In this sermon, the preacher highlights the tragedy of the church being preoccupied with trivial matters instead of focusing on the supernatural. He emphasizes the need for the church to examine the Word of God and seek God's ways rather than following the ways of the world. The preacher criticizes the church for becoming copycats of popular culture and treating the gospel as entertainment. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining reverence and awe in worship and warns against losing sight of God's presence in the pursuit of modern ideas and activities.

I want you to look at 1 Chronicles 13. We are pursuing our studies in great decisions with David's decision. He made a great many, and some of them were pretty bad, as you very well know. And this is one of the mistakes. I am assuming that you are sufficiently familiar with the story of bringing the Ark back to Jerusalem, that we do not need to read the long account of it. But beginning in chapter 13, you read in verse 2 that David said to all the congregation of Israel, verse 3, let us bring again the Ark of our God to us, for we inquired not at it in the days of Saul, and all the congregation said they would do so. And then a very significant comment, for the thing was right in the eyes of all the people. But it wasn't right in the eyes of God. In verse 7, they carried the Ark of God in a new cart out of the house of Abinadab. And those in Ohio drove the cart. And David and all Israel played before God with all their might. It doesn't matter how loudly you sing and how many instruments you play, if you are not doing the thing the way God wants it done, that won't help. With all their might. And in verse 9, when they came into the threshing floor of Chidon, as they put forth his hand to hold the Ark, for the oxen stumbled, the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the Ark. And there he died before God. And in chapter 15, verse 2, David said, None ought to carry the Ark of God but the Levites, for them hath the Lord chosen to carry the Ark of God and to minister unto him forever. And so David gathered all Israel together and called the priests and said, Sanctify yourselves, for because ye did it not at the first, the Lord our God made a breach upon us, for that we sown him not after the due order. We didn't do it right. So the priests and the Levites sanctified themselves to bring up the Ark of the Lord God of Israel. And the children of the Levites bear the Ark of God upon their shoulders with the staves thereon, as Moses commanded according to the word of the Lord. You see, they got back to the real authority on how to do it. David decided to bring the Ark to Jerusalem. The Philistines had captured it during the sad last days of Eli. It caused so much trouble that they got rid of it and put it on a cart and returned it. And for a while it stayed in the house of Abinadab. David undertook to bring it to Jerusalem. His motive was good, but his method was wrong. His intentions were good, but his implementation was wrong. God had ordered that the Ark should be carried only on the shoulders of the Levites. David loaded it on a new cart, drawn by oxen. He probably got the idea from the Philistines that it was an expedient borrowed from the enemies of Israel. On the way the oxen stumbled, and as they tried to steady the Ark, God struck him dead. This strange tragedy has some serious lessons for us today. The Church, and I speak of the professing Church, you understand, is carrying the Ark on a new cart. Just as David borrowed an idea from the Philistines, the Church today is borrowing from the world the vehicles of her ministry. We study the techniques of this age in the gadgetry of the business world, the social world, the entertainment world, looking for new carts on which to carry the Ark of our testimony. We hold a wet finger up in the breeze to try to ascertain which way the popular wind is blowing. We set our sails to catch the breeze, and instead of asking, how does God do it, we ask, how does the world do it? We have become religious coffee cats, mimicking the mannequins of this Punch and Judy show that somebody mistakenly called Progress. We have called in Hollywood to our aid as though the gospel were a form of entertainment, which is the last thing on earth God ever meant for the gospel to be. Our worship is streamlined and our preaching slanted to tickle the ears of a generation that cannot endure sound doctrine. When my Lord expounded the scriptures, the disciples developed heartburn. But we read the time is coming when they will call in teachers who can tickle itching ears. The tragedy today is we have come all the way from heartburn to ear itch in the Church. The intentions were good when Uzzah put out his hand to study the Ark, but the whole procedure was wrong to start with. Today the Ark is reeling and rocking, and Uzzah is worried, and the brethren are all bothered about the unsteadiness of our doctrine and the wavering churches and the unstable swaying of modern Christianity. Sincere efforts are being made to stabilize the situation, but they will end only as Uzzah did in tragedy, for we have started out wrong. And we must give up our new carts and get God's work back on the shoulders of separated and dedicated people. Now, just what was the sin of Uzzah? You've read this all your life. Why would God strike a man dead for just trying to