In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of worshiping God. He states that worship is the chief purpose of man's existence, as taught in the Bible. However, due to sin, humanity has lost the true understanding of worship and the object of their worship. The speaker highlights that although there is a longing for worship in the human heart, it is often misguided, mistaking the beauty of nature or religious rituals for true worship. The sermon encourages listeners to seek God and worship Him in spirit and truth, as stated in John 4:24.

I am bringing a series of talks on worship. I gave the first yesterday morning. More to follow consecutively, though I'm not certain how many. In the 45th Psalm, verse 11, is the texting, So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty, for he is thy Lord. Worship thou him. Then, I'll add that text from John 4, 24, God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. I will deal only slightly with that last text, because I want to read a whole sermon from it, God willing, before I'm finished with the series. Now here is the truth we've built, or rather the truth that we're trying to develop. That God made everything for a purpose, and to worship him. That is man's chief end and the reason for his existence. He fell by sin, and has now only a foggy idea of what worship is, and has lost the object of his worship. Now, this morning I want to mention this. He wants us to worship him. So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty. It is one of the most touching and the most awe-inspiring truths that I know in the scriptures, that God wants to have us love him, and admire him, and adore him. Now, he doesn't need us. If he does, he would not be the self-sufficient God. But self-sufficiency is one of the attributes of the Deity. If God needed him to be God, he doesn't need us, for he existed in perfect, in a perfect infinite millenniums before we were created. But he wants us for reasons known to himself. So shall they desire thy beauty. When Adam sinned, it was not Adam who ran crying, God, where art thou? It was God who came crying, Adam, where art thou? It was God seeking his reasoned worshipper who had stopped worshiping. And it is written in the New Testament, thou shalt worship God. It's a command. God wants us to worship him. And in 2 Thessalonians 1.10, it refers to the day that shall come to be glorified in the saints and admired in all that believe. Now, those are what we call proof texts. But more convincing than all proof texts, or any proof text, is the whole import of the Bible teaching about a thing. For you preachers who may be present, I might drop this little word. The whole drift of the Bible is not in the direction of a doctrine. You may find a text that sounds as something, but if the rest of the Bible is away from that, don't teach it yet. Search to find out teaches by the whole drift and direction of the scriptures. If the whole tenor of the Bible doesn't teach it, it probably isn't taught in the scriptures. And the whole tenor of the Bible is toward this, that God created man for the purpose of him, and that man sinned and no longer worships him, though there is still in the heart of a man a yearning to worship. Now, that's the odd contradiction in the human nature, that there is in the human heart a longing, a desire for worship. ...to him, which I'd like to just read a brief one. Eternal power whose high abode becomes the grandeur of a God, thin it links beyond the bounds where stars revolve their little rounds. Meanwhile the first archangel sings, he hides behind his wings, and ranks of shining thrones around fall, worshiping and spread the ground. Lord, what shall earth and ashes do? We would adore our Maker too, from sin and die, the great, the holy, and the high. The great theologian in what's here felt that, which is benign. He felt that frightful incongruity between an ancient yearning to worship and the inability to because of sin. He felt this and called himself dust and ashes, and said he yearned to worship the great, the holy. How could he do it, being dust and ashes? Now, I say that men want to worship, but worship just any way that we will, and this is really what I want to talk about this morning. This is vastly important. ...to worship him has decreed how we shall worship him. Now, I'm going to shock your everlasting evangelical fund-brains this morning, but I am both an evangelical and a fundamentalist. I want to say this to you, that authentic religious experience is impossible apart from Christ. You can have authentic religious experience without Christ being in it at all. You can have authentic religious experience without Christ being there at all. If by religious experience you mean an awareness of the eternal power, if you mean even having some conversation or experience with the Almighty One, you can have that and not be saved. You can have that and not be converted at all. Look at Cain. Cain had authentic religious experience. God spoke to him, and he spoke to God. That was consciousness that God was hearing and that he was replying to God and God was hearing him, and yet Cain was Cain, with a black mark upon him. Judas Iscariot was not a Christian. He was never born again. He was the son of perdition and belonged to a place, and that's where he went. And yet Judas Iscariot talked to God and heard God speak and experienced the warm presence of the man who was God. Judas Iscariot had authentic religious experience. Now I go a step further and say, it's possible