Why
Vance Havner

Vance Havner (1901 - 1986). American Southern Baptist evangelist and author born in Jugtown, North Carolina. Converted at 10 in a brush arbor revival, he preached his first sermon at 12 and was licensed at 15, never pursuing formal theological training. From the 1920s to 1970s, he traveled across the U.S., preaching at churches, camp meetings, and conferences, delivering over 13,000 sermons with wit and biblical clarity. Havner authored 38 books, including Pepper ‘n’ Salt (1949) and Why Not Just Be Christians?, selling thousands and influencing figures like Billy Graham. Known for pithy one-liners, he critiqued lukewarm faith while emphasizing revival and simplicity. Married to Sara Allred in 1936 until her death in 1972, they had no children. His folksy style, rooted in rural roots, resonated widely, with radio broadcasts reaching millions. Havner’s words, “The church is so worldly that it’s no longer a threat to the world,” challenged complacency. His writings, still in print, remain a staple in evangelical circles, urging personal holiness and faithfulness.
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the speaker reflects on the constant questioning nature of children and how as adults, we still have many unanswered questions about life. The speaker acknowledges that sometimes God feels distant and we may find ourselves asking why. The sermon then references the crucifixion of Jesus, specifically the detailed description of it in the 22nd Psalm written by David centuries before the event. The speaker highlights the fulfillment of these prophecies on the cross and the significance of Jesus being forsaken by God. The sermon concludes with the mention of darkness covering the earth, an earthquake, and the curtain being pulled down, symbolizing the profound impact of Jesus' death.
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One of the words most often on the lips of children from the very beginning is that little word, why. And all parents know that they are constantly barraged by all sorts of questions from the very youngest. And one would have to be a walking encyclopedia to know the answers, but we never get over it. And all the rest of our days we see the trouble and the tragedy, the misery and the mystery, the iniquities and the inequities of life. So much doesn't add up and it doesn't make sense. Sometimes God seems so far away unto one phrase like Job, oh that I knew where I might find him. Behold I go forward but he's not there, and backward but I cannot perceive him. On the left hand or he doth work but he hideth himself, and on the right hand that I cannot see. And then we begin to ask questions of God and of ourselves. Of God, like David, oh God why hast thou cast us off forever? Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture? Or like Jeremiah, and this is one of the most unusual prayers in the book, it almost seems unthinkable for a man to talk to God like this, why is my pain perpetual and my wound incurable which refuses to be healed? Will thou altogether be unto me as a lie and as waters that fail? And then sometimes one talks to himself with this little question, and you know the one that stands out most in your mind. It's found in my Bible three times on the same page in Psalm 42 and 43. I remember a few years ago when I was in great strife and distress. My wife was quite ill, and the doctor had told me to get out some, and preach, and don't stay here in this hospital all the time. So I went away to try to hold some meetings, but you know how that is, or you can imagine, I hope, you're one place but your heart is somewhere else. And I remember how I came into that Holiday Inn Hotel that evening, and there lay a Gideon Bible wide open on the table, right smack at this chapter. Three times, why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. And then that's in the 11th verse, and in the 5th verse of chapter 43. I don't know of anywhere else in the Bible where that much is spread out on one page, repeated like that for our edification. If you have visited a hospital for crippled, retarded, abnormal children, and you've seen their little bodies twisted, and grotesque, and sometimes hideous. If you stood at the other end of the age line in a home for the aged, and beheld the pitiful vegetables that lie there, kept alive by machines that prolong death instead of life, shapeless lumps of flake unable to live or die either. If you have visited cemeteries where lie the bodies of countless soldiers, as I did not long ago in meetings in Arlington, Virginia. And every day I trudged over that, those acres and acres and acres of graves of soldier boys, lying there with faces turned heavenward as if to say, Lord, why didn't I get to live out my life? Why was this the end of it? And maybe in a war that we were afraid to win and ashamed to lose, as was the case in the last two. Or if you've looked on the victims of tornado, or