gets up early in the morning and gets down and says, you tell me that that man isn't free. He's free as the wide world, but he must be given the devil a bad time because the devil said, now you're no longer free. You're in religious bondage. And he squeezes a tear out of each eye and sits off with an old handkerchief and gets on his knees and says, thank God for a bondage like this. Thank God for a bondage as fine in Jesus Christ. The seraphim were free, absolutely free, and lay in the fact they could sin and didn't and wouldn't. They served God rather. They were a people who were free. Now, I said I was going to preach on the worship of the seraphim, and I shall have to do some high-class condensing here if I get anything. But let's notice a little of the worship of these seraphim, these strange six-winged creatures. Now, I don't know why they needed six wings, exactly. There's so many things I don't know. The older I get, the less I know. But the older I can lay, I know the two things that I do know. That's wonderful about that. You don't know so many things, but, well, you know some things terrifically. So, I know that there are seraphim, and I know there's another world, and I know that it's the world of spirit, it's the world of our son, and of the Holy Ghost, and it's the world into which Christians are born when they're born again, and let the pickers of theological lint fight over this all they want to, I'm happy to say that to me the kingdom of God is now ruled over by God the King, into which people are born by the new birth. And you can split it all up and divide it and set on a wiggly or Greek verb, and when you're all through, I'll still believe what I believe, that the kingdom of God is the realm of the which men are born when they're born again. Now, these creatures, the worshipers I notice here, they were there, they could have been anywhere else, I insist. These seraphim, God didn't say, now, how many are out there today, Gabriel? Well, he said there's 5,791 last count. Well, you tell those seraphim to place at a certain time. He didn't say that because there's nobody both in the kingdom of heaven. God Almighty rules by moral worth and moral rights and the fact that he is God and his rule is taken for a happy granted. Nobody's around, no sergeants with three stripes and a gravelly voice telling anybody what to do. They do it because it's in them to do it. They wanted to do it. They were there, they could have been somewhere else, but they were worshiping God and we find them here. And brethren, you worship God by being there where God is. Now, there are some individualists who have all the strength, the strength of the individualist, but they say, I don't go to church, I don't think it's necessary, I don't mingle with the people of God, I don't think it's necessary to go to retreat. And I find that just walking around on Sunday mornings is enough. Now, the seraphim could have said something like that, but they didn't. There was worship, and they worshiped God with their presence. Now, we have people even hanging around the borders of this church that say, if you don't feel like going to church, don't go. If you don't feel like going to prayer meetings, don't go. And that prayer perfectly fits. But only one thing, they're still down here in the flesh. And their freedom is not the few spirits before the throne, it is the carnal license of half-converted men. Wherever God is, there you want to be. And where the people of God are, there you want to be. So he worshiped God with his interests, and he worshiped God with his presence. And he is there. Then, I noticed they worshiped God with their feet and wings and hands. And they gave over their feet and their wings and their hands to God. They didn't serve God at their convenience, but a lot of people do. They were serving God freely, and they didn't have to do it. They had really three things, their feet, their wings, and their hands. And these they gave to God joyously, and said, Let me move at the impulse of thy love. Take my hands. Take my feet. Take my silver. Take my gold. So God had everything. You know, brother, if God gets your feet and your hands and your wings, he just about got you. Your feet determine where you go, and your hands determine what you do. And your wings, I don't know about that. So I don't know what that typifies. But you know, you study typology in school, and if you get the course, you know what it means. But if God can get your feet, brother, you won't go in the wrong direction. And if God can get your hands, you won't do the wrong thing. I sat with Dr. Harold Mason and Dr. Harold Lundquist and Brother Phil Newell. We were having a picture to be babbling to. They're going to put us on a calendar. You won't get one. But there we were, and we were sitting down, and we had the big two average-sized fellas sat around the edge. And I looked down, and I said, Brother Lundquist, that's the biggest pile of leather I ever saw in my life. And, brother, it was. Three pairs of feet, now I'm telling you. And, Brother Lundquist, I think they must be 14. And Brother Newell's were. They weren't just exactly ladies' shoes, either. Well, I believe God has a feet. I believe that God has a feet, Brother. Now, they were big, and they certainly weren't very handsome, but I believe that God had that three pair of feet. And if God can go in the right place, and if he can get your right hand, you'll do the right thing. But you say, what has that got to do with worship? You worship God by where you go and what you do, not only by what you sing and what you pray. Worship contains prayer. Worship is more than singing. Worship contains singing, but worship is also living. We find worship to be not only praying and singing, but doing and living and walking and working and going and serving, so that we can worship God with our feet by going the right way. We can worship God with our hands by doing the right thing, and we have to worship God with our wings by flying in the right direction. Now, they had voices also here. They testified their adoration, and they said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, and the whole earth is full of his glory. My