In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of true worship in the church. He laments the fact that many churches have become more focused on entertainment rather than worshiping God. The preacher encourages believers to give themselves fully to worship, as it will bring meaning and significance to their actions. He also urges Christians not to remain silent about the wonders of God, even if it means being a nuisance to the church. The sermon concludes with a prayer for God to prepare believers for eternity and to empower them with the Holy Spirit.

The Lord, your God, is a God of gods and Lord of lords, a great God of mighty and a terrible. Fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord thy God. Shall not his excellency make you afraid and his dread fall upon you? With God, his terrible majesty, he bowed the heavens also and came down when darkness was under his feet. And he rolled upon a cherub and did fly, yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness his secret place, his pavilion round about him, for dark waters and thick clouds of the sky. Who is this king of glory, the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle? And blessed be his glorious name forever, and let the whole earth be filled with his glory. Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. And the glory of the Lord shall endure forever. And I will speak of the glorious honor of thy majesty and of thy wondrous name. Enter into the rock and hide thee in the dust for the fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty. The Lord shall cause his glorious voice to be heard and shall show the lighting down of his arm with the indignation of his anger and with the flame of the devouring fire. The high and lofty one that inhabited eternity whose name is holy, glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. In the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, and things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is his times, he shall show who is the blessed and only potent, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who only hath immortality dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man has seen nor can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting. To the only wise God our Savior be glory and majesty and dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, begotten of him before all worlds. God of God and the light of light, the very God of the very God begotten, not created. Thou art the King of glory, O Christ, thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. And when thou took'st upon me to deliver man, thou didst humble thyself to be born of a virgin. And when thou hast overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Now, I have quoted from some of the ancient assertions made by the Church down the centuries. She has declared herself with great joy and a sense of deep unwillingness. I join my voice with theirs and say I believe these things. And I believe that he, the King of glory, the everlasting Son of the Father, took upon him to deliver man and overcame the sharpness of death and the resurrection and has now opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. And now the human mind has got to have an answer to some questions. And one of them is, why, O God, is all this? God of gods and light of light, he was born of the virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, overcame the sharpness of death and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. But there must have been somewhere a purpose back of this, for God, as I said at the opening sermon on this series, is a God, an intellectual God, intellect being one of the attributes of deity. And therefore, God must have had a reasonable purpose back of this, a plan that can stand up under the scrutiny of sanctified human reason. Why did God do this? And why was his Son born? And why did he suffer? And why did they lay the lash on his back? And why did they put the thorns on his brow? And why did he go into Joseph's new tomb? And why did he come out again? And why did he ascend to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens? Why did he do all this? Well, the Church thinks it knows, and the Church does know, because the Holy Ghost was wrought by the holy men who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And they told us why. But I am an evangelical, as you are, and I am very deeply worried and concerned to the point of some degree of suffering over the state we evangelicals have gotten ourselves into. By evangelicals, I mean the free churches generally, the churches that have order, that don't have order, and that have disorder, the churches that have beautiful services and ugly services and hit-and-miss, off-the-cuff services, the churches whose ministers feel that they must be a cross between Saint Paul, Moses, and Bob Hope. I am concerned about our evangelical churches, which I hope and trust under God that I am a part, and I don't believe that we have the answer to all this. I don't think that we know why all this happened, because we have been told by our preachers so long that he did all this in order that we might quit smoking. Well, I don't smoke unless I catch fire, but I believe nevertheless that that isn't why he did all this. I think the Lord could have found an easier way, and I don't believe that that's as important