In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of living a life that is pleasing to God. He highlights that true success is not measured by worldly standards, but by God's evaluation of our motives, principles, and morality. The preacher encourages the audience to seek forgiveness, cleansing, and transformation through Jesus Christ in order to live with God forever. He also emphasizes the power of praising God, even in the midst of suffering, as a demonstration of true victory. The sermon concludes with a reminder to save the remaining message for the evening service.

Do you believe that? Well, get on and love one another. Do you really believe that? It doesn't matter what your preferences are, or what your prejudices are. It doesn't matter in what mold your personality has been cast, through what they might say chromosomes or genes or hormones or anything like that, scientists can't enter here. What's the use of the mechanics? It's what is flowing through, and God can change it. And unless God has made you into a lover, he's not got through with you yet. You can count on his love, he'll always do that. But how about you? Men don't feel God's love, unless they feel it through some other human being. God didn't stop in heaven and proclaim his love. He came down on earth and loved us. Blessed Jesus, wonderful God, a God I can adore, a God I can begin to understand. Oh, not the mystery of him, but the reality of him. I'll learn the mysteries, I begin to glimpse them a bit now, dimly. Some are far off, but every step in life brings it clearer. But you, beloved, and I have got to know the love of God melting us. We're too hard, we're too strong on the wrong things, we're too powerful to destroy, to denigrate, to disrupt, to darken, dampen, anything. But can you love? And don't get this mixed up with what Hollywood turns out. Don't get it mixed up with sex. Animals have that. Love, pure, wonderful, real. Can you love a man like you love a woman, or love a woman like a man, whichever sex you are? Can you? Can you really love? It's not a call to male or female, it's a call to man. Hallelujah. It's a call from heaven, and heaven poured into the earth. And when heaven poured into the earth, it was love pouring into a personality, through him. Glory be to God. Has the revelation ever reached your heart? Have you ever seen what it's all about? Beyond forgiveness, far beyond it, for forgiveness came from it, as its vital, life-giving flow, is love. Amen. Jesus. Amen. And you're invited by every sin you've been forgiven, and every memory of God's goodness to you, to become a lover. As God is a lover, demanding nothing of any man, save a place in their heart, and an opportunity to do them good, and to bless them, and to emancipate them, and help them. If you seek other than that, it's because your eyes have never been opened wide enough yet to see, nor your mind broad enough to understand, nor your heart turned from its native stone. Amen. Now God wants us to be lovers, at all costs. And somewhere, if you will love, you'll find the cross. For love is not words, but it's the outpouring of the heart. In its beginnings it came forth as precious blood, speaks where words have no language, and speaks better things than any blood that's ever been. This blood of redemption, shed now, and held in the Holy Ghost in its original power, to be applied to your heart this instant. And you can be clean, so that you don't cry out in your uncleanness anymore. And you can be forgiven, so that you carry no burden of guilt any longer. And you can be changed, so that you're not yourself anymore, but the new creature that God requires you to be, ere you can live with Him forever. For we must all be changed, and it can always happen, whether it be the soul or the body, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, when a man turns his eye of his inward soul from the spectre of his own self, and the rottenness of the world, and the image of the devil that's extended. And look upon God, in all His glory, made known unto us. It's whether a man will turn his vision, it's whether a man will bend his stubborn neck, it's whether a man will own up that it's God that's been right, and I that's been wrong. It's whether a man will turn to Jesus, or whether he will not. But what a destiny, if a man doesn't. What an end, to seek love and never find it, to seek comfort and never rest, to seek forgiveness and die with the guilt in all its complexity, building up through the years. What an end, if a man doesn't discover love. There is an end, but not an end of cessation, but an end of an objective reached, a home attained to. But which shall it be? Shall it be the home of eternal love? Whence came the first glad news to men? Shall it be that that presently brought forth a babe on the earth, to be the redeemer of men? Or shall it be its opposite, the misery? The unendingness of it is frightening. But the eternity of love, the glory of being with God, the wonder of being new, this is love. And there we shall love, and love will be unmixed. It won't have any mixture that perforce it must have to some extent while on this earth, but