Attributes of God (Series 2): God's Infinite Mercy — A.W. Tozer

God's Mercy Revealed in Psalm 103

In the book of Psalms, Psalm 103, verse 8, the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.

For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.

For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust. The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children. Now let's offer a moment of prayer.

Now Lord, thou knowest that we are here only because these things have been said and are true of thee. And we feel this evening that we are neither worthy to talk about this before whose presence, before the mystery of which angels stand in wonder.

God's Name as Merciful and Gracious

Neither are we worthy to hear. O Lord, deal with us tonight, not according to our deserts, but according to thine infinite mercy, by the Holy Ghost, for Christ's sake, amen. When Moses wanted to see God's glory, the Lord told him, if he died in the rock, to cover him with his hand, and he would reveal the glory of God to him.

So the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. Now, what was that name of the Lord which was being proclaimed? The Lord passed by him and proclaimed and said, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and truth.

The name of the Lord, the nature of God, is mercy, grace, longsuffering, goodness and truth. And when they were dedicating the temple, it came to pass that trumpeters and the singers were as one to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord.

And they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music and praised the Lord, saying, For he is good, for his mercy endureth forever. And it was then that the house of the Lord was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud.

For the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God. Many centuries later, Jeremiah, grieving and lamenting over the fall of Israel, said, It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.

Things were bad, but Jeremiah believed that if it hadn't been for the mercy of God, God would have consumed them like leaves. Ezekiel says, as I live, he quotes God as saying, As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

When Ashman is condemned as he will be, for political reasons probably not sent to death, but if he should be sent to death, there will be one who will have no pleasure in his dying. That would be the God whom he so grievously and deeply wounded when he sent to the gas chambers six millions of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

No human tongue, no order, no human speech can describe the depths of the heinousness of the iniquity of the man, but says, God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. No matter how much the wicked deserves it, God takes no pleasure in any man's dying, particularly when he is wicked.

Mercy as an Attribute of God's Being

Blessed be God, said Paul, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. He is the Father of mercies, and he is the God of all comfort. In the Old Testament it says that he makes all our bed in our sickness.

And James says, you have heard of the patience of Job when you have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful. If he had said, the Lord is pitiful, we would have settled for that, because being pitiful is being the Lord who is pitiful, and he has to be infinitely pitiful.

But in his rush of feeling about it, James sets a candle to the sun and paints the lily and puts the word very before the word pitiful and says, he is very pitiful and he is of tender mercy. And Peter explains why wicked men are not destroyed.

He says, The Lord is not slack concerning his promises, some men count slackness. But he is longsuffering to us, we are not willing that any should perish, but desiring that all should come to repentance.

Now those are a few stanzas, or a few verses really, they are stanzas because you could sing them. But there are a few verses from the scriptures telling us that God is a merciful God. And mercy is an attribute of God, it is something God is, it is not something God has.

I have explained that, I hope, a number of times and sufficiently, that if mercy was something God had, God might lose it. If it was something that God had, it might diminish or cease to be. But mercy is something that God is, it is a facet of God's unitary being.

It is like a diamond, if you could imagine a great diamond cut with many shining facets all around it, it is all one, but there are a thousand facets we can imagine cut by the lapidary and catching the rays of the light and flashing them in a hundred and a thousand directions.

So God is one and all one, and one facet of God's character then is mercy. That's what God is, I say, not what he has. God has mercy, but he has mercy because he is merciful. Now both the Old Testament and the New declare the mercy of God.

But here is an odd thing, that the Old Testament has more than four times as much to say about mercy as the New Testament. That is, I say, an odd thing. It's not odd, except that it's odd seen against a background of error which we have been taught most of our lives.

We have been taught that the Old Testament is a book of law, and the New Testament the book of grace, the Old Testament is a book of judgment, and the New Testament the book of mercy. But the God of the Old Testament is a God of thunder and judgment, and the God of the New Testament is a God of meekness and mercy.

But the truth is, there is more than four times as much said about mercy in the Old Testament as there is in the New. And of course if God is merciful at all, then God's mercy must be perfect, it must be infinitely perfect.