as we make it out to be. And then somebody else says, Well, the Lord did all this in order that we might go to prayer meeting in place of going to the theater. Well, but we haven't answered anything yet. We have only pushed the answer a little further away from us and confused it a bit. My dear brother and sister, the reason the Lord did all this for us, the reason that he was born of the Virgin Mary to suffer under Pontius Pilate to be crucified dead and buried, the reason that he overcame the sharpness of death and rose again from the grave, is that he might make worshipers out of rebels. You put that down, that's not dramatic, and that will not be quoted in tomorrow's telegram, and it won't get into the big magazines, but I'm telling you something out of heaven tonight, that we are the recipients of a grace which was meant to make worshipers out of us and to save us from self-centeredness. The eye, you see, was made to look out and up. Who was the Roman poet who said that the difference between a man and a beast is that a beast looks down and a man is made to look up. That a man can engage the God above, where the beasts go about and they see the ground underneath their little short legs, but man can see into the heavens above. Now this, I say, is the purpose of God in redemption. And I'd like to throw in something here which I have said at various times, but I want now to put it in here because it is a part of what I am saying, that God is infinitely more concerned that he have worshipers than that he have workers. We have degenerated into a place where we put God on charity and we make God to be a foreman who can't find help. And he stands at the wayside asking, how many helpers will come to my rescue and to come and do my work? If we could only remember that God doesn't need anybody here, God doesn't need anybody in this city, and if this city were to be blown from the map by an atomic explosion tomorrow morning at 7.20, the Lord God wouldn't lose anything because as far as his plans are concerned, God doesn't need us. But we make out that he does. We make out that he wants to make workers, and so we say, well, I'll go to work for the Lord. Now I think we should work for the Lord, but I think that it's a matter of grace on God's part. But I don't think we should ever work until we've learned to worship. A worshiper can work with eternal quality in his work, but a worker who doesn't worship is only piling up wood, hay, and stubble for the time when God sets the world on fire. So I am outright and bold about it, and I don't know how many want to hear it, and it isn't too important. I hope the seed of survival, I hope that that crowd that can hear, that selected group that will listen, will hear me when I say that God wants worshipers before he wants workers. He calls us back to that for which we were created, to worship the Lord God and to enjoy him forever, and then out of our deep worship we do work. It is quite a significant thing that all the great hymns, not all of them, but almost all the great hymns that ever were written came out of revivals of some kind. They came out of the Lutheran Reformation, they came out of the Wesleyan Revival, they came out of the Moravian Revival, they came out of the times when the Church of God labored and the Spirit fell upon her and heaven was opened and she saw visions of God and a radiant beam from the throne above reflected from the hearts of his people, and then there were old hymns and we're still singing the hymn. I suppose if the devil has a sense of humor, I don't know whether he has or not, I suppose he has, Khrushchev has. But if the devil has a sense of humor, I think he must laugh and hold his sooty sides when he sees a bunch of dead Christians singing a hymn written by a live composer sometime or other. When he hears a fellow groaning through, a lot of hymns are great hymns and I didn't like them in my early days. And the reason I didn't like them was that I heard them sung under bad auspices at unfortunate situations. You get into a dead prayer meeting on Wednesday night with a dead leader who doesn't expect anything and dead people in front of him who don't expect anything and would be shocked if anything happened. And you get them to singing some grand old hymn and brother, they can not only kill it, they can embalm it. They can put it where they can put it where it's just no good at all. And my heart reacted against it. The Holy Ghost comes on the people. They're a worshipful people. They've got to be a worshipful people. So God wants you to worship him and then out of your fiery worship, he wants you to work for him. But he doesn't want you to jump up and start any amateurish religious toil. I heard a college president say one time that the Church of Christ is suffering from a rash of amateurism. And he certainly hit the nail right in the middle of the head that time. We're suffering from a rash of amateurism. Any untrained, unprepared, unspiritual, empty rattlecap of a fellow who is a bit ambitious, can start himself something religious. And then we all listen to him and we pay and we promote and we work to try to help this fellow who never heard from God in the first place. Amateurism gone mad, gone wild. Well, that's because we're not worshipers. Nobody who worships God is likely to do anything offbeat or out of place. Nobody who is a true worshiper indeed is