relieved of other necessities, because our very bodies shall be changed, and our appetites shall be wholesome in a spiritual body that has no need but to feast on God and serve Him in His heavenly kingdom. What a wonder! What a glory! Every saved heart longs for this. Every man who knows the truth longs for this. Hallelujah! Though he feel himself entirely redeemed on earth in his spirit and soul and mind and affections and emotions and all these marvelous things, yet he awaits a great consummation, when he should be redeemed in body also. He no longer has to keep under his body, but can even let his body go free, spiritual, under God. That's the picture held out by the Bible. There's no gospel in the mouth of any man that can be compared with this, none. No poet, no sage, no philosopher, no scientist has discovered this. And he is not a true philosopher unless he find this. His sage wisdom is his folly and his curse if he doesn't discover this. He is no scientist who does not know that this must be the eternal law upon which all is built. He is a fool. He hath discovered his own wicked inward self unless he discover Christ. And to discover self is the prelude to hearing the music of the gospel of heaven from the lips of Christ. And he can come out of it all. And he can be completely ransomed and be a totally new man and a new woman. And he can live in love. And the purity of God shall ever keep him clean. And that blood that first he drank shall become like the river of redemption in his own heart. And it will purify his soul and that inward man of him that cannot live by bread and cannot live by meat and cannot live by the ideas or pictures or creations or anything that man may bring forth but can only live upon God. It dies upon everything else. It sees beauty and the beauty of it mocks him and turns to his ugliness. He sees hope and it dies in him. He finds light of some sort and it turns to darkness in his own heart. He eats the cream of the world. And he eats its meats and they turn to ashes in his mouth and gravel in his belly. And he has nothing. But God gives us everything. And love is the foundation of it all. Amen. Amen. And God is here. Loving us all. You may not feel it. But you are aware that someone does. And you can have it. For love is not sent to mock you. Love comes humbly, lowly, broken, seeking a place in your heart. You may trample on it if you wish. You may spurn it if that's what you are in your heart. But it will come again and wash around your feet. It will come again and again. How many times it will come, I do not know. Nor can I promise you. How many times, how often, God knows. I only know it's followed me. I only know it's preceded me. I only know it has spread out all around me. I only know that God has been gracious to me. Therefore, I say, presuming upon my own knowledge, and more, coming onto the written word of God, to tell you that his grace is more than sufficient. And his love will meet you again and again. There is no place you can flee to escape love. There is no place to which you may fly to get away from his Spirit. There is no home. There is no hole. There is nothing you can take, nowhere you can go. Nothing that you can believe. No pretence, no castle, no prison, that can take you out of the orbit and ambit of his love. Hallelujah. He loves you. And that's the beginning and that's the end of it all. And that's all there is of it. Amen. Amen. Sit down. My subject was going to be the communion. I am in the communion. We will leave the rest for this morning. Because it has come to my heart, and the person that spoke this to me is in the room, but the person will not mind if I use the truth to make it greater than what was needed to one individual's heart and apply it to all. For this is the truth that we all discovered, that one man's poison is another man's poison, although he may think it's meat. In this great realm of the Spirit, remember the Bible says this, that God fashioneth all their hearts alike, our faces may differ, but heart needs never vary. God is a God of law, never varies. The great thing that I want to share with you came from someone who turned to the 15th chapter of John. You may like to do it. Bless God. I'm thanking God for this morning. I'm thanking God for this morning. If ever I thank God for a morning in my life, it's this one. You will find that it's the chapter on the vine, where the Lord is saying, I'm the vine, you are the branches. In that one phrase, the amazing love of God is revealed. Just in that phrase, I'm the vine, you are a part of me, that's what he's saying. And I told you that this was spoken in the communion room. In the same, I'm sorry, just after they'd left the communion room, it was spoken on the way to the cross, where he was going to display the truth that he is the vine, and that his Father is the husband. And how Father husbanded his vine by providing for him a tomb when he hadn't got one in which to lay. And he was the vine in resurrection. But not just that particular point. You'll find if you read down through that section, there comes a verse where Jesus says, that every branch in me that beareth not