In this sermon, the preacher talks about individuals who were called by God at a young age and finished their work early. He emphasizes the importance of not wasting time and energy on things that are not aligned with God's calling. The preacher shares a personal story of a man who made a decision to leave his old life behind and serve the Lord wholeheartedly. He encourages the audience to listen to the Holy Spirit's guidance and respond to God's call, even if it means giving up their old ways and embracing a new life in Christ.

...of a prophet, a sermon by Dr. A. W. Tozer, in the book of 1 Kings. 1 Kings 19, verses 19 through 21. 1 Kings 19, 19 to 21. So he, Elijah, departed Vance and found Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he with the twelve. And Elijah passed by him and cast his mantle upon him. And he, Elisha, left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, Let me, I pray thee, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow thee. And he said unto him, Go back again, what have I done to thee? And he returned back from him and took the yoke of oxen, and slew them, and boiled their flesh with the instruments of the oxen, and gave unto the people, and they did eat. Then he arose and went after Elijah, and ministered unto him. This, this morning, concerns Israel, a nation raised up of God for a purpose, a high and holy purpose, and two of Israel's famous sons, Elijah and Elisha. I might say, incidentally, that because the names are so near alike, and because there is a constant shuffling back and forth of the names, if I get one mixed with the other, put it down to the fact that I am also of dust and figure me out, rather than pay attention to what I am saying at the moment, because I might say Elijah when I mean Elisha. Now, this nation of Israel, let me get back to that. This nation of Israel was small, never has been large, never. Partly because it's been so scattered, partly because it's endured such terrible persecution, partly because it's endured so many massacres. It's never been a large nation, and yet it is the most important nation on the earth. If you are going to be a Bible reader and a Bible believer, you are going to have to accept this. If you don't want to believe the Bible but want to accept something that someone says about it, contrary to the Bible, then it's another matter. But if we are Bible believers, we must believe that when God divided the surface of the earth, he divided according to the nation of Israel, and that Israel has been God's key nation through the years and is yet to be again his key nation. But yet Israel never has been a strong nation, and never large. Now, it is always wrong for us to judge values by size, yet we are constantly tempted to do that, to judge values by size. Canadians and Americans of all the people in the world are guilty of this wrong judgment. We have the biggest things and the richest things and the largest and the shortest and the longest and the widest, and we have always said that this North American continent, they are the people, their standard of living is that they have everything. We have size, we admit that, and a lot of things, but it's always wrong to judge values by size. A man can back up a ton of coal or two tons or five tons of coal to your house, if you still use coal, and spend a day putting it in the coal bin. And yet your wife wears on her finger something that is far more valuable than all the coal that it took two men all day to put in your coal bin. Size and weight do not mean values. Values may be concentrated in the small things. I've pointed out the difference between a baby and a mountain. My brother Austin's little girl here, well, I could see her when my brother was dedicating her and taking it like a little lady. It didn't bother her. Here she is, I don't know how much she weighs, thirty, no not thirty, maybe twenty pounds. I'll guess twenty pounds. But look at the value here, and yet out here is a building weighing several tons, yet you don't compare the two. You smile at the thought of the comparison, because one is a value of personal worth and the other is another kind of value altogether. So the nations of Israel, China with her millions, America with her hundred and eighty million, and all that, means nothing compared with Israel, because let me read to you what God said about Israel, in case any of you are wondering why I'm having a rhapsody on Israel here. I say the truth in Christ, and I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, can be said of no other nation in the world, and the glory, that is the Shekinah glory, no other nation ever had it, and the covenants, no other nation ever had it, and the giving of the law alone, God gave that law to Israel, and the service of God, that is the service of the temple, no other nation ever had it, and the promises, dating back to the early chapters of Genesis, no other nation ever had it, whose are the fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then as a crown upon it all, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who was over all God, blessed forever all men. Now, that's Israel, and God has not cast away his people whom he foreknew. Israel's importance, I point out to you, lies not in what Israel is as a people, but what God has made her in his covenant purposes for. Now, Elijah, in that most important nation in the world, held the most important position. And someone may question that again and say, how could it be that Elijah, who was only a hillbilly prophet, that he should hold the most vital job? He wasn't king, he wasn't high priest, he had no official position, he