In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of preaching and singing in the church. He believes that when preaching and singing are done well, God blesses them and uses them to change people's hearts. The preacher also discusses the characteristics of a true church of God, including the presence of joy and a distinct appearance of believers. He uses the analogy of a bird's nest to illustrate the process of spiritual growth and maturity. The sermon concludes with a reference to Peter's sermon in Acts, where he proclaims the resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

When the day of Pentecost was fully come, with one accord in one place, we hear people pray, Lord, that we might be one. But we got the cart around in front of the horse there, because the Holy Spirit didn't come, that they came because they were one. That is always true, that the Spirit doesn't come to unify us, he comes back. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing, mighty wind. Now, it didn't say it was a wind, it said it sounded like it. And it filled all the house where they were sitting. There appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak in other languages. And they were dwelling in tongues of devout men out of every nation. And it was a noise abroad that a multitude came together, and they were confounded in his own language, they heard everybody speak, and they were amazed. You notice, confounded, amazed nowadays, the church marveled about, except how dead we are. But they were marveled there by God just made them marvel, wonder. And there were pythians and Medes, there were seventeen languages represented, and they heard these people speaking their language. It wasn't a mutter, nor a peep, it was language, they could understand it. And they were all amazed, and some of them had the doubter there, he'd stand around and shake his head. And others said, what does this mean? Now, there was the mocker there who sits in the seat of the scornful drunk. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and he said, he meant all ye that dwell in Jerusalem, be this known unto you. He hearkened to my words, and then he went on and gave them a beautiful song, which certainly had a lot in it. He told them this was a fulfillment of Joel's passage, where he would pour out the Spirit upon men, old men, women, they'd see visions and dream dreams, and on his head, and show wonders. Then he said, ye men of Nazareth, hear this, or ye men of Israel, hear this. Jesus, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him, he was crucified. And verse 32, this Jesus that God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses, and being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received the fulness of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear. Therefore let all know assuredly that God hath made this same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now, the verse that I want to, I don't know whether I'll use this in the way they tell us to do in Bible school, but I'll sleep soundly anyhow, I never worry about it. I mean, tonight, I hope I'll stay awake while I preach, and I hope you will. But in verse 14, it says, But Peter stood up and lifted up. He stood up and he lifted up his voice and he said, Hear me. Now, Peter, here in the Church of God, the whole Church of God, he stood up and he lifted up his voice. And as far as and as long as the Church, any Church, is the Church of God, it doesn't have to be named the Church of God, but it is the Church of God. You can name your Church the Church of God, and it isn't the Church of God. It may not be. So it's not in the name, it is in the content, the spiritual content. And as far as the Church is the Church of God, Peter represents it here. For he had with the others belief on the Lord's word, and he had received confirmation in his own breath. Now, this sounds old-fashioned and far remodeled and smooth doctrine of fundamentalism, but I believe in confirmation. I believe there is spiritual confirmation. Now, somebody said, You mean that you're saying that everybody ought to speak in tongues? I say no. I don't think the Lord puts ultimate proof in anything that's physical. No spiritual things ever lies in physical things. That would be contrary to all the ways of God with man. There is a confirmation that doesn't touch the flesh at all. It goes deep into the soul, and it's an inward knowledge that's beyond the earth. There is a difference between knowing you're saved because you figured it out, according to the scriptures, and knowing you're saved because you have an inward witness. There is a difference, and it's a difference between a revived Church and another kind. It's a difference between, oh, the difference between the alliance back there 50 or 60 years ago. See, we've been taken over by the Schofield Bible. Now, I've worn out five of them, and I have one that you can never want. But we got from, maybe not from Schofield, but at least from that school of thought. Yes, it was by faith, only we put an adjective in front of the word faith, and we called it naked faith. There's no such thing in the Bible mentioned as, and they talked about