flood, or fire, or the corpses of innocent men and women murdered by maniacs. If you've watched the haunting faces of alcoholics, and drug addicts, and the despair of terminal illness, if you've held the hand of a dying dear one whom prayer and physicians alike fail to save, as I did for a solid day when the doctor said she's already dead, except her heart, which has kept going, and the monitor kept beeping over there, and a lot of comfort you get out of that in such a time. And hold a hand that's already cold, and find yourself praying, good Lord, help me to remember the way she did look, not like this, and help me to think about the way she's going to look, thank God, one of these days. If you have faced the ironic enigmas that add up to nothing in your little arithmetic, if some of you here tonight have had your dreams blasted and your hopes destroyed by the heartless law of cause and effect, no answer from the brazen heavens, you find your heart crying out in all honesty with the biggest little word in the vocabulary. My God, why? Some time ago, a dear lady wrote to me. I knew her husband, he was a godly man, a preacher of great holiness of heart. He was getting ready to go to Brazil on a preaching mission. They gave him some shots, and I don't know what happened. He'd had some spells of depression, but they put him in the hospital and he killed himself. And she said, now it's bad enough to lose him, but why, why did he have to go this way after living that way? Well, I don't know, but there's the question. And so we make our way through Emmaus, and Emmaus has an answered question, for it's no possible solution here until we have more light on the subject. You see, beloved, everything's mixed up down here ever since the devil got in his work a long time ago. And one day you have a precious answer to prayer, and next day a weird calamity hits you. One day a miracle, and the next day a misery, and it all adds up to a mystery, just like the weather. I believe the devil got fouled up like everything else when sin came into this world. I don't believe God had it set up that way, to kill innocent people with hurricanes and all the rest of it. That wasn't the way it started, but the devil has a lot to do with the weather sometimes. It did in the case of Job, and in the case of that storm on the Sea of Galilee, and in the case of Euroclid, and when Paul headed for Rome. He can't go any further than God lets him go, but sometimes that gives the devil considerable latitude. And so sometimes it's everything else is like the weather, sunny skies and singing birds, and next day, hurricane and destruction. No discernible pattern. There just isn't any pattern to the weather, because you'd think that you'd have enough rain when you need rain, and then you'd have enough dry weather, but sometimes you have too much of this and not enough of that, and the thing's all out of shape, and has been all through these centuries. Who can make any sense out of blossoming buds and tender fruit all killed overnight by a belated winter frost? I was down in Gulfport not long after Cameo went through, and blew a hole in the side of the brand new magnificent First Baptist Church. They had to take all the carpets over to the fire department, turn those powerful hoses on, and see if they could make them usable again. One man said, everything I had in this world just disappeared. I don't know where it went. Next morning they said you couldn't hear a bird singing, and people talked to each other in whispers, and everybody was their good neighbor next morning, because they were all down on the same level ground. I'm glad I'm not a weatherman. I wanted even something more certain. Of course, weather's certain, all right, some kind of it. But life's like the weather, and there's no rhyme and reason to a lot of it, because of the havoc that's been wrought by Satan and the sin. But, thank God there came to this world one who could even handle the weather. Some time ago, I was in a conference with a seminary professor of great ability, and I had never seen this before, and I felt like shouting hallelujah, and he said when God made Adam, he gave him dominion over the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field, and the fishes of the sea. But two things he did not give him dominion over. One was wind, and the other was the water. Now, we use both, but we don't have dominion. He said one day there came to earth one who walked around a while in Galilee, and one day took a nap in a boat out down that little lake, and the storm came up, and the poor disciples forgot that the son of God was in there taking a nap, and I said, don't you care that we perish? He rose and said, keep still, and that storm subsided until the surface was like a mirror. And he said, no wonder that these who belong to that race has never been able to dominate wind or water. He said, what manner of man is this that even the wind