Who's Touching The Ark - Part 6

Therefore you'll have more to answer the judgment seat. And you've got enough to answer for? Are there areas in your life where you still are not obeyed, even though God said do this, you put your hand on the ark because it was coming and toppling over on you? It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God, the word of God said. Robert Louis Stevenson said, I only know one thing, and that's when you fall out of the hands of the living God. And that happens, it comes a time when God says to a nation, all right, you've been putting your hand on my truth. You've been withholding my truth. Job says, I have not eaten my morsel alone. You say, well, we've given money to missions. So we have. You know, this came to me, I mentioned it last night, there were a number of preachers in that place. And I said this, I said, you know, we had a national day of prayer last week. No, we didn't have a national day of prayer. We had a national suggestion. If we had a national day of prayer, the president would have said, every factory is closed down, every school is closed down, every shopping mall is closed down. Everything's going to stop. It's time we listened to God. It's time we humbled ourselves before God. But when God wants it that way, which he does, we put our hand on the ark and say, well, we'll steady it and make it a little bit convenient. Dear God, there was a time when they were so concerned about revival, they even put sackcloth on the animals. If you wear sackcloth, they think you're a crackpot. If you don't think so, get a sack, get an old potato sack and put a hole in the top, put it over your head and get your wife to cut some holes so you can put your arms in and go to church like that. And say, this is an outward sign of an inward sorrow I have. I don't care about the style of my clothes. I don't care what you think anybody else thinks. We've got to have revival. We've got to have a move of God. And we haven't had it by all our financial efforts and all our geniuses at evangelism, all the other things. We get so far that we put our hands on the ark. There's going to be a conference shortly. And I am not in any way troubled that I wasn't invited, but I know some of the godliest men in the world and they're not invited to that conference in Amsterdam. 2,500 itinerant evangelists. I guess that's why they'll get it. They say, well they're not itinerant evangelists. They're going to meet and they're going to go through a rigmarole again. Workshops, workshops, workshops. There's a workshop for this and there's a workshop for that. The hardest work in the whole world is prayer. Do they have workshops on prayer? No. The ark is falling. We're going to study it. We've got a new idea. Every magazine I pick up now, Christian magazine, is how to make your church grow. I'm looking for one that says how to take your church deeper. Somebody said to a preacher, you've got the biggest church in. How big is your church? He said three miles wide and an inch deep. I think that's true of a lot of them. Three miles wide and an inch deep. And while it's humorous, it's tragic. Are we going to change the style? Are we going to keep studying the ark? Are we going to say, no, no, no, we're not going any further like this. This old cart you've got it on with, new cart, we're taking it off. We're going to do it God's way. And it looks silly to carry it on your shoulders. It looks silly to walk around when you can mechanize the thing, or organize the thing, or paint it up, or make it more attractive. How can you make God's presence more attractive? That's about the height of insanity. Isn't God himself and his holiness attractive? For some reason, I don't know why I thought about Westminster Abbey, they recently redecorated it. Oh, they climbed up there and they put pure gold leaf. It's worth millions of dollars now. I don't think God ever enters the place to tell you the truth. You know, the less of the glory of God we have, the more showmanship we need inside. A fancy, good-looking choir with marvelous robes on, lovely church building, everything. And the more we get of that, it seems as though God says, I don't dwell in temples made with hands, I'm not comfortable here anyhow. You know what we need to do? We need to do what David did. We need to take all the implements, we need to take the cart and break it up, and we need to get hold of the bullets and chop them up, and have one big Holy Ghost bonfire and say, Lord God, I'm going to live on the stretch for you from now till I die, whether I die tomorrow or 10 years from now, I'm going to meet with you as I've never met with you before. I'm going on the stretch for God as I've never been on the stretch before.