God's Goodness Expressed as Active Mercy

Now, I'll have to lap back a little on what I said one other night, that the goodness of God is the source of mercy. I preached on the goodness of God, for it's not the same as the mercy of God, but it's the source of the goodness, and we've got to think now as men and use the language of men.

God's infinite goodness is that in God which desires his creatures' happiness. It is that in God which is an irresistible urge to bestow blessedness. It's that in God which takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

It is that in God which does take pleasure in the pleasure of his people. It is that in God which suffers along with his friends and grieves over his foes. It is that in God which we call mercy, which looks with compassion upon men who are in need of judgment.

Now, mercy, according to the Old Testament meaning, is to stoop in kindness to an inferior. It's to have pity upon, and it is to be actively compassionate. You notice how I use the word active and actively so much?

And I don't like the word passive and passivity and passively, the various forms of the word passive. And the mercy of God is not a passive thing. The mercy of God is an active thing. God is compassionate, but he's actively compassionate.

I remember hearing a story a long time ago about an old Jew who was driving a junk wagon on the street, and the poor old horse had seen his better days. In fact, he'd seen all of his days. And he was swayed back to null and miserable looking and underfed, and he collapsed and fell in the shalves, and when they went over, they found the old boy had passed in his checks.

He was lying there dead, and the old Jew was standing there, a picture of grief. That was his only living, his poor little old wagon and the old horse. And the people gathered around. One said, Oh, I'm so sorry.

And another said, I'm so sorry. Another went over and said, Mr. Katz, I'm so sorry. And one fellow, it sounds as if he might have been Irish, I don't know, but it sounds like an Irishman. He walked over, took off his hat and said, I'm five dollars worth of sorry.

How sorry are you? And he passed the hat and got him money to buy another horse. And that's the only kind of sorriness that I believe in. I believe in that sorriness that will pass the hat and first put your own offering in.

The sorriness that will do something about it. Grieving over the sins of the world is not going to help the world very much. God is not that kind of God. His mercy is active, not passive. He has pity upon, but he has active pity upon.

He stoops in kindness to his inferiors. Now I'd like to give you some facts about the mercy of God as they revealed in the scripture. That the mercy of God never began to be, never, never began to be.

The Eternal and Unchanging Mercy of God

If you go down to the delta of the Mississippi, you'll see a great river so wide that you have to, you'll have to, I rode across a whole train, we pulled a whole train onto a barge and went across the river on the barge and that was way up at Vicksburg, way upriver from the delta.

And if you went on down the delta, you would find the river so wide, I don't know how wide, but so wide. And yet if you were to just get in that river and paddle a canoe north and keep on paddling north and keep on paddling north, you'd get to a place where you could toss a pebble across it.

And I've been there, where you could toss a pebble across it, way up in northern Minnesota. For the Mississippi has her beginnings as a little stream that a cow can wade in and drink, way in northern Minnesota.

It has its beginning, the great broad river of the Mississippi has its source way up there somewhere. But you must never think of God's mercy as being originating somewhere and flowing out. It never began to be, because it's an attribute of the uncreated God, therefore it always was and it has never been any more than it is now.

Sometimes we think that one time back there in the past, God was very wonderfully merciful, that he walked in the garden with Adam and he walked with Enoch, and Enoch was not because God took him. And when we read the Bible stories of God's pity, we say, God must have been wonderfully pitiful back there, but that was before the day of gas chambers and brutalities and pogroms and all the rest of these things.

God isn't as merciful any more. My brother, to say that is to malign the name of God, because God is as merciful now as he ever was. Because being infinitely merciful, he never can be any more merciful than he is now.

So he never was any more merciful than he is now. The God who caused Noah, asked Noah, told Noah to build the ark and thus save the race is the same God with whom we have to do now in Toronto, 1961, in another part of the world.

But there is something else too that I'd like to say, that God will never be any less merciful than he is now, because being infinite he can't cease to be infinite, and being perfect he cannot admit an imperfection.