and the sea obey him? And so that's one time it was done, because he's Lord of everything. And I thank God the day is coming when even the weather is going to be right, and that's quite a prospect. And so you find yourself in all of this, constantly asking why, but God's patient with our complaints. He knows our frame, and he remembers where it is. I believe in praying just like you feel when you pray to God. He knows how you feel anyhow. Why don't you just tell him? Maybe it won't be elegant sometimes, but he knows he's your father if you're a child of God. You don't have to bombard heaven with unanswered questions, because God has gathered up all our agony and all our distress, and answered it in one all-inclusive why. Now, we can't fathom the depths of that why, but we can rest in the certainty that if we could get to the bottom of that one, we'd be at the bottom of all our little whys, and every problem that's ever vexed our hearts. You know where it is. It began with David in the 22nd Psalm. Centuries before Jesus died on the cross, David put in for writing a description of the crucifixion. Now, a crucifixion is a Roman way of execution, not a Jewish, and if I had no other argument for the inspiration of the word of God, it would be enough for me that here was a Jew a long time before the crucifixion, by divine inspiration accounting for something that wasn't within their policy. I'm describing it in detail. Bones out of joint, verse 14. Agony, verses 14, 15. Thirst, verse 15. Tears, pens and feet, verse 16. Partial nudity and scorn, 17 and 7 and 8. Casting lots, verse 18. And all of it precisely fulfilled on the cross. What does it mean? Well, it was said when my Lord hung there in Aramaic, and it still is in Aramaic in your Bible generally. Somebody said as though turning it into Greek might spoil some of it, so there it is. And Martin Luther studied it for hours and hours on one occasion, and then finally he just got up and walked around the table and said, God forsaken of God, who can understand him? Darkness covered the earth for three hours, Jesus six hours on the cross, 9 a.m to 3 p.m. Darkness set in. Maybe the cattle came home and the birds went to roost. An earthquake opened the graves and dead folks walked around. Nobody saw him die. God pulled the curtain down. Nobody saw him rise. There are heathen records of an eclipse of the sun about that time, and tradition says that God's and he's witnessed the darkness in Egypt and said either the deity himself suffers at this moment, or sympathizes with the one who does. All kinds of strange things happened around that cross. Here were the religious people of my Lord's time, the very ones that you'd have thought would have understood all about this. They'd studied the Bible all their lives, these scribes and Pharisees, and of all people they were the ones who said if he's the Son of God, let him come down from the cross. Don't ever forget, beloved, that the worst enemy Jesus had when he came to this world, read the Bible, went to church, prayed in public. All of them tithers lived clean, separated lives, tried to win others, and went to hell. The worst opposition he's ever had has come from that source. He didn't have much trouble with the old sinners, and that was the crowd that spearheaded the movement that put him on that cross. And yet, here stood a Roman centurion who'd never been in a revival meeting, never heard a sermon, and said this must be the Son of God. Can you imagine any groups any farther apart than that? And yet, who's confessing at least to some extent that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? Well, like the sun in darkness, hide and shut his glories in when Christ, the mighty maker, died for man, the creature of sin. And that's exactly what happened. God's Son, with no sin in him but all sin on him, for one brief moment, a holy God cannot look on sin and turn it back while his son drank the dregs of that cup when sin was dealt with once and for all, that God might be just on one hand and justifier on the other, that the judgment seat and the mercy seat might have their final and full meaning, that God might be propitiated and sinners might be reconciled. That's what happened. And we're not worshiping an angry God sitting up on a cloud somewhere, adding up all our sins, and if there's more good than bad, we go to heaven, and more bad than good, we go to hell. Some people seem to have just about that idea of God. God hates sin, but God loves the sinner, for God so loved the world that he sent his son. He loves them, and he takes no pleasure in the death of anybody. He doesn't take any pleasure in my fears, my troubles. He didn't come down here to rub it in. Bless God he came down here to rub it out. Now, we're inclined sometimes when some Christian brother or sister stumbles. We've done it. We've stomped them. You hear of a preacher under the bed? Yeah, that's what I thought. God