In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of worshiping God with adoration and love. He shares the story of a renowned philosopher and mathematician who had a profound encounter with God, describing it as a two-hour experience of fire. The philosopher's prayer and declaration of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob demonstrate his deep connection with God. The preacher then explains that worship is characterized by boundless confidence in the character of God and emphasizes the need for a higher opinion of God in order to engage in true worship.

From the 45th Psalm, as a point of departure, So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty, For he is thy Lord, worship thou him. Now, I want to talk a little bit tonight about what worship is. And necessarily I'll have to do some defining, but it'll be my hope that my definitions won't be as dry as some I've heard and some that I have given, but that they will contain some truth that will help you. Now, in the first place, worship is an attitude, it's a state of mind, and it's a sustained act. God has created us that we might be worshipers, and we have become everything else but worshipers. And when we are brought back to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and restored into the fellowship of the Godhead again through the miracle of the new birth, and our alienation has been conveyed away, and we were made friends of God through royal atonement, we are then to worship again. And now what does it mean? Unless we know what it means, we can't do it. And if I'm using a word and you're hearing it in a sense that I don't mean it, then we're not communicating, if I may use the word that's used so often today. We're not communicating at all. So worship is an attitude. That is, it's an inward attitude. It is not a physical attitude, but an inward attitude. And it is a state of mind, there's no question about that. And it's a sustained act, for worship is an act. Well, I suppose that I should say, and repeat it before I'm finished, that this is subject to degrees of perfection and intensity. You cannot always worship with the same degree of wonder and love that you do at other times, but it's always got to be there. A man may not love his family with the same intensity when he's low and he's tired and business has gone bad and he's feeling blue. He may not have a feeling of love toward his family, but it is there because it is not a feeling, only it is an attitude and a state of mind and a sustained act, subject to varying degrees of intensity and perfection, intensity in the same person and perfection among the people that compose the church. Now, it embodies a number of factors, mental, spiritual and emotional. And I want to talk a little about them. And here's a definition. I don't know that ever I've given this definition here. I don't think that I have. I have several dictionaries, one of them the Unabridged. And yet sometimes I have to make my own definitions if I'm going to mean what I mean instead of what Webster meant or somebody else. So I want to give you a definition of worship as it ought to be found in the church. And you take it down and think it over because you won't find it in any book. It's not been written into any book. First of all, worship is to feel in the heart. Now, I want you to hear that word, feel, and I'm saying it boldly and without apology. I do not believe that we are to be a feeling-less people. I came into the kingdom of God the old-fashioned way and believed that I knew something of the emotional life that goes with being converted. Then I brought in with people who rather gave us the notion that feeling was just a little bit off. It was something that nice biblical Christians didn't fool around with. And we were told that there was only one man that ever went by feelings, that was Isaac, who felt Jacob's arms and thought they were his brother's, Esau's, and he said the only one man who went by feeling was mistaken. That sounds awfully cute, but it isn't so because it's written in the scriptures that she feeling in her body that she was healed fell down on her knees before the Lord. I believe in feeling. I don't think we should follow feeling, but I believe that if there is no feeling in our hearts, we're dead. If you woke up in the morning and suddenly there was no feeling in your arm at all, you'd call the doctor and you'd dial with the left hand because you couldn't get dead. And anything that has no feeling in it, you may be quite sure that it is dead. So I do not hesitate to say that real worship is, among other things which I shall explain as I go along, a feeling in the heart. It is to feel in the heart and express in an appropriate manner. I don't go along with those who hold that we worship by certain attitudes. I heard of an old bishop who had a friend who hunted with him upcountry, and they hunted together several years, and finally the old man came to the city where the bishop conducted his services. And he said, Now, Bishop, I'd like to come to your church, but I don't know how to act. Well, he said, Just come