In this sermon, the speaker reflects on his past sins and the transformation he experienced when he realized his own depravity. He mentions going to jail multiple times and living a life of disbelief in heaven. The speaker also discusses the powerful sermon by Jonathan Edwards called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and how it impacted the congregation. He emphasizes the need for preachers to weep over people going to hell and highlights the importance of studying the lives of great preachers and church history to be moved towards revival.

Now, the glory of God doesn't come to us, so we clap and sing and shout. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's a substitute for the, for the more, for the deeper thing, for the more powerful thing. It could lead on to that. You see, prayer is preoccupation with my needs. Praise is preoccupation with my blessings. Worship is preoccupation with God. I don't know how many people call me and ask me, where can I get Dr. Tauze's books, or they say I'm reading this book of Tauze's and that. Now, if you want to go to a real good school, apart from Agape, you read Tauze's books. First of all, read his, read his Pursuit of God, and then after that, read his twenty-one studies on the Holy Spirit, the Knowledge of the Holy, and that'll do as much good as a year at Bible school, if you digest them that is. And I like the things he wrote. I like better the things he told me personally in his office. And one of the most staggering things was this. I went in one day and he said, Len, lock the door. He showed me a piece of rug. It was about, I guess not more than 40 inches by about 28. And he said, Len, look at that rug. I looked at it, and I said, I've seen your rug. These are his exact words. He said, Len, I come in my office some mornings. I call my secretary and say to her, put a notice on the door. No interviews today. You go home. I can't dictate any letters today. And then he said, what I think is one of the most awesome things I've ever heard. And I've heard the greatest preachers in the world in the last 60 years. He said, I get on that rug on my belly at eight o'clock in the morning, and I worship the Lord Jesus, the ascended Christ. At eight in the morning, and I'm still there at eleven, or even twelve, or even one o'clock. Now that's awesome. But a man with a vast intellect, need acres of culture, a brilliant mind, a rich relationship with God. And he says, I can lay on that rug for five, four or five hours, and worship him, and never say a word of prayer, and never say a word of praise, just worshiping him. Gazing on his holiness, gazing on his majesty. We don't often concentrate. Lord, we thank you what we've done for us. You've blessed us this week, and you've done this for us this week. Forget it. Turn it the other way. How often do you get there and say, Lord Jesus, I'm thinking of you now. You were there before the stars were there, before the trees of the field clapped their hands, or the stars sang together. From everlasting, to everlasting thou art God. Get some of those old majestic hymns and say of Wesley, he laid his glory by, and wrapped him in our clay. Could you lay down on the floor for even an hour without saying a word? Most of us have gone to sleep. Without putting in a word of request. Told you I like to get hymns. As a matter of fact, you sell the hymn book that he wrote here, and everybody should have a copy of it. It's in paperback, a good edition now. What's it called? Christian hymn. Yeah, Christian, thank you, Christian book of mystical verse. He puts Terce Fegan in there, Madame Guillaume. One that he liked most, best of all, Faber. He said, Len, I just, oh, I'll tell you what he said to me too. He said, Len, let everybody else do what they like. You and I will worship God face downwards. I read this morning about Abraham. God appeared to him, and he sat on his face. And then I turned into the Matthew, the chapter 20, somewhere around there, where it said that Mary, and the Marys went to the, to the grave, and they turned, and as they came back, Jesus met them in the way. What did they do? They shook hands with him. No, they didn't. It says they fell on their faces, and they seized him by the feet. I don't know if any of you have read, have you read Knowing God? Who's read Knowing God by J.I. Packer? Good, good, good. You should read, that's a tremendous book. In fact, most books by Englishmen are good. But anyhow, J.I. Packer is in the university, but he begins that very lovely book by stating, this was preached in a New Park Street pulpit. And he gives you about 50 lines of real profound stuff, like the Puritans used to preach. And then when he's finished it, he says, this was preached by Spurgeon when he was 20 years of age. Now, if he hadn't put that, and somebody said to me, who wrote that? I'd say, John Owen wrote that in 1546. If you want a good book on prayer, read mine. It's one I didn't write. It's the one I composed of the writings, A Treasury of Prayer by Dr. Ian Bownes. Ian Bownes said in one place, that God, Ian Bownes said yes, in one place, he said, God killed Stonewall Jackson, because he knew how to pray. Now, don't argue with me about it. Argue with, argue with him when you see him. Stonewall Jackson learned the science of prayer. Every major prayer he prayed, God answered. Exactly as Stonewall wanted it. Well, he prayed that the South would win against the North. They didn't, I don't know why, but there it is. And he said, God had to do one of two things, either break a law, not give, or give what he didn't want to give, or he had to kill Stonewall Jackson. So he killed him. You see, every revival has been birthed in prayer. The great strength, again, of Finney was he had Father Nash and Father Cleary with him. And I remember a church I pastored, well I didn't pastor it, I was assistant pastor to Dr. Fawcett, I think maybe one of the greatest preachers ever, died just a few months ago. He wrote that big volume of revival of Cambuslang, the history of the revivals in Scotland. It's a fantastic thing. If you can get it, it was published by Banner of Truth, though they didn't put another edition out, I think. And Count Zinzendorf, if you get that book of hymns that you should get, you must get it. You know, I don't mind these choruses, they're all right, but you miss an awful lot just singing choruses. You must get a hymn book. That's all you sing about, blessing and joy, and I love thee Lord. That's all right, but let's get some, if I can use the word, guts into some of this stuff. All right, these people were waiting. Wednesday morning, 13th of August, 1737. And the clock moved up to 11. And just as it did, God came down on a bunch of people. It was a, it was a kind of a reservation like this. It was owned by a man called Count Zinzendorf. He got refugees in the spirit to come and meet together. And the Lord came. Do you know what happened? That prayer meeting, I'm telling you again, began at 11 o'clock that morning. Do you know how long it lasted? 