In this sermon transcript, the speaker recounts a story of a Jewish widow who came to him with questions about his faith. The widow's son had seen the speaker at a college meeting and was impressed by his ability to withstand abuse without retaliating. The speaker emphasizes that becoming a son or daughter of God requires continual choosing and living by faith, even in the face of suffering and opposition. He shares his own experience of being attacked by rabbis and feeling inadequate in his response. The speaker also highlights the importance of being a son or daughter of God regardless of external validation or success.

This sonship, Spock says, is something which has to be borne out in a continuous process. A sonship that is something which relates to the whole life of the believer in a practical way of expression. It's not just a title. So that in as much as it is inseparably bound up with resurrection, as is the case with the Lord, Jesus, it demands a constant experience of His resurrection in power. For me to live as Christ is a moment-by-moment appropriation of that life because you have ceased from yourself. And I can tell you from my experience, you'll have always the choice before you in any given moment whether to meet that moment out of yourself or out of the life. If you meet it out of yourself, you can guarantee this, you'll be safe from embarrassment. You've met the requirement at the moment so your reputation can continue. He'll give you that option. But if you cease to live out of your human inability sufficient for yourself and trust His life, there will be a response and an answer of another kind. A life-giving kind that has not to do with saving your face from embarrassment but bringing life to that one who was a scoffer and a doubter and was resisting the very living God Himself. It's a moment-by-moment. This thing of sonship is not some automatic stamp and you're finished. Yes, there is a moment of transaction, but then a continual choosing and living from that life that you have affected by faith and bringing to the death that alabaster box. At any moment, you can go back to it. And we're continually faced with that. We can speak appropriately and please men or we can trust God and risk everything. And we're going to be brought moment-by-moment to those occasions in the call to be the sons and daughters of God. And I can tell you that when I was that human pincushion at City College in New York, when those rabbis with their nicely tailored van Dyck beards and erudition rose to their full dignity and let me have it full blast, I was the most pitiable object that you could imagine. And I had no clever thing to answer them. These charges and these men stalking out and slamming the door behind them, their heels registering on the floor that shook the building in power and authority. And this weak, pitiful thing who thought to bring the message to City College of New York, the first gospel outreach in its history, failed. Though I had been up all the night before, fastings, days and weeks and months in advance of that one great outreach. And when it came, pitiful, weak, inept, and they were the ones that were strong. They were the ones that were impressive. They were powerful. They were authoritative. And I didn't even choke. I just stood there. Boom, boom. They were letting me have it from every side. Up and down. Up, down, one side, down the other. You know what the death was? Not the humiliation of being unable to give answer to Jews at crisis moment because the life was not giving me answer. The life was bidding me be silent and bear it. But the greatest death was not from my Jewish kinsmen. It was from Christians. You would have seen their faces. Cats, we had thought it was you who would have restored the glory of God at City College. We had heard what happened through you at Yale University and Harvard and those universities overseas and your own alma mater at Berkeley. But you're a total dud and a failure. Don't you know about prayer? Haven't you ever heard of fasting? That's what their faces. Their faces were an indictment and a condemnation at my failure. That's death, saints. And what makes it double death is you're not able to answer them and you're not able to explain to them because God has not explained to you. Willing to bear that? Only a son will. And you go home with your tail between your legs, licking your wounds. For three weeks, licking your wounds and letting the devil have a field day. Whoever said that you were a university speaker, you failed wretchedly. You don't have enough to lick at the back of a stamp. Your presumption, your pride, you've... And then a phone call comes with a thin, frail voice. Mr. Katz? Yes? I'm a Jewish woman and I have some questions to ask about your faith. Could I come over? I said, lady, can't you find anyone better? So she came over. She was more dead than alive. I mean, just skin and bones. She looked like a concentration camp inmate. One foot already in the grave. Chain smoking. Asking me questions. And the last question was, what must I do to be saved? Yes! So like my 96-year-old mother, a year ago January, she took my hand and followed me word for word in a prayer to receive her life. And she passed from death to life, visibly. She's in eternity. And she became an evangelist in her apartment house in Queens, going with tracks from floor to floor, proclaiming the Lord. A Jewish widow. And so I'm putting her coat on her little shoulders. And I said, by the way, I said, how did you know to come to me? Oh, didn't I tell you, Mr. Katz? No. My son was at the city college meeting three weeks ago. And he came home with your book, Ben Israel, which is in the room today. Classic. Journal of an atheist. It's not written by a believer. It's an atheist journal being apprehended by God. It's... It's... It was his book, your book. And he said, Mom, he said, a man came to the school today. I've never seen anything like it, he said. He stood in the midst of these people who were outraged and vexed and spitting out of the corners of their mouth and coming upon him like gangbusters. And the man just stood there and took that terrible abuse without saying a word. And I've never seen anything like that, Mom. So, yeah, she said, so I read your book and I have these questions. Hey, all that suffering and multiple deaths for one little woman whose elbows are coming out of her skin? Yes. And I'll tell you what, dear saints, a son does not even require one little woman getting saved. It doesn't require anything. It doesn't require any proof, any gratification, any verification, any sign of the Father saying, well done, my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. Because the Father did not tell me anything. It was a sense of aloneness, the absence of God. At the crisis moment when he needed his encouragement desperately, he withheld it. Are you willing to be a son? Are you willing to be a son? Huh? That you can doubtless go back and return and carry sheaves with you, with singing and with rejoicing, in the place that you thought you had failed? I'm going back to those places. As a son who doesn't need to be gratified by evident appearance of success, even today.