not only to have authentic religious experience without Christ, it's possible to have authentic worship without Christ. That is, it's possible to admire, it's possible to surrender and give yourself to some God and yet not be worshiping the true God and Jesus Christ. You know, I'm interested, and have been for many years, in the old pagans and their worship in days gone by. Olympus, where their gods were, in later times, in Scandinavian times, they have, they called it the Valhalla, where they had their God, from which we get our word Thursday, and Freya, from which we get our word Friday, and many other such gods. Now scholars have dismissed this with a shrug, and they've said that Thor and Zeus and Jupiter and Venus and June, the gods of the old Olympia, that they were simply make-believes, that those old fellows were kidding, that they didn't believe that the Valhalla rejects that bully, and says, I do not believe that these men were fooling. I believe that these men were having authentic experiences, that they were meeting someone somewhere, or that they fought with somebody, and were honest men seeking God with all my heart. I do not believe the doctrines of all the old pagans could ever have originated if it had, that they were finding something somewhere and getting through to something or somebody, and yet they were not saved. They were not worshiping. They accepted their worship. Take those Baalites, for instance, up there who jumped on the altar. They were not Roman or Greek gods, they were the gods of the Hebrew days. But they jumped on the altar, and they cut themselves, and they cried Baal. They were putting on a show? No! They were sincere about that. They never would have accepted Elijah's bold challenge, if it had been their God. They were having religious experience. Once I saw in Mexico an old church without any floor in it, an old dirt floor, Catholic church, with the statue of the Virgin and the Saints around there. I saw an old Mexican with a leathery face come in and set her shopping bag down beside her, and then kneel in front of a statue of the Virgin, extend, put her hands together, and with open eyes gaze adoringly, with worship in her face, at the statue of the Virgin Mary. That poor old lady was fooling. She was not. She was sincere, more sincere than a lot of flippant fundamentalists are. Sincere. She was worshiping something. Her heart was going out to something. I say you can have experience without Christ and depart from salvation altogether. And the very reason that idolatry is God is that it is real. If it were not real, God could ignore it. But because it is real, God hates it. In 1 Corinthians, the Holy Ghost says this, But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to the devil God. And I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. Ye cannot at the Lord's table and the table of devils. The Holy Ghost through his servant Paul recognized that those pagans who made idolatry were not fooling. They were worshiping something. And they had a subjective experience of authentic worship, sacrificing to devils nevertheless. And Paul said, Never do it. Stay away from it. Keep the separating wall as wide as the world, and keep the cup of the Lord and the table of devils. God has accepted only the worship which he himself has dictated. He has accepted and does accept only that worship which is inspired by the Holy Spirit and truth. He must worship the Spirit and in truth. I want to point out this morning, and in doing this it won't be pleasant, but I have found that you can't always preach the truth. I have found that a lot of men have hurt the kingdom of God by being fighters all the time, but other men have hurt the kingdom of God because they would rather be nice than be true. I'd much rather be true than to be nice. I don't care whether anybody says, Isn't he a nice man? I certainly want them to say, After I'm gone, he preached the truth. So I'm going to give you some truth here that is not going to be nice. And if you wish I'd drop dead, and there are a few of them throughout the country, you will be able to go out and say, Well, it was negative. Of course, everybody knows that you couldn't run this microphone unless you had a negative and a positive element. You can't. You got to have negative and positive, everything Polaroid. I don't know whether that's a good word or not, but it ought to be. There are two sides to two poles to everything, North and South, two poles to truth. If you don't get rid of that which is false, you won't know when you see the truth. So I want to mention the four or five kinds of rejects, openly, and will have nothing to do with. One of them is what we call Cain's worship. Now, Cain's worship is without atonement. It is worship that does not trust in atonement as its way in. And worship or religious experience of any kind, without atonement, rests upon three errors, three bases unto you. Worship without atonement, without blood, rests upon the erroneous belief that God is a different kind of being from what he is. Now, God is exactly what he is, and he always was, and always will be, what he now is and always was. There is no change in God, but there are changes in the conceptions of God. And the man without a blood sacrifice who tries to worship is assuming that God is a different kind of God from what he is. They don't believe he's as holy as he says he is. They don't believe that he's as righteous as he says he is. They don't believe that God is easier to get on with, and that he's a good fellow and