study the Ark? Well, for one thing, he was the son of Abinadab, and all his life he had seen the Ark in his home. It had become a familiar piece of furniture. The Ark had become just a box, and he had lost his regard for the sacredness of it as a symbol of God's presence among his people. Old Matthew Henry, in his inimitable way, says, Perhaps he affected the show before this great assembly how bold he could make with the Ark, having been so long acquainted with it. Familiarity even with that which is most awful is apt to breed contempt. Uzzah was a Levite, but he wasn't a priest, and only priests could touch the Ark, Numbers 4.15, and that only under certain circumstances. Now, tonight we're all Levites, we're priests under God. It's a sad day, beloved, when the Ark becomes a box, when we become so familiar with scripture and worship and the ordinances that we lose our reverence. McLaren says, The trouble was a lost sense of awe. Nothing is more delicate than a sense of awe. Trifle with it ever so little, and it speedily disappears. There's far too little of it in our modern religion. What would Alexander McLaren say now? All you have to do is watch the average Sunday morning congregation. And what you see, you don't see all. What you see is awful. And we're so interested in relevance that we need to get back to reverence. Taking God's name in vain is more than custom. You can stand in church and sing a hymn and take God's name in vain while you sing it. Have thine own way, Lord, hold o'er my being, absolute sway, and if you don't mean it, take in God's name in vain. I have heard of some travelers in Africa back in the days when diamonds were plentiful in South Africa, and they chanced upon some boys playing what looked like a game of marbles, and they drew near, and they were playing marbles with diamonds. And we're doing that today. The tragedy is the Church is playing marbles with diamonds. Just a few weeks ago, I preached for three days to between 400 and 500 black preachers in Hampton, Virginia, at their wonderful Hampton Institute. And one of those preachers, I heard some terrific preaching, I'll undertake. One of them preached on being obsessed with the obvious. Now, that'll need to think over. We get so taken up with secondary, ordinary things that we have little time for the supernatural, and we handle the carnage of the word of God without ever examining it to see whose image and superscription may be thereupon. I heard of a group of tourists in Vienna looking around over the museum where Beethoven's piano is to be found. And one teenager sat down and began to play some rock on it, and the old caretaker smiled indulgently. And when she finished, he said, Paderewski was here some years ago to see the piano. And what did he play, she asked. The old caretaker said nothing. He said he was not worthy to touch Beethoven's piano. I imagine that poor little thing must have gone out of there red-faced with embarrassment. It's a fearful thing to treat the Ark like a box in a cheap familiarity with the holy things of God. And it's only by the long-suffering of God that more corpses don't lie around today, like us before the Ark. Beloved, beware of this evil. Somebody has said there is no greater hindrance to true spirituality than a superficial acquaintance with the language of Christianity from childhood. I thank God that I grew up in a Christian home, but it's dangerous. I thank God for it. I thank God that I was saturated with the scripture and started writing little sermons for the paper when I was nine and ten years of age and could recite an awful lot of it. But one day I came to the place where I had to back myself into a corner, and although I had been licensed to preach when I was about twelve and ordained when I was fifteen, I had to back myself into a corner and say, Hey, you! Is this real? Or is it a language you've learned to parrot along without any sense of its real meaning? I went through some anxious times with that, beloved. I thank God, as I say, for the Christian bringing up. But don't ever assume that because you know the language, you have the life. We can become so accustomed to being Christians and preachers that we place unholy hands on sacred things. Our intentions may be good, so are others. But Matthew Henry says again, It will not suffice to say of that which is ill done that it was well meant. Oh, how he can say things in that old vernacular! But there is another angle to this episode. There was something personal about carrying the ark on the shoulders. Shifting it to a cart lessened a sense of personal responsibility. And today the Lord's work has become impersonal, and we let a machine do an awful lot of it. Somebody said the other day, America is suffering from a stampede from responsibility. We accept the privileges of being Americans, but a lot of people are shying away from the responsibilities. The privileges of marriage, but not the responsibilities. The privileges of church membership, but not the responsibilities. It is required of stewards that a man be found faithful to responsibility. Now, putting our shoulders to the wheel is not the same thing as putting our shoulders under the ark. Too much of our Christian giving is like feeding nickels into the slots of a vending machine. So much for home missions, and so much for foreign missions, and so much for local expenses, and so on. And it becomes