doesn't rub it in, he rubs it out. He removes our sins as far as east and the west, puts them in the depths of the sea, forgets them forever. Mighty glad he does. Now, I'm not preaching tonight a lot of theological gobbledygook. We've dressed up Calvary today in sickly sentimentality so as not to offend some fastidious Sunday morning benchwarmers who don't want their fastidity disturbed by gory references to a bruised and beaten Savior with his beard pulled out and his face covered with blood and fiddle, dying between two criminals. That's not pretty, and there's no way on earth you could dress that up. There's nothing elegant about it, and it may grate on the tender sensibilities of some folks on Sunday morning, if they ever hear it, who've been up so late at the late, late, late, late show on Saturday night. I don't know how they could ever be sensitive to anything on Sunday morning. I want to say two things about this death. Jesus did not have to die, number one, and second, he did have to die. We die because we have to, because we have the seeds of death, and it's the wages of sin. It's death, we have to pay the wages, but Jesus didn't have any seed of sin inside, so he had no wages to pay. He said, I can lay down my life and I can take it up. Now, you can lay your life down, you can kill yourself, but you can't take it up, and as he was climbing that hill with that cross, some women were crying over here, and I've never heard a sermon from this. I suppose they've been priests. They ought to be. He turned to these weeping women, God bless them, but it was useless, and he's saying, don't weep for me, weep for yourselves and for your children, and I think there's some people today who get sentimental about poor Jesus carrying his cross up the hill, who don't weep about their own sins and about the sins of their own children. Jesus is saying, in effect, I could snap my fingers. I'm not going up there because I'm the victim of a mob. Jesus wasn't the victim of a mob. He could have snapped his fingers and run every Pharisee out of Jerusalem and scattered all the Roman soldiers. He said to Peter, you know, poor old Simon Peter, always making the wrong move there in the garden. When they arrested him, he got out his sword and started whopping all fairs, and the Lord had to stop the biggest business of all history to do a repair job right there in the garden. And he said to Peter, put up that sword. Don't you know that I could call down 12 legions of angels, a whole legion for each one of you apostles? I don't have to have an armed guard. He could have called 10,000 angels to destroy the world and set it free. He could have called 10,000 angels, but he died alone for you and me. He was not the helpless victim of a conspiracy, and he said to Pilate, and that was the strangest prisoner who ever faced the governor, you wouldn't have any power over me except it were given you from above. I guess Pilate thought this is the strangest prisoner I've ever seen. And please remember, beloved, my Lord was in complete charge of his death. Nobody else has ever died in charge of their own dying. He didn't weaken away and die because the blood all ran out of him. Plenty of people have been crucified, but he prayed for his enemy. Father forgave him. He appointed John to take care of his mother. He took care of the dying thief and gave him a ticket to paradise. He fulfilled the scripture. They gave him vinegar to drink as he cried, I thirst. He experienced separation from God, transacted all his business, and then when he got through he simply said, into thy hands I commend my spirit, and said it finished. He was in full possession of his faculties and laid down his life of his own accord. No man took it from him. Nobody else ever died like that, because there's never been anybody else like that. His life was in his own power. He allowed them to kill him, but he didn't have to die in that sense. But he did have to die. He said this is a commandment I've received from my father, and in the garden, if it be possible, let this cut fast. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as I will. He gave up his life because it was in the will of God for him to do it. Well, why was it the will of God? Here's where you and I come in. We're all in trouble. We've all sinned, and sinners and the Holy God can't get together, unless there can be somebody who is God and man, and who could meet the demands of God's righteousness on one side, and so identify with sinful man as to take all sin on him, though no sin in him. There is penalty. He saved others himself he could not save. The agony of Calvary wasn't just physical. There is no more painful way to leave this world than by crucifixion. It takes so long to die. Of course, only those who died would know, but it's been said again and again by those perhaps most capable doctors and others of surmising what all must go on before you finally die. How many