had never been elected to anything. How could that be? Well, Elijah was not king, and yet Elijah held no official position. And yet I say that he was the most important of all men in Israel at that time, because Israel alone could reach heaven, and Israel alone saw through the situation. The king who was anointed and crowned couldn't see, and the high priest couldn't see, but the man Elijah could see. He wore no insignia on his uniform and he had no high-sounding title, but he nevertheless was a priest before his God. He was a prophet, but he was a priest. And always remember that the race of God's anointed priests will never pass away. Before his holy face they stand and serve him night and day. Though reason, rave, and unbelief flow on a mighty flood, there are and shall be till the end the hidden priests of God. And we don't always know who these priests are. The priest who wears the robe may be but a stuffed shirt, a perfunctory fat totem in the temple, but the man who is the true priest may be not known as a priest at all. Yet this man Elijah was the very hope of Israel. He was the hope of her future, and under God he and his position and his service and his labor and his ministry meant more to Israel than that of all her high priests and all her priests put together and her king and her queen. Elijah was about to go. He was getting ready to go. The old man was getting ready to go. It was wonderful to live a good life under God and then get ready to go. Dear old Dr. Max Eyrich of Moody Bible Institute, he was an old Quaker, a dear friend of mine, a little bearded old Jew who loved God and Christ and who got into the Old Testament scriptures as a prophet and a psalmist and interpreted and preached those scriptures as few men I've ever heard could do. So I guess he was, I don't know how old, he was approaching 80 maybe, middle 70s anyway, and he decided that he had had enough. So he said goodbye to his friends and he cleaned up his desk all nicely. He had one of those old-fashioned desks where you pull the top down. You remember those kind that pull the slide down? He pulled the thing down and said goodbye to his friends and went over in Pennsylvania and died and went off to heaven and there was no more for the Lord took him. I thought that was a wonderful dignified way to die. Many of us just peter out. We haven't got enough to hold us here and we haven't got enough to take us there and so we kind of make an embarrassing mess of it at the end. But Elijah was going to go and he was going to go like the man that he had been, just a little bit dramatic, but he was going to go as he lived in God, standing before God, walking before God and he was looking around for somebody else to take his place. Somebody had to step in there. It was no easy job when a man has been in a place for a long time and he's known and honored and God's used him greatly. It's very hard to fill his place and it's hard to fill the place of this man Elijah. The work of God will never stop, you may be sure of that. God's servants come and go but the work of God never stops. So God was going to continue to bless Israel. They couldn't have Elijah there and he couldn't in the natural course of things, Elijah would have to leave. So the Lord raised up a man by the name of Elisha. And that work went on. Now let me say that some of God's present leaders are going. Some of those whose names that you've seen in every magazine and whose names are household words and wherever English language is spoken and far beyond that yet. Some of them are getting ready to go, some of these dear old brethren. Some of them have gone within the last few years. And the temptation is to say, well, if the Lord takes away his giants, what are we going to do? Who will hold the ridgepole up in the hour when the mighty tempest strikes? Well, God never takes away an Elijah, but he raises up an Elisha to fill his shoes. He never takes away a Moses, but he raises up a Joshua. He never takes away a Saul or a Paul, but he raises up an Augustine or someone else to take his place. So God is laying his hand on somebody in Israel when Elijah is about to go. God is laying his hand on somebody now here that's going to take the place of someone that you look up to now and think that he is so great, this mighty preacher, this mighty man that you've heard of. You think, that man, I'd be afraid even to shake his hand or speak to him. I'd be awestruck in his presence. And yet that man is just a man with his breath in his nostrils, and one of these days his breath is going to be out of his nostrils and then he'll be a lump of clay. And that's all he's ever been in the first place, and all he had that was good was what God gave him. So here you are afraid, and we look with awe upon these mighty men. God is going to take them home, and he's looking around for others to take their places. And the people who are taking their places may not look like important material at all. Who is the Lord looking for? Some mighty giant who would walk out there like Hercules? No. When God would bestow honor, he seldom turns to the mighty. It's very rare that God turns to the mighty when he wants to bestow an honor. You'll remember that Gideon was hiding away, threshing a little bit of grain in a depression in the earth, afraid of the Midianites, and God came to him and said, Thou mighty man of valor. I don't know, I don't think God has the sense of humor in the sense that you and I use the word, but surely God must have smiled when he said to this little fellow hiding away from the Midianites, Thou mighty man of valor. Gideon said, You mean me? He didn't believe it. Of