100 years. That prayer room was never empty. It's the longest prayer amongst men and women I know of. For 100, you know, you know little boys and girls, seven and eight years of age, would travel in birth for revival in countries they didn't know how to spell the name of it. Dr. Tozer, I'm always quoting Tozer because I spend a lot of time with him. And if you haven't read him, you've missed some of the greatest writings of the past 50 years. And every preacher should have every book he wrote, which would be about 14, I think. And they're all in paperback. And if you want to study on the Holy Spirit, his knowledge of the Holy, I have 21 studies of the Holy Spirit, which is superb. And so, it's good to remember that little thing that you often see on the wall, these little slogans we have, you know, only one life will soon be passed, and only what's done for God will last. And we quit there, but that's not what the poet wrote. The poet said only one life will soon be passed, only what's done for God will last, and when I am dying, how glad I shall be if the lamp of my life has been burned out for me. The greatest challenge I ever had as a teenager, about 17, somebody gave me a little brochure about self seeking. Nicely bound, sure enough, it was an abridgment of the life of David Brainard. And I kind of, I hadn't read much in those days, and I didn't know much about it, but I knew less then. And I read that book, and it really shook me up, it did something for me. I thought God had done our production, you know, at the end of the New Testament. I didn't know he made men like that anymore. And when I read the life of that amazing man, that he prayed himself to death, really, by the time he was, what, 28. There's a little book, it's not, sure, it's not a very great book, on the epistles of the Hebrews. There are many, of course, but it was run by a Nazarene theologian, Dr. Orton Wiley. He's quite good. And Orton Wiley begins by saying, this epistle doesn't have a single word for the unsaved. I read that, I thought, boy, that's, that's, that's pretty profound, doesn't have a single word for the unsaved. And then I thought, well wait a minute, is there any epistle that does have anything for the unsaved? Hmm? Isn't the epistle of Paul to sinners? Is the epistle of Paul to the Baptist? Every epistle is to a church. The problem of God in the Old Testament wasn't Amalekites, Hittites, and Perizzites, Jebusites. God's problem in the Old Testament was Israel. God's problem in the New Testament is the church. It always has been. As I say again, the greatest tragedy today is not war today, it's all this, this, this, I never thought Kissinger would work it out anyhow, but they didn't this much. The greatest tragedy in the world today is a sick church in a dying world. The church is sick. It doesn't look anything like the New Testament. Now I'm not facetious here, but I'm just saying this, if John Baptist was filled with the Holy Ghost the day he was born, could he speak in tongues? Could he speak in anybody's language? I believe there is a genuine gift of the Spirit. I do not believe everybody filled with the Holy Ghost has to speak in tongues. I'm making myself clear here. You're going to tell me a towering figure of a man who changed history? A man who was used of God to abolish slavery before ever he was abolished in America? That Wesley wasn't filled with the Holy Ghost? That those men who were with him were not equal to him intellectually, they were equal to him spiritually. You have some books here that my friend Schmuel reprinted, Daniel Steele's and Samuel Chadwick's. He's also reprinted those lives of the early Methodist preachers and they're fascinating. And when men tell you they were pulled down from a chair in the street and they were kicked until their ribs were broken and they got up and sang the doxology, well I think a man like that can take all that surely is filled with the Holy Ghost. And the mighty works of God were demonstrated in and through those amazing men. But John was filled with the Holy Ghost right from his mother's womb. And I don't care how you measure this man. You can measure him socially, you can measure. If you measure him theologically and you do a little homework, you'll discover that in his own right John the Baptist was a theologian because he preached 29 different points of doctrine. To make our weak hearts strong and brave send the fire. To live a dying world you say. Do you know the Salvation Army went into 70 countries in 90 years? In your book store there you've got the life of Brangle, read it. I don't think he was more than in his 20s. When the guy that used to make Walter Woody, he made a beautiful automobile later. Used to make carriages but anyhow he, he heard this young man speak and he said you're the greatest orator I've ever heard. Stay here and I'll build you the greatest church in America, I'll give you the greatest salary. If you haven't read Maysfield you should read his Everlasting Mercy. I think it's the greatest poem maybe ever written outside of the Bible. That's apart from the hymns that are so beautiful. And Maysfield says at one point, he makes Saul Cain who is the hero in the story, a man who'd live for the devil. The poem starts off from 41 to 51, I was my folks contrary son. I bit my father's hand right through and broke my mother's heart in two. Sometimes I go without my dinner, now when I think of times I've dinner. From 51 to 61 I lived in, I cut my teeth and took to fun. I learned what women's lips are made of, I learned what not to be afraid of. I cursed, would make a man look pale and 19 times I went to jail. And then he goes on from 60, 61 to 67 I lived in disbelief of heaven. I fought, I lied, I poached, I whored, I did despite to the Lord and then wham, he has a revelation from God. He sees what a leper he is. And when the great