Dead Orthodoxy and How God Brings Men to Salvation — Rolfe Barnard

Wonderful, and you're taking care of the visitor, and you're stepping aside and bragging on the great teammate, Les Smith, to himself, but he brags only to you, and that's good, and I appreciate it very, very much.

Dead Orthodoxy and the Need for Revival

I share with you every child of God that's here tonight. I share with you the shame, the distress of soul, the heartache, that the empathy in the house of God now is terrible. I'm not satisfied with empathy, are you?

I'm not sounding a low note, but I don't want us to get used to defeat. I want us to claim victory, and I want us to press for it. I picked up a book some time ago, written by my friend, a preacher of the Holiness group of Scotland and Britain, Leonard Ravenhill.

I've had the joy of getting personal acquaintance with him. He's doing some provocative writings now, and calling mourners, and in one of his little books, he made this statement, and I've been under conviction about it.

It haunted me. He said, some of these days, a simple child of God is going to pick up the Word of God and read it and believe it, and when that person does, he'll make the rest of us ashamed about it.

You get it? One of these days, some simple child of God is going to pick up God's Word and not try to understand it, not try to get it all together, not to harmonize all the doctrine, not to square everything by your pet doctrine, but he's just going to read it and believe it.

And if one of us could get converted, some of his little children, just where we can't understand it, we'll just worship it. It'll set us on fire. If there's any crowd of people under God's time, believe that all of the effects of the Bible are the result of dead Orthodoxy.

They say they believe the Bible in their head, but it doesn't control our tear ducts, our prayer lines. The thing this side of hell, the fellow that's Orthodox in his head, wants to get excited about the Lord.

I believe we ought to cross swords with every enemy of the gospel, across the path of the gospel, but revival would be people excited about the Lord. In every one of the other battles, brother Bristol knows he's fighting a losing cause.

I rejoice in what the Lord's doing for us, but he's going to lose. He knows it. That's none of our business. This thing's gone. I'm not going to say it's America, God's going to judge us. He's got that much time.

There's not enough Christians in this country to control the politics of this land. It's gone. The church is going underground, hallelujah. When we get there, we'll learn how to pray, learn how to weep, and then we'll see victory, isn't it?

There's any way on earth we could generate, not put on some excitement about the Lord. We've got nothing to apologize for if we're knowing God's answer. All the wisest men put his son on the throne where men can't get to him and turn the world over to him.

We ought to have a holy bonus. It's time we quit apologizing for being believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Work up our zeal. The most exciting thing in this world is still the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm trying to encourage you to get excited and to begin to put your money where your mouth is, in the witness, and to begin to feel Birmingham full of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Talking about everything else now, I told you, but the hour has arrived, and I rejoice in it. If you believe what your young pastor preaches, why don't you get on fire about it? You know what it is to be a nice little Orthodox Calvinist.

You know what it is to weep. How long, Benson? See the scriptures teach God's people to break up the fallow ground in their own hearts, and yours looks to me like it could stand a good deal of cloud. Have you learned yet that this world don't give a hoot that you are Orthodox?

Have you learned yet this world isn't interested in what you believe? They don't. It's a day of demonstration. Television has changed the whole advertising world. They don't tell you now, they show you.

Now is the time to put in the tears. Well, brother, get something you believe in. Believe in it all over. Limerick, when I was a boy, had a little dog whose name was Rover. When he died, he died all over.

For God's sake, get excited. You're the nicest little people in the heart of the place. Get excited. If you can't get excited about the Lord, join the Communist Party. Get excited about burying America.

Get excited about something. None to God. I'm talking to you. Amen? And let's open our mouths. Are you mad at me? Do you think that this world is going to be won by truth? It has to be saturated in tears.

And in blood. Your blood and mine. And in the power of the Holy Ghost. Do you weep over lost men? Do you, sister? Or are you one of these nice Orthodox people? If you don't weep because of the way the claims of my Lord are despised, then you need to pay a little attention to the Scripture.

