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The God I Worship
S.I. Emery

Stephen Isaac Emery (March 18, 1895–September 30, 1977), commonly known as S.I. Emery, was an American Holiness preacher, educator, and author, celebrated for his eloquent preaching and significant contributions to the Pilgrim Holiness Church. Born in Monterey, Michigan, to a devout family, Emery grew up immersed in Christian faith. He married Lelia M. Smith on September 4, 1918, in Allegan, Michigan, and together they raised eleven children, though a set of twins died in infancy. A World War I veteran, he served as a minister lieutenant and later earned two doctorates, reflecting his commitment to both ministry and scholarship. Emery’s ministry spanned churches in Michigan, Colorado, and New York, where his deep bass voice and emotional delivery—often preaching without notes—captivated congregations. He served on the faculty of several Bible colleges, including Colorado Springs Training School, Bethel College in Indiana, and Frankfort Pilgrim College, and was a member of the Pilgrim Holiness Church’s General Board from 1942 to 1946. Known for his emphasis on Christ’s atonement, he authored works like A Catechism for Senior Young People and Bible Answers. Emery died at 82 in 1977 at his home in Michigan after a long illness, leaving a legacy as a passionate preacher and teacher who “fought a good fight” and “kept the faith.”
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the power and speed of God's spoken word. He compares it to the process of human imagination and construction, highlighting that God's ability to bring things into existence is much quicker and more efficient. The preacher also discusses the concept of justice and judgment being the habitation of God, and how belief in God cannot be demonstrated through physical proof but rather through moral evidence. He concludes by emphasizing that God sees and knows the hearts of all individuals, and that humans should recognize their limitations in comparison to God's unlimited vision and understanding.
Sermon Transcription
I was told a year ago that I was supposed to live five weeks and a good number of people were praying for me. And I learned about an old brother. In fact, I was down at Old Sound. He came into my trailer. And he's not at all a man who would present himself, push himself forward, but a very humble, godly man whom I had come to respect. He rather limited acquaintance that I had had with him. He was an old brother in his eighties, very rugged old fellow, worked with a pick and shovel around on campus. But he came in and sat down and told me that he had gone to the altar and been anointed in my behalf. I got out of the hospital on the 29th of January, last January. And he went back to his room and he said to the Lord he was praying again. The Lord asked him if he would be willing to die for me. He said, you are willing to be anointed, would you be willing to die? The old brother faced that a while on. Then arose and wrote it out, signed his name, that he'd be willing to die for me. Well, God gave me a touch somewhere. I didn't know this for about a year. I learned I was supposed to live five weeks, but I'm in better shape than I was last year. Physically, by the help and grace of God. And I owe much to the old brother from that angle. There have been a few things I have been able to do this year that will maybe kind of top off my ministry. I don't want to stay not a day longer than the Lord wants me to stay here. I don't want to go a day before he wants me to go. But as I face the future, I face it with some curiosity. For a number of years, I wondered what it would be like to make the crossing. I think it's Olin Curtis who tells us that when we come to the article of death, for the first time in our existence, we will be absolutely alone. Never has been a time up till then that there wasn't something or somebody that you could touch or be conscious of beside yourself. You could see something before sight began to function in your infant eye. You became conscious of somebody by touch. That newborn infant is conscious of a mother's breast. And consciousness begins to develop. And sight comes, and then hearing develops. And we broaden out our scope of information or attaining information. But down there at the end, we'll be absolutely alone. Your loved ones may be in the room, and you may be looking at them, but sight fails. The eyes may be open, but sight doesn't function. They're talking to you, you hear them, but that fades out. No longer can you hear. And they may take you by the hand, but you become insensible of that. Your soul is leaving your body, and you'll be absolutely alone with yourself. That'll be something, sir. Be alone, just absolutely alone with yourself. Some years ago, when I read it, I came to another field of thinking related to that. When you come to defining death, death is not annihilation, certainly. We do not believe that. Writing a little catechism back in 44, I wrote it, I think, in 42, and it printed, copyrighted 44, I was feeling for a definition of death that would be adequate for all three aspects, spiritual death, physical death, eternal death. And I came up with something like this. It is that change of condition and separation from