sometimes a vain oblation, and that's when we put the money on the plate and never give God ourselves. The Macedonians first gave themselves. Self, service, substance. That's the divine order. It never changed it. I fancied that these new Philistine carts were pretty. It took a load off their shoulders. But you cannot transfer personal responsibility. Now, it may seem more sophisticated. I suppose that ark was more sophisticated than lugging the ark along over those rough roads. And wouldn't it get there more quickly on an ark? Well, it didn't. It took longer to get there after all than it ever would have if they had carried it from the beginning. The problem was not that the oxen stumbled and the cart shook and the ark lurched. There shouldn't have been any oxen in the cart to start with. And no matter how many uzzahs try to steady the ark, we're working on the wrong problem. We're not going to help matters by making better carts or hiring more trained uzzahs. And we're doing an awful lot of that today. There are new ways to raise church money and interest the young people and increase church attendance and new styles in church music. And I've never seen so many new carts running around all over the place. And never has the ark wobbled like it does now. Plenty of fanfare and plenty of music, but that didn't help here because the thing was right in the eyes of all the people, it says, and that's it. It's possible to put on quite a religious parade, but it's a performance and not an experience, a form of godliness without the power. You mentioned A.W. Tozer. I get hold of everything I can find at that prophet, and he was a prophet. He's an individual. I was with him a week in his church in Chicago. He sat out there in that little upper room and surveyed the scene. And although he had never gone to the schools, he trained himself to be one of the best writers. Matchless use of English. I'm amazed at it. And that last book was at Harper's that published it, Knowledge of the Holy. The Lord took him. I was with him for a week, and he was bluntly frank. Paid me a compliment. He said after his own over, Well, thank the Lord for one man I don't have to clean up after. And he said this, Evangelical Christianity is now tragically below the New Testament standard. Worldliness is accepted as part of our way of life. Our religious mood is social instead of spiritual. We've lost the art of worship. We're not producing saints. Our models are successful businessmen, celebrated athletes, and theatrical personalities. Now, who else would say that? We carry on our religious activities after the method of the modern advertiser. Our homes are turned into theaters. Our literature is shallow. Our hymnody borders on sacrilege. And scarcely anybody appears to care. Well, that's the new card all over again. David finally came to his senses, a little late, but better late than never. He began by recognizing that the Ark should have been carried only by the Levites. And he'd broken that rule. The first thing we need to do today, and take this thought with you, God's work must be done by God's people, God's way. And for the failure to comply with that requirement, we're in a lot of trouble. When the seven were appointed in Acts 6-7, they were seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom. Now, just because a man in some town is a lawyer, probably, and talks all week, does not qualify him, not of itself, to be a Bible teacher on Sunday. Just because he's a good talker, and just because some man works in a bank all week, does not of itself qualify him to be the Church Traitor. Just because some lady has a diploma from a music conservatory, does not of itself qualify her to sing. I don't care if she sings so high, Lily Ponds couldn't have sung bass to it. You have to have something else. You can't run a church like a department store. Only Levites are qualified to carry the Ark, and only the separated and the sanctified and the dedicated qualify. So David had a convocation, gathered all Israel together, in 1 Chronicles 15. And I go over the country every day, holding convocations in the churches, trying to get the Saints together, calling them back to dedication, to doing God's work, God's way as God's people. He assembled these people and said, Sanctify yourselves, that you may bring up the Ark of the Lord. I sometimes think that we are rededicating ourselves to death today in a lot of our churches. We are running an old Adam Improvement Society. Having begun in the Spirit, we are trying to perfect ourselves in the flesh. People who have never died to sin, never risen to walk in newness of life, are marching down church aisles, rededicating themselves, and God couldn't use them in a thousand years, no matter how many times they dedicated themselves, because old Adam cannot rededicate himself. God can't use old Adam to start with. He has been crucified. We are dead in sin. Christ died for sin. We are dead to sin. You can't crucify yourself. The Holy Spirit does it. We were crucified with him on Calvary, and we have risen to walk with him in newness of life. Our lives are hid with Christ in God, and we are dead. We are put on the new man. Sometimes I think the wrong people are rededicating themselves. Only dead people alive unto God can be used to do God's work. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and always will be. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. We are told over in Exodus 30 that the oil that was poured on the high priest was to be restricted in three ways. If in man's flesh it shall not be poured, second, you shall not make another kind like it, and third, don't put any of it on a stranger. That goes for the work of God, the Holy Spirit. You can't anoint old Adam for the service of God. Two, imitation worship and praise and joy and phony revivals, no. Three, you can't anoint a stranger if he doesn't belong to the household of faith. God can't use him. And if ever the church needed sanctified musicians, it's now. Church music has fallen on evil days. We used to take the church to the jungle, and now the jungle has come to church. Let the world sing the songs of the world. After all, we have a song that says, Take my voice and let me sing only, always for my King. That rules out a lot of music. We have a better song to sing than the world. Let them sing theirs. We have a better song. What we are hearing today is not even art, not even what you hear out in the world. By some of these records, there are still a million of them. My soul is not music. I think a tomcat, with its tail caught in a screen door, could strike a better note. Some of these I've heard and have sold a million records. You hear about the top 40. I'd hate to hear the bottom 40. Oh, Dr. Nelson Bell said, Oh, Dr. Bell said, It is my opinion that should our Lord enter one of the, quote, worship services now being contrived for you, with their offbeat and frenetic music, nightclub atmosphere, flashing of lights and slogans, the emphasis on psychedelic art, he might well wade in and say, Take these things away. My house will be called a house of prayer. You've made it a den of psychedelic emotionalism. Somebody asked Billy Graham about this kind of music. He said, I rarely hear any of it, but I do think it's gotten out of hand. Anything that whips young people into a frenzy is bad. I often am disturbed by what has happened to teenagers after they listen to it. If I were 17 today, I'd stay as far away from it as I could. Had a young man up at Moody Institute some time ago who used to make his living with rock music, and he spoke to the students up there. Rock and roll, he said, is the first type of popular music written not to be heard but to be felt. Rock and roll is the exploited agency of Satan to gain mass demonic control over the lives and bodies of young people in America and the mass immoralization of the country. But we're not hearing music today. Ernest Hemingway said, We're living in the millennium of the untalented, deluded with writers who can't write, actors who can't act, singers who can't sing, and they're all making a million dollars a year. Some of them don't know any more about music than a billy goat knows about Beethoven. When it comes to the work of God, we're in another world where the standards of this age do not apply. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, and the Church doesn't operate like any other business on earth. Well, finally they got it all together and they started off again. And I like to read how it went this time. This is Revival. They were happy this time, and everybody cooperated except David's wife, Michael. She was the daughter of Saul and had a lot of bad blood in her veins, and she despised the king, met him with satire and scorn, and God struck her with barrenness, which was an awful blow for a Jewish woman. When God's people do God's work God's way, there will still be Michaels in the Church who won't like it. But God has already stricken them with barrenness spiritually from his presence. And whenever things begin happening as it did in the Temple in Matthew 21 when Jesus cleaned up the Temple and then they had revival, the lame came in limping and without leaping, the blind came in sightless and without seeing, the little children waved palm branches and cried those down, and everybody had a great time except the Pharisees. They had a little caucus over there on one side that didn't like this. Kids making too much racket in the Temple. They went up to Jesus and began to complain. He said, Yes, and if you never read out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, thou is perfected praise. The better Christian you are, the more childlike you'll be, not childish. A revival is when the childish Church members become childlike. Just that. And such people who complain as they did are already smitten with barrenness. But notice, the blind didn't come in sightless and go out seeing. The lame didn't come in all of their feebleness and go out in all their joy until the Temple had been cleaned. And you're not going to see that happen in any Church until there's a cleansing of the Church. And so let's carry with us tonight three Christians, and I'm one of God's people. If there's anybody here tonight who's what you've always been, you're not a Christian. Because a Christian is something new. If any man be in Christ, he's a new creation. If you're just what you've always been, you may be a hard-working Church member, head of the missionary union, teaching a class, could be a deacon in the Church. You've told us about some of that, haven't you? But you're not saved. God's people are a peculiar people. That doesn't mean queer. Some of them are, but that's not what this means. This means a purchased people. The word means to