faith, but not naked faith. You're saved by faith, but not by faith alone. You're saved by faith, and then you're for something. And if it doesn't produce something, it isn't faith. You can just figure on that. You don't eat the tree, but you can't have the fruit without the tree, so that you can't have the fruit of salvation without faith, which is the tree, the root of salvation. But you can have a dry, naked faith without any fruit. Your faith can stand like a tree in midwark and barren without a leaf or a bud, and most people do. We just stand there, our faith is naked. He had confirmation in his own breast, and so he stood up and he lifted up his voice, and he became a witness in heaven. And if you will reduce it to its ultimate, I think that's about what we can say, that we are here to witness in heaven. We are men of God among men of earth, and our witness is of earth, to heaven. Jesus said the things he saw, he told the people on earth, and he said, you receive not my witness. You don't hear me? He said, I can't, because I talk about things and you don't hear them. And we can say the same today. Peter was a witness on earth, I say, to things in heaven, and he became a witness of a power beyond the earthly and the human. If you can explain a man, that's not God's man. The man that can be explained, he is psychological. But the spiritual man, you can't explain. Paul said about him, he said nobody understands him, but he has the mind of Christ and he understands all things. He stands up there and looks everything over and he can appraise it, he knows where he stands, by an inward light, an inward illumination. But the people don't understand him, they try to figure him out. I remember once Bruce Barton, the Madison Avenue Huckster salesman, he wrote a book on St. Paul. Dr. Schuman was the editor of Alliance Weekly, and I read it and I wrote him back, and I said, Brother Schuman, I can't review this book. This book is Adam Christ. It's Esau writing a book about Jacob. It's the flesh writing a book about the Spirit, and this man is a good writer. You don't understand the spiritual man, he's a mystery and a wonder. You can stand amazed at him and shake your head and say, what do these things mean? But you can't explain him. Just as soon as they put you on the couch and try to explain you back to selling life insurance, because you certainly aren't called to preach, or if you are, you're backslid. Because there's something celestial, something divine, something super mundane, all above the earth, something of heaven about this man, Peter, about this church. And they witnessed to a power beyond the earth. But that power was interested in us men and women. I believe Emerson wrote about what he called the over-soul. I read that essay a number of times and still don't know what he meant. But he had a feeling that there was a great over-soul, something vast and huge and full of energy, and palpitating and undulating and moving, and that it struck down upon us. One day that undulating energy said, when you pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven. And he gave himself a name and said, Our Father. I am undulating and moving and full of power, but I am not a thing. I am God, the Father. Call me Father. That divine power to which Peter witnessed is Our Father which art in heaven. Thus Peter witnessed to things in order that he might inform and influence the people to whom he spoke. Now, if a church, notice that I am a church man, that is, I believe in the church of Christ. I love thy kingdom, God, Lord, the house of the church our dear Redeemer saved with his own precious blood. I don't think that we're doing God's service when we church into a music hall or a literary debating club, or we prove the word of God's truth by scientific films. I don't think that's a church at all. A church is a place where people that love the Lord touched heaven and been moved by the things of heaven meet together and look at each other and say, Isn't it wonderful? And listen to the word, give of their money, and spend time in prayer, and sing hymns together. They may be a little off-key, but they're singing hymns to God, God, and Christ, and heaven to come, and the regions beyond. That's a church, that's it. This isn't a church here now. This is a convention, a gathering of people from many churches. I'm sure we'll agree if I say this, that if this is what you live for and this is all you live for, then you're just worth one week out of a year. But simply a place you come to get your fire kind of kindled up, that's perfectly all right. I'm fortunate I wouldn't be here. But if you're no good when you get good here and you're no good anyplace else, God won't know what to do with you, because the theologians say you're justified and therefore you can't be loved and there's no place else for you. But you're no good, you're just no good. And the church, you see, it's the group, the assembly. Now, there are two groups to talk about the assembly, the Pentecostal people and the Plymouth Brethren. I don't belong to either group, and I wrote an editorial called The Passing of the Assembly Concept from Christianity, and somebody wrote me a letter and said, any