present environment that man has no power to reverse. That'll fit spiritual death, it'll fit physical death, it will fit eternal death. Adam was not annihilated when he died the day he sinned. Somebody said he didn't die that day, he lived 930 years. I say he died that day. I'm a little premature in some things I may want to repeat here, but the light went out in his soul. His soul had been illuminated by the presence of the Spirit of God. There was a withdrawal of that spirit. We call it theologically a deprivation with an attendant deprivation. The light went out. Moral faculties with no light degenerate. And when he was driven out of the garden, he didn't have a tool in his hand, not a shovel or a saw, an axe or a hammer. And there was no house built nor tent pitched or a ceiling. He had sin in his heart, guilt in his conscience, fear in his mind, an angry God behind his back, and a cursed earth under his feet. I say he died. He was on his road to hell, didn't know it. And if something didn't happen before he arrived, he'd certainly arrive. He was a wanderer on an island of time, which is an island, I call it an island, in the sea of eternity. You journey across it, I journey across it, and a step off into the sea of eternity. But then I raised the question, he was separated from his present environment. He'd been in the garden, taken out of it. Condition was changed from a holy being to a depraved being. He couldn't reverse that. He had absolutely no power to change it. When you come to physical death, you have the same thing. Change of condition and separation from present environment, and you can't reverse it. You can't change it. When you come to the judgment, if you're so unfortunate as to be lost eternally, you'll be resurrected to appear before the infinite God, there to become the object of his wrath. No man becomes the object of the wrath of God until that hour. He is judged and tasked into the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. I'd better cut that off because there are some things right there that I want to pick up and maybe elaborate upon a little farther. But I ask myself, is that what Jesus meant when he said, He that liveth and believeth on me shall never die? You'll never come to a place where you're absolutely alone. I like to think that. I may come to a place where I can't see my kinfolk. I can't hear them, and I'm not sensible of their touch. But I want him there. And so that there is such a thing as living to die. That's what I want to be doing, living to die. And I've wondered what it'll be like to close your eyes here and fade out and open them there. I don't know. And by the grace of God, I want to be ready when that hour comes. And for the privilege of being here, I thank God and you. Trust that what we have to say will, from service to service, will be of benefit to you. Now it's very seldom that I use notes once in a while. I've taught homiletics a few times, believe it or not. You may not recognize that from the way I go about things, but I've told the youngsters, don't do what I do, do as I tell you to. The matter of whether to preach with notes or not is a debatable thing. Some of my good friends have said if I tried to without notes, I'd be in the brush so far I never could get out. My good friend R.G. Flexon told me that. And he preaches with copious notes. We've worked together a number of times, and when he sees me working without them, then he sometimes talks to me afterward. Well, C.G. Finney and his head had notes he could write on the back of a calling card. A single word meant more to him than a whole paragraph to some other people. Well, whatever the Lord would want, now I've written down just a few things here, so I, maybe I won't use them, I don't know. But if I have to or feel like I want to, I will. But the subject that, if you want a subject in these lectures, the first one will be the God we worship. The God we worship. I wonder if you know how much you know about him. I know so little. But what little I do know is so wonderful that I'll be glad to know more. One of the most sublime and profound statements that you will find in all literature is the first verse of the Bible. In the beginning God created. You have a tremendous statement there. You have an adequate first cause for everything that is in existence. I don't care what it is that's in existence. You have the cause for it right there. In the beginning, God. When I think of what God has done by way of material universe, and I know so little about that. I'm not an astronomer nor a scientist in any area in that field. But I remember reading years ago about a constellation or a planet out there in the constellation Orion that they call Betelgeuse. And they told me, and I've read it numbers of times since, that it is so large that this whole solar system could be placed inside it. Our Earth could continue to rotate around the sun inside that with 25 million miles to spare. That's all in one planet. My God put that out there. And you go to thinking about the material universe, you have something to think about. God created. In the beginning, God. God never tries to prove that he is. There's absolutely nothing in the book to prove that there is a God. There is a statement that a man's a fool who denies it that