course he didn't believe it. He was an almighty man of valor, and he knew that he wasn't a mighty man of valor. And yet when God calls you something, you are that. When God calls you by a certain name, that's it, you're it. And it's with a part of faith not to argue with God, but to say, Amen, Lord, so be it. And there was David. David was the least likely looking of all of his brothers. You remember that where they tried to put the anointing oil on every other one except David. They put the anointing oil on seven tall, prepossessing young men. And the Holy Ghost said, No, that's not my man, that's not the man, that's not the man. And finally when they were all around chugging and saying, Well, there's been a mistake someplace, somebody thought of something. I said, God, Jesse has another son, another son named David, whereas he's out keeping sheep. I said, Go get him. There's no possibility it could be David. But when he came in, handsome little fellow whose cheeks were pink and whose face was beautiful, his eyes bright and his cheeks tanned with the wind and the sun, and who smelled a bit oily from sleeping beside the sheep and keeping the sheep. God said, There's your man. And they put the oil on the head of David, that mighty man. And it was David the choir sang about this morning, not the other seven sons of Jesse, but David wrote that song. And it's David that gave us Jesus, for he was born of the seed of David according to the flesh. So God takes that which is nothing and makes something out of it. God takes Peter the fisherman. Who would have picked Peter? You ask me, who would have picked Peter? They were wanting somebody to play a part in Hollywood. Would they go and look for Peter? No. They wanted somebody to run on some ticket here in Canada. Would they pick Peter? No. Peter was just not the fellow. He would have been voted the man least likely to be wanted around. But God said, Peter, I've got a job for you. And so he picked Peter and made the great man out of him. Now, I think about John the Baptist and the great people. Do you ever see that? And here is another place where I think God must be smiling about it, that passage in the book of Luke. Do you ever notice that? Now, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, isn't that a name? Tiberius Caesar, D.D. And here he is, the Right Honorable Tiberius Caesar, His Excellency Tiberius Caesar. Everybody stand at attention. Play the fanfare. Tiberius Caesar is coming. And Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was the Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was Tetrarch of Iteria. And Lysanias was the Tetrarch of Abilene, and Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests. There they were all lined up, the Honorable This and the Honorable That, and His Excellency So-and-so, and the Reverend Annas and the Right Reverend Caiaphas. But do you notice what happened? The word of the Lord came unto John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. Why didn't the word of the Lord come unto Tiberius Caesar? He couldn't have heard for the fanfare of trumpets. Why didn't it come for Ananias and Caiaphas? Because they were walking about, people were saying, Rabboni, Rabboni. They couldn't have heard. But the word of the Lord came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. There is where the word comes, to the man who is ready to hear and the man who can hear. So when God picks a great man, he humbles him and he picks a poor man and raises him, and that's the way that it is done. And remember that the call of God always bestows honor. God never calls anybody down. He may call them down from their dizzy heights, as he called Nehemiah down from up on the tree, because he never should have been up there anyhow. But he said, Come down, I'll abide at your house. And that way he may call them down, but he never calls a man to come beneath himself. He never calls anybody away from heights. He calls us up higher always. When you move up toward God, you are moving up, and when you move away from God, you are moving down. And no matter who it is that God calls, he calls them up always. If God were to say to President J. F. Kennedy this morning, Jack, I want you to become janitor in the Alliance Church in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, it would be a promotion. When God Almighty takes any man and gives him a job, that man has been promoted, no matter who he is. If the Lord were to tell anybody, no matter what high job he holds here, you come and serve me. If God were to say to Dog the Hammer Shield here, instead of being head of the United Nations, I want you to preach on the street, he'd promote him. And always God promotes men, if you can remember that. So if the Lord has called your son or your daughter to some kind of humble service, if it's only working in a rescue mission, God has promoted your son or daughter. If you say, I had high ambitions for my son or daughter, I wanted my son to take over my business. God maybe didn't want to bury your son in your business, or you've been buried ever since you got it. The Lord may want your son to preach on the street or on a rescue mission, a high and lofty position compared with any business in the world. So God called this man Elisha, and Elisha was plowing. Now, that wasn't a particularly high job, but it was an honest one. And he must have had quite a farm there because he had 12 yoke of oxen and you hadn't handled one of them. And as he passed along there, Elijah passed along, he looked out, and God said to him, There's your man. He said, This farmer? Yes. He said, That's your man. He walked over to