things have to have to happen to your body? Poor thing, they're fighting against all these forces. Horrible beyond description, but others have been crucified. The difference was that when Jesus died, he not only suffered all that, but he poured out his soul unto death. That's the difference. It is the will of God. Jesus had to die to fulfill that purpose. I have an artist friend in Maryland, and he doesn't paint pretty pictures. He spent his life trying to depict, as best any human being can, something of the agony of the sufferings of our Lord. He's a little bit bothered sometimes about these pictures, and I am too, that show Jesus, well, he doesn't look like he's hurting much in some of these pictures. Looks like he's suffering some minor inconvenience. And my friend Ken Hudler believes that although Jesus walked on earth as a man, he suffered in soul as only God can suffer. Of course, no artist's brush can ever fully depict that, but he has a try at it. Some time ago, two preachers were talking, and one said to the other, man, I sweated blood over that last week. The other said, don't let me ever hear you say that again. You don't know what sweating blood means. But my Lord did, and when they took him down, Isaiah 52, 14, from that cross, his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. When they took him down, he didn't even look like a man. That's what the original really says here. He was not recognizable as a man, and that was the price that he paid. But what did he buy? Well, he bought not only our salvation, but he bought a resurrection. When some dear bodies that we've watched in the last moments, whose visage was marred, are guaranteed an Easter outfit one of these days. And I'm quite sure I speak to some dear people here who perhaps have memories of that same thing. Three years ago, well a little over now, my wife and I were down at Old Charleston, South Carolina, where I used to be pastor of the First Baptist Church. And I took some snapshots out there on the waterfront one day, and one of her, and didn't develop the rest of the role. I left it in the camera, didn't finish the role, and it lay that way for a year and a half. Then suddenly it occurred to me one day, my soul is a picture of her in there, and I finished the role, and there she stood, and it was kind of a surprise in a way. And then I got to thinking, I said, now just as that's negative, lay in that role for a year and a half in the dark, just so her body lies in a little Quaker graveyard in Guilford College, North Carolina. But one of these days, the great photographer is going to turn negative into positive. And when he does, corruption will put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on immortality, and death shall be swallowed up in victory. You see, there's something really to look forward to. I have a sermon on living in the great until. The New Testament is just full of until. My, there's a string of them. Look it up sometime in your concordance. Until he come, until I come, observe the Lord's Supper until I come, the fullness of the Gentiles until he come, the times of the Gentiles until he come, all the way through. And I tell them, now when somebody comes up and wants to know what time it is, you tell them it's until. And they may look at you and think, well there's another one off his rocker. But go on, go on and tell them, no friend, I mean it, we're living in the until. And you know, after that, I've been getting letters to this day from different friends here and there who do not sign it yours truly, or anything like that they sign it until. My wife heard that sermon, and before she finally went, she couldn't talk, she had machinery in her mouth to breathe for him, but she could write. How, I don't know, and she managed to scribble something that I'm keeping. It's in my book, my book of memory. I am going through things I can't tell you about until. And there she stops. And that's the until I'm waiting for. You see, if you're his, you've got a lot to look forward to. I heard of a little modernist preacher, he said he's tired of that word salvation, so he ought to use the word salvage. Now wasn't that a bright remark? When you salvage something, you salvage the same old wreck. I don't want to go into heaven behind a wrecking crew, I want to go in brand new. And that's what I'm assured here. You know, there's one verse that comes to my mind again and again when I look at myself in the mirror. You know what it is? It does not yet appear what we should be. I feel like saying, Lord, you've got a job to do yet. I've got to look better than this. Now some of you here tonight, you're waiting for that day when you're going to have your new outfit. The old equipment's playing out. Looking at me now through those trifocals, got your teeth in your pocket maybe. Going to pieces. But oh my friend, I'm glad I don't know an awful lot about what awaits me, because I'm afraid I'd