and do what the rest of us do, and you'll be all right. So Monday they met again. And he said, Well, I was at your church yesterday, Bishop. He said, I didn't know what was going on, and I didn't know what you were talking about, but I rose and sought with you. I always thought that was a nice expression. He said, I rose and sought with you. That is, I rose and sat down with you, that old-fashioned American. I rose and sought, and I got up with you, and I sat down with you, and I suppose I kneeled with you. But I believe that you can worship God in any manner that's appropriate to you, and then it's to feel in the heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring all. That is, worship humbles you. The proud man can't worship God any more than the proud devil can worship God. There must be humility in the heart before there can be worship. It is humbling, but it is delightful, and it is a sense of admiring all, an astonished wonder. You know the difficulty with us in this day of being sure of everything. When everybody's an engineer now, I'm just waiting for the time when they'll change the name of a minister of Christ to a spiritual engineer. I'm looking for that. I remember when an engineer used to be one or two fellows. He was a stationary engineer, which means he ran a machine that stood still. Or he was a locomotive engineer, which meant that he ran an engine that ran down on track. And that's about the only engineers we had. Then we began to multiply engineers. We even got to calling the man who cleans up the church a sanitary engineer, and the man who feels your head, the head shrinker, we called him a human engineer. We have human engineers now. Well, I'm waiting for that time when we will be said to be spiritual engineers. But we have reduced things to engineer's terms and to scientific terms and psychological terms. But in the scriptures I find this which I have called astonished wonder. That astonishment and wonder, you found it in the book of Acts, and you'll always find it where the Holy Spirit is, and you'll not find it where he isn't. But the Holy Spirit, when he comes, opens heaven until people stand astonished and wonder at what they see. And our astonished wonder meant, we confess, an uncreated loveliness. So this astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most ancient mystery, there we have a word again without which there can be no worship. If it isn't mysterious, there can be no worship. If God can be understood by me, then I cannot worship God. But one thing's sure, my friends, I will never get on my knees and say, holy, holy, holy to that which I can figure out. That which I can explain will never overawe me, never fill me with astonishment or wonder or awe or admiration, so that in the presence of that most ancient mystery, that unspeakable majesty which the philosophers have called a mysterium tremendum, but which we who are God's children call our Father which art in heaven. This ought to be present in the Church. You know, I have tried to figure out what revivals have been down the years, and I have rather come to this conclusion, possibly it could be modified somewhat. But I think that generally this is true, that revivals have been a sudden bestowment of the spirit of worship. Where people worship God, a sudden spirit of worship comes on them. There is a bestowment of it. It is not something you work up to, but something God bestows. And where it is present, then you have a revival immediately. I lived many years ago in France, a man by the name of Pascal, if you like, and he was one of the greatest minds that ever lived. Generally said to be, when the great thinkers and heavy-domed brethren are trying to figure out who had the heaviest dome, they usually say there are six of the great thinkers of the world. I am not one of them, brother, but they say that there are six of the great thinkers of the world. St. Paul, incidentally, is usually placed among them. And this man is said to be one of the six great thinkers of all time. He was one of the greatest mathematicians. When he was only a boy in his teens, he was writing advanced books on mathematics that astonished people. He was a great philosopher, mathematician, and thinker. But one night he met God. And they tell me that he wrote down his experience briefly on a piece of paper, and he folded up that paper tenderly, and he put it in his shirt pocket or the pocket that lay close to his heart, and he kept that paper there until he died to remind him in some sort of way of that experience. But here's what he wrote. He said, from about half past ten at night to about half after midnight, that would be two hours, then he had one word, fire. Now, here was not a fanatic. Here was not an ignorant farmer with hayseeds back of his ears. Here was not somebody that had climbed up out of the ghetto or out of the slums. Here was a man who was a great brain, a great thinker, a great mathematician, and who was given to thinking mathematically and mechanically about things. And yet God broke past that and threw that into his life so that for two solid hours he could only characterize what was going on in him as fire. Then he prayed, O God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the wise, security, security, feeling, joy, peace, understand, this was not a sentence for somebody to read or sentences. This was the ecstatic utterance of a man who had had two wonderful, awesome hours in the presence of his God. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and the wise, God of Jesus Christ, he says, thy God shall be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of all save God, who can be found only in the way taught in the gospel. O righteous Father, he prays, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. And he put an Amen after that and folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket and kept it there until he died. This praying man, this thinker, this great mathematician who had been moved so in the presence of God that he wrote it down and the philosopher that he was, he said, I don't mean the God of the philosophers, Father, I mean the God of our Lord Jesus Christ who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. Now, this is what I mean. Now I want to break down a little further of what worship is and show you that it is about four things. Now, it's lots more than that. I've given a running definition. Now I want to break it down and find four major factors, ingredients in worship. One is boundless confidence in the character of God. We can't do very much worship these days because we have not a high enough opinion of God. God has been talked down and reduced and modified and edited and changed and amended until he is not the God that Isaiah saw high and lifted up, but something else again. And because he has been reduced in the minds of the people, we don't have to have that boundless confidence in his character that we used to have. Confidence is necessary to respect. You can't respect a man in whom you have no confidence. And when you extend that respect upward to God, if we cannot respect God, we cannot worship God. We cannot have confidence in him because where there is no respect there can be no worship. And worship rises or falls in the church altogether depending upon whether the idea of God is low or high. So we must begin with God where everything begins. You know everything begins with God. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And it's at the beginning of your Christian life there is God. At the beginning of the gospel was God. At the beginning of the incarnation, God. At the beginning of the end, God. Everywhere and always, God has to be. God is always antecedent. God is always there first. God is always previous. God is always prior. God must be there first. And the God who is there is not the home-made, cheap God that you can buy these days and mark down because he's shelf-worn, but the God and Father, the awful God, the awesome God, the mysterious God, the God who arches over the world and folds the universe in his great wing, this God we must worship. And we must rescue our own concepts, not rescue God. God needs no rescuers. But we must rescue our own concepts from their fallen and frightfully inadequate condition. So that boundless confidence is one thing. If I haven't absolute confidence in God, I can't worship him. You can't sit down with a man and have fellowship with him if you have reason to fear that he's there out to get you and that he's tricking you or deceiving you or cheating you. You can't do it. You have to respect him before you can sit down quietly. You have to trust him before you can have human fellowship. So when we go to God, we have to raise our affections and our confidence to God. And in the presence of God without doubt and without nervousness and without worry and without fear that God will cheat us or deceive us or let us down or break his covenant or lie or do something wrong, we've got to be convinced to the point where we can go into the presence of God in absolute confidence and say, Let God be true, though every man be a liar. And the God of the whole earth cannot do wrong. And when we can do this in the presence of God, we're at the beginnings of worship. Boundless confidence in the character of God, I say. The second thing is admiration. Now, admiration for God, you can have respect for a man and not admire him particularly. And so I suppose it would be remotely possible to have some kind of theological respect for God and yet not admire what you saw particularly or have inability to admire. But when God made man in his own image, as I've said, I think, every sermon, he gave him a capability of appreciation. He gave him the ability to appreciate and admire his creator. I heard old Dr. George D. Watson, I know Dr. Shaw too, but Dr. George D. Watson, one of the greatest old Bible teachers of his generation, heard him many years ago talk about the love that we had for God. He said there were two kinds of love, at least two kinds of love, the love of gratitude and the love of excellence. He said we could love God because we were grateful to him or we could go on past that and love God because of