turnaround comes he says in one of his phrases, sometimes I get up and he said this day I felt I'd like to hit the world a belt. You know what I mean? I'd like to punch it. Sometimes I feel like that about the church but he says I felt I'd like to hit the world a belt. And you know when I read the Sermon on the Mount, all our problems are answered in this sermon. You see Jesus again is not advancing a creed here, he's advancing a life and it's the life of God. Maybe the best definition of Christianity was given by Henry Scougal, a little Scotsman, he lived before John Wesley. And it was the book that actually stirred the heart of one of the greatest evangelists that ever lived, that was Whitfield. And he said it seemed gracious of God that he should hand to me a little book called The Life of God in the Soul of Man which is published to this very day. It was never intended to be a book, it was just his own thought. I don't know how many times somebody said it's one of the most published books in the whole world. That's what he wanted, he wanted the Life of God in the Soul of Man. This is not disciplining yourself and say well I'm going to be poor in spirit. You can't do that if you're saved by yourself. You say well how do I know when I'm poor in spirit? Well one way is when somebody really treads on your toes and offends you and there's no retaliation. You're not self-defending. You take the spoiling of your good cheerfully. They cast your name out as an evil thing. I don't think anybody defined the Christian life outside of the Bible better than Henry Scroogle. He lived before John Wesley. John Wesley was born about 1, I don't know. He died in 1791 and he was 88 when he died, now you think about that. So somewhere in the 1600s a little man by the name of Henry Scroogle in Scotland, he wrote a book which he never intended to be published. It was a manuscript found under a chair where he used to sit very often and he called the Christian life the Life of God in the Soul of Man. If you've read any of the books of Amy Wilson Carmichael's, and you should read every one, they're just amazing books. I don't know anyone over the years who's used more photography than she has. You know she's going to explain about the true vine and on one page there's a gorgeous picture of a fruit bearing tree. You turn over she's going to talk about living water and there's a waterfall coming out. She's absolutely, was absolutely brilliant even 50 years ago in using pictures. But one day a bishop in England went through all her beautiful books and he said, I was overwhelmed with the fact that while she had used hundreds of pictures, there wasn't one picture, pardon me, there wasn't one book that had a picture of herself in it. Well that's not like the magazine you get is it? I know one magazine I get and if a teller's picture isn't on every page it was because he's sick. He was sick, he couldn't get photographs that day or something. Huh? Oh self-esteem. Hmm? I love reading biographies. Maybe the most malign history of preachers. Lived back in the 1600s. He preached that amazing message you may remember, sinners in the hands of an angry god. The other week a young lady on the TV, I like to hear TV interviews, this girl had no brain, she was hardly beautiful, oh she was beautiful but it went down the sink right after the show. But you know she was saying, oh people today wouldn't listen to Jonathan Edwards, he was cruel, he was a tyrant, he said God will take your head and turn it off and the blood will run down into hell and oh she was really going, oh wait a minute sister, you didn't read the right thing. Jonathan Edwards says that there were times when he was convulsed in prayer. Um, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, my good old friend, died a few months ago and he said that the greatest most colossal intellect that America has ever had, was not in our scientists, but it was deposited in the body of that man that preached sinners in the hands of an angry god. He touches heights of spirituality, touches revelation of God's holiness. And he says the man admits that when I saw the terrors of hell, oh no people say he was saying wicked things, he wasn't saying wicked things, he was saying what the Bible says. The wicked shall be turned into hell and nobody wants to hear that anymore. I quote scripture, you quote scripture, oh that's not for today, well only the goodies are for today. But I read something else about him. He said it was a lovely morning and so I decided to ride to a certain place. The sun was shining. I dismounted and I looked at the lilies of the field, I looked at the stream, I heard the birds sing. And in our language he put his hands back and said oh my god how great thou art and he says tears gush from my eyes as I said your holiness, you feed my soul, you ravish my soul, you you touch me where no human being could ever touch me. I feel your love burning in me. And Johnathan Edwards says I see that black spot in a man and I see him as he goes out of church so neatly dressed and I say listen you've got something that's gonna sink you into the lowest hell forever and ever and ever. I don't find any TV preachers weeping over people going to hell. I find them weeping because we didn't get our money last weekend. It's really bad you know. A million dollar organ won't be here unless some of you sell your homes or something. Boy I wouldn't give my dog this shit. The great revivals have been born. Johnathan Edwards was the key actor in that revival when God swept through that area. When you have to lay prostrate and for hours pray. I used to get up at five in the morning and pray with that old guy. Great old fella. I said to him one day what about the night you came home and your daughter came to you. She was at University of Edinburgh. And she sat down and said ah Debbie, you preach at the big conferences but you never see revival. Why? Well that's not the best thing to hear just before you go to bed is it? I mean you know like when you've had a feeling revivals when you've seen whole cities rocked with the power of God. And he said I just said good night. And I went to my office I think he said at ten o'clock at night and at five in the morning he was still prostrate on the rug beating it and saying God bring back that anointing. I don't want to be number one speaker in the greatest conferences. I don't want people reading my books merely. I want that something which cannot