man that can write that editorial ought to be with us. But he was a Plymouth Brethren. I wrote back and said, if they would agree with everything else in the Bible, I'd be with them. But I said, as it stands, we can take a hold of one thing, you know, and the rest, and I don't like that. Well, the church is a living organism, and every church should have, the whole church has in large, each church should be a piece of the whole church of Christ. Now, if that church is to be an organic member of the redeemed body of which Christ is the head, then its teachers and its members have a profound obligation, a crushing obligation, lying upon them. It is that they earnestly and sacrificially in prayer strive to make its belief and practices New Testament. You see, you and I are always being wooed away from the scriptures, always. Down the centuries you can begin with when the Holy Ghost came and traced the history of the Christian church down the years, and you'll find that always in every age some movement or influence or power coming to try to move the church away from the New Testament pattern, move it to the Ising brethren. And there were the Manicheans, and there were later on the Patronizers. Then came the Roman church. So we have powers, we know where they get their energy from below. But it's always to move the people of God away from the New Testament pattern. It is the business of a preacher not only to preach twice a Sunday, hold a prayer meeting, dedicate the babies, and bury the dead. But his job is to see to it that his church is a New Testament church, that it learns our New Testament, that its practices are New Testament, that its objectives are New Testament, that its methods are New Testament, that it listens to the grassroots and learns from the scriptures themselves what to believe, what to do. They don't know why they are here on earth. They are taught that they were born again and their citizenship is in heaven, but they don't know why they are on earth. There is a reason for your being here, my friends. When you were born again, the seed of God came into you, and you belong in heaven. Part of you, Adam's old part, that part that gets gray and wrinkled and gets liver trouble and flat feet, that's down here. But the inner part of you belongs in heaven, that's the eternal part of you. Thank God the other part won't last too long, and it will get fixed up. What one could ever say to me would be, Torsion, I have determined to let you live for eternity with the body you have now. I'd say, please, God, no, Lord, give me a help. I need help. I don't want to go around with my feet hurting the rest of eternity. No, I don't. I don't want to go around feeling this old clay frame that I have here. That's got a mortgage on it, you know. Satan and nature, they're going on these days, and when you get older you don't care. You know, when you're young and the world looks big and you're going to conquer, why, sad days are going to be a terrible day. But when you get older, you don't mind. When nature calls you up and says, now I'm going to foreclose, you say, foreclose, brother, all right with me. And there's a lot of you dear old Saints sitting around here, actually, secretly, you wish that nature would foreclose. Part of you has gone over there anyhow. You've got more up there than you have down here. As long as you've got more down here than you have up there, look at death with terrible fear. But as the proportions change, and you slowly, first you've got 25 percent up there and down here, and you want to stay where the biggest amount is. And then later on, when you get older, you get 75 percent up there and 25 percent down here, where he had four times or three times as much as where he is. So some of you dear old Saints say, dear old Saint, I'll come to Pittsburgh and you won't be here. Well, she's got 95 percent up there, and that's all right. And one of these times she'll go up and say, come on up, here's your heritage. Well, amen, and nobody will worry about it, it'll be all right. Now, we've got a New Testament church. Oh, I don't know, I'm fighting for that all the time, you know. I claim what we need is not reformation. Revival means to get more of what you have, and that would be the worst thing that could happen to some of you people, what you have. You need to get rid of a lot that you have, and by more than one way I mean that, too. And you need to get rid of a lot that you have and get the right thing. Oh, a backslidden church, aping the way of Elvis Presley and the world. You may say, Lord, give us more. I don't have too much now. I want the Lord to come and I want him to reform the church and bring us back to the New Testament pattern, back to the power, back to the holiness, back to the purity. No, we've got to see to it that we go back to the grassroots. I think it's good we ought to read the Book of Acts about once a year. Now I know what the people tell us. They tell us it's an official book, it doesn't belong to us. It wasn't for anybody. The people the Book of Acts is for us now. I believe that in the Book of Acts God was laying the pattern for the church for all time. He's going to scare me out of it. When