likely to give himself up to carnal and worldly religious projects. Now, worship is the normal employment of moral beings. Every glimpse that we have of worshiping creatures, or of creatures, every glimpse that we have of heaven, shows the people there, or the creatures there, worshiping. Ezekiel 1, 1-28. I read that sometimes. I never heard anybody preach on that text, and I don't suppose anybody ever will but me. I've preached on it a few times, and I read it often and think about it. And I beheld and looked, and a whirlwind came out of the north, and a great cloud and fire unfolding itself. I'll not bore you with reading this whole thing, but here were strange, beautiful creatures with wings and wheels, and the wheels in the middle of the wheels that our colored friends love to sing about. And the high and lifted up creatures that put down their wings and dropped quietly by the throne of God. And then at the voice of the Lord they raised their wings and went hurrying away again in the service. And they went, everyone, straight forward. They turned not when they went. I love that, too. I could preach a sermon on that one. They went, everyone, straight forward, and they turned not when they went. And I saw these creatures and the likeness of their faces. Four of them had a face of a man, the face of a lamb, the face of an ox, and the face of an eagle. And their faces and their wings were stretched upward two ways for everyone. I won't go on, but we have that picture there of the creatures, God's people worshiping, God's creatures worshiping. Then you find this man Isaiah, the year that King Uzziah died. I saw also the Lord high and lifted up in his train through the temple, and above it stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With twain he covered his face out of modesty, and with twain he covered his feet because he wasn't going to boast about his labors and his travels. And with twain he did fly to serve his God. And they answered each other antiphonally, and they said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, and the whole earth is full of his glory. And the temple was filled with the incense, and the temple doors shook, the pillars shook. They were worshiping God there. You turn to the book of Revelation, and you will find there also that there is worship. There is worship there. And when they had given glory and honor and thanks to him that sat on the throne who lived forever and ever, the four and twenty elders fell down before him that sat on the throne, and they worshiped him that lived forever and ever. And they cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Now it were thee, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power. For thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. And a little further on, when things had developed a little further, every creature which is in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshiped him that liveth forever and ever. I pity these sand-counting, meticulous IBM machine type of mentality that will spend more time trying to figure out who those elders were and who those beasts were, and what the word really was in their Greek. Oh, I'm blessedly glad I don't care. I just see a picture there, a wonderful picture there of some class of being called elders. Now, I don't know whether they're elders, such as we're going to elect here Wednesday night, or not. Could be. And then there are beasts, which otherwise are called living creatures. Beasts being a living creature, we assume that all beasts are dogs and horses and so on. But I'm not sure that there are beasts that are of the highest type. And they're up there, these living creatures, and they're all worshiping the Lord God. And wherever you look in heaven, you'll find them worshiping there. And if worship bores you, my friend, you're not ready for heaven. Now, let's get something straight here. I believe in justification by faith. Martin Luther never believed in it any stronger than I do. He did everything he did stronger than I. I don't mean that. But what I mean is, he believed it and I believed it, and I can say amen to what he said about it, and I didn't learn it from him, either. I believe in justification by faith, and I believe we're saved by having faith in the Son of God as Lord and Savior. But there's an automatic quality about getting saved nowadays that bothers me very greatly. It's an automatic quality. You put a nickel of faith in the slot and pull down a lever and take out the little coin of salvation, tuck it in your pocket and off you go. And after that, you say, Yes, I'm saved, how do you know? I put the nickel in. I accepted Jesus and I signed the card. Very good, very good. Nothing wrong with signing a card. I believe that's a good thing so we can know who they are. But my brother, we are brought that we might worship, we come to God. Not that we might be automatic Christians, cookie-cutter Christians, Christians stamped out with a die, but that we might be individually, personally vibrant, individual, personal Christians, loving God with all our heart and worshiping in the beauty of holiness. Not only is worship the normal employment for moral beings, but worship is the moral imperative. I want to read from the book of Luke here a little bit. It said, When they came nigh the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen. I want to warn you about