be bought with money. That which is a prerogative of God. That endowment which will shatter every other petty idea I have in my life. And he said I was still praying at five o'clock in the morning and I heard a tick going across the room. He said you put a hand on my head and said oh God don't let my daddy go insane. And she read it about five minutes and said oh God don't let my daddy go insane. And a third time she said the same thing. And he said after she said it suddenly that stream came from heaven. Unimaginable power. Broken, contrite, not hanging on to a reputation, not thinking I'm a somebody. He studied the lives of some of the great preachers. Willsby has a book Walking with the Giants. It's very good. Then he has one Listening to the Giants. It's amazing to find out how these men were well they were moved by reading church history. They were moved by reading bible histories of revivals. We put unfortunate things. The worst thing we can say almost is we've never seen revival. Sure we've had blessings. Sure we've had some meetings better than others. Sure, sure your church hasn't been open 24 hours a day for six months has it? And people stopping from the night shift to pray in the morning or people praying before they went on the night shift. It's such a burden. I thought repeatedly this week of that awesome sermon. One of the greatest ever preached in America. Back in the 1700's it was preached by Jonathan Edwards. We're told he brought his manuscripts and he had a candle there. And he wasn't very good looking. And he had a big nose. And he sung and he read with monotonous routine. He read that sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And people fell off their seats and they clung to the pillars that were holding the gallery up. And he didn't say, Oh friends please excuse me I never meant to embarrass you like that. There's some psychological phenomena going on here. But while they were laid out he just lashed them with the word of God. And people cried out in their despair. There was a reason for it because before he had prayed over and over and over again, Oh God stamp eternity on my eyeballs. I don't know anybody else that ever prayed it. Maybe we've said it. But you know if God should stamp eternity or even judgment on our eyeballs or if you like on the fleshy table of our hearts. I'm quite convinced we'd be a very, very different tribe of people. God's people in the world today. We live too much in time. We're too earthbound. We see as other men see. We think as other men think. We invest our time as the world invests it. We invest our money. We're supposed to be a different breed of people. I think before we point the finger at the world we better turn to the church and say look we better all get sackcloth and ashes and humble ourselves and say Almighty God. When I see the church in the New Testament, they didn't have stately buildings, they didn't have paid evangelists, they didn't have a lot of money, they didn't have organization, they didn't come get on TV and beg. But I'll tell you what they did, they turned the world upside down. And I'm embarrassed to be part of the church of Jesus today because I believe it's an embarrassment to a holy God. Most of our joy is clapping our hands and having a good time and then afterwards we're talking all the drivel of the world. Oh to be lost in Him, to be consumed in Him. We mentioned this week a little frail woman, my dear boy that's in South America. Many of you heard him preach Paul. I think he has every book that Amy Wilson Carmichael wrote, about 30 of them. He drenched himself in her teaching. She was a fine little Irish woman. She had a curvature of the spine. The last three years of her life they had to lift her in and out of bed, change her diapers. She was helpless but she loved 350 little children. She wrote this, from subtle love of softening things, from easy choices and weakenings, not thus a spirit glorified, not this way went the truth aside. From all that dimmed thy calvary, O Lamb of God deliver me. You know we're overboard on laughter and happiness. There's an old saying in the world, laugh and the world laughs with you. I change it, I say laugh and the church laughs with you. But weep and you weep alone. Praying patient of Portland had a floor harder than that and at the side of his bed when he knelt he used to pray and pray and pray. And when they washed his body for burial he had great big holes on his knees like camels, like history says that James in the Bible had camel's knees. At least tradition says that. Well it's a living fact that patient had them. And when they were washing him somebody said what abnormal knees, they're calloused, they're heavy with calluses. Yes because he used to pray at the side of his bed with energy. And in that hard floor he wore two grooves like that, about six or seven inches long, where he used to pray and make intercession. Praying patient of Portland. Many of you can buy the book, if you haven't read it I think it's in the book still there, Praying Hyde, John Hyde. I met somebody who used to hear him pray and told me what an amazing thing it was to hear him pray in India. You know we think we've got a message, you've got to drop it here and run there and catch a plane here and go there and say no, no, that's not true. That's not the greatest ministry. It's good God has ordained it, but the greatest ministry I'm sure is the ministry of intercession. Let's ask Gabriel to hand the book down. Let's look at all the apostles and all the saints of all the ages. There's Phineas, look there's Phineas with his amazing revival. There's William Boole the founder of the Salvation Army. There's John Wesley. We suppose, well Bilheimer has a book out right now, it's called Destined for the Throne. Well that's alright, it's a good book, a good title. But I think if you narrow it down we're not only destined for it, we're supposed to be sitting on it aren't we? Doesn't Ephesians say he has lifted us up together and made us sit together and we're dwelling together with him in high places? Some of you have read some of Gordon Olson's work and I couldn't find it, I'd like to have read it, but I'll turn it up. He has a section on which he speaks on the grief of God. Well if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, if he's touched with the feeling of our infirmities, then surely he must look on a church which is disgustingly unlike the New Testament church. We