I get blessed on a chapter, I don't want some Bible teacher to tell me that isn't for me. Anything is for me that makes me fat and healthy and is good for me. I remember, what was his name? Mel Trotter, that great Saint, that great soul, that soul in there. He got converted, I think he was in jail. Anyway, he was in a mess, and he got converted. He just loved the Lord so he didn't pay much attention to the dispensation. In California one time, he was giving his testimony, and he came to the part where he got saved. He said, So I got on it, God have mercy on me a sinner. And he said, The Lord saved my soul. Well, afterwards somebody came up to him and said, Brother Trotter, I'm glad you're converted. But he said, You know, you're dispensationally all mixed up. He said, That passage, God have mercy on me a sinner. He said, That's not intended for you at all. You never should have prayed that prayer. Well, he said, I suppose not. He said, I guess you're right. I didn't know it at the time. And he said, Furthermore, the fix I was in, God would have saved me if I had said, Mary had a little lamb. He said, I ought to have done Mary, for the Lord was with me. God doesn't listen to your theology. He listens to your heart. Can you imagine dispensationalists when Peter said, Lord, help me, and he's up to his waist and walking. Lord, help me. That's no way to pray. You're supposed to pray the way the theologians tell you. Well, Peter could have been drowned in bubbles coming and got around to it. But Peter's heart prayed, Lord, save me. And Peter saved him, brought him up, put him back on the surface, and said, Walk along with me, and got in. So I'd rather have something from God and have the theologians out to get me than to have the theologians telling benignly down on me and not have anything but an empty soul and disappointment, wouldn't you? I'm a theologian, too. Gee, it's the doctrine of God. But I believe that we ought not to get so narrow that we can't find ourselves in the dark. We ought to see to it that our Church has experience, that it has spiritual experience. And we ought to see that the Church is living a life of heavenly order. We make too many excuses for ourselves, I tell you. We excuse ourselves all the time and say, Oh, yes, but now remember, we're in the flesh. But Peter said that even though we were living here in the flesh, now we were supposed to live holy lives. And it's you who make us live right now. Now, I'm not speaking about sinless perfection. I've never met anybody that I thought was sinlessly perfect. And it wasn't. And he had one more sin than you and I have, because he had the deception of thinking that he was perfect. I don't believe in that sense. But I believe that if we walk in the Spirit, we'll not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. And I believe that it's entirely part of love and joy and peace and righteousness and all those good virtues right in us now. Now, when the devil sold the idea to the Church that because we were carnal and born in sin and conceived in iniquity, therefore we had to live like the dents of heaven, when he sold that big rotten bill of goods to the Church, he did us tremendous harm. And I'm not going to let him tell me that. I've met men and women of God that would die rather than sin, that would die rather than do wrong. We've got to live there at the Church, the Book of Acts Church, the Book of Romans Church, the Book of Colossians Church. And we are to teach our people that they are to put loyalty to Christ first. Loyalty to Jesus Christ our Lord. Such a Church as I've described here is not likely to be a very popular Church. I warn you against popularity. I warn you when the public will begin to tell you that you're all right. When they begin to pat you and say you're just one of us, only you say it differently. Look out for them, brother, because just as soon as you're popular, you've lost the disgrace of the cross from your life. The cross was never popular and never will be popular. The electric chair isn't popular, the hang-up-a-lear neither is the cross. The cross is a place where people go to die, and that's never popular. They want to put on on the outside and ball us all up. Then they say, now he's a fine Christian, but he's not such a bad fellow after all. The worst things you can say about a man is that he's a good fellow. Nobody could say it about Jesus Christ our Lord. Nobody could say it about Paul. Who would slap Dr. Simpson on the back? He's one of us. Never, never. That's those deep, deep fiery eyes that look far into the distance that were not as though they were. It wasn't too easy to be around. I remember when Dr. Jeffrey, eight years ago, and he just had come in from New Guinea, from not New Guinea, it wasn't opened yet, but from Indonesia, and I tried to with him. You couldn't hold conversation with that man. He'd turn around and look down at me, and I absent-mindedly answered my question, and then he started getting the gospel to more people. He was an absent-minded fellow, preoccupied, taken up with things of heaven. The people that were lost ought to live like that. Then they'll say that you're otherworldly. That's all right, that's