will all be well, as the poet said. They believe the actress called him good old God. They believe that he is what another one said about him, that he's a living doll. That that kind of God, a nice old chap who's very kind to be there to help you when you're in trouble. Now, that's Cain's, based upon a false concept of God. Then the second error is that it assumes that man occupies God, which he does not in fact occupy. Those who try to worship God without the blood of Jesus Christ, believe that they occupy by nature a relation to God, which they in fact occupy. Nobody is born a child of God the first time. Hear me. Nobody is born a child of God the first time. That's God until it comes out of his mouth, eyes, and ears. Marries a young woman who loves God till her face shines with the glory of God. The baby, that baby is not a Christian. That baby is born into the world a son of Adam, or daughter of Adam, as it might be. Atonement covers a child until it reaches the age of accountability. But that child is not born anew till it is consciously born anew. Atonement by accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, not as Savior only, but as Lord and Savior, and trusting the blood to cleanse from sin. This Cain worship rests upon a false assumption that sin is less serious than it is. We have fixed up sin now. We've baptized it, we've circumcised it, and we have brought it into the Church, and it is fair now. Brother Brown said to me in conversation, or did he say it here last night in his sermon, I know I heard him say it recently, that we used to repent and get convicted over things that we now let pass. Following the Alliance, if anybody lost his temper, they said, you're out of victory, brother, and he had to get right, get the blood on him. Nowadays people get a red face and lose their temper, maybe they're Bible school presidents or professors or pastors. And about it said, the Reverend blew his top. And the next day their brother has recollected his top, and he gets up and with the typical nasal intonation he preaches, and everybody thinks he's a holy man. He's not a holy man. No man is a holy man until he has made his temper to be something else than the devilish thing that we know it to be. Well, then there is another that God rejects outright, and that is Samaritan worship, the kind of worship that they had. You see, they were heretics in the correct... A heretic, as you may know, heresy rather, is picking and choosing. That's what the word means. They had somebody who rejects the Bible. He is somebody who picks out what he wants to believe and neglects the rest. A heretic is not somebody who rejects all Christian doctrine. He is somebody who likes certain Christian doctrine and emphasizes that, and either rejects or neglects the rest. That's a heresy according to the etymological meaning of the word heresy. Now the Samaritans were heretics in that sense. They were Jew and Gentile, more Gentile than Jew, but they did believe in Moses and the prophets, and they had the scriptures, or at least a part of it. So the Samaritans were not and they were not Jews. They were an Irish stew, a hodgepodge, a cross between the two. They believed in Jehovah and in the fathers and in the prophets. They didn't believe that God dwelt in Jerusalem and that they that worshiped should worship, and that the altar in Jerusalem was the center of worship. They didn't believe a lot of things they should have believed, and they believed a lot of things they should have believed. They were heretics. They selected and rejected. And I find a lot of Christianity like that today. We neglect what we want to believe and neglect what we don't, or reject. Nobody here would ever reject anything in the scripture you'd be afraid to. You'd be afraid it's going to pout at you. If you ever outright rejected anything, but you neglected, and to neglect the thing. You can neglect the diet just the same as you can if you hit it over the head with an axe. All you have to do is let your baby die and let him lie there for five days. You come back, he'll be good and dead. All we have to do to kill anything is neglect it. And all we have to do to kill a truth is neglect it. Incidentally, I'd like to say this, the Lord to hear me that will. I am bothered by the fact that there is a neglected truth, and that is the truth is being neglected in alliance circles. You don't hear it at all. One of the first things that shocked me when I reached Toronto a year and a half ago to take was that nobody up there believes in the coming of Christ anymore. They're all millennialists, or they're non-millennialists, or they're post-something else. But nobody preaches it. You know what I'm going to do? Starting the beginning of next month, I'm going back and preach a series on the book of Revelation. I'm not an expert on the book of Revelation, but possibly I know more about it than they think. And I'm going to preach pre-millennial eschatology. You know what eschatology is? You heard about the dear old Bishop. When he was an old man and had been around seminary so long, his church changed. He got up one day and wiped his eyes and said, Brethren, when I was a young fellow, they talked about heaven. Now it's about eschatology. He said, I don't want to die and go to an eschatology. I want to die and go to heaven the way my father's did. Now, Samaritan worship is the neglect of worship. That is, it's the neglect of certain elements of things that shouldn't be there. Then there's another kind of worship, which God rejects. Now