To afflict your mind more. And to break up the solid ground in your heart. I want you to get excited. Save America, which we ain't going to do. I went to hell to see a bad plot. He turned it a lot longer.

In a few little days, he got left there on his own. Get excited. I was up in Pennsylvania. I'm going to spend a little time trying to encourage. I'm not standing on the outside throwing stones. Cute, nice people.

I go from place to place. And you've got your doctrine for this place. And you're here holy as ice. And you have no passion for the soul. You're afraid you're going to be unorthodox. You're going to let your own kinfolk go to hell.

Don't be afraid to make a theological mistake. I made one 31 years ago. I haven't made any sense. But I lived over it. I'm trying to say that what we say we believe, we get to where we believe it all over.

It's the greatest thing, or it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, that we should get excited about. I wish the people could note excitement and passion and urgency and tears in our voices as we plead with men to be reconciled along them since you've pled.

I mean pled like a lawyer pleading to get his fine acquitted. You've pled with them to be reconciled to the Lord. Huh? Is that good scripture? He said you Paul said. He's a crob of it. We plead with you.

Urgent Pleading for Reconciliation to God

This is urgent. We need it. We beg you in Christ. Some of these folks think you'd get that old sinner Satan out on his doctrine and he'd go to heaven. No, he'd just learn the doctrine and go on to hell.

Ah, let's get excited. I had a happy letter today. I got back home Thursday and left Friday at noon to come up here. And I had a letter waiting for me from Pennsylvania. I don't take this time. I ain't got nothing to preach about tonight, anyhow.

I don't spill these feet. And I want Mr. Wet Eyes to start coming back to the Minor Heights. I said, well, what happened to Brother Wet Eyes? He said, amen. Doctrine says it's cool enough. Somebody said, long Mr. Wet Eyes.

He said, amen. Don't come to church. We're not going to have doctors. I didn't mean hard. I said melt like my Lord. I got this letter. I've been up in Pennsylvania. And they put down all the messages on tape.

And now they've got a stenographer and they're taking all the messages down on tape and they're mimeographing them. And they're saying they're going to put one in the hands of everybody in that city, the 170 ,000 people.

They're taking the tape and making copies of them and going into unsaved homes and asking people if they'll let them play a sermon for them. And they're beginning to believe what they say they believe.

If you believed it, brother, you'd want everybody together. I was in, I tell you, you folks been sitting, you know, and your family and all, and you knew, you remind me of old cows. When I was a boy, we had this uranium, this awful rich stuff that fed the cows, mixed with cotton seed.

And old cows broke in the crib one day and ate about a half a bushel of that high-fat stuff. She was sick for three years. You see, what truth you keep for yourself, you will lose. You've got to build a fire.

I left here a fire burning. Got to start somebody's fire. And then it'll spread. And we'll get excited about our Lord and what God turned over to us and the issues involved and the gift he has in his hands.

We'll get excited about it and we'll begin to have a note of urgency and compassion and God's helpless agony in our voices as a membership of our churches with no Christ throughout from the house of God to witness a good confession and to plead with men and women whose paths they cross in the name of their eternity down, so please, I beg you.

You see good to that? My Lord, did all day long have I stretched out my hands to a disobedience and came saying, people, you're not too good. Stretch out your hands and beg, send it up, up, up. That's the spirit of Christ.

Let's fill mine a height full of tears and urgency and compassion. Break up the solid ground, you heart, sister. That's the way you can weep over souls. You can't weep over them, you can't win them, I'll tell you that.

The Danger of Religious Experience Without Salvation

I want to talk to you a little while tonight from the 107th Psalm and I frankly am going to preach tonight so I can preach tomorrow night. God willing, tomorrow night I want to speak on how God gets men lost.

How God gets men lost. The message tomorrow night breaks my heart every time I speak along that line for I share a crushed and broken heart for the Christians, for the preachers of America and for my own heart in lying to sinners.

I charge that we build America just full of church people who are not hypocrites but they do not know my Lord. And it's almost impossible to see anybody saved if they've ever had some kind of religious experience and made some sort of suspicions or been around some sort of decision.