a kind of being an otherworldly person. I'd like to drop a word right in here, and I'd like to clear my garments of this, and that is between a program and a present. We're programming ourselves to death these days. What's your program, they ask. I haven't got one. I know you're supposed to preach and pray and sing and give of your money and behave yourself and help the poor and all men, especially to them that are a household of faith and preach the gospel to every creature, and outside of that I've got no program. What's your program? I heard you're worth $10,000 for spatial music, just to hear people put on little caterwauling trios and so on. Well, if you don't have a program, the theater's got you beat. Now, why not let's get honest about this. If what you want is entertainment, here in the city of Pittsburgh we'll give you a far more professional job than ever you can put on. When it comes to programming, I've got a word there that I'm too much of a gentleman to use, but it's in my mind, I'll tell you that, about that kind of a church. Good, brothers and sisters, no good. Programming, no, no. It says in the 13th of Acts that when they were met together, "...gathered unto worshiping the Lord, and prayed. And while they were worshiping the Lord, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me, Barnabas, and Squire, unto whom I have called them." I don't think God ever called a missionary out of a program yet. If he did, he called him in spite of it, not because of it. A program, you know, there was a day when all you had to have was a Bible and a hymn book, and you didn't have to have the hymn book, you had a lot of good hymns. But if you had a Bible and a hymn book, you had it made, you know. All you had to have over that was limber knees to get out there and preach. The old Methodists used to be so poor, all they had to preach in would be they took a blanket and cut a hole in the middle, stuck it through the hole and preached. What was on underneath was nobody else's business. And they preached in power, the Holy Ghost was on them. Nowadays, you know how to run the gadgets, and you've got to be a prop man to know what to do with the props. I held a meeting in a tent one time in Chicago, and all I had was my New Testament. The fellow was to follow me. I closed on that one on Sunday. I'm not naming him, but I walked to the platform Saturday night meeting, and here was enough strut at a good-sized truck. I said, What's this? He said, That's the material for the fellow that's coming for next week's meeting. He had all this. I had my Bible, and he's here to fill a van, you know. You had to have all that for Jesus' sake. So he had the program and the entertainment and the fun and all. I don't believe it's necessary. Peter didn't have it. What would have Peter done if he had to have a truck? There weren't any trucks. How many donkeys would he have to load in order to get them around from place to place? But Peter stood up and lifted up, and he stood up and lifted his voice and preached. God always blesses preaching, always blesses preaching, if it's good preaching. And he blesses singing, if it's good singing like these two men can do. When you've preached and sung, there isn't much to do except look around for your hat, because the meeting is over, you know. You preach and sing, and the Ghost takes the preaching and the singing and drives it home to the hearts of the people and changes them, changes them. He does. He changes people. As I get older, more and more, I see that the Word of God, not the altar call, though I believe in altar calls, the altar call, but the Holy Ghost is doing the work. And I've had them come to me in ones and twos and say, I was converted. Converted last week? Yes, I want to be baptized. He hadn't been in the altar. He had heard the word and believed and changed his life. Well, I called up in the middle of the night, eleven-thirty. Well, it was the middle of the night for me, but for some people it's still early. But it was eleven-thirty, and he said that all brothers told him he was all broken. He said, I just couldn't go to bed until I told you. He said, I'm converted. I got born again tonight. I got born again. Well, I'll tell you, he was having himself a time. And the Lord was blessing him, he had been born again. Now, he hadn't come to the altar, but again in his room. Dave Enloe, that does the news for the Alliance Witnesses, a member of the church in Chicago, the editor of Contact magazine, a Christian businessman's magazine, a good friend of mine. He's a Floridian, by the way. Maybe you know him. Well, Dave told me about Wilbur. And Wilbur, his difficulty was that his head was in his way, intellectual difficulties. When I find a young fellow with intellectual difficulties, I don't take him too seriously. The average fellow with intellectual difficulties has an intellect not to give you the truth, you know. But he says he had difficulties. And this man had difficulties for quite a long while. He's in his thirties, and he's having difficulties. And our good friend Dave, if you know Dave Enloe, he's just about this thick, you know. They're about this high and about this wide. But he's a