what he was. Just as it's possible for a child to love his father or mother out of gratitude. And that's proper and right, he should of course. But years later when he gets to know his parents or maybe after they're gone, then he'll remember that he loved them also out of a love of excellence, if there was any excellence there. There are some people that we're supposed to love but there's no excellence there. You can't love them. You have to love them with an infused love. You can't love them with a love that's called out by their excellence. But God Almighty is excellent. Beyond all other beings he's excellent. And so the love of excellence surpasses the love of gratitude. The love of gratitude is the love we have for him because he's been good to us. And you know God's children rarely get beyond that. You rarely hear anybody pray admiring God and worshiping the excellence of God and talking to God about his own excellence. Now the Psalms do and Christ did and the apostles did and do, but we don't hear it much now because we are strictly Santa Claus Christians. Strictly we look to God to put up the Christmas tree and put our gifts under it. And we're grateful to God and we should be grateful to God. It's right and proper we should be grateful to God for all the things that he does for us and all the gifts that he gives us, large and small. But that is, I say, only the lower elementary kind of love. There comes a love then of excellence that you can go into the presence of God and not want to rush out again. But stay in the presence of God because you're in the presence of utter infinite excellence. And so naturally you admire and this can grow on you, this knowledge can grow, the knowledge of God, until your heart has been lifted into an excellency of love and admiration. Now the third ingredient that I find in worship is fascination. That is, fascination is to be filled with moral excitement. I'd like to stop here and just let that sink in and I'd like to underscore it, not put footnotes down disclaiming it. I want to insist upon it. Fascination. You can't read your Bible very long until you find that God fascinated some people in that Bible. They were fascinated by him. They were filled with a high moral excitement. There's not much of it. Now really there's not much of it. I'm not coming to you saying, for I used to preach, I had it, and you don't have any of it here. I'm a little weary of that. The man who can always have a revival somewhere else and then comes home and says there's none here, leaves with me the suspicion that what he had there wasn't a revival. Any new voice, you know, stirs somebody up. But that's something else again. I'm going down to Gordon Seminary tomorrow. Be back Thursday, God willing, and preach here next Sunday. But I will spend three days down there, Gordon College and Seminary in Boston. I'm just out of Boston. I'll be a new voice down there, and at least, I suppose, they'll be sitting up to wonder what this new thing is that has come in. So I can come back and tell you next Sunday about how many people came to me and asked me questions and wanted me to pray with them, but it won't mean too much. I'm not coming and saying, in the olden days, it will be to us now. Not that at all. But I'm saying wherever God is known, indeed, by the Holy Ghost's illumination, there is a fascination and a high moral excitement. That is, that fascination is to be captured and charmed and entranced by the presence of God and by the person of God. It's to be struck with astonished wonder at the inconceivable elevation and the magnitude and the splendor of God. I don't know how you feel about it, but for me it's either God or else it's agnosticism. I don't know many churches that I'd want to join and get into the rat race. I don't know very many of them. I don't know that I'd want to be part of any religious group that each person is a cog in the wheel and the pastor turns the crank and if it comes out all right at the end of the year and there's no deficit, he's a good man. I don't think I'm interested in that at all. I want to begin with God and I'll end with God and I want to know that I'll never end with God because there is no end in God. And this fascination, this sense of worship, we wonder where the hymns came from, why the hymns came out of this sense of admiration and fascination that was in the hearts of men. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, dearest Lord, forgive me if I say for very love thy precious name a thousand times a day. Where did that come out of? It came out of a man who was fascinated by what he saw. He admired God until he was charmed and struck with wonder at the inconceivable elevation and magnitude and moral splendor of the being that we call God. And then the fourth ingredient that I would mention is adoration, which is all else brought to white heat and made incandescent with the fire of the Holy Ghost. That is to love with all the powers within us. It is to love with fear and wonder and yearning and awe. I tell you, I get goose pimples when I think of this modern way of doing. I preach about Jesus dying for me and I say, Now, if you believe that and accept him, all is well with you. So a lot of people believe that and accept him and there's no fascination, no admiration, no adoration, no love, no fear, no wonder, no yearning, no awe, no longing, no hunger, no thirst. I wonder if they've met God at all. I wonder if they've met God at all. A young couple that have their baby and lay it in little warm, twitching, kicking form there. They love it and continue to love it more and more. They love it because it's alive. There never was a doll made anywhere. This most skillful, artistic thing ever turned out the most beautifully painted and human-looking thing that could bring out the shining-eyed wonder in a couple's face that a newborn baby can bring out. It doesn't have to be pretty, there never was one yet that was pretty, I think, at first. But it just has to be there, their baby, alive and warm and breathing. And there's a difference between this botanical, nickel-and-the-slot Christianity that's passing for Christianity now and that Christianity of our fathers where men worshiped God in awful wonder and adoration, to love and yearn and work on God. Bishop Usher used to go down by the bank of the river, kneel down there Saturday afternoon and spend the afternoon on his knees in the presence of God in awesome worship. John Edward's son-in-law, David Brainerd, said that he would kneel in the snow and be so lost in worship and prayer and intercession that when he was through, the snow would be melted around him in a circle. And the man he called the horrific Fletcher, the saint of Methodism, used to kneel in his little bare room on the floor. When he'd lived out his life and gone to be with God, they found that he had made a concave place in the floor where his knees actually wore out the boards. And they found the wall of his room stained with his breath, for he'd waited on God and where he had worshiped his God in the beauty of holiness. This adoration, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind, can only mean one thing, and that means to adore. So adore is a word that I use most cautiously. I never say about any person, Oh, I adore him, I adore her, I adore it. Never. I love babies, I love people, but I never adore them. Adoration I keep for the only one who deserves it. In no other presence is before no other being can I kneel in fear and wonder and yearning and awe and feel a sense of possessiveness that cries mine, mine. There are those who are so theologically stilted that they feel it is not right to say mine. I have even read, I've even gone through hymn books, at least one or two hymn books that I have seen worthy editors, the cold, chilly editors who got out of their deep freeze and shook off the scaly ice and got their pen and dipped it in blue ice water and edited the hymns of Wesley and Watts and they took away the I's and the me and the mine and they put ours in. I love thee, O God, and we love thee, O God, and so on. Because they're so modest that they can't imagine they're saying I. But my brother, your friend, that I always heard you worship, they cry out, O God, my God, only will I see thee. And so it becomes, it becomes, it becomes a love experience between I and God so that it's I and thee. Paul was like that in David and Isaiah and Moses and the rest. And that desire to possess God, that I will, God is my God, the Lord is my shepherd, I say not one. He made it me to lie down in green pastures. Can you imagine what an ice water editor would have done with that? The Lord is our shepherd, we say not one, he made it us to lie down in green pastures. That's togetherness, you know. And so we all lie down together, but nobody has got anything that means I. Whether in faith you can say God and I, or you can't say us and me and anything. Until you have been able to meet God in loneliness of soul, you and God as if there is nobody else in the world, you'll never know how to grace the love of the other people in the world. I wonder if your Irish saint here in Canada pulled a hand of which they're out and said, she talks to God as if there is nobody else but God and he had no other children but her. So that's selfish, you know. That's not selfish at all. Grump dynamics. Grump dynamics. Hundred dead people sit down and try to generate life. Can't do it. They put one more man. You'll get some kind of reaction anyhow. In this adoration, we desire to be poured out at God's feet. We desire. We want to be poured out at God's feet. Remember David? When David suddenly got a touch of nostalgia. Used to call that homesickness. I think it's a nicer word. Let's call it homesickness. He got a touch of homesickness. And he said, oh, that I might have a drink out of the good old well of Bethlehem, hidden under his boyhood. And one of his fellows, who was looking for a promotion, he grabbed up a teacup and started for the well. And he ran in there at the risk of his life and got some water and brought it back. And David picked up the water, but instead of drinking it, he said, I can't drink this. This is blood. He said, this costs