In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of understanding the character of God. He mentions a previous series of sermons on the attributes of God that had a profound impact on the listeners. The preacher acknowledges the difficulty of talking about God and compares himself to an insect trying to carry a bale of cotton. He highlights the decline in the spiritual state of churches and attributes it to forgetting what kind of God God is.

Then, as a kind of text for tonight, in the 9th Psalm, verse 10, they that know thy name will put their trust in thee. Now, over the next weeks, I expect to be speaking on that which, then, which there could be no more central or important theme. We are to consider that which is behind all things. You can trace effect back to cause, and that cause back to another cause, and so on, back and back and back, through the long, dim corridors of the past. And when you have gone back until you have come to the primordial atom, out of which all things were made, then you find the one who made them, and you find God. And so, back of all previous matter and all life and all law and all space and all time, there is God. God that gives to human life its only significance, there isn't any other apart from it. If you take the idea, the concept of God, the thought of God, out of the human mind, there is no other reason for being, for living. We are, as Tennyson said, but sheep that nourish a blind life within the brain, and we might as well go with the sheep and die as sheep, unless we have God in our thoughts. God is the source of all law and morality and goodness. We are to talk about the one that you must believe in before you can deny him. We are going to talk about the one who is the word and the one who enables us to speak. Now I'm sure that you will see immediately that in thus attempting a series of sermons about God, we are going to run into that which is difficult above all things. The famous preacher Sam Jones, who was a sort of Billy Sunday before Billy Sunday's time, said when the average preacher takes a text, it reminds him of an insect trying to carry a bale of cotton. And when I take my text and try to talk about God, I feel like that insect, and I'm not trying to be humorous, I feel like an insect. Only God can help me. I'm thinking about a man once who started to write a book in which he was to deal with the fall of man and the restoration of man through Jesus Christ our Lord. He was to call his book Paradise Lost. And before he dared to try to write it, he made a prayer, and that prayer I want to sort of make tonight. For tonight and all over the next times that are before us, he prayed to the Spirit, and he said, Gently thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer before all temples the upright heart and cure, instruct me. And I'd like to say to you very simply and with no attempted morbid humility, that without a pure heart and a surrendered mind, no man can preach worthily about God. And without pure hearts and worthy minds, no man can hear worthily. No man can hear these things unless God touch him and illuminate him. And so he said, Instruct me, for thou knowest. And what in me is dark, illumine, and what is low, raise and support, that to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to man. You know, there was a time when men were very unsure of themselves. We're so cocksure about everything now except the things we ought to be sure about. But in those old times, the times of Thomas Blake Locke, when they called their souls in, I think it might be a good idea when we get together Sunday mornings to call our souls in as Watts said, Call home thy thoughts that are over broad. And he prayed this prayer, and I think I might as well make this as a kind of a recitative to that which will follow. He prayed this prayer, or said this, I don't know if it's a prayer or not, it's rather not a prayer so much as a testimony or a meditation. He said, Come, O my soul, in sacred lays, attempt thy great Creator's praise. Now he didn't say, praise the Lord, he said, let's attempt it. But O what tongue can speak his fame, what mortal verse can reach the theme. Enthroned amid the radiant spheres, he glory like a garment wears, to form a robe of light divine. Ten thousand suns around him shine, raised on devotion's lofty wing. Do thou, my soul, his glory sing, and let his praise employ thy tongue till listening world shall join the song. Now I expect to speak about self-existence of God and the self-sufficiency of God and the eternity of God, the divine omnipotence, the divine transcendence, the divine omniscience, the divine immutability, the infinitude of God, the sovereignty of God, and I want all prayers to be present that night. Sovereignty of God and the omnipresence of God and the faithfulness of God and the love of God and the holiness and grace and goodness, and that's only a few but there are the others, and as our brother said, if things look good we'll go on for maybe twenty or twenty-one sermons. I don't know whether we can last that long or not, or whether the audience will last. If the audience will last, I'll promise to last. But if the audience starts walking out on me or staying away in huge droves, then I'll take something else. Maybe I'll tell stories about little girls or something, you know. But if people come, I'll talk about these things that I have said. Now who can do that and do it worthily? Who is capable of anything like that? But I am here to tell you, my brother, that I am not. So I only have this one hope, as the poor little donkey rebuked the madness of the Prophet, and as the rooster crowed one night to arouse an apostle and bring him to repentance, so God may take me and use me, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a little donkey, so I pray that he may be willing to ride out before the people on such an unworthy instrument as I. Now, it's utterly necessary that we know this God, this one that John wrote about, this one that the poet speaks about, this one that theology talks about, and this one that we are sent to preach about and preach. It's absolutely, utterly, and critically necessary that we know this one. For you see, man fell when he lost his right concept of God. Satan brought that about. As long as man trusted God, everything was all right. Human beings were healthy and holy, or at least innocent, and pure and good, and everything was all right. And then the devil came along and threw a question mark into the mind of the woman, and he said, "'Yea, has God said,' which was equivalent to sneaking around behind God's back, as he thought, and casting reflection on the goodness of God, or on the character of God. And then began the progressive degeneration downward. Now I want you to see that when the knowledge of God began to go out of the minds of men, we got into the fix that we are in now. Now here is what the man of God said. He said, "'Because when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. And professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like the corruptible man, the birds, the four-foot beast, the creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to unclean mess, and they changed the truth of God into a lion, worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever on men. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men burned lusts toward other men, and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to reprobate mind to do the things that are not convenient.'" Then he ends that chapter with a terrible charge of unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, and so on, a long blacklist of crimes and sins and iniquities that man has been guilty of. Now all that came about because man lost his confidence in God. He didn't know God's character was what it was. He didn't know what kind of God God was. He got all mixed up about what God was like. The only way back is to have restored confidence in God, and the only way to have restored confidence in God is to have restored knowledge of God. That text says, "...they that know thy name will put their confidence in thee." That simply means that word, name, there, means character plus a report of the character. It means character plus reputation. "...and they that know what kind of God thou art will put their trust in thee." We wonder why we don't have faith, and the answer is we don't have faith, because faith is confidence in the character of God, and if we don't know what kind of God God is, we can't have faith. We read books about George Muir and others and try to have faith, but we forget that faith is confidence in character. And because we are not aware of what kind of God God is or what God is like, we cannot have faith, and so we struggle and wait and hope that we might have faith, and hope against hope, but faith doesn't come because we do not know the character of God. "...they that know what thou art like will put their trust in thee." It's automatic, it comes naturally when we know what kind of God God is. Now, these sermons over the next weeks are going to be reports on the character of God, that's all. I'm going to give you a report on the character of God and want to tell you what God is like. And when I'm telling you what God is like, if you're listening with a worthy mind, you'll find faith will spring up and will follow knowledge up, because faith follows ignorance down and unbelief drags faith down, and the restored knowledge of God will bring faith up. Now, first, I don't suppose there is ever a time in the history of the world when we needed this more than we need it now. I gave a short series of sermons on the attributes of God in a Presbyterian church one time over in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they had a lot of students in there and some preachers and so on came in, and one of them made this remark afterward. He said, in this short series of sermons, I have learned more theology than I learned in the seminary. Well, now, it wasn't because the preaching was good. I hear myself on tape, and brother, you can't fool me, I'm not a good preacher, but I preach about good things. That's the difference, you see, a vast difference between being a good preacher and preaching about something good. I preach about something good, and I'm preaching about God, and therefore this preacher said I got more theology there. Why? Because I was talking about the core and center and source of all theology and all doctrine and all truth and all life and all matter and all mind and all spirit and all souls. Now I say this is the hour of the great need because of the situation in the gospel churches. Now, I'm not going to talk about the liberals. Let the liberals stew in their own embalming fluid. I have nothing to say to the liberals. But I am going to talk about the gospel church, and you might as well know it. I mean us. I mean us. I mean the Zionist churches and the Baptist churches and the gospel churches and wherever there are churches that believe the gospel and grab a Bible and jump up and down on it and say, you get me a rock, I want to get after that liberal. I'm a Bible believer, all right, Bible believer, I have somewhat to say unto thee. And I'd like to say that we Bible-believing Christians, it's us I'm talking about now, and I want to tell you that there have been over, oh, say, the last 25 or 30 or maybe we'll say 40 years, there have been gains made and losses suffered in