something, brothers and sisters. Two things. First, I don't believe that it's necessarily always true that we're worshiping God when we're making a lot of racket. Religious racket and worship don't necessarily mean the same thing. I also want to warn you, cultured, quiet, self-possessed, poised, sophisticated people, that if you're so sure of yourself that it embarrasses you if anybody says, Amen, you've got some help coming to you. Because the people of God always were a little bit noisy. I quote that dear old English Saint that goes back 600 years, that Lady Julian. She said she got to thinking about how high and lofty Jesus was, and yet how he nicked himself down to the lowest part of our human desire. She said she just couldn't control herself. She let go with a shout, now she prayed God aloud in Latin. But translated into English, it just meant, Well, glory to God, isn't this a marvelous thing? Now, if that bothers you, friend, I'm afraid something's wrong anyhow here. When it was come nigh and the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen. And I'm quite sure they weren't in tune. Now, I like to hear singing in tune. I don't think there's any excuse for anything else if you've had time to practice a little. And everybody's stopping and starting and releasing and attacking and all that. I like to hear that. I think there's no reason that we should sound otherwise. But when you get a crowd of people who've been blessed by the Lord and when they go out of themselves with worship and joy, they're just as likely as not to praise God a little bit off-key. So if you hear me singing off-key, don't look at me. Because singing off-key was what they did here. And they praised God with a loud voice. If it wasn't musical, at least it was loud. And they said, Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Some of the Pharisees, God bless those Pharisees with all their degrees and their seminary training. And they were polished and smoothed and buffed and lacquered and polished and sanded and polished again. And it hurt them to hear anybody saying, Glory to God, out loud. So they came and answered and said, Master, rebuke these disciples. Rebuke them, their fanatics. And Jesus said, I tell you, that if these should hold their peace, the very stones would immediately cry out. He said, Why, I am to be worshipped. God my Father and I the Holy Ghost, we are to be worshipped. And if you won't do it, the rocks will worship me. The very rocks will shout my praises. Those Pharisees would have died in their tracks if they'd heard a rock praising the Lord. So these poor people here were praising God atop of their voices. It's a moral imperative, my brother and sister. And yet it is the missing jewel in evangelical circles. It's the missing jewel. The crown is here, but there are no jewels in it. Or at least that one is gone. The Church has decked herself with every ornament, but one shining jewel she's lost. And that is the jewel of worship. I tremble when I think and think of myself related to it. And this Church is related to it. None to the angel of the Church of the Laodicean right. These things says they are men, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou art cold or hot, so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest I am rich. We have the rich Church today. I'm no good at statistics, as I've said before. I can't remember them 20 minutes, and when I try to quote them, I always quote inaccurately. So I'll not try any statistics on you. I'll only say that this is the hour of the Church's riches. You know, we had a little piece in the magazine that I edited. Somebody got to looking around and got nothing. She wrote a little piece and she said, I cast a little vote against all this wasting of money to build fancy buildings and country club style churches and so on. I had to make it a whole lot worse if I had written it. I didn't write it, I just said we could put it in. You know, I've had some mean, nasty letters about that. I've had letters not from liberals and modernists and Roman Catholics, I've had it from a lion people who wanted to know how come. And a run-one knew how come and said, listen, he's the head of another department. I happened to be the head of one. He said, well, we'd like to know why. Now, I could write him a letter, you know, and I could just peel his epidermis off nicely and hang it up there to dry, but I won't do it. If I did it, I'd suffer and I couldn't pray and I'd have to write him and ask him to forgive me. So I'm just going to not do it. I'm going to write him a nice, respectful letter and tell him I would put that in. Well, I believe it, my brother, and sister. You know what will happen if a depression ever hits the North American continent, Canada and the United States? There will be more churches going into bankruptcy and going back to the man from whom the money was borrowed. I know one church, another big one, that borrowed over $100,000 right out of a bank. Now, if you were from a bank, you wouldn't lend $100,000, I suppose, but they had a good credit rating, so they borrowed over $100,000 right out of a bank and went and built themselves a church. I am rich. I am rich and increased with goods, this church said. And of course, she had statistics on her side, and if you charged her with it, she'd write a nasty letter to the editor. I am increased with goods, and I have