there is. Fool has said in his heart, there is no God. He could do what the psalmist did, scan the heavens. The heavens declare the glory of God. Firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech. Night unto night showeth knowledge. And there's not a language in which their voice is not uttered. And any man that can stand that is a fool to say there isn't a God. We could go out into that. Now the old theologians called it the cosmological argument. Some people say it's old. I said that doesn't mean it isn't good and it isn't true. It's a solid, sound argument for the existence of God. Cosmos is there. And it's not only there, but it's evidently controlled by somebody. Did everything just happen to be in the order that the orderliness of the cosmos argues for this God? The being of this God, the power. A creator big enough to make and to sustain and to rule, keep it in order. Suppose he'd stop just one time and the sun wouldn't come up tomorrow morning. I tell you we'd have a lot of atheists converting. Yes, sir. We'd just have one little thing go wrong with this planetary system. And you'd understand. But now there is no way of giving demonstrative proof that there's a God. You can't demonstrate, prove demonstratively. There's no demonstrative argument for his existence. I can demonstrate to you that 2 and 2 is 4, or that 4 and 3 is 7. I can demonstrate that. But you can't demonstrate that there is a God. All you can offer is moral proof. You cannot give demonstrative proof. You can offer moral proof, which makes it more reasonable to believe than to disbelieve. In other words, God does not force morality. You can't force morality. Morality is the result of a moral agent choosing and volitionally carrying out what he chooses to carry out. And I, the moral argument would be, where did this come from? Did it just pop into existence by a cosmic explosion somewhere? Is that how things came into existence? I read about men telling how many millions of years, why they get so they can do a thousand million years ago, this happened as though they were right there. I sat on the bank of a river in Illinois. I was in the officer's training school at the time, World War I. A fellow was lecturing to us in the field of geology. With all the confidence of a man that had been right there and seen it, he said, 500,000 years ago, this was the condition here. I went back to my barracks and got my Bible out, searched in vain. Now, I do not know when the beginning was that God created. I would tell you that. He doesn't either. Could have been 500 million years ago. I belong to what is known as the Restorationist School of Bible Students. That the original creation, whatever it was, we don't know when it was. I belong to that school. If you wish to criticize me there, you're welcome to do that. You don't have to agree with me. I tell students that many times. You don't have to agree with me, but you're going to have to know what I'm talking about if you get a passing grade. Well, that's fair, isn't it? I'm not here to make people little emerys. I'm here to help them to learn the issues that we're facing. Learn all they can about them. You don't have to agree with me. Never did ask a student to do that. I want to be a Calvinist. When they go off from under my instruction, they're free to be that. I'm not trying to convert them from Calvinism to Arminianism. I'd like to, because I think Arminianism is right. But that's not my aim. They themselves must make the decision. I do not know of a case, and that's not anything, any credit to me. Understand that, please. If I converted a man, then the next fellow could convert him, too. But I have never known a Calvinistic young man to come face-to-face with the issues just like they are and go out the scene. I've had a number sit under me in theological class. I've never known them to go out the scene. One young man stood with a book in his hand open that I had asked him to write either a critique or a review, book review, digest. He had it open. He said, Brother Emery, I can't agree with this fellow. I said, You don't have to. You don't have to. You have to know what he's teaching. Well, it was a rock-ribbed Calvinistic book he was reading. The Sovereignty of God by Pink, Arthur Pink. If you haven't read it, you have. You know he's a rock-ribbed Calvinist. This fellow thought he was a Calvinist, had been for 22 years, Baptist. He said, I can't agree with this fellow. I said, You don't have to, sir. All I want you to know is to look at it. Here it is by one of their own writers without any varnish. You know exactly what he's trying to tell you. He said when he started, it seemed so logical. He said, I can't go with this. Well, again I said, You don't have to. He snapped his fingers. He said, You know, after you've been in this 22 years, you can't throw it off like that. I said, I'm not asking you to do that either. I just want you to know the field. You arrive at your own conclusions. I'd rather a man be that than to jump and then wonder why he jumped. I want him to know what he's facing. So when you come to the matter of trying to give demonstry proof that there is a God, you can't do that. You can give moral proof. And the power of God is manifested in the cosmos. And the orderliness is there