But God

That water was put here to water the flowers, but I'm thirstier than those flowers tonight. It's a real privilege to be back here, and I enjoyed the visit so much last year, but I miss Brother David Jeremiah. There are Jeremiahs all over the place, one in the Bible and two here in San Diego.

I was back in Binghamton, New York, a few weeks ago for their graduation, and all I heard about was Jeremiah. I said, yes, we have him down in San Diego, and he's one of the outstanding men we have on the West Coast. I said, we're not talking about him, we're talking about his father.

He's a preacher back here, and he is really the great Jeremiah. These two are his boys, and David is not here tonight. For that reason, I want to bring a sermon tonight that is a doctrinal sermon.

He's been to Dallas, he'll understand it. Maybe. I was in Florida this winter, and the pig jokes were going around down in Florida.

Have you heard any of the pig jokes? One of the pig jokes is that there was a man in a Volkswagen going down the freeway, and a truck was ahead of him filled with hogs, pigs. One of the pigs fell out of the truck, and this man stopped to pick up the pig. He got the pig in his car and started out.

He got going too fast, and the officer pulled him over to the side and said, where are you going? He says, well, a pig fell out of the truck, and I stopped to pick the pig up, and I'm trying to catch that truck. He says, well, you can't catch that truck. You'd break all speed laws if you tried to catch it.

He says, you take that pig down now to the zoo. Take that pig to the zoo. The fellow said, yes, he would.

The next day the officer was cruising down the freeway, saw that Volkswagen, there was the man and the pig there beside him, and he pulled him over again. He says, I thought I told you yesterday to take that pig to the zoo. He said, I did.

We had such a good time, we're going to the beach today. I had such a good time last year, that's the reason I've come back this year. I'm turning to the third chapter of Galatians, and I'd like to read some verses beginning with verse 19.

Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made, and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid.

For if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto faith, which should afterwards be revealed.

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster, for ye are all the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. And I break off the reading now at that particular juncture.

This epistle to the Galatians has had a tremendous effect upon the Church down through the ages. I believe that every great movement that has taken place in the Church, that the epistle to Galatians is what sparked it. Martin Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order.

He spent every night in a harsh shirt, sleeping on a cold slab. And he fasted, he went through other gyrations to try to please God. It was about that time that he began to study the epistle to the Galatians.

And so one day he said, These things I'm doing do not commend me to God. They do not bring me into right relationship with God. And so he went to Rome.

And while he was at Rome, he went up to the Sacra Scala. And when he went up, on his knees, they were bloody, he got near to the top, and he stopped, stood up. He says, This is no good either.

He says, This does not justify me before God. He says, Only faith in Jesus Christ can justify me before God. And he walked down those steps out into the darkness of the dark ages in Europe.

And he brought a message that broke the shackles from the hands of multitudes in Europe and opened the eyes of others and drove back the darkness. That was the epistle to the Galatians he'd been studying. John Wesley came to this country as a missionary.

He hadn't been here very long, and he had a very unfortunate love affair. And he said, I've come to America to convert Indians, but who's going to convert John Wesley? And he went back to England. And one night walking down Aldersgate, he heard singing as coming out of an upstairs window.

He found the stairway, made his way up there, sat in the back. It was a meeting of the followers of Fox, Quakers. And the teacher that night taught the epistle to the Galatians.

And later on, when John Wesley wrote that in his journal, he said, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust Christ, Christ alone for my salvation. And there was given to me there an assurance that God had taken away my sin.

And John Wesley led in the great spiritual movement that saved England from the revolution that destroyed France, from which it has never recovered. And today it's my firm conviction that if we have a spiritual movement, and I'm not a gloom and doom preacher, I think a revival is possible. I think that we are near a revival now than we've ever been in the entire history of this country.

And I'll tell you why. Don't listen to the newscasts. You won't get it there, I can assure you.

Nothing but bad news is on TV today. You can get some good news on radio, but the bad news today is on TV, and I mean it's bad. And somebody says, I don't see how there can be a revival.