the field, took his mantle, a symbol of his office, and just flung it toward him. Now, there was destiny passing along the road, and you know we're altogether too flippant in this day in which we live. We take things too lightly, we're too flippant, we turn from one thing to something else too easily, we don't think enough, we don't meditate enough, we don't dream enough, we don't give God a chance to talk to us. The result is that when God may be wanting to speak to you undramatically and quietly by nothing more than the whiff of wind from a mantle of the Holy Ghost flung in your direction, we can't hear and notice it because of the drama and the color and the noise and the speed with which we live. Here was a man plowing in the field, and destiny passed by in the person of an old prophet about to go home. Elijah waved his mantle quietly, and the response had to come from the man Elisha. It couldn't come from Elijah, it couldn't come even from God. It had to come from the man Elisha. So he laid his hand on Elisha there, and Elisha recognized this was the man of God, and said, he's called me, he's called me, but I don't know whether it was Mother's Day, but he said, let me, I pray, he kissed my father and my mother, and then I will follow thee. And the old man, the salty old prophet that he was, he wasn't going to be sentimental about it, and he said, go back again, what have I done to thee? He said, I haven't, I haven't said you had to come, or you want to go back home to Mama, go back. He said, it's all right with me, go back, go back again, what have I done? He returned back from him and took a yoke of oxen, and he slew them and boiled their flesh with the instruments of the oxen. Now, I can't believe that one plow would be enough to boil, but wooden plows there were, you know, and I suppose he having a big farm, they had a lot of plows. So in order that he'd never be tempted to come back and plow again, he just burnt the plow. And in order that he might never come back to that yoke of oxen, he killed the oxen, slew the oxen, cut them up, dressed them out rightly, and got off some whatever it was, kind of meat off of them, and he had a little banquet. He said, we've been invited over to Elisha's house. Invited? When is it? Thursday night at six o'clock. Everybody's to be there. They have spatially nicely done savory meat for it, and you know the Elishas, how they are. He said, I know them. So they all went to that banquet that night, and when everybody had eaten and drunken and was feeling good, Elisha the host got up and said, his father and mother sitting smiling beside him, and he said, I have wanted to come back. He said, I have been commissioned, I've been transferred, and I have been promoted. And now I want to tell you that from now on I don't intend to be here, I don't intend to be around. He said, where are you going? He said, I wouldn't know for sure. He said, I just know who I'm going with, that's all. I'm going with the man of God and with his God. But I don't know quite where I'm going. You never know when you follow God, you never know quite where you're going. The people who always know where they're going, as a rule, aren't following the Lord, because the Lord can't be predicted quite so perfectly as that. Elijah never knew where he was going to be. He knew where he was going to pass by, and that was about all there was to it. And they built him a little house where he passed by. But just exactly where he'd go, finally, he didn't know, except that he figured that he'd go to heaven. But he didn't know he'd go on a whirlwind. So after they'd had their testimonies and talks, Elisha kissed his mother and father publicly and then said goodbye to all his friends and said, Well, I've been promoted to be a prophet, and I won't be around anymore. Now, knowing human beings, I don't want to read into the sacred scriptures what's not there. But knowing human beings, I'm quite sure that a lot of those hard-headed farmers thought Elisha had gone off his rocker. They said, Well, look, he has a fine farm and he's growing, he's inherited from his parents, and they're about ready to go, and soon it will be all his, and he's got enough of a farm there that he can afford hired men and extra ox and extra teams. And he said, Look, the man can be honored in the neighborhood and he can have much, and he can even use what he has to give to others. You know how it sounds, he can even use what he has. He doesn't have to keep it for himself. He can be a blessing. And yet he gave the whole thing up and walked out on it all because God called him to do it. Now, I bear down on this, God called him to do it. If God hasn't called you to do it, then don't do it. A woman came to me one time, or came one time and said that the Lord had called her to preach, and the brother said, Well, are you married? Oh, yes, she said, and I have seven children. Well, he said, Isn't that good of God? He not only called you to preach, but he got your congregation to start with. And there is common sense, there it is. You got your congregation. The Lord isn't going to do anything foolish, and he isn't going to do anything that runs contrary to his other laws. God is the God of nature, and he is the God of grace. But he isn't the God of carnality. He isn't the God of big shots, and he isn't the God of people who are proud. He isn't the God of all of this rat race we call civilization. He is our God, and he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he is willing to be the Father and God of whoever will put their trust in the Lord Jesus. But you can't read God's approval into a lot that is going on in