the gospel churches. I might mention some of the gains made. You know that we're proud of the fact that we have more Bibles now than we've ever had and that the Bible is the best seller. We have more Bible schools than we ever had ever in the history of the world, more Bible institutes. You can never, a day goes by, I think, but what somebody is starting a Christian college, a Christian seminary, a Christian Bible institute or something, a Bible college. And then we have more books printed, the outpouring of the press is simply tremendous, millions of tons of gospel literature is being poured out all the time. We have an increasing flood of periodicals, and then we have increased and improved methods of communication. It used to be you'd shout through a megaphone or tie a message to the neck of a dog and start him off or take a carrier pigeon or send an Indian runner. But now you can step up to one of these tiny little fountain pens here and talk into it and people hundreds of miles away will hear what you have to say, and of course the churches are taking advantage of that. And then we have more missions. Did you ever see a list of the gospel missions, I mean foreign missions, that there are? Why, you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes the Sunday School Times will print a whole two-page spread just of the names of missions, and then it's only a few of them. There are more missions now than we know what to do with. And evangelism is riding very, very high at the present time. And more people go to church now, believe it or not, than ever went to church before, and we have more church members than we used to have. People think that's not true, but statistics bear it up that we have it. And then we have organizations for the evangelization of everybody. We have organizations for the evangelization of children and evangelization of young people and the evangelization of housewives and Indians, railroad men, artists, and just about anything. You name it and I'll find an organization who is busy evangelizing that crowd of people. Now all that has something in its favor, there is no doubt about it. But you know, a man can learn at the end of the year how his business stands by balancing off his losses with his gains. And while he'll have some gains, if he has too many losses, he'll be out of business the next year. Well, we of the gospel churches have made some gains over the last years, but we've also suffered some losses. Or maybe I'd better say we've suffered one great central loss. And that loss has been at the root of all the other losses that we've suffered. What we have lost is our lofty concept of God. Christianity rises like an eagle and flies over top of all the mountain peaks of all the religions of the world, chiefly because of her lofty concept of God given to us in divine revelation and by the coming of the Son of God to take human flesh and dwell among us. And Christianity, the great church, has lived down the centuries and she's lived on the character of God. She's preached God, she's prayed to God, she's declared God, she's honored God, she's elevated God, she's witnessed to God, the triune God. But in recent times there has been a loss suffered. We've suffered the loss of that high concept of God and the concept of God held by the average gospel church now is so low as to be unworthy of God and a disgrace to the church. It is by neglect and by degenerative error and spiritual blindness God has become any one of these things. He's become a pal now to people and some are saying that God is their partner. He's even become the man upstairs. And I told you about one college, the Christian college, that put out a booklet called Christ is My Quarterback. He never misses a play, he always calls the right play. And then there was that actress out in California, she happened to be in New York, but she lives out there in Sodom, the place they call Hollywood. And she was in New York crawling around among the saloons and she was sitting there blowing smoke and licking up liquor and she got into a religious conversation with somebody and they said to her, you're a religious woman, aren't you? Oh yes, she said, I'm a religious woman. And she said, the fact is, I know God. Do you know God? And this fellow hiccupped and said, no, he didn't know God. Well, she said, you'd better get to know God. You'll find if you get to know him, he's a living doll. So we have God as a living doll. And a certain businessman said this, he said, a Christian businessman, he said, God's a good fellow and I like him. Now there isn't a Mohammedan alive in the world that would stoop to call God a good fellow. There isn't a Mohammedan, there isn't a Jew probably, at least no Jew who believes in his religion that would ever refer to the great Yahweh, the great Jehovah, the one who's known as the Tetragrammaton with the incommunicable name. Never would they dare to do it. Even though they might go out and teach out here on Saturday or Sunday or Monday on their holy day, they talk about God respectfully and reverently. But in the gospel churches, God's a quarterback and a living doll and a good fellow. One fellow said he went into a huddle with God. You know, I feel sometimes like walking out on a lot that passes for Christianity when they talk about prayer as going into a huddle with God. You'd think God is the coach or the quarterback or something and they all gather around, God gives them a signal, and away they go. What preposterous abomination! When the old Roman sacrificed a sow on the altar in Jerusalem, he didn't commit anything any more frightful than when we drag the holy, holy, holy God down and turn him into a cheap Santa Claus that we can use to get what we want. Now, at