Chances are they'll go to hell drinking water at that empty cistern and thinking they've been satisfied. And I do not preach down to brother preachers that usually are passionate and get on them own as they speak.

Not only have we told this generation the truth about them, not only have we preached the gospel to this generation. When I first started out to preach a great crowd was getting littler all the time. Everybody was tired up as far as I could see.

We'd all like to go to heaven but we just ain't got time. I think most of us are going to wind up in hell because we're so busy killing ourselves, paying for our luxuries that Mom and Papa never heard of.

And we're just going to have to go to hell because we ain't got time to preach God. Our employers own us, and the school teachers own us, and somebody else owns us. If the picture says we'll enter the kingdom through much tribulation, that's exactly what it says.

It may be that a new note needs to be founded to tell people the awful truth about them. For that reason I flip up on the subject tonight and I just have one purpose in mind in speaking as I do tonight and that's to encourage and beg you after everything else I've asked you tonight to be in grave agony in a session.

For the preacher, in order to tell men the truth about themselves, they'll never be interested in the truth about Christ if they've not faced with the truth about themselves. And they'll never become speakers after the Lord will face them with the truth about themselves.

I've preached all my life for generations where we thought that we could get people saved by keeping the truth from them. Now we've got a monstrosity. I want to encourage you to be in agony of prayer.

Prayerlessness as a Mark of Spiritual Death

That's what I'm going to preach for us tonight. With your Bibles open, will you turn to the 107th Psalm? May I see. I think maybe you've got Bibles, haven't you? Would you mind listening? I'd be very happy if you shared it with that person next to you.

For tonight we're going to be largely reading the Scripture. And what I have in mind now may fail, but ladies and gentlemen, you've got to listen to me. A sure mark of spiritual death is prayerlessness.

And if that's the truth, I'm scared to death about church people. That's a mark of death. If the very life of Christianity is one brave, leaping out after and seeking out after the Lord, that's our life pursuit.

And that's what prayer is. I want to talk to you a little while tonight to encourage you to quit the prayer. If we've just got two weapons, the proclamation of the Word. That's not simply the proclamation of truth from this pulpit, but the proclamation of truth from this pulpit and from your lips.

Amen? And prayer. I want you to notice how God is bringing men to salvation tonight from the 107th Psalm, verse 3, verses. I trust this is very familiar to you. And I want to give you an outline. Verse 1 of 107th Psalm speaks of the work of God the Father in the salvation of sinners.

Now you who study the Bible much will understand that we are bringing an application, not an interpretation tonight, but the Scriptures will allow it. You could preach from this chapter that God will ever save a nation, which he's never done so far.

We go about saving that nation just exactly like he outlines in this psalm. If God ever were to save a church, make a power out of a church, save it from its deadness, and we are facing that now. Every godly pastor cries all the time inside over the deadness within our hearts.

Isn't that awful? Or if God saves an individual, we go about it exactly as outlined here in the 107th Psalm. Verse 1 speaks of the mercy of Almighty God. No one will ever be saved unless God Almighty makes him an object of his saving mercy.

We're in mystery here. You cannot understand it. Nobody needs to understand it. Nobody can understand it. But after you get saved, you'll naturally start tracing back where it came from and head right back to God.

Who gives thanks unto the Lord? The word endurance, if you have the authorized version before you, as I do, is in Italian. The school children can tell us what that means. It means it ought not to be there.

Is that right? And the men who translated this thought it would help the meeting, but it ruined it. I wish you would rejoice with me just a little bit before we get down to the burden that we have to face before we make a mockery out of setting aside days to try to get men under the influence of the gospel.

Just rejoice. Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for his mercy for us. In the providence of God there is a cross in the heart of God for us. Some people get afraid of some of the terminology of the Scripture.

If I tried to understand them, they'd scare me. But I don't try to understand them. I worship that. For instance, suppose I'd get somebody here that thinks he knows anything about the Bible and give you 15 hours to explain such an expression as from before the foundation of the world.