the world today, or in that day for that matter. So if God hasn't called a person, then I think by all means a person shouldn't go. There was a young man in our church in Chicago by the name of Keen Spittler. He had never been to Bible school, and he was a very keen man, as his name implies. He was keen all right, but he wasn't well educated. He told me one day the Lord had called him to go to the mission field. I shrugged, I didn't think he had, but then the Lord doesn't always tell me who it is that he has called. So I said, That's fine. And I gave him no encouragement at all. But he still not only was called to the mission field, he knew where he was called to. He had the name of the people on his heart, the Somalis. I hardly knew what the word meant. Somalis! He said, God has told me I must go to the Somalis. He was married and had two children. No money, no preparation, and he had a personality that wasn't easy to get along with. That doesn't mean he was nasty, he just was nervous and on the go. Then war came. He went off to war. He went over to Europe and fought over there in the war. One day he was wounded, tragically wounded, terribly wounded. He fell and was rolling, and he came to the edge of a cliff, part of his body hanging over. It looked as if one or two more convulsive, pain-wracked motions from him, and he would be over to his death. He stood there on the cliff. I knew I was the priest of the Somalis! The Sergeant, at least the Sergeant did one good deed. The Sergeant ran over and grabbed him, pulled him back, and Keene Spittler got better. The war was over, and he came back to the United States. The alliance wouldn't take him, too old, hadn't had preparation. So he cast about for somebody that wouldn't. Some society that wasn't quite so particular from the human standpoint said, We'll take you. So they took him and sent him to the Somalis. He has gone over there and been an outstanding missionary among them ever since. When God calls a man, the man knows it. And when God calls a man, the man can't die until he has done the work God wants him to do. Now, don't come afterward and ask me if I meant that. I meant that. I write a booklet or something or an editorial, and somebody writes in and says, Would you please explain? I don't think you meant that. Sure I meant that! And I mean this. I mean that if God calls a man to do a work and the man says, Yes, that man can't die until that work is done. You are immortal until your work is done. You never know when your work is done. You never know that. It may be that the Lord will have you started and then take you to heaven somebody else carried on in a way you couldn't do. So never judge God if a missionary dies young or if a worker in the church dies young. Never judge them. Somebody wants to know why people die young. An old young man died, young Jewish boy died, and they came to the rabbi and they said, Rabbi, we don't understand it. How could it be that this pious, godly, prayerful, worshiping young man should die? The rabbi said, The Lord Jehovah looked down from heaven and he looked for those whose work had been finished. Some finished their work when they were old and gray-headed. He took them. Some had finished their work in the middle of the day. They were middle-aged. He took them. A few had finished their work when they were still in their twenties. He took them and said, This boy was one of them. He had finished his work early. You get it done at nine o'clock. There is no use to lean on your shovel until sundown. And if the work is done that God has called you to do, there is no use to lean on your shovel. So Elisha left everything, ate his little banquet, said good-bye to everybody, left his job and his friends and his wages and his big farm. But he didn't try to do the impossible. He didn't try to walk on both sides of the fence at the same time. He didn't try to ski down the hill around a tree, one ski around this side of the tree and the other around that. Yet people try to live for God like that. They try to walk on two sides of the fence at the same time, and they can't do it. Our Lord told us about the futility of putting new wine in old bottles, old wineskins. He said, If you put new wine in old wineskins, it will burst and everything will be ruined. He told us of the futility of patching an old garment with new cloth. You know why that was, don't you? Because the old cloth had already been washed until it stopped shrinking. The new cloth would shrink, and the new cloth shrinking would tear the old. He said, If you are going to have a new coat, let it be new altogether. If you are going to put wine into a bottle, put it in new bottles if it's new wine. He was saying, Christianity is not something patched on to Judaism, it's a new thing altogether in the earth. And so was the life of a Christian. When you become a Christian, my friend, you are not to try to patch your Christianity onto your old life as you might pin a beautiful brooch on an old pair of overalls. You ought to start all over. So Elisha said goodbye, killed his oxen. If the oxen are dead, why don't you go back? He said, Go back to what? My oxen are dead. Go back to the plow, the plow is burnt. Go back to your parents where I've kissed them goodbye. It would be a shame to go back there now. He had it fixed so there was no going back. He burnt the bridge. Well, I'm sure that God called some of you out and up, and yet some of you are standing on by the fence looking and can't make up your mind. Why is it that only two or three missionaries have gone out from here over the last ten years? You should have 25 more pretty soon on the way. Haven't