make a ring around. God bought you and made a ring around you, and you belong to him. You're not your own. You're bought with a price. But a lot of our work today is being done by non-Christians. In the Shantung Revival in China, one of the missionaries got saved. Bertha Smith tells you about that. I was down in Greenville, South Carolina, a couple of years ago, didn't know that that old lady was in the congregation. She came up and said, I'm that missionary. And I said, I want you to come back tonight and tell us about it. Think of that, going all the way to China to be a missionary, and then waking up to the fact he didn't know the Lord. And Mr. Culpepper, Dr. Culpepper, was leader of our Baptist group over there, one of the godliest men that ever went to China. But the Holy Spirit got a hold of him so that you'd have thought he was the worst sinner that ever went to China for several weeks. And he'll tell you that. I used to think that revival meant a movement among the backslidden and the Christmas and Easter crowd and all that sort of thing. Revival begins with the best people in the Church. You have to start with the kindling wood. You don't start with the backlogs. You're going to make a fire. Start with the best people in the Church. I don't get out of heart when all the members don't come. I've learned better than that. If you've got the faithful, that's the way God starts anything. Then you work out to the periphery, out to the margin. But start with the best, and Dr. Culpepper's one of the best. Bertha Smith is one of the best. And this lady was in many ways fine, but started with the best. Am I one of God's people? Second, am I doing God's work? Somebody said, The Church began with a company of lay witnesses. It has become a professional pulpitism financed by lay spectators. That's a pretty good description. I'm not talking about just Church work. There's a lot of Church work today that God may not be remotely interested in. I am talking about doing the will of God and the work of God from the heart, whether one be a lawyer, doctor, engineer, farmer, bricklayer, housewife, whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, doing all to the glory of God. That's full-time Christian service, and every Christian is really in full-time Christian service. People sometimes ask, What does the Church do all week? Well, if it's a real Church, it's working in shops and offices and treating the sick and driving trucks and rearing children and teaching school wherever a Christian is living for Jesus on the job. That's the Church at work. We may have too many meetings inside the building. I don't know. Dr. Jowett used to say we're not doing most business for God when we're busiest. Sometimes a lot of the Church work, God never started it to begin with. God's people are doing God's work God's way in spirit and in truth. You may be one of God's people. You may be trying to do God's work and still not doing it God's way. You can be doing it in the energy of the flesh. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. Have you ever backed yourself into a corner to ask, Why do you do what you do in your Church? Why do I? What am I doing it for? Is it an experience or a performance? It's time to get the ark off new carts and on the shoulders of God's people who are doing God's work God's way. And yet I don't know if I ought to amplify that a bit. I'm not quite satisfied with putting it that way. I think we'd better say that it's God moving among his people doing his work, his way. It's not our doing something for God. It's God working through us. The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show himself strong in them whose heart is perfect toward him. God is not interested in our showing how much we can do for God. He's out to demonstrate what he can do through us. And that's something entirely different. You remember that after the golden calf out there in the wilderness in Exodus 33, God said to Moses, My presence shall go with thee, and I'll give thee rest. That precious verse has meant more to me in the last year than it ever meant in my life. And God has proven it abundantly. And Moses said to him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence. Lord, if you're not going along, we're not going. For wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have found grace in thy sight. Lord, what's the trademark of God's people? What's the badge? How is everybody to know that we are a people? Is it not in that thou goest with us? So shall we be separated, I and thy people, from all the people that are from the face of the earth. What is the mark of identification of a church? I don't care how nice the building is, how loudly the organ plays, how well the choir sings, how talented the preacher is. No, no, that's not it. The mark of identification is the presence of God among his people. The conscious presence of God, I'd like to say. I was in meetings back in the 30s in Gainesville, Georgia, First Baptist Church. Two weeks. I had an interesting time. Half of them were for me and half of them against me, I think, in the meeting. But God was there, and one of my preacher friends dropped in on a morning. We had morning services. He and his wife sat down before the service began, and he tells me that as they sat there, he said, I turned to her and I said, God's here. And that's all I said. There hadn't been a word