opinion, brethren, is that the silent Christian has something wrong with him. You know that there is, in abnormal psychology, where they're going to silence. They just shut up, and that's all. They won't talk. They just get quiet, and there they are. They keep still in on themselves, and there's something wrong with the mind that doesn't want to talk. God put a mouth out there in the front of you, in the course of the open night and day, as some people seem to imagine. But he did mean you were to use that mouth to express some of the wonders that generated in us. And when we come to God in Christ, and we give ourselves to him, one of the first things we get is And I've heard it said silent Christians and hidden Christians and secret Christians, and I've heard men say it would be so fun to find people there who were secret Christians who never talked about it. One man said about the Quakers now, he said, they don't, can they live it? Oh, how foolish can we get? The things that are in our hearts are the things we talk about. And you talk about that which is closest to your heart, and if it's close to your heart, you will talk about it. Some of these old oversized dowagers that sit around the canastic table, smoke cigarettes by the yard, and then never bring up religion. And if anybody says, oh, there's some things that are too sacred to mention, we don't mention them. We don't mention them. They're too sacred to mention. I've been dismayed. They're too sacred to mention. I never played canastic. Maybe that's not the language, but anyhow, they excuse themselves on the ground that there are some things to talk about. There are some things they've never seen and can't describe. That's their trouble. There's some places they've never familiar with it. That's their trouble. And all this quiet religion that says, I haven't anything to say, no, no, I know you don't, brothers. These seraphims, they said with their voices, holy, holy, holy, holy faith to expression. And a faith that never gets expression is not a Bible faith. For we will stand utter forth with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and we shall be saved. Now, I wonder about some of you that sit around the edge. You haven't led in prayer. There are some people around this church that hang around. I haven't heard you pray. I'd be afraid to ask you to pray in public. So you just go on year after year and you never pray. But you say, well, I worship God in my heart. I wonder if you do. If you are simply not excusing the fact that you haven't generated enough spiritual heat to get your mouth open. Voices, they gave God their voice. I used to wish I had a good voice. They used to tell me that I had a good feel. And then I heard myself on a record. And I never was so shocked in all my life. I had to hear myself. There was a certain speaker I thought was one of the worst speakers of all. And when I heard myself being played back, I said there he is. I sounded like the man that I thought was the worst man in the world years ago. Nowadays they say I sound like Harry Truman. Absolutely. I've heard that. So did you ever know who sounded like the President of the United States before I got in? No. I didn't know it. But they tell me I do. Well, the point is, God, when he was giving out good voices, he asked me, you know, I'm not a squeaker, but then I haven't anything to make women tremble and strong men break down. But there's one thing, that whatever it is, brother, that's the main thing, huh? You know, there's not much to it. It's got a little gravel in it, and it's getting more and more gravel, and it's old for the time, it's next to his shoulders. But your gravel and no gravel, God's got the voice. And he can have it. God had the voices of these seraphims. I don't know what they sounded like. I should suppose they had musical voices, being seraphims, but had it anyway. Now, I God got your voice? Now, I ask you, has God got your voice in school? Is there something in you, an impulse that wants to talk about God at all? Or are you discreet to keep your mouth shut and say nothing? And you know all about the world's ways, but when it comes to God and Christ, has God got your voice? And can you talk to your schoolmates about the Lord Jesus? Can you say even a little word about it? Do you dare do it? Do you dare a minute's silence before you eat? Because your voice belongs to God. And then I noticed their voice was both mockery, for they covered their feet and they covered their faces. And I suppose the only reason for covering their faces was the Holy God. And they reverently covered their faces. Reverence is a beautiful, beautiful thing. In this terrible day in which we live, some churches try to superinduce reverence by putting up statues and having light filtering through and having carpet on the floor and everybody talking through his adenoids. And they try to superinduce it, succeed. They only make you feel queer and you all feel funereal. But a man, and I've said this a thousand times, a man who passed the veil and looked even briefly upon the Holy face of God can never be irreverent again. There'll be a reverence in his spirit. And instead of boasting he ought to say, and if he's been somewhere and place of coming home and telling it, chances are he'll cover his feet. You know what I wish? That ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of all these world travelers, religious and non-religious, would cover their feet when they come home from far places. For my brother, he's a jackass. He's still a jackass. Put him in a box car and send him back, and when he comes back he's still a jackass. And yet we have the mistaken notion that if a fellow gets in a machine and climbs around the world and comes back, he's been transformed. No, he hasn't been transformed. He's just put geography under his feet. Any ordinary duck can do that. Then flies to Florida and puts geography under his feet, and next spring he comes back again. Bad idea now, and men are making money and they've got big socks full of green bills that they got from gullible children. And wanted to know, wanted to hear them tell about where they'd been. I don't care where they've been, I want to know where