don't compare with the New Testament church, we contrast with it. It's day and night. It's life and death. It's a regimented, turn God on at eleven o'clock, turn him off at twelve o'clock, turn him on at seven o'clock Sunday night, turn him on Wednesday night. That didn't exist in the early church. It didn't exist for at least a hundred or more, nearly two hundred years, two centuries after the church was born. Loneliness. It's a good school to go to. One of the young men said to me the other night, if I were your son, what seminary would you advise me to go to? I said none. I said well that's settled the problem anyhow. What would you do? I'd get two volumes, the big two volumes on the life of Whitfield. I'd get that big volume of the Christian incomplete armour, eleven hundred and twenty-eight pages, that takes a bit of digesting. And I would get the life of John Soong and I'd get the life of little Sammy Morris from Africa. And one more, what was the other one there? Oh Tolstoy's books, yes there was another one I was thinking of there. It's just been reissued by Banner of Truth, Fair Sunshine. It'll show you about the young men that many of them died before they were twenty-five years of age for doing nothing else but preach the gospel. One of them didn't go to bed for two years. He slept out on the moors in Scotland. It's pretty lousy up there because I've been through that country. And it's miserable inside, never mind sleeping on moors. And he'd knock on a door in the middle of the night and ask for a crust of bread. One of the great saints, they were persecuted by the English until 1665. I said take the summer off, work as little as you can on work, go to a farmer and say give me bed and bread. I don't want any wages. I want to start at eight in the morning, finish at five at night, put my head under a pump and wash the dust out of my hair at the end of the day. I said you read those books, you let those two volumes of Whitfield, see how God made that amazing man. He'll have about twelve hundred pages. Balance it by reading the Christian Incomplete Armour which you can get up at Agape right now. Twenty-five dollars it is, nice little book. Don't be nibbling at all these little magazines that come around that don't say much. They're all rehashing little stories and there's no meat in them and there's nothing that gets under your skin and makes you feel unworthy. People say you know we need to feel sinful. No we don't. What sin will honour God? You can't tell me a sin in your life that will honour God. I don't want to feel sinful but I sure want to feel unworthy. This is hallowed ground where he is, as the Irish sing almost every prayer meeting, where'er we seek thee thou art found and every place is hallowed ground. Okay. We're through. He poured out his life for us. Can we do less than pour out our lives for him? The chapter will soon be over. Your little volume, your writing of volume. People say I'd like to write a book Mr. Ramey. I say you've been writing one from the day you got saved. There on the bookshelf in eternity with your name on and one day God's going to read the whole thing from the day you were saved till the moment you died. How much you prayed, how much you sacrificed, how much you loved him, how much you served him, how much money you gave to him. Your personal biography. Mmm. No, it's not a biography. It's an autobiography. You're writing it every day. I don't know how many people sing, pardon me, how many people will preach Wesley's sermons. Thousands of preachers preach Spurgeons every week. But all around the world everybody sings John Wesley, Charles Wesley's wonderful hymns. Hymns. Love divine, all love excelling. Jesus, lover of my soul, he wrote a mere three thousand. And it's a shame if you don't know a lot of them, you're very ignorant, you'd better get a hymn book and memorize them. Because some of you young people may have the joy of finishing up in prison. Did I hear an amen? Oh sorry. Why not? That's what the early church did. They hardly got going, they put them in prison. The early church was married to poverty, prisons and persecution. Now we're trying to marry the church to prosperity, personalities and what? I need another P there. Pardon? Popularity. My wife got it, you see, she heard it so often. There's a book on that, I wish you'd buy it, every one of you. It's called Who Moved the Stone? It's written by a man by the name of Morrison. He set off to prove the fallacy of the resurrection. And halfway through it, the stone fell on him and he got saved. You know what the scripture says, if you fall on the stone, it will break you to pieces, but if it falls on you, it will grind you to powder. There used to be a great preacher in England by the name of Dr. Jowett. Read some of his books, they're very good. And he said whenever he could get a weekend off, he would go to London, and Spurgeon was preaching at that time, and Dr. F.D. Meyer was preaching at that time. But I think the king of the pulpit, as regards the type of preacher that Chip mentioned on Sunday, who got all his homiletic straight, and he had a colossal vocabulary and so forth. I think they're the king of the whole bunch. But Jowett said whenever I needed a spiritual refresher, I'd slip down to London, and I would, if I could get in, I would hear Dr. Joseph Parker. And he said of all things I got there one Easter day. And he said Joseph Parker buried Jesus like only Parker could bury him. He got Jesus in the tomb, they put the stone over the tomb, they put wax over the stone, they put soldiers over the wax and over the seals. And over the stone, and there he was a prisoner. You see, we, we, we, oh mercy, I was reading the other day where a preacher said he'd been in England of all places, and he'd been to about twenty churches, and I was impressed with one thing, in every church I went, that every meeting was totally flat. Again, in God's name, how can you have a dead service with a risen Christ? There's a remarkable book written by a man called, what's his name called? Gouge. He wrote it, I think about 1604. It's on the epistles of the Hebrews. It has about eleven hundred and forty pages. It's worth buying. Keep you busy all year reading it. He finished, not began, he finished his devotions by two o'clock every morning. John Wesley rose at four every morning. So did Whitfield. I don't know what there is magic about that four o'clock figure, but I noticed in reading