my shuffleboard courts and my breezeways, and I have all the comforts for the luxurious Saints who stretch themselves on beds of ivory and drink out of golden bowls, but are not bothered by the woes of Israel. That was the church of Laodicea. And the church of Laodicea says, I have need of nothing, look at my statistics. I have need of nothing, look how much I owe. Can you imagine boasting about how much we owe? The evangelical church in the last year borrowed so much money to build, and we owe that money, and so we boast about how much we owe. I pray to God, no, I don't need it, I'll take that back, I'll let God handle that without any suggestion from me. But I don't know if their depression comes, brothers and sisters, it could easily mean that we would do what happened right after the First World War. Now, some of you people don't remember that. Right after the First World War, a lot of healing evangelists and other evangelists got going, and throughout America, and I don't know about Canada, I lived in the States then, throughout the United States, everybody that could built himself a tabernacle. And each one tried to outbuild the other. And then along came that woeful depression that they blamed on Hoover, who was no more to blame than I am. But where came that woeful depression, and those tabernacles were nailed up by the scores every place, and the poor people who put their money into it couldn't get it back, and the fellow that built it was off somewhere else. And that happened. Now, that same thing will happen again. We're in a big building boom. We have everything. Sometimes it's necessary to build, and if you don't build when you should, you're not doing the will of God. But when you build when you shouldn't, you're not doing the will of God. I have need of everybody who had everything but worship these days. You can't get to go to a prayer meeting and sit on a board and decide how much money you were going to put into a radiant heat for the men's room, so that no fellow had to walk around in giddy little paddies, cold on the floor, without radiant heat. But you couldn't get him to a prayer meeting because he's not a worshiper. He's just a fellow who runs his church. I think in any of you people now, you don't have to like this because this is not important to me. I hope you do because you're on the right side then. But listen, my brother and sister, it seems to me that it's always been a frightful incongruity that men who do not pray and do not worship are nevertheless able to run the church and determine the direction it will take. No man has any right to debate an issue or vote on it unless he's a praying man. And yet, in the Alliance, we let the women do the praying and the men do the voting. The men sit around and lean back and stay cool in the law until midnight trying to make decisions that ought to be prayed for in the first place. Because we're not worshipers, we're wasting other people's money tremendously, we're marking time, we're spinning our wheels with the axles up on wood blocks, burning the gasoline and making a noise and getting no place. Oh, brother and sister, God calls us to worship. And I find this missing in the Church of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in this day. We have learned instead of worship, we are now second in entertainment to the theaters. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you something tonight. It's this. If I want to see a show, I know where I can see some good ones, put on by top-flat geniuses who know what they're doing. And if I want a show, I'll duck right out and go down to O.T. Theater and I'll see a show that's straight hot right out of Hollywood or London. And by men and women who, though they've devoted themselves to that thing, nevertheless, I have seen their funeral. I will not go to a church and see a lot of ham actors putting on a home-talent show. Yet that's where we are in evangelical circles. We've got more shows in evangelical circles than we have anyplace else. I'll tell you, outsider politics, there isn't another field of activity that has more words and fewer deeds and more wind and little rain as we have in evangelical churches these days. Amen. Now, it's an awesome and beautiful thing, this worship. I'd rather worship God. I'd rather worship God than any other thing I know of in all the wide world. I have hymn books piled up in my study. I wouldn't even attempt to tell you how many hymn books I have of all sorts. I can't sing a lick, but that's nobody's business. God thinks I'm an opera star. And who listens while I sing to him the old French hymns in translation, the old Latin hymns in translation, the old Greek hymns from the Eastern Church, and of course, the beautiful songs done in meter, as well as some of the simpler songs of Watts and Wesley and the rest. So I would rather worship God. But you say, if you worship God and do nothing else, but nobody ever worshiped God and did nothing else. That's the beautiful part about it. If you worship God, you will be an active person. I read somewhere today, I think it was old Dean Ng of London, the gloomy Dean who is now dead. But he said something about worshippers, people who worshipped and shut themselves up and worshipped. They weren't very good Christians, they didn't get much done. Where has he been all his life? Doesn't he know that practically every great deed