they're going. All that matters is where are you going brother, not where you've been. I have a lot of sympathy for the red cap and his bellboys. A fella came in and he had his suitcase just plastered from just, there wasn't a spot that wasn't plastered. Airlines, Air France, and all the rest, he'd just been all around the world and this bellboy said, ah fella, perhaps you'll tip me and I'll clean the thing. So he got some eraser and took that all off. Back here was his suitcase clean as a pen. He'd taken all the labels off. He ruined the fella's reputation, you know. And now everybody knows where he's been. But I don't care where he's been anyhow. Abraham Lincoln never got out of the States and Jesus never went out of Palestine. For years they tried to send me away. I could even go and have a soda extra thrown in, but I won't go. And God tells me to go, I'll go, but I won't go just for the going. I wouldn't come back and spend other people's time telling them about it. They covered their feet. They must have been somewhere. They had their feet. They must certainly have been somewhere, but they modestly hid their feet so people wouldn't know where they've been. Look what I have seen. One fella years ago, back when Mussolini still had his chin, you know that big chin? All around the country made himself a nice little wad saying, I was arrested by Mussolini's police. Any bum could get arrested. Anybody could get arrested. I could go to Germany or Italy or somewhere and go over there and take a break and you'll get arrested. Most of these fellas that are arrested somewhere get chased by Hitler. They've been doing something they had no business to do. And they come home and make a mess. And then they reverently covered their faces before God all night because here was the great God. Their worship was pure and spontaneous. I have said it was voluntary and fervent. The word means a fiery burner. And I'm wondering how about you and how much of a sight these creatures, these wondrous creatures inhabiting that other world worship God day and night like all burners. And I wonder about the fervency of your spiritual desire. You are. Jesus said to the church, Thou hast left thy first love. And they tell us it means first degree of love. Thou hast left thy first degree of love. You don't love me with the fervency that you have This grieves God and indicates backsliding in the heart of the individual. These burners are before us as examples. And we are called of God to look heavenward and say they select with fervency of spirit. How about my heart? Brother, I want to ask you, are you a fervent Christian? Are you warmhearted to the point of heat? Is there fire inside your spirit? You are religious all birth, but are you filled with fire? He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire. Some have tried to say that means judgment, and they've twisted it all around, but when the Holy Ghost came, he came as fire. So that ought to settle that. And he entered upon them. There were tongues of fire that sat upon their foreheads, and they went out to be men and women of fire. And it's fire we need in this hour, you see, that glows, that boils. Talk about diathermy. Somebody used the term in my hearing today, diathermy. Heating clear through. And I believe in spiritual diathermy. I believe that God wants to heat the spirit through till suddenly we are awakened to the fact that heaven and earth is full of the glory of the An old Englishman lived and he wrote this. He said, You never enjoy the world aright, the sinful world, but God's natural world. You never enjoy the world aright till every morning you wake up in heaven and see yourself in your father's palace and look upon the skies and the earth and the air as celestial, having such a reverent esteem of all as if you were among the angels. The bride of a monarch and her husband has no such cause of delight as you. Thomas Traherne. You'll never enjoy aright, he says, until every morning you wake up in heaven. Holy, holy, holy, the whole earth is full of his glory. Brethren, we ought not to be satisfied by being merely Christians. We've ridden that term until it's almost offensive to hear it. I'm born again, I'm born again. Oh, I know, I know. Again, thank God if you weren't you'd never see the kingdom. But a one-day-old baby might have lived for fifteen years that had been born. To have you both you've been born again. The business of a day-old busy and grow, develop, do something in the world before he falls on sleep. And the business of a born-again Christian is to enter into the fullness of the Holy Ghost, surrender his hands and feet and wings and voice and brains and presence and all to Jesus Christ and be filled with the fire of his love. Then, I bend in dust before thee, even so veiled cherubs then, in calm I adore thee, all-wise, all-present friend. Thou to the earth its emerald robes have given, were curtained in snow, and the bright sun and the soft moon in heaven before thy presence bow. Thou power sublime whose throne is firmly seated on stars and glowing suns, O could I praise thee, could my soul elated wahons, had I the harps of angels, could I bring thee an offering worthy of thee. Notes of glory would I sing thee blessed notes of ecstasy. Friends, our trouble is the absence. These seraphim were ecstatic. A note was a rhapsody, and we claim to be followers of the Lamb, the Spurs of the King, which were lukewarm and cold, and our notes are flat without vibrance, and the leaping fountain should be within our hearts, barely flowing, instead of sparkling in the sunshine, merely at a great effort makes the surface feel a pitiful apologetic trickle of spiritual fervency and joy. May God do something for us, may God do something for us in this church. I feel this so deeply, that if I had what God was saying to this church, if you've had your chance and you've muffed it, if you would grieve me more than you have, I'd resign and hunt another place. I'd rather preach in a barber shop or over a barber shop, in a rented storeroom with a dozen fervent, spirited people than to preach to you fine people, if I didn't believe that God had yet to do for you. I believe he does have something.