great biographies and autobiographies, that so many men were, they'd been praying two or three hours by five o'clock in the morning. Do you wonder that they had such expanded intellect? Do you wonder that they discovered something of the height and depth and length and breadth of the love of God? That other people didn't discover? Somebody said to him, one day, aren't you a shoemaker? He said, no, a cobbler, because an ordinary cobbler can't make shoes. He would not take any dignity. When his son eventually quit being a missionary and became the ambassador to India for the cause of St. James, as we call the English crown, somebody came to visit the old man and said to him, what about your son? Is he on another mission field? He said, no, he stepped down to be an ambassador. Most of us would think that's a step up. You know, man has been trying to put the world right. I guess, I don't know, but let me, for my argument, maybe the first classic on this, putting the world back together again, is in Augustine's City of God. Have you read that? There are two Augustines, so be sure you get well. There's only one in the City of God. He says he had the answer. Now you can go from one extreme, that's an intellectual thing, it's worth reading, it's slow, it's difficult, it's hard, but it's beautiful. It's almost a dream like John Bunyan, and so on one hand you get Augustine's City of God, and on the other hand you get another children's story, Gulliver's Travels. You read those? You've got to read them, they're marvellous. But what it is, it's really trying to liberate humanity. It's trying to get the nation out of the rut, or people out of the rut. Leckie, a secular historian, says that when it looked as though England would be submerged, God raised up a man, this is a secular historian, not a Christian historian, God raised up a man who turned that revolution round. He stood like Joshua and begged the walls fall down, or like Joshua commanding the sun to stand still. The little man of course was Wesley, who had borrowed the torch, I guess if you're really honest about it, if you read Whitfield, and if you read Whitfield you'll need to get the best volume ever written. I had at one time lots and lots of books on Whitfield. There is no book like Arnold Dalimore. I talked with Arnold Dalimore about this book. He lived in a little place away, over, I don't know, 50 miles, maybe from Windsor, Ontario, and he worked for 17 years on that book. He crossed the Atlantic four times to the British Museum. He has the best library on Whitfield, as far as I know him. Other men know he has the greatest library on Whitfield of any man in the whole world. Now he has lived and breathed and eaten and slept Whitfield. It took him 17 years to write the book. If I had told you about that book about three years ago, you could have got it for about eight, nine, I don't know, eight dollars, something like that. Now it's about 16. You won't make a better investment, because again you'll see how first God made a man. You see God's ways are not our ways, we'll never rationalize. I'll tell you one thing, as I get older I realize this. You can never explain God. But I'll tell you what you can do, you can experience Him. There's a book, I didn't notice it on your bookshelves, but you can get it now. It used to be three or four dollars. And now it's in a paperback for, I don't know, about $2.50. Old books are crazy, prices anyhow these days. But it's called, if you haven't read it, and if you have read it, read it again. It's called, The Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. The Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. And it's by a man by the name of Gilchrist Lawson. L-A-W-S-O-N, Gilchrist Lawson. The Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. And you see how God approached the hearts of individuals in so many different ways. As I say again, the main problem, the root problem in personality. Look, if everybody lived a sermon on the mount, there'd be no split in any churches. You know, one of the most difficult things we have, most of us, to get over is a thing what we call pride. And if you've read that book by, um, what's his name? J.I. Packer, Knowing God. Remember he has a phrase about the second chapter somewhere, where he says, It is an awesome thing to live every day under the eye of an omniscient God. Now that's the only way to live. But, you know, one of the greatest men that ever lived in England, never had a large church, was a man by the name of John Fletcher. John Wesley said he was the greatest saint that had lived since the Apostle Paul. He lived in a place called Mabley, Scottshire. And they said when he went past the tavern, men would take off their hats. And they were half drunk, they'd be there by the wall, and they'd say, There goes the man that loves our souls. John Wesley said he was the most holy man. He believed that he'd lived since the day of the Apostle. He was a very profound teacher. He wrote a thick volume of text antinomianism. You should get it. Make your headaches a bit, but then it's worth reading. You need mental challenges. You need spiritual challenges. But, this godly, saintly man. And it shows again, you see, that it doesn't matter how smart you are, and you may be very smart, you may be very holy. You still make mistakes in this judge. God will share a lot of things with you. He'll share his love. His love is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost. He'll give you power. The power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you. He'll give you wisdom. He's made unto us wisdom and righteousness. But there's one thing he'll never share with you. That is his glory. And another thing he'll never share is infallibility. We still make mistakes. They're good for us sometimes to make mistakes. And John Wesley said of this godly, saintly man, the most saintly man he'd ever met. He said, you know now, I can die comfortably. And I'll hand the reins of Methodism over into the hands of John Fletcher. One day John Wesley stood at the grave of John Fletcher. And Wesley lived about 30 years after he'd buried John Fletcher. And somebody said to Wesley, Mr. Wesley, you're grieving that your wonderful friend has died. He said, yes. This person said, well, don't grieve. Why not? Well, you're going to be with him in eternity forever, aren't you? And he put it like this. He said, well, I'll tell you. This is what I think. If you describe