mark you, I want to say boldly, and a lady said about that Jesus Christ was God. She went out and she said the disgusting arrogance of that man, that he would insist that we believe that Jesus Christ was God. Disgustingly arrogant or not, I still believe it, brethren. And I believe that he is God. I'm saying here now to you with what I hope would be gentle dogmatism. I want to be a dogmatist for the man. Dogmatist ought to be selling insurance. He ought not to be in the pulpit. If he can't get up and says, this is the way it is, he has no call from God at all. But I want to be a gentle dogmatist, because if you're not gentle you can hurt unnecessarily. Well, nature worship now. Nature worship, that is not the worship of natural worship. And worship in the presence of nature, it's the poetry of religion. It is a horrible experience that comes from contemplating the sublime. When I was a young fellow, I studied phrenology. Now, phrenology is a thoroughly discredited and repudiated pseudoscience, so don't get me wrong. But just for the fun of it, I studied phrenology, and I used to read people's heads, you know. Well, phrenology says that you can tell by the bumps on the outside of the head. The way I got cured of that was by a statement made by Oliver Wendell Holmes. He said, well, try to find out how many five-dollar bills there are in the safe by feeling the outside of the safe is to find out what a man is feeling on the outside of his head. After I read that, I said, amen, I got it. There's no use fooling with that. But anyhow, you've got here over your ears, those are your bumps that give you bad temper. And then there's a bump up here somewhere makes you love ladies, and there are many bad bumps there. They're Earl Carroll's, you know, and so on. And then there's a bump right here. It's called the bump of sublimity. That means if you've got that bump, there's something in your head that loves the sublime. You walk around looking at the fir trees and saying how wonderful they are. On now deep and dark, blew out ocean roll, ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. You know, all that stuff. Sublimity, you know. And that's up there. Well, now I suppose that's true. I don't say, so you can tell it up there. Jacob naturally lived for the sublime. Jacob had a sublimity about him. I'm just now reading again in my own private reading of the scriptures, I've come, Jacob was a scoundrel of a fellow, but he had something in him that yearned after God. He had a bump of sublimity as big as somewhere up there on his head. Well, a lot of people have that, and so they go around in a glow of wonder. They look at the birds and the flowers and all, and they feel so good and everything's so wonderful. They think that's not worshiping God, brother. That's admiring God's handiwork, and the devil can do that. Nature worship is the concentration of the mind upon beauty. That's distinct from the eye or the ear. Your ear listens to a poor concentrating upon beauty with your ear. Your eye looks upon scenery, and you're looking, you're worshiping, you're enjoying. And when your mind contemplates sublimity, then you're having an experience above all the others. But it's not worship yet, worship. It's not truly the worship of God. Emerson said that he went out, he would go out into the fields after a walk beside the woods, over the meadows, with little puddles of water about, and the moon struggling through the clouds, and he said, I would feel so good that I felt scared. He was in gear with nature. He was good in gear with nature. And nature came and blessed him and lifted him until he felt so, so rapt that he felt afraid. A lot of that, a lot of it. And some people mistake the music of religion and the rapture of nature, they mistake that for worship. They go into some churches and they do everything possible to take an old sinner and make him worship. They have candles and bells, pictures of the Virgin and pictures of angels and pictures of Jesus with babies on his lap. And the music is low and soft, up and down the aisle, they walk as quiet as mice on a rug. And everything is soft. The preacher, when he gets up, has a voice that never leaves, deep and sonorous and very religious. And they go out and they're scoundrels when they come in and scoundrels when they go out. And they'll be scoundrels all week. They'll tell dirty stories, they'll cut the corners in business, they'll abuse their wife, they'll tell dirty stories. One day they'll come back into that holy place and feel religious again and enjoy the sonorous tones of the pastor and the bass of the organ. But they're sinners nevertheless. God rejects that whole business. He rejects that whole tag. And now God is spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit. And the word must clear away all sin and take worship out of the hands of men and put worship in the hands of God where it belongs. You know, I was not too many years ago and I heard one of the celebrated modernist preachers of the country preach, and he said, this we ask in the spirit of Jesus. Others pray in the spirit of good. And some pray to the All-Father. And some pray in the spirit of good. You go into some of our new hymn books and you'll find whole sections, particularly those hymn books that were edited back there, half a generation. Social gospel was riding in the saddle high. They were talking about brotherhood and service instead of heaven and eschatology. It was service. Well, now that's all right, I suppose, if it's done out of a loving heart filled