you the rest of your life. So he poured it out as an oblation to his God. And when you've known God enough, when you come to have faith in him, found his confidence in his character, and when you come to admire him and love him for his excellence, when you become magnetized by his beauty and adore him, we want to pour ourselves out at his feet. We don't have to be urged to do it. David didn't say, come and consecrate, come and consecrate, come and consecrate. Oh, it's a do-right affair. Come and consecrate. The person who has ever really met God wants to pour himself out at God's feet. Consecration is not difficult for the person who has met God. He won't insist upon giving himself to God. Now, I say that in this that I have described imperfectly, these mental emotions and spiritual factors are present continually in varying degrees of intensity, of course, but present. And so on in faith and prayer and mental prayer, they condition our thoughts, our words and our deeds. They hallow every place and time and task. And they give back the glory which Christ had before the world was to the Christian. You in him and you in us. And the glory that he had, I have given unto him. Now, when I come to Jesus Christ, if we understand the scriptures right, not that we might stop smoking, although we certainly ought to do that immediately. God had meant a man to smoke, but he turned his nose upside down and broke his nose. But not that we may stop drinking, though certainly no man ought to drink liquor. Not that you might stop beating your eyes, if you do. I don't know if you do, but I suppose you don't. But why do we come afloat? We come in order that we might be brought back into and reinstated in that place that we were brought in and fell out of when we were lost and had them. Back into the place where we adore and admire the great God who made us, and where we are prepared to live in forever without embarrassment. To live in his awful presence with uncovered faces, and look upon his face and be like him, and his name be enough for us. If you listen to me now, I went to the creature once. I've mentioned this before, maybe, but let me call attention to it again. I went to the creature once whom God created to seal up the sun. He was full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. God placed him in Eden, the Garden of God. He is described as having every precious stone as his covering. Sardis, 10,000 in Eden. In Eden is the anointed cherub that covers. God says, I have set thee so. Thou art upon the holy mountain of God. Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the storm and the fire. Thou art perfect in thy ways from the day that thou was created till, an awful word, till iniquity was found in thee. Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty. Thou hast corrupted thy wisdom and reason by thy brightness. I will cast thee to the ground. I will lay thee before kings. I will destroy the old covering cherub. I will cast this profane out of the mountain of God. That's in the Old Testament. That tells of some way out there beyond where the fireless rocket can go. God had a cherub created for the purpose. He was a creature who could, without embarrassment or fear, burn, burn, burn the presence of God, covering the stones of fire before the throne. He fell in love with his own beauty. God said, Thou art profane, and God felled him down. Many Bible teachers believe that was the devil. The devil is a creature created to worship, who turns his worship on himself, and God felled him down. I want to read now in the New Testament, under the angel of the Church of Ephesus, right? These things says he that holds the seven stars. I know thy works. I approve some things you do, but nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. They hadn't left their activity. They had left their first love. They had works, verse 2. They had even labor, verse 2. They had patience. And they couldn't bear them that were evil. They lived right, and they were theologically sound, and they threw out everybody that didn't teach apostolic doctrine. I nevertheless have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works, or else I will come unto thee quickly, and remove thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent. I am not a schoolboy of Canada, of course, as I am of the States, having lived down here so long. But I suppose it's true here as well. You can travel out to the countrysides, and you'll see nice windmills, cattle grazing, occasionally a horse, little flocks of sheep living there, grain growing, fruit trees, and you'll come down the side road and here stands an old church. Nobody attends it anymore. You get out, open and close the door, but it's padlocked. And more and more you walk around the church to the back, and there you see the two sons. The youngest father, the youngest the wife, and their little baby, too. I always feel bad when I look at the tombstone and say, Well, there he is, born Mary 4th, of Jesus. This one here, the daughter. And they're George and I. The old building grandfathers that used to pump that big cold heavenly