best, at best, God is only the top celebrity, that's all. If God were to come to earth now, they'd want him on the Jack Parshall immediately. If God were to come to earth, they'd have a story called This is Your Life and tell God how he got that way. God is only the top celebrity, and in the meantime, Christianity has lost its dignity. You know that, my friends? Christianity has lost its dignity. I've always heard you Canadians are dignified people, and I've liked you for that reason. But I find a lot of Canadians aren't any more dignified than us Yankees. You know, we come to things of God because we've lost our dignity, and you'll never have it in religion unless you know the dignified holy God who rides on the wings of the wind and makes the clouds his chariot. We have lost the concept of majesty, I say, and we've lost the art of worship. We've lost the art of worship. We don't worship any more. I got two letters today. That is, they were here waiting for me when I came to the office this morning. They had come the latter part of the week, and I hadn't come down for them. One of them was some good friend in Stratford, wherever that is. These people said they had been in here to the Church and hoped to come in at least over the weekends in order to hear this series. And this letter went on. I got home and I read it. This letter went on to say that they had found in the teaching of a Bible class that the people were starved for God, and so they taught God to the people, and how wonderful it was. And I got another letter, and this time from my good friend Stacy Woods, who was until recently head of InterVarsity. And he said this in his closing lines of his letter. He said, The Church is getting away from worship. I wonder if it is because we're getting away from God. I think he's right, and I believe that's the answer. We're not worshipers any more, you see, my brother. And then our religion has lost its inwardness. For Christianity, if it's anything, it's inwardness. It's inward religion. Jesus said that we're to worship in spirit and in truth, and we've lost it. And why have we lost it? Well, we've lost it because we have lost the concept of deity. That makes it possible. And we have lost the sense of God's presence. And some of you dear people, and most of you I would suppose leave here, you will leave behind you a sense of God. If you feel a sense of God here, you'll leave it behind you. We never, never, never should leave the sense of God behind us. But we've lost awe, and we've lost wonder, and we've lost holy fear, and we've lost spiritual delight. And even though we hung on to our Schofield Bible, we still believe in the seven main doctrines of the fundamental faith. We've lost the awe, we've lost the wonder, we've lost the fear, and we've lost the delight. Why? Because we've lost God. Or at least we've lost our high and lofty concept of God that God honors. And so do you notice that the gains we have made have all been external? They've been Bibles and Bible schools and books and magazines and radio messages and missions and evangelism and numbers and new churches and new schools. They've all been external. And the losses we've suffered have all been internal. They have been the loss of dignity and worship and majesty and awe and inwardness in God's presence and fear and spiritual delight. So that if we have lost only that which is inward and gained only that which is outward, I wonder if we've gained anything at all. But I wonder if we are not now in a bad state. I believe we are. I believe our gospel church Christianity is thin and anemic and without thought content, frivolous in tone and worldly in spirit. And I believe that we are desperately in need of a reformation that will bring the church back. I've quit using the word revival because we need more than a revival. When the great Welsh revival came to the little country of Wales back at about the turn of the century or a little beyond, they had something to work on. The Holy Ghost had something to work on. There were times when they never preached a sermon. Nobody could preach. They sang the Psalms after the Psalter. They sang them and nobody preached. The Holy Ghost had something to work on. The people believed in God and their concept of God was lofty. But because the church has lost her lofty concept of God and no longer knows what God's like, her religion is thin and anemic. Frivolous, I say, and worldly and cheap. Now, compare the preaching of the church from the Hebrew prophets, say, to Finney. Compare their preaching, if you dare to do it. How serious the men of God were! They were men of heaven come to earth to talk to men. As Moses came down with his face shining from the mount to speak to men, so the prophets down the years and the preachers after Calvary and Pentecost went out. Serious-minded men, solemn men, lofty in tone and full of substance and thought and theology. The preaching of those days. But today the preaching to a large extent is cheap and frivolous and coarse and shallow and entertaining. I charge it home upon the gospel churches that we've got to entertain the people or they won't come back. I charge it home upon men who ought to know better that we have lost the seriousness out of our preaching and have become silly. We've lost the solemnity and have become frivolous. We've lost the loftiness and have become coarse and shallow. We've lost the substance and have become entertainers. This is a tragic and terrible thing. Compare the Christian reading matter. Our Protestant fathers, you know, we were pretty much the same. I was toying with singing the song, Our God, not Our God, Our Help in Ages Past. We sang that, but what was the other one? God of our fathers, whose