with the Holy Ghost. Brethren, God is God. There's only one God. And Jesus Christ is his son and there's only one son of God. And Christ said that we came, we come unto him. We were not seeking for God, we found him. If we come to Christ, we found him. There's a lot of self-pity and a lot of pride in this seeking after God. People say, oh, we're serious, but I'm a seeker for God. I think there's a good deal in that that ought to be exposed as phony. God is in Christ Jesus the Lord. You know, there are certain types of poets, and I, being an editor, I, some of them, old maids of both sexes, they write poetry. I've been a lover of poetry since I was in my teens, as much as the average man, and still do. But I can't take this religious poetry that pretends it's seeking after God. Let me give you a sample here now, not to lampoon the man, he's dead, let him sleep. To point out, it's a sample, and a great many others have been written. If you get a great big thick books on religious poetry, you'll find a whole, just like this. Now listen to this fellow. See, the pattern is all the same. I went out seeking God. I went everywhere seeking God, because I didn't find God, and then I saw a little baby smile, and I found God. Well, this fellow's name is Edwin Markham. Here, put this on the air, clear with them on the copyright, because afraid it's going to cut this one part out. He says, I made a pilgrimage, now that was an American writing that, out there somewhere near Dr. Brown, there he lived. And he was a great poet. He wrote The Man with the Hole and Lincoln. But when it came to religion, he was a woozy-headed old maid. And here's what he said, I made a pilgrimage to find the God. I was born in a land with a church at every crossroads and on every city corner, in a land where Rudy and Penny and Beecher and Edwards and Cotton Mather and all the rest, he refers to our Father which art in heaven as the God. He takes on a pagan phrase, I made a pilgrimage to find the God. What a noble boy. What a noble God ought to take him to heaven just for trying. And he said, I listened for his voice. Now, what would God be in a holy mausoleum for? I listened for his voice in holy tombs. No wonder he dint him. He was listening in a holy tomb. But you know, this takes on a very highly religious flavor right here. You know, he gets out a silk handkerchief and wipes her eyes right here. I listened for his voice in holy tombs, searched for the print of his immortal feet in the dust of broken altars. Now, what altars there were he didn't say because he was an American. And there weren't any pagan altars in America. But somewhere he was around looking among the broken altars for God. What kind of a dusty God was he looking for? And here's the old pattern, yet I turned back with empty heart. Poor Father, he couldn't find God in the tomb or in the dust of a broken altar. Then suddenly he gets illuminated, he says, and on the homeward road a great light came upon me, and I heard God's voice singing in the nestling lark. There you have it. That's the type you know. That's Christianity without religion, without blood, without atonement. That's seeking after God naturally. That's asshole. Well, he said he heard God's voice in the nestling lark. Now, I don't like to embarrass him, but the fact is nothing. Not only was his theology offbeat, but he was also considerably inadequate. And then he said, I felt his sweet swaying rose. Look at that, isn't that a pretty rose? Smell it. I received his blessing from a wayside well and looked on over his face, saw some young fellow coming along embarrassedly holding his girlfriend's hand and said, look, there's God. Saw his bright hands from the sun. Now, that was Edwin Markham, a man who was brought up in a Protestant country with a Bible he should have known. But there is no fool more perfectly foolish than the man who has truth. The person who is seeking truth may be very wise as he seeks, but the man who has rejected God just smears his face over with mud. They let him have it. Read Romans 1 and see what God did when they refused to have the thought of God in their heart. God turned them over to reprobate minds. And there are poets writing reprobate poetry everywhere, all doing the same, never finding him, last finding him in a rose. Well, in spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Now that's what truth incarnate said. And that word, in spirit and in truth. We worship God, we must submit to truth. And we must submit to truth of five subjects, on five subjects. We've been missed. We must admit to truth about God. Nobody can worship God acceptably who believes that God is any other than what he is. And nobody can worship God acceptably who rejects anything that is true about himself. True theology must rest upon what God has declared to be true about himself. They must believe what God has declared to be true about Christ. I cannot worship God unless I accept what Christ is. I must accept what he says he is. Now that doesn't mean that I am instantaneously to believe all about him, because it'll take eternity, all the glories that shine around the person of our Lord. But I am to believe everything that I'm capable of believing to be true about himself. With all of my heart, I believe in the deity of Jesus Christ, the Lord. I believe that the man who walked the earth, I believe that the man who is at the throne is God. And I believe that the God who is beside the Father there is man. And that if you were to look, you would see a man there with manly