fruit, my Father or the husbandman taketh away. Men gather them up and they are burned. And this was the way it was presented to me. God showed me that verse. And oh, and away it went. I've been broken off the vine. I was once and I'm lost because I didn't bring forth any fruit. What's the answer? Men gather them up and they are burned. And I want you to see the difference here between men doing the gathering and angels that do the gathering in Matthew 13. It's the angels. That's at the end of the world, you see. But men do gather up the branches that God has broken off. Well, then they've lost. They've been broken off. Fear not. They're broken off so that from the same place another branch may grow. Yeah. The life may have been fruitful, unfruitful and wasted and God's had to break it off. And he says, now we'll make a fresh start. Same joint. Same beginnings. Another branch. Yet the same branch. It's a new beginning for people who've failed. Men gather up those. That's right. Everybody knows you've been unfruitful. Everybody knows. You may think you've been. You may have said the right words in the right places, gone to the right meetings, very charismatic. You may have gone to everything. But that's not fruit because you bang a tambourine or wave your arms or sing or clap. That's not fruit. Fruit comes forth from the vine that was sowed in agonies and sacrifice. Fruit comes, that was planted I mean. Fruit comes forth from that. Your life, union in the bonds of eternal love with him that hung on the cross and rose again from the dead. The fruit of that death and resurrection is the fruit that God is looking for and that is the fruit of an entirely new life. If you haven't been living it, friend, listen. The husbandman breaks it off. He says, I can't have that. And so you're broken off right up to the vine, you see. You were sticking out like that. And then you were broken off. But you see from the same place there comes the shoot again. It's the New Testament equivalent and much better of the Old Testament figure of the clay in the potter's hands. Where Jeremiah in the 18th chapter, you needn't turn it up, was bitten to go down to the potter's house. And when he went, the potter wrought a work on the wheels. And as he watched, he saw that the clay was marred in the hands of the potter. Listen, it's still in the hands of the potter. Hallelujah. Yeah, that's right. Still in the hands of the potter. Still under the control of the husbandman. That's the thing you have to see. The vine. And so he made it again. Another vessel as it pleased him. Well, that's the Old Testament figure. They're always short of the New Testament figures. God purposely made it so. The New Testament figure is not a vine taking a lump of clay, making it into a pot. It's not a potter taking a lump of clay and making it into a pot. It's a vine growing. It has life in itself. It's not a lump of old dead clay just for something to be poured into. It's a living branch of the living vine. Who can excel Jesus? And he breaks you off if you've not been fruitful. He says, come on, now shoot again. You're not lost. You're not damned. You're not eternally doomed. Start again. Hallelujah. That's the teaching of the vine. It's the teaching of old love that will not let me go. I rest my weary soul in thee. I give thee back the life I owe that in thine ocean depths its flow may return. Fuller, fuller be. That's the teaching. This great love of God, if in his great love and mercy, foreknowing you before the foundation of the world, decided that you should be a branch in that vine, I don't know, I don't want to go into Calvinistic theology. I don't want to go into harsh depths or lie in lush feathery pillows of Arminianism either. I want the truth. I only know that Jesus said, did you see that bird up there? He says, not one of them falls to the ground without your father. Five sparrows sold for two farthings and not one of them falls to the ground without your father. That's love. This is the concept. This is the plateau of understanding unto which your soul is to rise. It doesn't matter whether the world seems to doom it, damn it, deny it. You are to take the words of Jesus. The word, the final authority, the original unalterable utterance was made flesh. That we might see in a world of darkness, perversion, twisted. Down is called up and up is called down. Black is called white and white is called black. Morality is called amorality. There is nothing. We are lower than the animals because we know to do worse damage than the animals and we act worse than they. No lion ever made an atomic bomb. No snake ever devised germicidal warfare. No ant ever built a Polaris missile. Nobody, no dog ever became unknown of Zurich to rule the affairs of men in hatred and threats and fears. God sent his Son into the world and the beast said, let's destroy him. And the devil said, yes, damn the hopes of future generations. And he said, I am the resurrection, the life. I'll let you do what you like with me. I'll rise again. To rise above it all and keep shining like the sun that rose in the vision and spread its light all the earth. God knows. God loves. God