this as eternity, this way of eternity. And here is the throne of God. He said, John Fletcher has graduated, in my opinion, to be round there with the Apostles. But he said, J.W., John Wesley, will be so far away, I'll only see the reflected glory of Christ in the face of John Fletcher. And that's quite a statement, isn't it? By a man that we think was one of the greatest men, at least I think Wesley was one of the greatest men ever. But you see again, he esteemed this holy man. And though he wanted to hand over the reins of the great flourishing Methodist Church, God said no. You think again, as has been said, of all the, excuse me, all the, what, what, Laury. There's a book called The Possibilities of Grace by Laury. L-O-W-R-E-Y, Laury, if you can get it. A friend of mine used to say, sell your shirt if you have to, to get it. I looked at it for 30 years and got it not too long ago. That is an abridged edition that the Church of the Nazarene put out. But I like the title, The Possibilities of Grace. They're so vast. Pardon me. Someone was talking about, no, about Ruth Harrell. Well, Ruth Harrell is an amazing man of faith. And an amazing, but I've met his son, and I think his son is a greater man than Ruth Harrell. But the greatness of his life is not in some great act of faith, it's in another area completely. He's a man that kept himself away, six, seven, eight hours a day. Hardly possible to see him. I have talked with him privately, and he's a wonderful man of God. And this precious little woman was, she, she founded a Donovore Fellowship. Her name was Amy Wilson Carmichael. You should read every book if you can get it. My son Paul, down in South America, I think has every book she's written. He followed a pattern to some degree. He came home once in 10 years from a mission to the States, five weeks. And going back, and I said, well, his mummy said, I don't know when you think you'll come back. He said, maybe never, I'm not sure I'll come back. And I said, well, that's all right, we'll see you in eternity. I've often said, I'd be, I'd be happy if my boys died on the mission field. I'd be embarrassed if they died on the, on the battlefield. Let them die for Jesus, great. Whether they do it sooner or later, that's all right. But she, to me, is a remarkable example again of patience and love. That she had 350 children that she cared for. That's quite a lot. As soon as you ladies have driven up the wall the streets. So how would you do with 350? And never asked anybody for a penny. I like that kind of thing. I think the Puritans were wonderful. I like reading Puritans. The only thing is they never come out on the victory side. It's all death and despondency and you carry the old man to the grave. You know, a lot of us could be good Mohammedans. We've no more victory over sin than Mohammedans. If you say to people that a Christian doesn't sin, they'll say, boy, that's heresy. Well, you tell God that when you see him because that's what he said in his book. I didn't put it in the gospel, in the epistle of John. John put it there. He that is born of God does not commit sin. You say it's impossible to sin. No, I say it's possible not to. And the normal Christian life is victory over sin. But if we sin, if you slip, we have an advocate with a father. What's the difference between the sin of a Christian and the sin of a man in the street? All right, a Christian man gets fouled up. He commits adultery. Any difference in that adultery to that man's adultery? No. What's the difference? That as soon as this man discovers this awful thing, he's heartbroken, he mourns, he weeps and he seeks God and he gets cleaned up and by the grace of God he doesn't do it again. That man does it every day and enjoys doing it. That's the difference. The difference in attitude. But whatever corruption there is in God is able to cleanse it by his blood and indwell it by his precious blood. A lot of people want Jesus to come today because they're scared stiff of suffering. That's right. After all, the church has been getting lashed and tormented and stripped and prostituted. There's a little man, some of you read his book, God's Smuggler. How many read the book, God's Smuggler? Wonderful, exciting book. I know that little man. In fact, I gave him that title before ever he put the book together. I said, well, you're God's smuggler. And he had been over in China and he said when he was in Shanghai he noticed men sitting on the side of the road. They'd been for a haircut and when their hair was cut they left a cross in the middle of their heads. Cut it, the pike is out, left their hair standing up in a cross there. And then they had to sit on the sidewalk and a young communist came past and hoisted all the flesh they could and spat on their heads. The church tonight is suffering untold agony. You listen to the sweet little boys over the radio. They'll tell you that the Russians are going to come and burn the country up and they're going to put us into hell itself. But you know, you little darlings, you being so faithful, you're so thin with your fasting and your homes are so poor and poverty stricken and you haven't two dimes to your name and you're so stricken and helpless that just out of his great mercy the Lord's going to pluck you out of it so you won't have to suffer one little step. All the suffering is for the Christians in Russia and the Christians in China. But no body in America is going to suffer because we're the most faithful people on God's earth. Isn't that lovely? Well the man who tells you that is a liar. That old preacher who was in Shanghai and when he was there because he had preached, pardon me, he was in Formosa and because he had preached in Shanghai twenty years before and found the Chinese people were in Shanghai, were in Formosa where they are now, he went in to see them and he greeted them in his eloquent Chinese and they ignored him and he said, but I'm the pastor, I used to teach you in Shanghai and they ignored him. And he said, now look this isn't oriental courtesy, what in the world are you doing? I'm your pastor. One man looked up from his busy work and just frowned and said, you're a false prophet. A what? You're a false, a false prophet? Why I gave you lectures on Mormonism and the other reasons, I am not a false, we remember when you were our pastor in Shanghai and you had some maps of the world and some wonderful pictures of the Roman Empire and you had a marvelous chart