get night restless. Think I'd be like a boy trying to eat a bowl of spinach with a chocolate cake sitting on the end of the table now. Paul Morgan says, speaking of the dear ones who have gone on, he said God never ends that veil, he never lifts it, but he does thin it. And I like that. And you know, the more of your crowd goes over there and you lift down here, it gets pretty thin, thank God. And I'm indebted to Dr. Morgan for that. And in the meantime, I don't need to ask Lord why, because all my whys were taken care of in that one. He asked it that I may never ask it. He was forsaken, and I may never be forsaken, not for a moment. And he assures me of the ultimate defeat of the devil, and my tears will vanish, my tears will be dry death. If you are one of his, and told according to his purpose, nothing is ever lost. Death can hide but not divide, thou art but on Christ's other side. Thou art with Christ and Christ with me, united still in Christ, are we. No prayer that you ever pray is lost, no tear that you ever shed is lost. Don't you remember what the psalmist said, thou puttest my tears into thy bottle? Did you know God was in the bottling business? Your tears are not lost, the star does not fall without his notice, the hairs of your head are numbered. He will perfect that which concerns us, he which hath begun a good work will perform it. God's going to see the thing through. And so if you've been worried about some of the things that there's no use trying to understand anyhow, not now, it's ridiculous to arrive at final conclusions before you finish the book. That would be foolish about any other book, wouldn't it? When a new building is going up, there's a lot of rubbish around, always broken pieces, odds and ends, leftovers, clutters of clay. Nehemiah, you remember, they couldn't get much done rebuilding the wall because of the rubbish. But when the building is complete and the trash has been carted away and the new edifice stands clean and complete, you forget about all the rubbish. My God is in a great reconstruction job these days, and he's not finished, and we get weary with the broken fragments of our lives, and things that don't fit into the blueprints, but we've not seen the end of it. God will finish what he's begun, and he will also dispose of the rubbish. And I was a boy in the country, the book agents used to come along, and they'd leave us a prospect, as they called it, several pages and pictures out of the sure enough book for us to look over. But it was a most frustrating thing. You'd read page five, and the next page would be page 21, and you couldn't make any sense out of the whole business. You said, I'll have that book if it's the last thing I ever buy. Good psychology, it was. When Jesus came to this world, he brought his prospectus with him, and the miracles were just sample pages out of what it's going to be like all the time, someday. He would heal somebody here, and raise somebody from the dead, then feed the multitude. Just sample pages of what it's going to be like in the kingdom age to begin with. And you see the crumbs make you want to cave, and that's why the miracles are so fascinating, and so marvelous, because I wonder myself, if you did that much on a limited scale, what's it going to be like when it rains there on earth? In school I was the worst mathematician ever to darken the doors of any institution. My marks in arithmetic, the less said about that, the better. But one thing I always remembered, the answers were all in the back of the book. Thank God I've got a book here, that if I open it in the middle and try to understand some things, I don't get anywhere much. But I know one thing, there's no devil on the first two pages, and no devil on the last two pages. Thank God for a book that disposes of the devil before it concludes. And so I want to remember that God's going to finish what he started. In the last three years, I've had some of the most precious notes and letters from all everywhere. I'm a bird watcher, and it's made a sort of a study of that through the years, and some dear lady from Nova Scotia sent me the prettiest picture of a little bird out on a limb where it was, where a late winter snowstorm had come, and early spring had also come just a few days before, and so there were buds and snow both on this limb. And I guess this bird was trying to figure out which season it was. But anyway, there he was, and the little poem said, you have to believe the buds will blow, believe in the grass and the time of snow. That's the reason the birds can sing on these darkest days. He believes in spring. And there come times when we think, Lord this is the longest winter I've been through yet. I don't mean the one on the calendar necessarily, but the one in your life. And another dear friend sent me just two little lines. Birds do not sing because they have an answer. They sing because they have a song. I think there's a lot of