You couldn't do it to save your life. But to me it means that this installation isn't a happen-so or an aftermath or a second thought. It's forever in the heart of God. Or take the expression Jesus Christ was as a lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.

You understand that? All I can get out of it is that it is in the heart of God and still must be. Yet in time we had to go to the cross. But I can tell you now that the cross will never be erased. It's still at the center of the heart of God.

God's Mercy and Christ's Finished Work

And so is his mercy. I wish we wouldn't try to be theologians and we'd just rejoice in the wideness and the wonder and the glory of the mercy of God. I wish that it would thrill our hearts again and again and again that he shows mercy to us.

And I wish it would so thrill us and melt us and tenderize us if that's the good word, that we'd come up with this solution that if almighty God would set his affections on such a worm as I am, surely the wickedest sinner that ever arrived and wriggled his way to here need not be discouraged.

For as it should please God, he wouldn't have any trouble showing mercy on anybody else. And the reason I know it, I have felt being an object to this mercy in my own soul. And if he'd show mercy to me, there isn't a sinner in Birmingham too big for God.

I remember my seminary professor, I mean president, Dr. L .R. Scarborough. He was a man who couldn't read, over-stoked. God, to help you if you ever get where you came, you are terror, you are scourge, you are disgrace.

In the name of my sight, you can handle the grave truth of eternity without a tear in your heart. If you can talk to lost men and women, they cannot hear a tear and a tear and a heartache and a heartache and agony and urgency.

You need to pray, pray, pray and weep, weep, weep, that God will break your heart. And then break it again and keep on breaking it. And if you share some of the compassion with him, he'll look in awe of the multitude.

He'll burn with compassion in the seminary as he'll burn out his heart and let it bleed over them. Scarborough could weep. He told a story of when he was a pastor in his young days in Abilene, Texas. He preached one Sunday morning, came home and lying down flat on his back on the bed while his wife was preparing the Sunday noon meal, resting a little from the message.

And he says, this little six-year-old boy climbed up on the bed and straddled his stomach and was jumping up and down to help him relax, you know. And finally, the little boy said, Granny, I didn't believe what some school teachers had to say.

Dr. Scarborough said, You didn't. He said, No. And the preacher said, Well, Sonny, what did the teacher say that you didn't believe? Why, he said, You know, Daddy, the teacher told us about a big old fish swallowing a man by the name of John.

So that'll be worse. I don't believe there ever was a fish big enough to swallow a man. And the preacher said, He said to himself, Yeah, I got a rebellion in my own right. He said, Let's see what I can do about it.

Boy, he doubted. He racked my brain. He said, Well, Jimmy, there's a boy's name. He said, Suppose that God made the man and suppose that God made the fish. Don't you suppose that God could make a fish big enough to swallow a man?

And the little boy said, But now, Daddy, if you're going to bring God in it, that's different. Well, thank God that's where it is. God is in this. And what translation was humiliated by being born in a couch table and crucified in the most terrible death that the mind of man can conceive.

A man's grave ran perfumed in spices he couldn't taste. And now, he's been exorbitantly He's got something in his hands. He can give repentance to the vilest tenor of it and grant the knowledge of forgiveness to everybody.

It pleases him. My, if you ever soak your soul in that stupid ambidextrous devil's face and tell him to go back to hell, we're going to occupy some territory for this exalted Christ. And we can look out for the Redeemer.

Come in and come in. The grace of repentance and the gift of the forgiveness of sin. Because that's what he's raised for. He can show mercy to me. He wouldn't have any trouble showing mercy to somebody else.

The Holy Spirit's Work in Bringing Sinners to Salvation

Oh, ladies and gentlemen, what happens to the praise our Father knew about, the praise and the praise until the Lord, the catalog of the Bible, is taking the name of the Lord by God's own name. And if you disabuse yourself of the idea that that happened down in the garages and business places and on the streets where men did what they did, cursed.