Well, a revival has come at times like this, and it always begins with people having an interest in the Word of God. Now, I've been in the ministry a long time, but right now we're finding there's more interest in the Word of God than there's ever been in my ministry. I've never seen anything quite like it.

And it's all across this country today, and it's not only in this country today. It's Indonesia. A revival is going on in India.

A revival is going on in parts of Africa today. There is a revival today someplace, but not here. It could come.

And personally, I think it's the only thing that's going to save the United States now. I've given up on the Democrats, and I've almost given up on the Republicans. I don't think anything can save this country now but a revival.

We've gone a long ways into apostasy. Now, let's see what it was that brought revival. It was the message that's in Galatians, and the very thing is that it was such a simple message.

May I say to you with the risk of probably being repetitious tonight, it was just one thing, that a man is justified by faith, the emphasis is on faith, and that God accepts and God justifies, and saves a sinner on the basis of just one thing, and that's faith. And that faith is not just a historical faith. And I mean by that to believe in the historical Jesus.

I think we've got a lot of people today that they say, yes, I believe Jesus lived, I believe Jesus died, I believe Jesus rose again, but to them it's just a matter of history. I think that the important thing is that we need to recognize that saving faith means to trust him, means to trust him. And let me attempt to make the difference there with a very simple illustration.

When Bandini, the French wire walker, came to this country, he had a wire stretch over a portion of Niagara Falls. And so he got up there, and this tremendous crowd assembled, of course, and he walked across that wire. He pushed a wheelbarrow across it.

He did some other things. And he stopped and looked down, and he saw a boy standing down front. And he said to the boy, he says, if you come up here, I'll carry your cross on my shoulders.

And the boy shook his head, and that's what I would have done. He shook his head and said, no. And so Bandini said to him, he says, don't you believe I can do it? He says, I believe you can do it, but I don't trust you.

There are a lot of people today in the church that are saying, yes, I believe Jesus, but really have you trusted him? Do you know what it is really to rest upon him for your salvation? That's a message that's in this book here, and I want us to look at it. Now, he says this. He says, wherefore then serveth the law? The question naturally arises, why did God give the law? Why did for over a thousand years he let a people be under the law if the law wasn't going to save them? Wherefore then serveth the law? He says it was added because of transgressions.

That's interesting. You see, man was a sinner before the law was given, but he wasn't a transgressor. He became a transgressor when the law was given.

You see, you can have a sign out here that said, don't walk on the grass. And if you walked on the grass before, you're not breaking any rule at all. It might not be a nice thing to do, but you're not breaking the law.

But when that sign goes up and you walk on the grass, you're now breaking the law. The law showed man that he was a sinner. It was added because of transgressions.

Tell the seed should come to whom the promise was made. Tell the seed should come. Another reason is it was temporary.

It never was given to be permanently. Tell the seed should come to whom the promise was made, and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. I don't want to go into that in detail, but angels are associated with an Old Testament ministry, and the Holy Spirit is associated with a New Testament ministry, by the way.

And so we are told here it was added in order that man might see that he was a sinner. In other words, the law would not nor could it remove sin. Who in the Old Testament was ever saved by keeping the law? You want to mention somebody in the Old Testament that was saved keeping the law? How about Moses? He was the giver of it.

The system is called the Mosaic system. He should have made it. He didn't.

He was a murderer. He never would have been saved by law. How about David? You want to mention David? Well, if you mention David, he broke all of it.

David didn't leave any of it undone. I tell you, David could never have been saved by keeping the law. No one could ever be saved.

I used to say that a great deal at the Church of the Open Door in those days, Hal Lindsay was with Campus Crusade, and he used to bring a group of the boys at UCLA in on Saturday night to the service. And there was one fellow, he always was trying to find something that he could, you know, get me, because he wanted to get me, he said. And he came down one night, he says, Dr. McGee, you are always saying that no one in the Old Testament was ever saved by keeping the law.

I can mention somebody. And I said, Who? He said, Daniel. Well, I said, You sure got me there.