sense in that. If you're going to wait till you've got all the answers, you'll never sing down here. So sing anyhow, because the answer is guaranteed. And so if some of you dear folks tonight are sore beset with unanswered questions, may I remind you of something that just leaped out of the page and grabbed me as many times as I've read the 16th chapter of John, and thought I was pretty well acquainted with that. And he was talking to his sad and weary disciples. He was about to leave them, and verses 22 and 23 just jumped out and grabbed me. And therefore you tonight too, and ye now therefore have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man take it from you. Now listen, and in that day you shall ask me nothing. Had you ever thought that over? He's not going to answer our questions. We're not even going to ask them. You get one good look at him when he comes back and he says, don't you forget every question you had. I've got a stack this high now. But I believe that when my eyes behold him, I don't think those questions are going to make a better difference than this one. They're not going to seem so momentous then. One good look at him and all the question marks will turn into exclamation points. For in that day, not that he will answer, it's that you won't ask the question. Shall we bow our heads in prayer? Before we close, you have listened so well. How many out there have tonight a burden, a special, a special why, or a special burden? Oh, we could all sing I Need Thee Every Hour, yes. Not talking about your ordinary needs. Do you have a special need, a burden about yourself or about somebody else that sometimes brings tears to your eyes and keeps sleep from your eyelids? You've got it tonight. You don't know the answer, and it bothers you. You're human, and it does bother you. Have you got a burden tonight, a desperate, special, extra burden, above the run-of-the-mill burden that everybody has? It's about you physically, mentally, spiritually, or about somebody, or about something. Do you feel like it's special, and it's desperate? Do you feel like you could say, Brother Hasner, I, among all my ordinary needs, I've got a special, and I don't know the answer, and I bother, and I know I shouldn't, but I do, and I've got a burden, and a load. And I would just like to ask you to come to the front. You don't settle things like this by coming down the aisle, but I would like to know if you've got that burden. If you have such a burden tonight, would you put up your hand right now all over the place if you've got such a burden? Yes, I see many of you all over the place. Many burdens that you can't even describe, but I know what you can do about it. And before we dismiss, I want us to sing 121. It's an old-timer that we were brought up on. Are you weary? Are you heavy-hearted? Tell it to Jesus. Are you grieving over joy and departing? Tell it to Jesus alone. And right now, before we sing it, Jesus, lift you the hand. I'll wait right where you sit. You'd have a little word with the good Lord before you sing it. You say, Lord, I've been trying to carry this, and I can't. I roll it over on you, and Lord Jesus, I don't want it to roll back. I'd like to remember that on a certain Friday night at Sandy Cove in the auditorium, I turned this thing over to God, and I've left it with him, and I'm persuaded that he's able to keep all that I have deposited with him against that day. And then when that day comes, I probably won't even ask him about it, because everything will be answered by his own presence. In the stillness of this hour, and it happens many times, right where you are, won't you just quietly in a moment say, Lord, here it is, come unto me, and I'll give you rest. I turned this over. Here is too much for me. Before we sing it, in this moment of trouble.
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Vance Havner (1901 - 1986). American Southern Baptist evangelist and author born in Jugtown, North Carolina. Converted at 10 in a brush arbor revival, he preached his first sermon at 12 and was licensed at 15, never pursuing formal theological training. From the 1920s to 1970s, he traveled across the U.S., preaching at churches, camp meetings, and conferences, delivering over 13,000 sermons with wit and biblical clarity. Havner authored 38 books, including Pepper ‘n’ Salt (1949) and Why Not Just Be Christians?, selling thousands and influencing figures like Billy Graham. Known for pithy one-liners, he critiqued lukewarm faith while emphasizing revival and simplicity. Married to Sara Allred in 1936 until her death in 1972, they had no children. His folksy style, rooted in rural roots, resonated widely, with radio broadcasts reaching millions. Havner’s words, “The church is so worldly that it’s no longer a threat to the world,” challenged complacency. His writings, still in print, remain a staple in evangelical circles, urging personal holiness and faithfulness.