clay till the morning shook were sleeping the sleep of the just. Waiting for the resurrection of the dead. If you can get into the building, you'll find dust a quarter of an inch thick, the old pulpit cloth is faded now and the old pulpit Bible is turned down. Thou hast left thy first love. In Ephesus they tell me that six years or so after this was written, not a Christian church stood in Ephesus. God removed it, canceled it. You can ride through Toronto with a man, an older man who knows Toronto, and you'll think to a church and say, that church, Mr. Joseph, it was a building the fire of God burned there and sold to a convertant, but they left their first love. The old godly pastor is long gone, the young man who is there now, not a bit of gospel, nothing. That church stands there as an awful monument to what happens when we don't know why we were born, and don't know why we're Christians, and don't know why we're met together. We have forgot to worship God, and God has allowed our church to peter out and die. And they're petering out and dying all over. The man came from India, the city of Chicago. He wasn't Peter Carson, he wasn't Kenneth Bregman, he wasn't Anglican or Baptist or Presbyterian. He had met God through the New Testament. And I was awestruck with him. I let him preach, and he spoke fairly good English. And I learned more about it. This man was a Hindu, converted to Christ by reading the New Testament, come to America as a missionary. And thus, we here, arouse ourselves and wake up, that Jesus tells of our Lord, the Lord is coming from the Valley, to try to show Canada what real Christianity is. If that makes you mad, you'll desperately need this soon. He may be going to New York and Chicago and Buffalo and Boston from the Valley, from Los or Vietnam. But God has no particular fondness for nations or buildings or denominations. He wants to be worshiped. He is thy Lord, worshiped are him. Say unto the King, Greatly desire thy beauty. And when the Church loses her love, she begins to slip. Little by little she'll slip. And for another generation, people will have to come to her to tell her the gospel again. And maybe they don't. My dear brethren, I've tried to say tonight what worship is. I've tried to say again that we are born to worship, and if we're not worshiping God in the beauty of holiness, we have missed the music of being born. I've tried to say that worship is a delightful, awful awesome, awful humbling, wonderful experience which we can have in varying degrees, but have always, even living in the middle of it. We never need to leave church with the worshipers. When we've locked the building and we've driven out away from the place and it's dark, we're not left church at all. We carry our sanctuary with us, and we never leave it, because worship is a continual thing. I have said that in the Old Testament we learned a mysterious creature who forgot why he was created, turned his eyes on himself, and perished. I have said in the New Testament there was at least one church that forgot why she was a church, began to admire herself, fell in love with the Lord, and the Lord said, I'll take the king and stick out. And the church figured out. My friends, there are some of you that have been stirred over the last weeks when you've talked with me about this building. I think tonight would be a wonderful time to take hold of ourselves and say, I'm sick of my coldness of heart. A man spoke to me this morning, a fine young man. I can't give a verbatim what he said, but the gist of it was that he was deeply concerned for his own spiritual life. He had been in this church 17 years, but felt in his deep heart that he wasn't fulfilling the will of God for himself. And he was cold and relatively powerless. And I quoted to him a sentence from Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard of Clairvaux writing to a man who talked like this young man, who was afraid his heart was hard. He said, my brother, only the heart is hard that doesn't know it's hard. Only he is hardy who doesn't know he's hardy. If you know that your heart is cold, it isn't a hard heart yet. God has the gist of it. So that if there's a yearning within you, God put that yearning there, and he didn't put it there to mock you. He put it there that you might rise to it. God puts the date of yearning in your heart. He doesn't turn his back and mock you. He puts it there because he's there smiling to meet you. And if you have this night, just this night, return it, that you're going to get rid of this business, this coldness, this mediocre, half-dead way of living. And seek the face of God in repentance, and long until he comes and fills you with himself. Come to nature, all right. And I think by the end of the day this will be a good night. Let's see, is it 285? Number 285. What's the song about the blood? Now the problem is, of course, the problem of cleansing, the purity. Let's see about it. Now, let's go to this prayer room over here, and if your heart has waked you up, I'm proud of you. Let's go to the prayer room, and let's have a little prayer together tonight.