Because I can't mention anything Daniel did. I don't know whether he murdered anybody. I don't know whether he broke laws like David did or not.

In fact, I'm almost sure he didn't. But I don't know what he did. And I told this young fellow, I said, You got me there.

But I said, You know, Daniel made a mistake then for us because he prayed a prayer, and he recorded that prayer. And twice in that prayer he said, I have sinned. Now, he should have kept his mouth shut.

Nobody would have known it. He says, I have sinned. Now I said to this young man, I said, Daniel either sinned or he didn't sin.

If he did sin, then he couldn't be saved by the law. If he didn't sin and said he sinned when he didn't sin, then he sinned when he said he didn't sin. So he broke the law.

Anyway you take him, he was a lawbreaker also. Men are not saved by the law. That's made very clear.

God never did save anyone. And actually the law is not given to keep us from sin because the law was given long after sin came into the world. So God didn't put that down at the very beginning.

And yet the first boy ever born became a murderer himself. And also the law shows us today one thing, that we're not a sophisticated or a refined or trained sinner. We are a sinner in the raw.

We are a sinner by nature. Now let me try to illustrate this if I can. Let me take you into the bathroom.

Now I don't mean to be crude or rude about that, but I want to take you in the bathroom. Now in your bathroom I'm sure that you have what I've seen in every bathroom, and that is there's a washbasin and a mirror above it. Every bathroom I've ever seen has both of those things, besides other things.

But it has those two things. You can always put that down. They'll be there.

Now suppose a member of your family, you see them go in one night, and they look in the mirror and see a spot. Then they rub against the mirror. And you suspect something then.

You're going to call a psychiatrist and see what it means when a person starts rubbing against a mirror, you see. No, the thing to do is to use the washbasin. Now the law, James says, the law is a mirror.

And you see yourself in the mirror. But what do you do? Well, you use the washbasin. What is the washbasin? There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunge beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains.

You see, the law, the purpose of it, it was a schoolmaster. And I want to drop down that we might see that. In the 24th verse, he says, Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith.

Now, a schoolmaster here is not a schoolteacher. The schoolmaster here actually was a servant in a Roman home. He was a pedagogus, is what he was called.

And he was actually a servant who took care of a little child in a Roman home. A man has a boy born in his home, firstborn especially. So a rich Roman, he would get a servant, and that servant would be responsible for that little fellow.

He'd dress him, he'd wash him, blow his nose, feed him, do anything to help the little fellow. But a day would come when that pedagogus couldn't teach him anything else. It's time for the boy to go to school.

So he takes him by the hand and he leads him to the school. And now what Paul is saying here, Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith. You see, the law was our schoolmaster.

The law, listen, the law took us by the hand and says to us, Little boy, little girl, come. There's the cross. That will save you.

I can't save you. In other words, the law is to reveal to us that we are sinners, but it was never given to save us. It was given till the seed should come.

And Paul says here in Galatians, That seed is the Lord Jesus Christ. And now man is not to look to the law for salvation. He's to look to the Lord Jesus Christ who died to pay the penalty for the sins that are caused by breaking God's law.

I may be wrong, but I have a notion that there's not a person here that hasn't broken God's law somewhere along the way. That somehow or another you know and you're down deep in your heart that you're really not really right with Almighty God by what you do. That the only way that you're right is by your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And what a comfort it is to know that I don't have to look at Vernon McGee. I'm tired of looking at him anyway. And he can't save Vernon McGee.

He can't save himself at all. But thank God he can look to Christ and be saved. And the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ.

And the only place I know that there's people that never broken the law, a friend of mine got me on this one. He says, you know in New York City we have a whole section and the people that are there have never broken the law. The man, I said, I've never heard of a place like that.

And he says, yes, it's a cemetery around the Baptist Church. The people there, they don't break laws. As long as you and I are in the flesh down here.

And therefore it's only faith in Christ. Now what does faith in Christ do for us that the law cannot do? Because faith in Christ does something for us that the law could never do at all. And that is this.