too, but it's not quite so prominent. We look and think usually of the cosmos in its greatness, the majesticness of it, and then the orderliness. But when we come to the teleological argument, the purpose of things, we look at flowers. Who can make a flower? Nobody but God. You find the architect of that lily, that orchid, or that rose, and you found God. People may make imitation, but they don't have the odor. Bees don't work on them. You don't get any honey from them. There's something about the program of God in the field of nature about us. I heard old Seth Reese say one time a lot of things in this world he didn't understand. That he didn't understand how power, what power it would take to push sap through a hundred foot of hardwood log. But he knew it happened. I don't understand how sap is pushed up apparently out there to stalk the leaves on the cherry tree. The buds come out, then the leaves. Then when the fruit is there, if that sap, those leaves, fall off from that tree, that sap doesn't come up. Apparently it pushes the buds and the leaves, then the leaves fall. I don't know. But I know in a cherry orchard, and I lived in the fruit belt of West Michigan, you go out and sometimes it looks like somebody's been out there with a little muzzleloading shotgun like they used to hunt with. It wasn't choked. And birdshotting, it just, you know, spread all over when it went out. The leaves just full of little holes, just like birdshot had gone through. Those leaves will not pull the sap up. They'll fall off after a bit. The cherries are large, full size. They turn red at a distance. You might look and say, man, wouldn't that be good cherry picking. No leaves to bother us. But you get a little closer, and they're sickly red, kind of a jar. They aren't any good. Now, I don't understand that. But I'm like my little children. When they would talk among themselves, I'd hear them off in the other room or somewhere. One would be talking and said, I don't know, but Daddy does. I don't understand that, but my father does. There are a lot of things I don't know, he does. And I'm glad I can worship him. He's the God I worship. Now, in the 89th Psalm, at the 14th verse, you have a statement regarding this God. Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne. Mercy and truth shall go before thy face. Psalm 89, 14. In the midst of that, there's a pronoun, personal pronoun, thy. Justice and judgment are the habitation, and the margin says the establishment of thy throne. Take that pronoun, thy. It speaks of a personal being. But you know, there's a lot of people who claim to be worshipers of God. I wonder if they have any idea at all of the God of the Bible. This, to me, is a tremendous text. The first time my attention was called to it, I think, was sometime back in the 30s, early 30s. I was speaking at a Bible school chapel for a week. And coming out of a revival meeting, I was to give the five days there before I went to the next meeting. And I was asking the Lord for something that I could use to help those young theologues. My attention was drawn to this verse. I thought I would start with it. But working without an outline, I started. And the thing was bigger when I stopped the first chapel than it was when I started. And I used it all five chapel mornings. Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne. Take that pronoun, thy. It speaks of a personal being. Personality requires certain things. Without it, you do not have personality. I think Dr. John Miley, one of Methodism's great theologians, said that it takes intelligence, sensibilities, and will to constitute personality. Now some would use another word for sensibilities. They'd use emotions or feelings or something. But I like it the way John Miley gave it. Intelligence, sensibility, and will. If you're lacking in any part of that, it's not personality. Well, if there is a God, a person, a very personal God, what is God like? Well, I said I do not know of any better way to approach the study of God than to work through the creature that he made in his own image and after his own likeness. So I look at a man and I say, there's a person. God's a person. This man was made in the image and after the likeness of God. And if he is, he has the faculties of being that God has. Now when the man sinned, and I don't want to get into that area, only just to point this up, when he sinned, he lost the moral image of God, but he did not lose personality likeness. He retained, far as I know, Adam in the garden saw through a pair of eyes just like I see. He would hear through a pair of ears just like I hear. He had a pair of hands that would feel just like I feel. He had a tongue and a palate that could taste just like I taste. He had all the powers of personality that I have, but the moral faculty went dead on him. Light went out in his soul. But if the man retains those personality faculties, then could I say that God sees, the Bible says he does, but the Bible says God is a spirit. He doesn't have any eye to see with. He doesn't need one. Every organ that you have sitting right here, you will have when you're lying in a casket if you lie in a casket. It has an eye, but it can't see. Every faculty, every organ that you have sitting right here, you will have when you're lying