said, no song sung, no sermon. It ought to be that way all the time in the house of God. But now tell me the truth. How many times do you get into a situation where the thing that impresses you, maybe of course half of it's your fault, maybe you're looking to be impressed some other way, but how many services have you been in that the thing that impressed you was the conscious sense of the presence of God? And you felt like slipping out of the place on tiptoe after the service. Because God was there. I longed to get more though, and I have trouble finding them. Half of it may be my fault, but all is vain unless the spirit of the Holy One come down. Just a few weeks ago, in one week, I had three glorious experiences of the sense of God. I was at Moody Institute, preaching to 700 preachers, in their preacher's conference. And on Thursday night, I gave an invitation to preachers. I said, if we can't take our own medicine, why, we're poor doctors. We tell everybody else what to do. Nobody ever gives preachers any invitation. And I preached on holy desperation and so on. I said, I'm not even going to sing a song. I dwelled on it a bit. If you mean business with God, just get up and come. And they came, and they filled the whole front of Torrey Gray Auditorium and God Metis. Dr. Sweeney wrote me the other day and said, we won't forget Thursday night. And I think everybody there had a sense of God. Then I came down to Asbury College for the baccalaureate, and they've had a great revival there in the last few years, and the flavor of it is still there. I had dinner that day with the President, and he told me how he got in late when the revival was going on. He'd been away, and his wife said, well, they're all down at the chapel. Two-thirty in the morning. He said, I went down there, and there most of them were, a great group of them, and it was that holy disorder that's orderly because it's of the Spirit of God. Then I came over to this Hampton Institute with these black brethren, and God gave me wonderful liberty, joy, and some of those sermons will linger with me all my days. The last night when that great crowd in that lovely church of theirs sang that old song, Farther Along We'll Know All About It. They sang about twenty verses over and over again. I wish they'd have sung fifty. The only thing I could do then was just pat my foot and cry. I didn't care who saw that because I'd been through a lot in the last year, and the prospect of farther along knowing more about it was pretty precious to me. And God was there, and that's what we need above everything else. I've been in big churches where there was a pandemonium of activity, everything geared and tailored to the latest ideas on how to do it, and you came away sick at heart. You had everything but a sense of God, so I'd better restate it. It's God moving among his people, doing through them his work, his way, and it's the same thing for you. It's God working in you to will and to do of his good pleasure, doing his work, his way. After all, God saved us to demonstrate him. That's what he saved us for. Why are we a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people? That ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. When David was getting ready to tackle old Goliath, he said, I want to prove this, I want to do this, that all the earth may know, not that there's a David in the camp, but that there's a God in Israel. And while old Elijah had his offering up there on Calvary, he said, We're doing this that this people may know that thou art the Lord God. And my prayer these last years, and won't you pray for me to that end, is that the last chapter may be the best of all. And I find myself praying Psalm 71, 18, when I'm old and gray-headed, forsake me not, until I have showed thy strength to this generation, thy power to every one that is to come. For I know my heart, that's all I want tonight. Any way God wants to do it, it's all right with me. The details are in his hands. But I do want the last chapter to be the best, and it ought to be, and it ought to be with you. And I want to demonstrate God, and Havner gets in the way a lot of times, and you get in your own way a lot of times. You go around demonstrating what you're doing for the Lord. Then you need to spell a repentance again. But God help us tonight, in the depths of our hearts, to covenant with him, dear Lord. Work in me to will and do of thy good pleasure, whatever happens to me. The road may even be tougher from here on. You never know how God's going to do it. Because I started out in 73, seeking a closer walk with God, that at any cost I might get through to him alone, and I did. But how? But it's worth it. And so I pray the prayer of David, and I pray for all of us, that we may be living demonstrations of God working in us to will and do of his good pleasure any way he pleases. Let us stand and pray. Lord, if any of us have been running around with little carts of our own trying to do the thing our way and expedite matters and can't wait on the Holy Spirit, get in a hurry and try to do it some fancy modern way, Lord, help us to get the ark on our shoulders again. And do it the right way because we might as well not do it at all. Thou wilt not give us credit for the works of the flesh. Bless this to all our hearts and help us to walk in the life of thy word, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.