on the Antichrist and you had some more on the dispensations. And you told us before long we were going to be washed in blood here in China, that people were going to cut us down as though we were grass, they were going to rape our women in front of us, they were going to burn our churches and tear our Bibles up and subject us to the most gross humiliation and suffering it was possible to have. But you said, don't you worry about that because just before that happens the Lord's going to take all his dear little children out from this, you're not going to suffer. The man said with tears streaming down his face, my wife was dragged out of my arms and the last time I heard she'd had three children to the Russian guards. My daughter was taken away and my sons and my children were taken away. You told us everything that was true except one thing, we weren't snatched out of this misery. The Lord didn't spare us, we're living in anguish and suffering. We've got the most reckless, lawless, lusting age that this world has ever seen and I don't pull any punches tonight that I was bitterly disappointed to hear Billy Graham speaking there at a rock festival down in the other state, just a few weeks ago when he spoke in Florida to a bunch of lusting, dirty, filthy rebels against God and man, sex perverts, drunks, dopey kids, smoking, drinking beer and he finished up by saying they're a great bunch of guys. They're a bunch of rebels against God and man. And while we tell them they're great guys they're not going to get any idea they need to repent and seek God. The day has come I'm sure when we need again. I'm convinced with all my heart that in this shabby, slick, sick evangelism of the hour that one of the greatest things you could do as a pastor would be to give your whole church a series of messages on biblical regeneration. Because most of our people don't know what justification and pardon and adoption and forgiveness and assurance and regeneration really are. They got a package deal and it seems to me that Protestants are about the most theologically and biblically ignorant people in the whole wide world. My good friend Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones' address and maybe someday he'll come along and I hope he takes this series on the Sermon on the Mount. That's really fantastic. In any case you could get his two books on the Sermon on the Mount before he gets here and really read them. It's a majestic thing. These young preachers don't know too much about this but you know the old preachers used to preach a lot about prevenient grace. The working of the Spirit of God before all of you get anywhere within a hundred yards of being born again. God begins to do some manipulating in your life. Oh brother this was prevenient grace all right and one day this man really got a vital relationship with God. You know it cost him, cost him 15 years in jail. But in those 15 years he wrote the most wonderful book outside of the Bible, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. And then his holy war. But it all happened because a woman gossiped the gospel and told how she passed from death unto life and from the power of Satan unto God. I say John Wesley used to say that the greatest thing that a man can know is that he has assurance. And you remember how the apostle mentions that in the chapter of Romans, the Spirit dareth witness with our spirits. And brother there isn't a man on God's earth, there isn't a demon from hell if you ever get the witness of the Spirit. And never the next spirit is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. And if you hear the voice of God, the voice of man, the voice of reason, the voice of logic, the voice of philosophy, nobody will ever shake you from that fact that you've really been born again of the Spirit of God. You can stand on both feet and say I know in whom I have believed and I'm persuaded because Christianity's a no-show religion. The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. But I believe that God is going to shake everything that can be shaken in the day in which we live. The American economy is very wobbly right now. In another two years we may be standing in bread line. Mr. L.B.J. kicked his friend into the oil bank. Very interesting story isn't it? You can get free records if you have about eighteen dollars on a system called Illuminati. I don't know who published them but I heard them not long ago. They're scary. Tells you how the monetary system of the world has been dominated for the last two hundred years, right down to the day in which we live. It's a very, very frightening thing. Or you can get a little book on, I forgot what it was called, what was it called Martha? The profound revolution. That'll keep you sleepless for the week. And if you want to be sleepless for the second week you could buy one on the death of the dollar. Talking about books here. There's a book by a man called William Gouge. It's G-O-U-G-E, it's published by Kriegel. Ask your grandmother to buy it for you for Christmas, it'll cost you thirty dollars. Thirty-six dollars. It's eleven hundred and forty pages. It was written in, what, sixteen hundred and forty I think. It's just the epistle to Hebrews, it's about so thick it's like a big old family bible. For thirty-six dollars. That man preached in an area of London called Blackfriars. It's like you go to New York and you have Queens over here and never saw any Queens around. Lived in a dirty old place called Brooklyn for three years when Teen Challenge was just starting. This man lived in Blackfriars, London and for thirty-two years every Tuesday night he preached on Hebrews. The average preacher in town can get through it in one night. It's amazing he could stick in that book for thirty-two years. The most amazing thing to me is this, he finished his private devotions by two o'clock in the morning. Almost all those men, John Wesley, John Fletcher, you name them, almost all of them had their devotions between four o'clock and five o'clock in the morning. He's got Barnes there, one of Barnes' commentaries. He wrote those commentaries, or commentaries, whatever you want to call them, between five o'clock in the morning and eight o'clock. I have no argument with Barnes, he's just pretty good. You see the Bible is so vast that no man can be a good expositor of the whole Bible. It's like trying to cross the ocean in a rowing boat. Or coming down Mount Shasta on a skateboard.