in a casket if you lie in a casket. Maybe Jesus will come before we get that far. But if you lie in a casket, you will have every organ that you have now, you will have then. But the organ that you have limits the faculty that you have. God isn't limited. He doesn't have an organ to bother him. Actually, it's your soul that sees, it isn't this. Your soul is the seeing thing. Your soul is the sinning thing, we'll find out later. Your soul is what sees, but your soul is gone. The eye can't see, because the thing that sees through the eye isn't there. But that eye limits me. I can't see through that wall. Well, that wall doesn't mean anything to God. He can look right through it. I suppose, separate all the atoms and every piece of wood or mortar that's out there. Just look right through it like it wasn't there. God sees your heart and my heart. The heart of all you preach to. I look at your face. I wonder what kind of a fellow you are. And each of us try to evaluate the other fellow, you know. I had a very good friend. We were very good friends. We sat on all kinds of boards together. District council and examining board and school board and, well, just about all the district boards that were where we had been on together. We were not at all alike. He was probably six inches anyway, taller than I, and thin. Well, I haven't always been as heavy as I am now. But I said to him, brother, naming him, we're like a couple of dogs, two strange dogs coming together. They're about a block apart. They see each other. They stick their nose up and they sniff a little. They take a few steps and they sniff and they stop and look and, you know. I said, those dogs are trying to take each other's measure before they get together. And I said, we're like that. You think you have my measure and I think I have yours. He laughed. I said, if frankness becomes cruelty or diplomacy becomes deception, in either case we've missed the trail of holiness. And my danger is that my frankness I'll become cruel. Your danger is that in your diplomacy you'll become deceptive. He just laughed. He thought he knew me. I thought I knew him. I look at your face. I study your walk. I study all I can about you. If I'm interested and then form a judgment. But brother, that judgment could be so far off. God looks at your heart as he looks at my heart. And nothing escapes his notice. For there's nothing hidden from the eyes of him with whom we have to do. He doesn't have an organ that he has to limit himself by. The light's too bright. My organ won't function. The light's too dim. In fact, I told brother, I got lost in the light this morning. I was coming down 13 and I got in that little town, I still can't remember, La Palla, is that it? And when 13 turned, the sun was just coming up, shining right down that road. And I couldn't see anything. I backed in and turned around. I don't know how many turnarounds I did there, but I was trying to find where, I was pretty sure it started south out of that town somewhere. And I sure didn't want to keep driving east against that. I got lost in the light. Why? Because I looked through an organ. The light's too bright. My organ's no good. The light's too dim. My organ's no good. A brick wall, a board wall, anything will block my vision. But there isn't anything that will block his. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee, That's what the book says. God is a great pattern in whose image man was made. Man had a faculty. God has a faculty. I can only look a limited distance. God looks, shall I say, to the end of eternity? No. I don't know what eternity means. There's no end to it. He's infinite. There isn't anything in all the universe, anywhere, he doesn't see. It's no wonder that Ezekiel tells about him being full of eyes before and behind. There's no place you can escape the eye of the Lord. The righteous don't want to escape. The wicked may want to hide us from the face of him, fall on us, but mountains wouldn't do it. No way to escape the eye of the Lord. But this same Lord who looks at everything and sees it, this same God has the faculty of hearing. But again, I don't believe he has any ears, for he's spirit. God is a spirit. But he can hear without an ear. Isn't it a fact that the ear limits our faculty? The sound, the vibrations are too rapid, we can't hear them. They tell us that there's some little bird, I don't remember which one, that can sing out of the range of our organ. They've watched that little bird singing, and the little throat is vibrating and the beak is open, and they hear the note going higher, higher, higher, and it keeps on when they've lost the sound. The little bird is still vocalizing. It's gotten so far, the vibrations have become serenity. I can't hear them. They don't register. But you let them go down, down, down, slower, slower, and we see the old string vibrating, we can't hear any sound. But it never is lost to the ear of God. Now, the Bible talks about the ear of the Lord, the eye of the Lord, the nose of the Lord, the hand of the Lord, and all of that. But at the same time, it tells us God is a spirit. Now, the God of the Bible is infinite in all of his faculties. Seeing, hearing, feeling. I often wonder if his relationship to the universe is likened to our relationship to a body. I