No, no. That means to dare to stand up. Listen to me. To stand up in a hostile world. His name on you. Unless you've got a right to show her. If there's one thing you ought to be dead, look at me. I'm not my own.

I'm bought with a price. The apple of God's eye. I'm the object of his affection. I'm his magnificent obsession. I'm part of his inhelicence. His. Did the other came from the hands of the enemy. For a man of the faith becomes an object of the dying of my Lord.

One for whom the Holy Ghost rang the bell. Here's the most beautiful thing in this picture showing how the Holy Ghost gathers the objects of God's mercy, the objects of the working person of my Lord into the fold.

Have you ever read these lines? Let's read them. Then we'll go home. Verse four. Here's how the Holy Ghost works. These folks, the objects of God's mercy, these subjects, here's the Holy Ghost gathering them in.

How's he doing? Well, he brings them, as verse six says, in verse 13, we'll read them in a minute, in verse 19 and verse 28, four different times, he brings them in different ways, the Holy Ghost, using this means and that.

No two people ever have exactly the same spirit. You can't get your little recipe not as long as you're preaching a great gospel. I've had to fight for this. They say, well, our custom here is so-and-so, and I've actually had people come up to me and say, Brother Barney, you ought to give people a chance to be saved.

They mean by that that we ought to stand and sing a song and give what we call public invitation. People can't be saved unless you do that. And that's the poor people they've been taught that. But isn't that terrible?

The poor little old fellow like me has got to do something for a sinner. He's got a chance to be saved. That's serious. And yet we've had to battle it. Other people say, well, I tell you, I believe you've got to go to the mourners' base.

I'm not against any of these things. Any way on God's earth you can get into a living relationship where you touch the living Christ and P-O-W-E-R power, supernatural power, flow from a living Christ into your life and make you a brand-new, utterly different person.

Any way you can get that's all right with me. I ain't going to worry about which way you will go at it. I'm just simply saying that you can't get all fixed up and say, God's got to work this way. And here in this chapter he always brings a person to a certain place to be saved.

And that place, verse 6 tells us, the Holy Ghost, this is what I want you to see tonight, beloved. He brings people to the place of trouble. And he brings them into a place of such terrible trouble that they'll do what they'll never do.

Otherwise, they'll call on the Lord. We'll go back and see how he brought them in a minute. Then some things took place, you see. Then they cried unto the Lord in that trouble. Where you've got no way of getting out of it except to look up.

We don't, in mercy, deal with you that way. You're going to go to hell. It sure is off on you. In that trouble. God bless you. I wish you was a person working. I don't think you're a Christian unless you are.

But a misguided person working comes to that old boy in trouble and quotes him a verse of scripture and gives him assurance of salvation. And the boy goes to hell with the assurance.

The personal worker gave him. But does God ever change ya?

He's going to, by the work of the Spirit, using the means of God's grace, bring you to such terrible trouble.

You'll take nothing but the deliverance power of God for an answer. Nobody on God's earth will have to pump you up and assure you every six months that you're a Christian. Our Baptist churches have to have revival.

Every six months to get people to rededicate themselves. They'll never have experience in deliverance. And so, whether they say it or not, they're awful to God. So they'll have to get the backsliders to come back and get people to rededicate themselves.

I've been going up and down the land 37 years. Nearly every place I go at three, four nights, the people say, well, if what he's preaching's so, I don't know whether I'm saved or not. Well, God bless your heart.

I'm looking you straight in the face and telling you this. This ain't no make, this is damn stuff. Salvation is delivered from the spirit of this evil age. Salvation is delivered in that power into your life.

It wasn't that. I hope God'll get you in such trouble. You'll cry to him and you'll keep on crying until the experience in God's name don't go to hell and trust in the doctors. In God's name keep tugging at the coattails of the rest of the Lord until it is nailed to his hand.