done in the Church of Christ back to St. Paul was done by people blazing with the fire of God? Doesn't he know that the great mystics and the great hymn writers and the great worshippers were the one also who were the great workers? Doesn't he know that the great saints whose hymns we so tenderly sing were active to the point where you would wonder how they ever did it? George Woodfield and John Wesley and Charles Wesley and St. Bernard and Terry Stegman, you can name them off. St. John Wesley They were the ones who wrote our hymns of praise and also they were the ones whose knuckles were skinned and whose hands and palms were calloused with toil. Hospitals grew out of the hearts of worshipping men. Insane asylums grew out of the hearts of worshipping men. The youth of the man who went off in his mind used to drive him out of the city and throw rocks at him. Worshipping men and women learned to be courteous and compassionate to those whose minds had failed them. So we have these institutions that take care of people. Some of the great advances in civilization were made by worshipping men and women. Wherever the Church came out of her lethargy and rose from her sleep and into her renaissance and into her revival, always some worshippers were back of it all. We are called to worship and we are failing God in this, my brother and sister. We are not worthy of worshiping God as we should. I was in a church once. I was pastor of it. I had nothing to do with it. It was God. A man came in from the West Coast and he was a minister, an intelligent man apparently, and he came to talk with me. Now he said, I'd like to ask you some questions, as I told you. I said, all right, what is on your mind? He said, what is on your mind? I said, what is it here? Well, I said, I don't think I know what you mean. He said, I sense a presence here. I said, the very wall seemed to reflect it. Somebody's here, he said. I sense it. Well, I backed out of that. I couldn't answer. I knew what it was. I knew. I knew because I remembered that when the glory of God was revealed and God came down to the temple in olden days, the priests couldn't stand the ministry. I knew that. And I remembered that when the traveling salesman went into the town where the revival was going on in New England, that when he came into the little town, utterly innocent of what was going on, the first man he met, he said, tell me, what did I feel? What is this? He said, when I drove into the city, the town, I felt something get hold of me. He said, this is one of the things What is it? Well, he said, there's a revival on in this town. He said, God is here. People are getting converted. Saloons are being closed up. Halfway houses are being, the doors are being nailed shut. Evil women are cleaning up. Evil men are quitting their daily habits and getting right with God. He says, God's in this place. Brethren, this is what we lack in the evangelical circles. We don't have them in our Bible conferences. We don't have them in our camp meetings. We don't have them in our churches. This I mean in our churches. We're running our church the way you would run a club. It leaves me in my heart. I wish that we might get back again to worship so that when people come into the church they sense instantly they're in where are holy people. Where God's people are. And they fall on their faces and say, surely God's in this place of the truth. As it says in 1 Corinthians 1, 1 Corinthians, God's in this place of the truth. Dear friends, the presence of the Lord is the most wonderful thing in all the world. A great American preacher said he went out, one man said he went out with a great American preacher and he said we talked, we lay down on the grass, it was a summer evening and he said we sat, we lay down there in the afternoon and we talked about God and we talked until the shadows fell and we talked until it got dark and we talked until it was late and we said, well, we must take this off and go home. And the great saint said, let's pray before we go. And so he broke into prayer and the friend who was telling it said, a sense of God shut down around us until he said, I pulled my arms tight around my body, I was afraid to stretch my hands out before I touched God. I told you once that I had prayed under a tree with some preachers and a Salvation Army captain. And I prayed and the others prayed and we all prayed. You know, we have our prayers. We laugh at those who have liturgical prayers and formal prayers and then we have prayers just as formal, only they're not good, not pretty, they're not well done. Anyway, we all prayed our prayers, including me, and then the Salvation Army began to pray. Now, they're not all like that, but he was. And that's when I remember that prayer. I don't know what he said, can't remember the word that he said, but I knew that here was a man engaging God in the awesome, marvelous, elevating, healing, holy act of worship. And I was a member of the Methodist Church as a lad, a young fellow, and I got converted, and then joined the Methodist Church in Gosprin, too. And they took me in, and I got busy, and they helped me, and all right. One night, a little lady got up to sing. She was a hunchback, a little woman, and she had a sick face, a face that looked as if she had suffered a lot, but oh, what a beautiful little face it was. She stood there and sang with a child's voice. That's