have a soul housed in a body. How it engulfs it, I do not know. But you touch any part of my body, whatever my soul is, it knows that, unless I'm paralyzed. And sometimes silly things strike me just. They told me this summer about somebody who came to Victory Grove Camp Meeting, that's right at the edge of Albany, New York. A woman of the fashionable set came in all dolled up, and she had a little pooch in her arm. Brought it into the tabernacle and sat down right on the front seat with the pooch down beside her. Well, there was an old sister. One of the old, tight, holiness women, you know, sitting behind her. She saw that dog, she didn't think it had any business in the house of God, nor do I. There was an old brother up on the platform talking about it like I do about it. God. That put it back. My friend on the platform, they said, just convulsed with laughter. The pooch took off, and the woman after it never did come back. Well, it had sensibilities, though it was an animal. And you, you touch any part of my body. And I don't know what my soul is, nor where it is, nor how it involves, but I know it has feelings. And I somehow wonder if God doesn't indwell the universe like my soul indwells my body. He knows everything that's going on in it, just as sensible of it, as though it were in the I itself. It's my hand. I know it's hit my hand. I've hit my hand a few times with a hammer. Well, it didn't have to hit my eye. My eye knew what had happened. It knew where to look and knew all about it. Well, I don't understand the God of the Bible. I don't comprehend Him. But I thank God one day I apprehended Him. I read this a long time ago, that a God comprehended is no God at all. And I stood on that through these years. And some university students have come to me to tell me they appreciated that. If I could comprehend God, I'd be bigger than He is. But I bless God I can apprehend Him. That is, I can know Him and He can know me. I can call Him Father and He can call me Son. And we can make love to each other. Now, not only do we have God with eyes and with the faculty of seeing and the faculty of hearing, we have a God that can create. I do not know what the image would be like unless it would be in our imagination. We're the image of the great pattern. He was the pattern. We became the image. Limited, infinite. He's infinite. We're finite. He can see everything. We can see only in a limited way. He can hear everything. We can only hear when vibrations are within our range. I have a creative faculty. Mine isn't as active as some people's. I call it my imagination. I tell you, I had a big home. I had a big library. I've been an avid reader for all my life, I reckon, since I began to read. I, in my boyhood dreams, daydreaming, I had a mansion. I've never seen it. Because I build soap bubbles, he builds worlds. He speaks. There it is. I dreamed, and it never was. The imagination of man seems to me to be his creative faculty. Some men see things, they must see them before they come into existence. Then they have to work to that end. I think about some of the bridges, the Mackinac Bridge, North Michigan, five miles long, a little over, I think. The engineer saw that in his mind before you ever saw it. They build those skyscrapers, somebody has a vision, they see that. Brother's building here, he had a vision, he saw something before it began to take shape. But it takes him a long time to get that imagination, that thing he saw in his imagination, into reality. Doesn't take God long. Just speak. He spoke, and it stood fast. Well, I bless God that this God that the psalmist is talking about is my God, the God I worship. Now, let's keep watch of my time here. I didn't know exactly when I started, and I usually pile on 45, 50 minutes, I think 50 minutes is a classroom period. We try to stay somewhere in that. But looking at this again, justice and judgment are the habitation of thy, here's a person, thy throne. Somewhere in the universe of God there's a center for personality. I do not know what the center of personality is. I've dealt with people who were materialistically minded, but when you come to personality, the Bible talks about a heart that's not this physical heart. It talks about some things that proceed out of the heart. Read it in Mark chapter 7, about verses, what, 21, 22, out of the heart proceed. Well, that's the seed of life, the very center of personality. Now, I don't think of God as the pantheists would think of Him, just spread out in everything. Everything you see is God, no. Because here it talks about a throne. And yet it tells me that God is everywhere, present. Whither shall I flee from thy presence? Said the psalmist. Whither can I go from thy spirit? That if I go here, if I go there, no matter where I go, thou art there if I make my bed in hell. Behold thou, the words aren't there or supplied, but it seems to me that the psalmist is saying that a man that goes to hell will be jarred when he faces God there. You just take a look. The words aren't there, I think, or supplied. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou, not going to get away from God. What do we mean here? What's the issue? I don't know how God could be omnipresent. I'm not omnipresent. I don't know how He could be omnipresent and be localized or centralized on a throne, but the Bible says He is. Whether I understand it or not is beside the point. I believe a lot of things I don't understand. I believe them upon the evidence that's presented to me, but I stand here occupying space enough to accommodate a couple of hundred pounds of advertive boys, but I'm pushing my personality. You could sit back in there, I think, with Lao Tzuang Yen and my wife, and you'd find it back there too. I'm extending my personality by means of the faculties of my being. Just as far as I can see, my faculties reach. Just as far as I can hear, my faculties reach. Just as far as I can make myself heard, my faculties reach. I'm present. You go home and say, Emery was there. Well, I occupied this little space, but I trust I'm where you are too. I trust I'm pushing my personality out. Something about me, beside my voice, something that's feelingly there. I don't understand that either, but I know I've been in the presence of people, and that I wish I could just stay that close. Oh brother, he said there were some people into whose presence he goes when he leaves. He felt like he needed a spiritual bath. He didn't touch them, they didn't touch him, but there was something emanating from them that made him feel like he wanted a bath. I said when I heard him say it, yes sir, there are other people into whose presence I go, when I leave I feel as though I've had one. They haven't touched me, I haven't touched them, but I felt, I felt the power, I felt the presence, I felt something about them that I couldn't see, an intangible something. Well, I do not know how God projects himself to the ends of the universe, but I know if I can project my personality out through this building and as far as I can see or hear or make myself heard, I don't have any problem about God sitting on a throne somewhere just seeing and projecting his personality. Well, eternally, brother, eternally and infinitely, there is no place, you couldn't go any place in the universe that you wouldn't come in contact with him. That's what the psalmist is trying to tell us. This throne, sitting on a throne, a throne speaks of authority. A throne is where kings, rulers sit. And I've often wondered if men who talk about God so vividly take his name in profanity so fluently. I've wondered if they'd ever stop to think that he's looking right into their heart. He knows every thought. I know what your thoughts are far off. He saw you before the atoms came together to make your body. Why, as yet, there were none of them, said the psalmist. He knew all about that because his knowledge is infinite. He doesn't have to reason to conclusions. I have to gather evidence. He knoweth the end from the beginning. It's instantaneous, knowing now. And he sits on a throne, which means he governs all that he's created. He's a ruler. God ruleth over all. And because he does, I'm going to have to give an account to him one day. I thank God that I made my peace with him and I worship him. He is the God I worship. He's infinite in all of his faculties. Who hath known the mind of the Lord or who hath been his counselor? Certainly Emory never was. And I don't believe any other human being or angelic being was. He was the infinite God. Having all knowledge, being everywhere present, having all power, searching out all hidden things, knowing my heart like I don't know it myself. And then one day I'm going to have to be done in the body. I worship to thee. I worship. I worship. And I thank God it's not just form. My heart worships. My heart worships God and then in return he loves me. He said, Jesus said, If a man love me, he shall be loved of my Father and I will love him and manifest myself to him. And that's what I live for. Periodic manifestations of the Son of God to my heart. God loves me. He loves me. I love him. And we have a fellowship together. Period.
The God I Worship
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Stephen Isaac Emery (March 18, 1895–September 30, 1977), commonly known as S.I. Emery, was an American Holiness preacher, educator, and author, celebrated for his eloquent preaching and significant contributions to the Pilgrim Holiness Church. Born in Monterey, Michigan, to a devout family, Emery grew up immersed in Christian faith. He married Lelia M. Smith on September 4, 1918, in Allegan, Michigan, and together they raised eleven children, though a set of twins died in infancy. A World War I veteran, he served as a minister lieutenant and later earned two doctorates, reflecting his commitment to both ministry and scholarship. Emery’s ministry spanned churches in Michigan, Colorado, and New York, where his deep bass voice and emotional delivery—often preaching without notes—captivated congregations. He served on the faculty of several Bible colleges, including Colorado Springs Training School, Bethel College in Indiana, and Frankfort Pilgrim College, and was a member of the Pilgrim Holiness Church’s General Board from 1942 to 1946. Known for his emphasis on Christ’s atonement, he authored works like A Catechism for Senior Young People and Bible Answers. Emery died at 82 in 1977 at his home in Michigan after a long illness, leaving a legacy as a passionate preacher and teacher who “fought a good fight” and “kept the faith.”