serious-minded Christian young man. He prays for people and wins them to the Lord. One night after he'd patiently waited, I think I'd have thrown Wilbur out. I didn't know, you know. My patience gets used up early. But plenty of it. He kept the fellow praying and backsliding, praying and backsliding. He never got anywhere. His head was in his way. After being at church now, not being in the meeting, but in the prayer room, when he got home he called Dave up. He was awoken, tears, and excited. He said, Dave, it's happened. What's happened, Wilbur? I'm converted. He said, born again, I'm converted. The Holy Ghost out and converted that man. Well, he not only got converted, he got married. Now he's happy. When I left Chicago, he and his wife came up to me, she was not too young either. She said, Wilbur, Wilbur, you tell him. You can guess, you know. He started out a miserable poverty without God and without a wife and without a kid or child. Now he's converted, got a wife, and going to have a baby. God does those things for people you know. He doesn't. The power of God. If you trust the program, I don't know what anything will ever happen. Well, you won't be popular, you'll always be looked upon as being just a little bit queer. But these fruits come to follow if you are a true Church of God. The people will be a joyful people. The Lord's people are the most joyful people in the world. They ought to be. You shouldn't have to work it up, you shouldn't have to work it up. They ought to be the most joyful people in the world. Because you see, there are two sides to the grave. There are those who are moving toward the grave and down in and come out and are moving away from it. And the sinners are all moving toward it and the Christians are all moving away from it. We are moving away from the grave. I think I preached a sermon about 12 years ago here, if I recall. It said that they all left the grave and ran to tell the story. My sermon was that that's the direction of the Church from the sepulcher. It had been toward the sepulcher before, but now Christ had risen and was away from the sepulcher. Always God's children's son. And the son never goes down on their upturned faces, because they have been to the grave and come out of it. Well, I'm sure as I said at the first foreclosed, we'll put him down in the grave and bawl a little and say he was a dear Saint, and it will be all right. But that's the old clay, that's not the Christian, that's the old tabernacle he lives in. Do you ever see a bird's nest? A robin will come in all round-eyed and brown, red-breasted, and he'll tear up the cloth and he'll steal strings and rubber bands and he'll make himself a nest, along with his little wife. And then she'll lay four pretty years with the sky purple in color, and she'll sit there four long weeks. I've often wondered why Mother Nature made it so hard on the poor things. Four days she has to sit there and just wait. At the end of 28 days, four little robins stick their little worthless looking things, miserable little blobs of life, and give them three or four hours and they get dry, and then they start getting fat. And the mother then starts, she gets up off her nest and she starts gathering bugs, worms, and everything that can be, and they're just never getting enough, just never getting enough. And after a while they get so that they crowd each other out of the nest and sit on a bush and shove and finally they learn to fly. Well now there isn't anything more pathetic than that robin's nest along about November 15th. And the storms and the rains have broken it up partly and the old dead leaves have gotten down in it, and it's a miserable looking old thing. But the four robins are singing and soaring somewhere where the green sky is blue and bright. They're not there anymore. So there's nothing more pathetic than to see the body of an old saint at the cemetery. Is there? Poor old fella. There he is, you know, his chin and his nose have gotten chummy and they're getting close together. They've fallen in and what little hair he had now doesn't show up very well. That's the old bird's nest, you know. It's kind of miserable and old. Oh he's soaring and seeing where the skies are blue and the sun shines all the day on the mountaintop. He's not there anymore. He's not there. The grave didn't get a hold of him. None of God's saints can ever go to the grave. Dear brother Jeffrey, dear brother Thomas, you and I know and love and that have gone there and up there. That old body we put, that's the old bird's nest. The saints are with the Lord. So the people, God's people, be a happy people. But to see if you have to wait on a guitar and a banjo and a half-saved cowboy, as soon as he gets out of town at your expense, why, you won't be happy anymore. You'll get up Sunday morning and say, oh goody, Bob's coming. Well, who's Bob? He's a half-converted cowboy with a big hat and he's a phony. Not only in his clothing but in his accent and in his spiritual life. But he's learned how to take the people, you know, between the clangs. And when it's all over, you've been blessed, you know, but you haven't been blessed at all. You've been cheated. The songs our brother's