been forty-some years ago. I can close my eyes still and hear that little birdlike voice singing about Jesus Christ. She was worshiping, you see. She got through, where the learned pastor never did get through. She got through. This is missing in churches. You say, but if we give ourselves to this, nobody will do anything. Oh, brother, if we give ourselves to this, everybody will do more than he's doing now. Only what he does will be more than he's doing now. He's more than he's doing doing more than he's doing now. better than I was able to do before. he's doing than he can and silence and forgot. Let the whole earth his power confess, let the whole earth adore his grace. The Gentiles, with the Jews, shall join in work and worship so divine.' Over in New Jersey, where I sometimes go to the New Jersey Chesapeake and preach for them there, they closed the service with a communion service, and then they clasped hands all around the building. Everybody takes a hold of everybody else's hand all the way around the building and the scene. The Gentiles and the Jews, the Calvinists and the Arminians, the Episcopals and the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Congregations. Not all are all, but those out of all of those churches will clasp hands round the world, and the Gentiles with the Jews shall join in work and worship so divine. I'd love that, wouldn't you? I'd like a colored man in my left hand, and a Jew in my right hand, and a Chinese on one, and a Japanese on beyond that, and a Ghanaian on over here, all with their faces black and yellow and red and whatever ours are, all looking up with our hands clasped round the world and saying, Bless, O my soul, the living God, for whom my thoughts are overburdened. That's true togetherness, and it's the only kind that is. The togetherness that's by law and the integration that is by supreme court rule is no integration at all. But when a man, I have a little friend who comes to this church sometimes when he's in town. In fact, if he's anywhere within walking distance, he's here, and he's just as black as his Bible. But he's my dear, loving friend. I like to put my arm around him and hug him until it hurts. He's a man of God who happens to be of the descendant of Ham. I'm the man of God, I hope. I happen to be the descendant of Japheth. Then my Jewish friend with the crooked nose, he's a descendant of Japheth. So we sons of Adam, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb with our faces up, from three races and three branches of the human race, but all one in Christ Jesus, we call whom our thoughts are overbroad, and we sing the glory of him who made us, who loved us and who redeemed us and who now saves us. That's what a church is supposed to do with its friends. Not a big ecclesiastical machine turned by a crank, and some pastor turns the crank with a big smile which he couldn't wipe off. He loves everybody, and everybody loves him, he's got to do it, he's paid for it. He turns the crank and the machine runs. Oh, this kind of thing grieves my heart. I want to be among worshipers. Do you know what? I'd rather you people would all get filled with the Holy Ghost and be a worshiping people than anything that I know. I'd rather. Are you interested at all? Dear Lord Jesus, we love thee and we love thy Holy Father. We love the blessed Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified. We love thee, O God. We expect to spend eternity with thee, not standing in a trance, worshiping always, but like the creatures out of the fire, worshiping with trembling joy and then rising to go to do thy service. Somewhere in the far reaches of the creation, hurrying back to the throne to report, O God. We look forward to this. I don't feel what I used to feel. Death is a terrible, dark, ugly, cold river, but in another way it's a door into a new life. We wait to look upon thy face, to see thy people, to see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and sit down in the kingdom of God with thy people of every tongue and tribe and nation around the world. O Lord, prepare us now for that hour. Teach us the protocol of heaven. Teach us the etiquette of the kingdom. Teach us now, so we won't be doing anything strange when we take up our harp and join the company innumerable, or sing in the choir invisible. Bless this people, Lord. Holy Ghost with light divine, shine upon this heart of mine. Holy Ghost with power divine, come we pray thee, and give power and grace and strength to these hearts of ours, for Christ's sake. Dear friends, these talks are not specifically evangelistic, that is, they're not aimed to sinners specifically. But do you remember that in the Welsh Revival, when the Christians began to get filled with the Holy Ghost, sinners began to get converted, and the Lord wouldn't let anybody preach on anything else, except worship and righteous living and holy walk with God? When the sinners got converted, they sort of tumbled in automatically because the Christians got right. So, that's my reason for featuring this series. Now, I want you to sing with me, and join in singing an old song. Matthew Beggs has wrote it. What number is it? 382? 382. I think we sang it last week, if we didn't, we'll sing it this week. 382. I want you to sing all stanzas, and lift your heart to God, and see whether God won't give you the gift of worship while we sing number 382.