does not always unexplain and you must not think you've always got to struggle to understand. You cannot make the broken ends meet. You cannot mend the fractures. But God can heal your soul. God can make you a new creature. And if God comes to you and says, well, I'll have to break off that. Well, that's all in keeping with the cross. I'll break that off. And the hurt of it, and the light that dawns afterwards and you see that it's happened, is not to light your path into despair, but to show you the wonderful love of God. And he says, come with me now and watch this vine again. Here is its virility. Here is its wonderful ability. Here is the law that governs it. It will shoot forth again. Hallelujah. The fruit will come. Always has to be an end. Listen. God will not come and tie a bunch of grapes on your old branch. He'll say, come on, grow it. I don't want anything artificial. Let's make a fresh start, shall we? Hallelujah. Oh, love of God. Amen. And those who've known the love of God constantly in their lives, those who've gone on steadily in growth, yet still you've had to have some chasings. You still had to have some purgings. You had to have some strippings. Amen. But that's all part of it too. The great life pattern. And the way it comes. And when you know that it's God that's doing it in your life, once you've tasted of the great original love of God that flowed into your shriveled heart and brought life to your dead mind, you come to the part where you say, well, that's right, Lord. Just keep going on. I know it's for my good and for your glory. Do you believe that? I know, beloved. I'm not talking theory. I've stooped over them on their knees, on the floor, in their chairs, standing up. I've bowed over them to bring them the love of God in their distraught and broken condition. I've done it. I've been there. I know. All I did was do for them, in a little way, what He has done for me. And love has always met them. That's the truth. That's the truth. And Jesus said, it's the truth that sets you free. Amen. Isn't that a wonderful thing? So then, we'll sing, beloved, let us love. Will we? We'll keep on singing it. I don't mean repetitiously in one meeting, but all our lives. Beloved, let us love one another. As I said yesterday, this was the thing that was said by Jesus at the communion table. They took the bread, they drank the wine. John supplies the conversation and the other things that went on at the table. He doesn't tell us about the bread and the wine. He tells us about the results of eating and drinking the bread and the wine. Beloved, little children, love one another. Love is of God. Amen. Hallelujah. That's what He says. Do you believe Him? Well, get on with it. Come out of this dream world you've been living in. Come out of this fantastic thing you've built up. Come out of it. The devil will help you to build up every error and sin and curse there is in the earth. You can't live to yourself. God says you can't live to yourself. The world proves His common sense, if I may use that word about God, extraordinary but wonderful. Amen. You've got to come right out of it all into this love and grace of God. Amen. And you've got to start practicing it. I don't mean here that practice makes perfect. I mean practice in the sense in which a doctor has a practice. He calls it a practice. Very practical men doctors apparently. But the tremendous truth is that you've got to practice it. You've got to do it. And strangely enough, if a doctor follows his practice, he will make it perfect. He will get on better. But we're not just to do it with the idea that if I keep on, I shall become perfect at it. We're just to do it because, well, it's love and it's life. And we minister to one another in it. Are you ready to do it? Of course, it will bring a certain amount of suffering. But listen, you must not connote suffering with gloom. You know, oh, I'm suffering. All the Christians have got to suffer. Gloom, gloom, gloom. Listen, nobody suffered more than Jesus. And on his way to the cross, when he talked about the vine, he said, my joy. He talked about his joy. Suffering and gloom. Some people connote suffering with gloom. That's because they're defeated, got the wrong idea. Suffering always brings joy. Then you know whether you're suffering as a result of your own folly or whether you're suffering for Christ's sake. If you're suffering for your own folly and for your own, well, what did the Lord say to Peter? If any man suffers a busybody or a thief, well, that's it. You're not to suffer for that. That should bring gloom. But when you suffer for Christ, always there's joy with it. So you'll know whence it comes. Always. You can still stand up and shout and sing, even through the tears. Amen. That's the wonder of this great love of God. Because you see, suffering outside of Christ brings perplexity. The great question, why? Why should this happen to me? I don't deserve this, so on and so on. But when you're suffering Christ, hallelujah, it's always for the joy. Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before Him. Always. He had the joy set before Him, just as He always had His Father's face set before Him. You must read this in Acts chapter 2, which is a quotation from the Psalms. I foresaw the Lord always before my face. Amen. Hallelujah. Therefore did my flesh rest in hope. Thou wilt not suffer, thy Holy One, to see corruption. You see? Suffering brings to corruption outside of Christ. Something corrupts and dies, and you can't have anything corrupting without stinking. But when you suffer, as a Christian has to, to some extent, there's joy with it. Glory be to God. Hallelujah. How about old Paul? Do you think he suffered? They stuck him in a stinking hole. We wouldn't even call it a cell. And he sang and praised God. Glory to God. Hallelujah. Sang so well that the prison burst open. I mean, the gates did. This is the way with God. Hallelujah. Can you do that? In fact, the best kind of praises and the best kind of dancing and shouting and singing comes from a suffering heart. Always. That's victory. The other is just being sort of borne along, you know, bobbing up and down on the tide. But this is the victory. Glory be to God. Amen. This is real. Why, this is superhuman. Precisely, that's what God is doing for us. Isn't that lovely? Yes. All right. It's no good me starting to preach this morning, is it now? So we'll have to save it till tonight. So we'll just... Amen. We're not finished yet. Let's love one another, shall we? Somebody, I will presume to say that you're not as old as she, sister. A lady came to me once. In fact, she has the honour of being called Grandma in all the circles in which she moves. And she said to me, she said, You know, children and old people need much love. So that's what you're going to discover as you get older, that you need more and more love. When you were a child, you didn't understand. It was showered on you. And you were quite ignorant of it. And then you grew up with a big chip on your shoulder that said, Nobody ever loved me. I had to go into a home. Or I was this, that and the other. It may not have been the best kind of love. But love isn't always lovey-ducky words. It's down-to-earth provision for need. You understand that? I know that we do need loving. I know that we need special caring. But nobody ought to cry out to love if they've once been bathed and steeped in the love of Jesus. It's a marvellous thing. That in itself is greater than every other love beside. Let that sink into your heart. And when you're old, you know you need loving. Don't you? Oh, aye. You see all the older heads going like this. You know who considers themselves old. You see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's right. But I'm going to tell you something. If you go all your life seeking love, and you don't come to the secret that the only way you can receive love is by giving it, you're lost. That's God's secret. God so loved that he gave. That's the greatest verse in the Bible. If you don't start giving love instead of waiting to receive it, you will never, never know the secret of God's love. For God's love is a giving love. See? And I don't just mean money, though it may involve that. Giving. How much are you worth? Have any, has anybody in this room has estimated their own worth? How much are you worth? A million pints? Perhaps you all say dollars now, pounds aren't worth much. A million oil fields under the North Sea would be the North Sea, wouldn't it? Well, I'd rather have the North Sea than the Southern Desert, where they get it from. Well, I think I would. How much do you think you're worth? Do you think you could give somebody a million pounds and say, now there you are? Because ten million pounds, a billion million pounds, eh? Say, now there you are. And that's me. Listen. You've got to give self. Not money. Not possessions. It's the giving of self. And that's why in the end this redemption we talk about is only worth anything. It's because God gave himself. That's right. He gave himself. Paul sees it. He says, God, the Son of God, loved me and gave himself for me. For me. This is the wonder of it. Now give yourself. You've got to give yourself. Now I know you can't force yourself on people. Jesus Christ can't. But give yourself to those who are willing to receive it. And try giving yourself to those that you think aren't willing before you cross them off your list. Don't stand on your estimation of relationships between you. If God stood on his estimation of the relationships between men and himself, he would never have ventured. He came forth and gave himself. And he went up to them and forced men either to receive him or reject them. Try it. Try it. Know the methods of God. The abiding principles. See how it works. You won't be 100% successful in that everybody you try to give yourself will respond to your charms or your tactics. But it will be 100% successful when it is weighed in the balances of eternity. Where God weighs motives, where God weighs principles, where God weighs morality, where God weighs good and evil, where God measures every man, it will be 100% successful there if you've given and given and given and held back nothing. Oh, I'm on a theme that I could talk all through lunchtime. So we're going to stop.