Will you listen to this very carefully? For ye are all children of God. How? By faith in Christ Jesus. Plus something? No.

No, actually our subject tonight is faith plus nothing equals salvation. And here it says, it's such a simple verse that we're apt to pass over it. I passed over it for years before I found out it was important.

For ye are all the children of God. How? By faith in Jesus Christ. Plus keeping the law.

Plus being a good boy. Plus promising to do something. Plus joining the church.

Plus baptism. Plus other ceremonies. No.

You become a child of God by just one thing. Faith in Jesus Christ. Faith plus nothing.

Plus nothing is what saves you. Do we trust him like that? Paul has a remarkable verse in this epistle that I never got over with. He says, Behold, I, Paul, say unto you that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.

He says if you trust in a ceremony to save you, Christ is no value to you if you're trusting that. Only Christ can save. Just think of that.

I heard the late Dr. Louis Perry Chaffer say this. This meant so much to me. It helped me to get to the place where I really would trust Christ and not Vernon McGee anymore.

And that was, he said, I want to so trust Christ that if I'm brought up to him someday and he says to me, I'm going to say to him, I trusted you as my Savior. And he'd say, Well, now that was very nice of you. But you must have something else.

No, I never trusted anything else. Well, now you did do a lot of good things. I never trusted those.

Well, you were president of a seminary. I never trusted that. I only trusted you.

And the Lord Jesus would say, I'm sorry, I can't save you. He says, I want to turn and walk away and say, I only trusted you as my Savior. Do we trust him like that tonight? Some of us have got a spare tire, haven't we? We join the church.

We've done this. We've done that. We've done the other thing.

For salvation, God has the world shut up to a cross. And he's not asking anything of Los Angeles. He wouldn't get much either if he asked something of Los Angeles.

But he's not asking Los Angeles to do anything. I can't find anywhere. I used to preach in downtown Los Angeles.

Somebody says, Why don't you preach on this? Why don't you preach on the police department? Why don't you preach? I said, I can't find that in the Bible. Nowhere does it tell me to preach against Los Angeles, asking them to do something. God has the world shut up to a cross.

And he's not asking the world to do something. He's asking the world to believe something. And he says, What will you do with my son that died for you? And until man answers that question, God's not talking.

That's the reason this book is a closed book. There are actually some preachers today that I hear on TV. Oh, I'll tell you what we've got on TV today.

Radio is bad enough, I know. But TV. May I say to you that God has the world shut up to a cross.

And he's saying to a lost world, What will you do with my son that died for you? Now when you answer that question, God is really talking. He's got a lot to say to you. He's going to ask you to do a lot of things.

He's going to ask you to be a certain kind of person. My, he's going to talk to you about things. But you must be saved first.

We have a notion today that preaching the Bible to the world, God's asking the world to do something. God's not asking the world to do anything. He asked his nation, Israel, for over a thousand years to do something, and they did not.

They rebelled against him. He sent them into captivity. He said, This won't work.

He said, I've got something I've been holding that I'm going to offer to a lost world. And they can't turn it down and say that they can't do it or they won't do it. They'll just have to believe that my son died for them on the cross.

Now, what will faith in Christ do for us? I'd like to mention here half a dozen things. But we'd be here till 12 o'clock, and I've got to get back to Los Angeles tonight, by the way. So, let me just mention one thing.

Faith in Christ, not works of the law, gives to the believer the nature of a son of God. Have you ever thought about that for a while, that faith in Christ makes you a son of God? He came unto his own, his own received him not, but to as many as received him. He gave them the right, the exousion right, the power to become the sons of God.

Even to those that don't do anymore than believe on his name, which were born not of blood, that is, just because your mama's a Christian doesn't make you one, nor of the will of the flesh, not effort on your part, but by one thing alone, and that is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. How important that is these days, because a great many things are passing today as the gospel, and the gospel's not God asking men to do something. He's asking them to believe he's done something for them.