almighty hand brings forth in glory all the starry band. I was thinking of singing that, but I was afraid somebody would say the fathers referred to there are Yankees. So we skipped that one. But my brother and sister, don't you know that even though that song was written in the United States, this one we're singing here was written in England, and we are of a common heritage of the Germans and the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh and the English and the Americans and the Canadians. We're of a common Protestant heritage. And I say that our fathers, when I talk about our fathers, I mean our Protestant fathers. Look what they fed on. Look what they fed on. They took an axe. They came to Canada with an axe and a pair of tough muscles in their arms, and they went out to build an empire out of a wilderness, and they built it. And what did they read, those Protestant forebears of yours and mine? Well, they read Godrej's Rise and Progress of Religion and Soul. They read Taylor's Holy Living and Dying. They read Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Holy War. They read Milton's Paradise Lost. They read the sermons of the English flavel. But I blush today to think about the religious fodder that is being given to people now. The religious fodder that is now being handed out for poor kids. Today, when they sat around and listened while the fire crackled in their heart, they sat and listened to a serious but kindly old grandfather read Pilgrim's Progress. And the young Canadian and the young American grew up knowing all about Mr. Facing Both Ways and all the rest of that gang, and Christian and the rest. And now we read the cheap junk that ought to be shoveled out and gotten rid of. I'd like to be Pope for 24 hours, and after that I'd give it back to the people. But I'd just like to be Pope long enough to get a bull going, you know, papal bull. And the first papal bull that I'd... I don't know what you do to a bull, whether you declare it or chase it or what you do, but how they get them going. But my papal bull would read like this. I hereby proscribe all religious junk that's been published in the last year. Get rid of it. And as soon as they got rid of it, I'd give them a try or a back and say, Now, you're okay, you have a good start. Well, then, think about the songs that are sung now in so many places. Ah, the roster of the sweet singers. The roster of the sweet singers. Do you ever think about them? There's Watts. There's Watts. That little man. That little man that nobody'd marry because it was so homely. I've seen some pretty homely ones get married, but Watts was too homely that he wouldn't marry him. And he was happy, and he loved her and was a friend of hers until they both died. So he didn't get married, so he wrote hymns. And what hymns he did write. We just sang one of them. Our God, our help in ages past. Now, let me say, it's not, Oh, God, our help in ages past. That's an editor's tinkering. Oh, these editors. God's going to have to judge the editors for tinkering with holy things. Our God, our help in ages past. Our help for years to come. But we say, Oh, God, well, it's all right. Then Watts wrote that. Then Zinzendorf. Think of that man. He was a count and he was rich. And he got converted marvelously in the Moravian church. And under his ministry there came the great revival. He wrote so many great hymns. Jesus, thy blood and righteousness. My beauty are my glorious dress. You remember? He wrote that. And there was Wesley. That's Skip Wesley. He's written so many. There was Newton. And there was Cooper who wrote, There is a fountain filled with blood. And Montgomery. And the two Bernards. Bernard of Clooney and Bernard of Clairvaux. There was Paul Gerhardt and Ter Stegen. There was Luther and Kelly and Addison and Toplady and Seneca and Doddridge and Tate and Brady and the Scottsalter. And a company of the littler stars that weren't as big as these great stars. But taken together they made a milky way that circled their Protestant world. And we've sung them. I have, as I've said before, Methodist hymnal. An old Methodist hymnal that goes back now 111 years. That is, that actual copy goes back that far. 111 years ago that rolled off the press. And I found 49 hymns on the attributes of God in that old hymn book. Somebody says, Yes, that's all right. But people's minds are different now. We think differently now. Did you know that those Methodist hymns were sung mostly by uneducated people? Farmers and sheep herders and cattle raisers and coal miners and blacksmiths and carpenters and cotton raisers and cotton pickers and plain people all over this continent. They sang those songs. There are 1,100 and some of them in that hymn book of mine. Forty-nine of them are on the attributes of God, and there isn't a cheap one in the whole business. So when they got together, those plain, simple people, you would laugh at them if you'd seen them. The men had plain clothes on and there wasn't a dub of paint anywhere on any of the faces of the women. And they carried their little kids in on their hip and slapped them down and made them keep still while the preacher preached for an hour and 45 minutes. And then they said, Now let's sing number so-and-so. And they got up and sang a gorgeous, old, rolling hymn. And the people sang them, and they were plain people. And nowadays, I won't even talk about a lot of this stuff now because I just don't want to do it. I don't want to work myself up here. Tonight I've got to preach some more. But some of the terrible junk that we sing. I think of one called, I'm in love with the lover of my soul. You ever sing that one? I'm in love with the lover of my soul. Down in the dear old U.S. of A., we have a