you heard the call of God? Don't you realize, the owner, that God is trying to do some of you people? Don't you feel the wind off the mantle as the Holy Ghost blows it in your direction, tosses it toward you? The Holy Spirit moves among you as a soft breath, breath felt by some, and if you can feel that breath and the Spirit of the living God is talking to you, then by all means I say, listen and listen closely. Or if you are not a Christian, you feel the call of God, Come and follow me. To be a Christian, whether it's in Christian full-time work or not, doesn't matter. But to become a Christian, that's first and basic. When God has called you, will you kill the oxen and say goodbye to the old life and give up the business and quit? There is a man in our church who will excuse me for reminiscing. He came to hear me preach for a long time. He liked to hear me preach, but he wasn't converted. He was associated with a certain organization I'm not going to name, but he played the organ in that organization in their meetings. He kept hearing the gospel and hearing the gospel, and he ran a currency exchange. I don't know whether you have that or not, or whether something else takes its place, but a currency exchange in the States is a little bank, just a tiny little bank, a hole-in-the-wall bank. He ran a currency exchange, and of course there was money there, anywhere up to thousands of dollars in these vaults. One day a couple of fellows came in, pushed their way in and said, Now, you lie down. He lay down, and they held their guns on him, while one of them opened the vaults and took the money. Here he was lying on the floor looking up at these big bruisers with the guns. He said, Now, God, I've had it. He said, I have known all the time what I ought to do. I said, If you'll get me out of this jam, I'll be your servant from here on. So they took the money and went, and he got up and brushed the dust off his coat, got on his knees and gave his heart to the Lord and was converted right there. He went home and told his delighted wife, Alice, who had been praying for him for years, told me, told everybody who would listen. He had been telling everybody that would listen still. He was working for the United States Navy now. But everybody listened. They had this organization. It wasn't a Christian organization by any means. He had this organization on his hands, and he had been in it for a long time. So he called them up and said, I'd like to come and play the organ one more time for you, and then I'd like permission to make a speech. So he played the organ, and when his time came, the Chairman said, Now, our friend so-and-so wants to make a speech. He got up and said, Well, brethren, I've been around here a long time. He said, You know me. He said, I've provided your music here now for years. He said, Tonight is my last night with you. He said, I was converted last week. The Lord came into my heart and saved me, and from now on I am a servant of the Lord, and I can't continue in this kind of business. Well, there was a sigh that went all over the place, and people looked at each other and couldn't believe it. They shook hands with him and patted his back and asked him how soon he'd be back. But he never went back. He burnt the plow and killed the ox and kissed his family goodbye and said, From now on I am a servant. Well, he is not only a Christian dragging his feet, but he is one of those Christians that keeps at you. In fact, he is so passionately a Christian that sometimes even I get bored with him. You can't talk about anything else. He is just pushing at you. He loves God, he just rubs his hands and talks about God and Christ and what the Lord did for this poor sinner. Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 2 That's a way to do it, my friend. Go back there and kill those oxen. As long as you can hear those old oxen bellowing, there is a temptation to go back to the old life. You sinners that got converted, go back and bust up all that old wine cellar stuff. Go down there with a sledgehammer and smash it all up. If you want to be more sanitary, pour it down the sink. You used to gamble. Get rid of all your cards and get rid of everything that could lead you back. You used to waste your time in theaters, tear up the old movie guide, forget the whole deal. You are a Christian now, by the grace of God. You have been honored, you have been called up from a lower life to a higher. So the Holy Ghost is moving among us. Brother Gray and I can, over the next few months, succeed under God in getting some people to a place where God can talk to them and the Holy Ghost can lay his hand on a few and say, Separate me, this one and that one, for the work I have called them to. I'll bid them good-bye as they go to Wheaton or London Bible Institute or wherever they go to get training to go to the field. I'll gladly bid them good-bye. And that's a blessed young people's society who always has trouble keeping a president. It's a blessed young people's society. I know a church where there is always trouble getting anybody to lead it, because the leaders weren't leading long until they were off to Bible school. Wonderful! So may the grace of God help us when God calls the Prophet Homer abroad, calls him to any kind of work. He calls him in his way, and it's our business. Say good-bye to the past, face the future, knowing we have been promoted and accepted as a promotion. If God calls a sinner out of the sinful life, it's a promotion out of sin. The kingdom of God, burn the old bridges, fix it so you can't go back and begin to serve God. A new day will shine when you do that. Amen.