Now, after you're saved, oh boy, I've been working on that part of it, and that, my friend, he has a great deal to say. Now, you remember that Nicodemus came to the Lord Jesus at night? Now, if any man could make it by religion, I believe Nicodemus would have made it. He was a Pharisee, and that meant something.

He was a leader of the Pharisees. That meant something in that day. That was just like being the leading elder, a deacon in a church.

That really meant something. He's a man that we know followed the law. He fasted.

He tithed. He went to the temple regularly. He brought sacrifices.

He went through all the ritual of religion, and yet the Lord Jesus said to him, he says, you must be born again. And he didn't let the man get away from it. The man said, how can I be born again? And the Lord Jesus said, you must be born of water and the Spirit.

And I think the water there means the Word of God. It's the Spirit that takes the Word of God and applies it to the heart. We were talking about this coming down here this afternoon, that we hear so often, how many converts do you have? And even on radio, you know, we mention that.

Well, if you want to know the truth, then don't let this get out, but I don't have any. The only one that can convert a person is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can do it.

I can't do it. Nobody else can do it. Brother Jeremiah can't do it.

All three of the Jeremiahs can't do it. But there's one thing for sure, one thing for sure, the Holy Spirit taking the Word of God and applying it to the heart of a lost man can make him a son of God. And that's the way a man becomes a son of God, through faith in that.

David, have you ever noticed that David and Moses were never called sons of God? Now, don't misunderstand me. They were men of God. Moses was a man of God.

But do you know that after Moses' life, after he died, God said to Israel, Moses, my servant, is dead. My servant, not my son. Never called anybody in the Old Testament his son.

Now, he called a corporate nation Israel. He said, Israel, my son. But that was the corporate nation.

That never was an individual Israelite. Now, another man should have made it. That's David.

David should have been called a son of God in the Old Testament because he said he's a man after my own heart. That seems like he'd be a son of God. He said to David, David, my servant.

Never called him a son. You see, only faith in the Lord Jesus Christ brings you today in the most unique group of people that's imaginable. I don't know why it doesn't thrill us more.

By putting faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you become a son of God, and you're brought in the body of believers by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and you are now made a member of the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. And somebody says, can you lose your salvation? Can you lose a finger? Yeah, you could have it cut off, but that finger's going to stay there unless somebody cuts it off. May I say to you that we are members of his body, the church, and what a wonderful arrangement that is.

And he says, herefore, ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. May I just take one more? If you've got someplace you want to go, you go ahead, but it won't take me but just a few minutes to do this. Will you listen to this? Way down in the fourth chapter, in the sixth verse, he says something else.

It gives you the experience of being a son of God. Now, I think that our charismatic friends are running away with the ball today, and I don't want them to because I think they're running in the wrong direction. But be that as it may, there's one thing that is for sure today, and that is that you and I can have an experience as a son of God.

And I don't believe that you can have it every minute and all that sort of thing, but I actually believe there comes a time in your life that you have an experience that you're a child of God. Now, so many men have wanted this. Let me just read this one verse.

And because ye are sons, now because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Now, why wasn't that word, Abba, translated? I asked an outstanding Hebrew scholar years ago. I said, why wasn't that translated, Abba? He said, to tell the truth, Abba is a family word, a term of endearment.

He said, actually, it would be in Aramaic, in Aramaic it would be, my daddy. The Holy Spirit crying, what, my daddy? No, I'm not going to use the term. I don't dare use it.

I'm just going to leave it Abba. Abba, Father. It reveals a closeness to God.

Have you in your life had an experience? It's come to you sometime. It may have come at the darkest moment of your life, but when it came, you were sure you were a son of God. You were sure you belonged to him.

You were sure that he was your father. A lady was telling me back east the other day in Baltimore about how that, she said, word was brought to me that my husband had been killed, and says, I just automatically turned on the radio, and she said, there you were, and you were talking about this. And she said, right there and then, God made it so real to me that he was my father.