been leading us in since I've been here, they have content. You get a song like old and you can live on it and die on it. And when the trumpet sounds, you can rise singing it to the right hand of God, the twinkle twinkle with the guitar accompaniment. You can't live on them and die on them, though, and lots of churches have. Well, that church I'm describing, that's only going to be half of my sermon. I'm going to have to quit, break it off, and maybe preach the rest some other time. I say the fruits that I'm describing will be joy. And another thing about a church that's a true church of God, easily distinguish them from the people of the world. One of the griefs I have is you can put 25 women up one side and 25 sinner young women up on the other and you won't know which is which, because they all just look alike. I think the Lord's children ought to show it by the way they look. Did we come to this world to get 1A college? I think we ought to. I think I ought to be 15 years old. And if anybody says anything like this, they say he's old fashioned, but he's quaint. Spiritual insight. Some of the dear saints of God. Now, if you've got that old wedding in your house in God's name, keep it off Saturdays. Keep it off late night. Get your sleep. Meditate and think on God. The world is organized to keep you from meditating, to keep you from thinking, to keep you from obeying. When thou enters into thy chamber, turn on. No, no, no. When thou enters into thy chamber, you enter into your chamber and turn it on. And you keep right there till you fall over. Well, God's people ought to be different from those people. And then I'll tell you another thing about a church like I'm describing, such as I'm describing. It's going to be influential. Incidentally, Pittsburgh Northside has been a very influential church. The church in Chicago was influential. I had nothing to do with this one. I had a little to do with that. I believe that every church ought to be influential. I told them last Sunday in Toronto that I feel that I, the New World Church, ought to take over the spiritual leadership, the spiritual ascendancy, and that God and the joy of the Lord ought to become the most influential church in the city. And instead of drawing from other churches, those churches. Because we contribute something that will last forever. And the Lord's people will be good lives and to die well. It's said about the Methodists that they died well. Ah, brother, you know you can't die well unless you live right? You can't do it. The old Methodist bishop, I've preached the gospel now for I get how many, 50 or so years, and he said, 75 percent of the people that I have seen weren't ready to die. He said they had to pack and cram for the final exams the last few minutes. Somebody came to him, Bishop, weren't you just a little overshooting it? You mean 75 percent? Yes. He said, I mean that in my Methodist parish, my long ministry, fully 75 percent of the people weren't ready to die. I mentioned the Methodists only because that Methodist bishop said it. Presbyterian, a Christian missionary alliance, or Nazarene, it isn't a question of what denomination, it's just a question of the condition. Able to go soaring off to heaven without anybody have to gas him up. Get him started, everybody. Children of God ought to be ready minutes notice. Yes, sir. But if you've been, if you've been fooling not doing your homework, and you're suddenly panicked with the thought that the examination is coming up, you're going to have to cram. Most people haven't lived right. They want to die right, but they haven't lived right. But the church that I'm talking about, its membership will be living right. And I'll close by saying that a church that doesn't live right isn't the church of Christ. What they've got, how many pipe organs, how much they've got. If they're not living right, they're not a New Testament church. For the people, good people. There are good living people. They may be a little bit dumb, you know. Lots of the Lord's dear sheep are a little bit dumb. There's treasures in earth and vessels, and you'll find the cracked one occasionally, you know. It's all right. But I'm not saying that we're great. We're great. But I'm saying that we're good. We ought to be good. We ought to live good. The Holy Spirit in a man will make him a good man. Good man. Not an old Shakespeare, and not an old Bach, you know, from something else. But he's a good man. Good man and full of the Holy Ghost. It could be said about me when I finally tumble over somewhere, and they gather up the 140 pounds or something, and carry it out. If it could be said about me, he was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. I don't want anything else. I don't want anybody to say he wrote this, and he preached there, and he had this office, the thing where I'm going. Nobody will ask me what I wrote where I'm going. Nobody will ask me whether I got elected or not, and if so, by what. Nobody will ask me that where I'm going. But if it could be said, here's a man, a good man, full of the Holy Ghost, I would be delighted then. Now, there's another half to this sermon. Maybe we'll get that maybe tomorrow. I don't know.