He delivers you from deep guilt and burden of sin. Look how the Holy Spirit goes to work. That's how I want you to start praying around here and witnessing as you never have done before. Be an instrument in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

Individualized Conviction Rather Than a Fixed Conversion Formula

What does he do? Well, he begins to deal with men and he makes wanderers of them. They wandered in the wilderness in the solitaire ways. They had a revival meeting and they got converted. You see, this generation got converted but they never got acquainted with Christ.

They can tell you when they see but they don't know the Lord. We isolated, we separated salvation from Christ about 50 years ago and made salvation in the net. When people get salvation they never get Christ.

How about you? They wandered in the wilderness in the solitaire ways. They lied here but the Holy Spirit comes with a stick and punched them and tied them up. Then the next meeting they rededicated themselves and that made them feel good for a week or two but the Holy Ghost came and took all of that away and they started looking somewhere and changed churches.

This is some other different person. Gave a dime to the beggar. Did this and did that and did the other but praise God the Holy Spirit wouldn't let them alone. Praise Him. They couldn't find any place to lie.

They wandered in the wilderness in the solitaire ways and they could find no place to dwell in. No place for foundation. And they wandered and couldn't find any resting place until they were... They cried unto the Lord.

They trusted Brother Griswold. They said, how many of you folks want me to pray for you? And you lifted your hand. You trust old Brother Griswold's prayer and you go on home and go to sleep while he stays up all night and prays for you.

Trust anything on God's earth they won't look to the Lord. The Spirit was the truth at His disposal. He just routes you out and closes you out and you wander and you get hungry.

And when all hope is gone.

In the most glorious times I've ever had this side of eternity it went away and salvation been all kindness in His hands. And the Lord can form a life. You don't have supernatural power in your life. You're not in touch with the source of power.

That's the living Lord. Four times in this chapter He comes out in different directions but He brings people to the place of trouble. I pray as I go up and down the land Lord whittle us down church people we're not hungry they're hungry yet.

We'll still sleep well eat well live well while the power of God is still not on us. We're not there hungry yet. We're not there thirsty for a living God. Lord bring us maybe we'll see the day in America and the church we'll have to meet on the ground.

We'll start looking for Him. I just took a little ride in Dallas to fix Manhattan till I was getting into trouble they'll call on the Lord and that's where blessing's been all the time. He's got it. And isn't it great when the devil doesn't have to but he delivers.

Deliverance and the Praise of God's People

And I want to close by reading the verse seven and then I think one other verse. How's this do here for a picture of what it means to be a child of God. There's indeed trouble and they call and he delivers it.

He delivers it. How the laddy says it. And that in order he didn't question it. He turned them away. He led them that they might go to a city of happiness. So that men would praise the Lord for His goodness and for His wonderful works to the children of men.

And then saying into this next verse part two satisfy and fillet the hungry soul. I think I want you to turn to verse 29 and I'll teach you another and then tell you a story. Verse 28 He said they cried unto the Lord four times there.

He goes at men from different directions but he gets them in a place of trouble and then he delivers them. I want you to pray that men get in trouble. Amen. Huh? I got a right to ask this congregation.

If you haven't had the truth out you couldn't take that. There's no excuse for you not knowing the way God works. Oh, I got a right to ask you. To solve the truth down with your fears and insecurities.

God brings people to the end of themselves. You have to or nobody will ever call on you. Isn't that right? Do you believe that? For water is with tears and prayers. At thy mission no secret is hidden.

I want to read you this description of what it means to be a child of God. Verse 29 They're in deep trouble. He brings them out of distress and makes it a storm of calm. He does that so that the way leads their opposite.

Then are they glad because they be quiet. So he brings them to their desires. In that message it says come to the water, come to the flood, come to the fire and all to the blood. That they may come to their desires.

That's the message. Oh, will you stand and sing it gentle? Yeah. One more time we'll hear men calling on us. One more time we'll see Pentecost repeated and men screaming what must be. We mustn't settle for England.

I'm not pushing that God's people and kind and courage and faith should not be willing to settle. We owe it to this confused religiously cocaine generation that demonstrates that we can get the attention and air of all nations and that in our days men shall feel the need.