lineaments and manly features and a manly shape and a manly form, as wise, but alive again forevermore, a man at the right hand of God. Dr. Brown, when I first came into the Alliance, the preachers used to talk about the man in the glory. We don't much anymore. A man wrote me this, the brother of Walter Wilson, Dr. Walter Dyke, wrote me this. He said, Brother Tozer, I have tested out, I have tested preachers. He said, I have made a, and he told me how many, quite a number. Probably not enough to be scientific, if you were actually going inside, but enough to satisfy him that he was on the right path. I have made a survey and I have asked the preachers, do you believe that Jesus Christ is now a man at the throne? And he said, a pitifully small percent believe that he was a man. Oh, they said he's a spirit. He was a man when he was on earth and he's a spirit now. And they had all sorts of vague notions about him being at the right hand of God. I believe a man is there, my brother. That man is named Jesus Christ, the Lord. And that when he comes back, he will be a man. He will weigh something. He will stand on his feet and drink. And here is a man, a true man at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Don't you let the heretics and the liberals and the nature lovers think that he is less than a true man out of Jesus. He's at God's right hand, a man, a glorified man forever, the sample man. There is a sample of what you're going to be when you're glorified at his second coming. Well, to worship God acceptably, a man must have been redeemed and he must have been born anew. Thank God. Born anew is to be regenerated. Regenerated is a good sound theological word. Born anew is a popular term, born again. It means that God implants a new kind of life in the body, in the soul, within the soul. And that whole thing lies in the human body, the temple of the Holy Ghost. And then he must have to be truly and indeed worship God, he must have an infusion of the Spirit of truth. When we neglect the Holy Spirit, we're neglecting the living pulse of the Church. When we neglect the Holy Spirit, we're neglecting the life battery that gives life to everything that is of God. You cannot worship without the Spirit. You can worship in the Spirit, but you can't worship without him. We get into moral confusion, and that is why we try to worship in the ways that I have mentioned, ways that have been specifically rejected. I wasn't going to be nice, and I wasn't. But I hope that I was gently dogmatic about this. Let people say, that's arrogance. Okay, let them say that I am he, he shall die in your sins. Except you be born again, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Except you repent, you shall not enter into heaven. Those are dogmatic statements. They're arrogant statements, if you like, but they're as true as the throne of God. The human heart has fallen into moral confusion, and we're trying to worship God just any old way. We've got every kind of cult imaginative. I thought I got to Canada, I'd get away from all that. I'm mistaken. They've got it up there, too. Everywhere. You can't overemphasize the simple, basic, fundamental doctrines of the faith. You can't go too far when continuing to teach them a line upon line, precept upon precept, until you think differently in your psychology. They said about Keats that he was an Englishman, but that he had a Greek mind. He'd studied Greek, but he had a Greek mind. They said about Milton, he was an Englishman, but he'd read the scriptures until he had a Hebraic mind. I believe it possible in the midst of the busy United States and the busy Canada, I believe it entirely possible, with television, radio, everything buzzing around about me, to study the scriptures so much and to live so in the spirit that I have a Christian mind. I can have a Christian mind in such a world as this. Dr. Simpson said in one of his great sermons, a lily can grow in a manure pile. A lily, he said, can come up out of the refuse pile, both rotten and decayed. But in the middle of it, she can rise and spread her fragrance and stand in it but free from it. So we can grow in a world but grow free from it, and have purity and whiteness and holiness, and have a Christian heart and a Christian mind in our philosophy, and reject from us all of this woozy Cain religion and Samaritan religion, and live like first-century Christians in a wild, violent 20th century. Father, we pray thy blessing upon what's been said. Being human, Lord, maybe some things were said that should have been said. Expunge them from our minds. Everything that should have been said, impress them upon our minds. May we go out from here humbly glad we're Christians, humbly glad for our fathers who taught us the Bible, for our fathers who translated the Bible for us, for our fathers for us, for our fathers who wrote expositions and commentaries and devotional books and read our hearts on in a day of pollution and pornography. Great God, we thank thee for all the good men, we thank thee for every worshiping Saint. We thank thee for Wesley, who wrote these great hymns, and Grant, and Watts, and Montgomery. And thank thee for that fountain of all hymnology, David, who now didst stand and say, O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. God help us today. As we go out from here, we pray we may go all the beauties that are about us, but appreciate him as Christians, seeing him not as pagans, but seeing him as Christians, birds and trees, worshiping the God who made the birds and trees. Amen.