little one that goes like this, sung to the tune of There's a Hot Time in the Old Town tonight. It runs like this, 1, 2, 3, the devil's after me, 4, 5, 6, he's always throwing bricks, 7, 8, 9, he misses me every time, hallelujah, amen. And the dear saints of God sing that now, Mark. You, the saints of God, sing that. Our fathers sang, our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. And we sing junk. Well, anyhow, now, my brothers and sisters, this tragic and frightening decline in the spiritual state of the churches has come about as a result of our forgetting what kind of God God is. Now, here's what I want to do over the next week. You see, this is what they call introductory. I'm not preaching on an attribute tonight, I'm preaching on an introduction to the first attribute, which will be next week when I preach on the self-existence of God, and then say, what does that mean to you and me if God is self-existent? What does that mean to us now? And so with all of the sermons. But I'm saying that unless we get to know what God is like, what is he like, what God's like, if you know God, what would you find God to be like? I believe I know. I believe I know because I have a Bible in my hand, and also I believe the Holy Ghost. And I have two knees, and I have fellowship with him, so I'm going to preach on these things. Now, we have lost the vision of the Majesty on High. I have been reading in the Book of Ezekiel over the last weeks, and I have just come now, I have been reading slowly and rereading, and I have just come to that terrible, terrible passage, that frightening, frightful, awful passage where the Shekinah, which is the presence of God, the shining presence of God, lifts up from between the wings of Decariobim and goes to the altar, lifts up from the altar and goes to the door, and there is a sound of the whirring of wings, and then goes from the door to the outer court, and from the outer court to the mountain, and from the mountain into the glory. And it has never been back except as it was incarnated in Jesus Christ. And he walked among us, but the Shekinah glory that had followed Israel about all those years, had shone over the camp, was gone. God couldn't take it any longer. So he pulled out his Majesty and took his Shekinah and went. And I wonder how many of the gospel churches there are, by their frivolousness and shallowness and coarseness and whirliness, have grieved the Holy Ghost until he has withdrawn into hurt silence. I say, my brethren, we must see God again, we must feel God again, we must know God again, and we must hear God again. Nothing less than this will save us. This church will do a favor. I never know where I'm going to be, but I have said I'd stay here awhile. But I'm going to preach this series, and I'm hoping that you will be prayerful and that you will be worthy to hear this, as you pray for me, that I'll be worthy to talk about God, the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and what they're like and what he's like. And I say this church will do a great favor to Toronto and a great favor to the evangelical church. If we can elevate the concept of religious people to God, if we can restore again knowledge of God to men, we can help in some small way to bring about a reformation that will restore God again to men. Now, I want to close by giving you a little thought here, which also our Father sang, but we don't. The ecstasy, the radiancy, the wonder of this, when the man of God said, full of glory, full of wonders, majesty divine, mid thine everlasting thunders how thy lightning shine, shoreless ocean who can sound thee, thine own eternity is round thee, majesty divine. My brothers and sisters, one hour with the majesty of God would be worth more to you now and in eternity than all the preachers, including myself, that ever stood up to open their Bible. One vision of the majesty of God, not as this nice little song says, one transient gleam. No, no, I don't want anything transient. I want the gleam of majesty and wonder to be permanent. I want to live where the face of God shines every day. No child says, mother, let me see your face transiently. The child wants to be where any minute of the hour of the moment it can look up and see its mother's face. Timeless, faceless, single, lonely, yet sublimely free, thou art grandly always only God in unity, lone in grandeur, lone in glory, who shall tell thy wondrous story, awful trinity, splendors upon splendors beaming, change and intertwine, glories over glories streaming all translucent shine, blessings, praises, adorations greet thee from the trembling nations, majesty divine. Oh, this is the day of the common man. And we have not only all become common, but we've dragged God down to our mediocre level. What we need so desperately, my brethren, is an elevated concept of God. And so by faithful preaching and by prayer and by the Holy Ghost, maybe over the next weeks we can see the splendors upon splendors beaming, change and intertwine. Maybe we can see glories over glories streaming, all translucent shine. And to God we can give blessings, praises, adorations that greet thee from the trembling nations, majesty divine. Now, I'm going to count on you to be my drummer-upper and go to your telephone and tell theological students and everybody that ought to know, you want to hear a series of sermons on what God is like, why you come over. And we'll really begin next Sunday. This has been preparatory to the sermon that begins on the self-existence of God, from the text, I am that I am. Now, I want Al to come up and lead us as we stand and sing all the verses of number 394, all the verses. Then our friend Clemenger will dismiss us, and that will be it for tonight. 394.