Even in the time of my sorrow, my misery, he's my father. He's my father. Paul Rader was probably the greatest preacher that the 20th century has produced, or will produce, for that matter.

But he got into a great deal of difficulty in the Chicago area, because they got the impression that he was saying you could reach the place of sinless perfection. I talked to his wife about that. She was a member of the Church of the Open Door, and I had a funeral when she died, and she had told me, she said that he never really believed that, and he never really taught that, but he had a desire.

He says he had a desire to want to please God, and he wanted to live on the highest plane that he could for God. And that's all that he had in mind. Well, he was misunderstood by a great many people that he was talking about sinless perfection.

I personally really don't think that he was, but he thought maybe you could reach that. One day he was preaching up in Massachusetts, and Dr. Chafer was sitting on a platform, and Paul Rader said in his sermon, he says, You know, that old nature is just like a dead cat, and what you need to do is just reach down and get that old nature by the tail and pull it out and throw it from you like a dead cat. I really wanted to do that, too.

I wish I could do it. Dr. Chafer told him afterward, he said, Paul, you forgot that that old dead cat has nine lives, and he's going to be right back. And the trouble of it is, I have thrown that old dead cat out several times, but he's come back more than nine times.

He always will come back. But the child of God has that desire of having a fellowship with God that God makes himself very real to him. May I be personal in closing? When I was told by my doctor that I had cancer, I didn't believe him.

I thought you could have cancer, but I never thought I didn't think I could have cancer. God wouldn't let me have cancer. Well, he did.

And so the doctor told me they took X-rays, put me on a thing, and they moved that. I was upside down, sideways, and they were taking X-rays, and they found out that I had something that men don't usually have, but a great many of them have it today, cancer of the breast. And so the doctor operated, and he put me in a hospital, and the head nurse attended our church.

She came in. She said, Now you get ready and get in bed, and here's a gown for you to put on. Remember, you don't put that front of it in front.

You put it in the back, and I never figured that out. I've been to the hospital for five major operations, and I've never yet. Why do they put that thing back? Why don't they put it where it belongs, up front? You can button it that way, and most of the time I had cancer, the doctor's always having to take the whole thing around.

But anyway, that's the way they do it in the hospital. And she said, Put on that gown and get in bed. It was that big old high bed at that time.

And so I got the gown on, but I couldn't get in bed, and if you want to know the truth, I was scared. Nobody was ever as scared as I was. I just couldn't make it up there.

And so she came in. She says, What's the matter? Are you sick? And I said, Well, in a way I am. I said, I'm just scared.

She said, I'll help you in bed. So she helped me in bed. And when they came in and said, We're getting ready to take you there, I said, Oh, I didn't know it was so quick.

But I said, Let me be alone if you don't mind. And I turned my face to the wall, just like old Hezekiah did, and I told the Lord about it. I said, I don't know why you let this happen to me, but you have, and you're my father, and I'm committing myself into your hands.

And when the doctor came in, well, he's a wonderful Christian cancer doctor. I said to him, I said, I've already committed you to the Lord. He's going to take care of you.

And I prayed for him, not for me. I sure didn't want him to make a mistake. And I want to say to you, friends, it was at that time, for that high moment in my life, that I knew I was a son of God.

And you know, I've thought about that since then. The Lord had to put me flat down on my back. He had to stop me when I thought that the world couldn't move.

Certainly the church of the open door wouldn't be able to get along without me. I just had to be there. He put me down on my back, says the world can get along without you.

You are not essential at all. I just want you to look up at me and know that I am your father. He was my heavenly father at that time.

Faith in Christ, friends, gives to you an assurance that you're not only a son of God, but also an experience that you belong to him. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you.

We thank you tonight that we can become any of us. You put no condition on it. And men from all ranks of life, even to the very lowest, have come.

And to the very highest, they've come. And they've become sons of God through faith in Christ. And if our presence here this evening, there are those that have never really trusted Christ.

May they tonight make that decision that they will receive the Lord Jesus as their personal savior and they'll trust him for their salvation. For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.