And so the mercy of God is what it is because God is who he is, and it isn't affected by anything anybody does. So many of the preachers and evangelists tell jerk-water stories, you know, tear-jerkers.

They want the stream of mercy to flow out of the human eye and think that if we cry on us that the Lord will have mercy upon it. My brother, God will have mercy upon you if your heart is as hard as a stone.

If you never weep over your iniquity, God is still a merciful God. He can't be anything else but a merciful God. And though everybody in the world tonight turned atheist and every human being turned beast and all the world turned into devils, it wouldn't change the mercy of God in the slightest.

God would still be as merciful as he is now. And if Christ were to die a hundred times on the cross, it wouldn't make God any more merciful than he is now, because God is as merciful as mercy can be, being God, and he'll never be less merciful being God.

And so nothing that occurs can increase or diminish or alter the quality of God's mercy. The cross didn't increase the mercy of God. Let's keep our theology straight. Let's remember we ought to be good, sound Bible readers and we ought to have our theology right.

Mercy Leading to Calvary and the Atonement

Let us remember that the mercy of God did not begin at Calvary. The mercy of God led to Calvary. It was because God was merciful that Christ died on the cross. And Christ did not die on the cross in order to make God merciful.

God was already merciful and that's why Christ died. It was the mercy of God that brought Jesus down here. It was God, it was his mercy. And when he came down, he came down and died because he was already as merciful as it's possible for mercy to be, God being mercy and being the source of all the mercy and the father of mercies and the God of all comforts, so that nothing can make God any more merciful.

Let us not imagine falsely that Jesus Christ, our Lord, is up before the throne of an angry-faced God pleading for his people. No, he's pleading all right and he's praying there and he's making intercession there, but the God to whom he's making intercession is just as merciful now, no more and no less, than before his son died on the cross.

So the cross did not make the mercy of God any more merciful, nor the quality of that mercy any more perfect, nor the amount of that mercy any more. Neither does the intercession of Christ. Now let's notice that the mercy of God operates in a certain way.

I said a couple of Sundays ago that judgment is God's infinite justice confronting moral inequity. Whenever there is inequality, whenever there is immorality of any kind, of any sort, jealousy or any kind of immorality, for remember that that which is not moral is immoral.

We have one sin and we call that immorality. All sin is immorality, my brother, in that it is not morality. And that jealous cat expression that you use about somebody, that's immorality. And that trimming on your income tax, that's immorality.

And that losing your temper and bawling out your husband, that's immorality. And everything we do that's wrong is immorality. And immorality is inequality, injustice, that which is not just and right and level.

Tonight I say, I said that judgment is God's justice confronting moral inequity. Tonight I say that mercy is God's goodness confronting human guilt and suffering. And all men are recipients of God's mercy.

We think that we're not, but we are. There isn't an atheist on the continent, but what's the recipient of God's mercy right now? I said this morning that I thank God it was raining rain and not fire. And if God should let his justice loose without mercy, God could justly rain fire on the North American continent.

Oh, we're proud of ourselves, we are here on this continent. We're proud of ourselves, we got so much, but we live such lives in comparison with what we should live, that if justice had its way unrestrained and without mercy, God would rain fire from the Rio Grande to Hudson Bay.

But all men are recipients of the mercy of God. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and mercy postpones the execution. Justice and judgment are God's justice confronting inequity, but God's mercy spares us and postpones the execution.

For he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Now, we got to notice this one thing, and this distinguishes Christians from all other people in the world or in the universe, and it is that mercy can't cancel apart from atonement.

When justice sees iniquity, death is the sentence meted out. But mercy brought Christ to the cross, and now justice and mercy see righteousness instead of iniquity. When the just God looks down upon a sinner who has been covered by the atoning merits of Jesus' blood, he sees not a sinner any more, but a justified man.

That's the doctrine of justification by faith, the very bulwark of Protestantism, and one of the great cornerstones of the Church and of the epistles of Paul. Now, when we see it like this, then we wonder about one thing, the perfections of God and the unitaric nature of his being, and the oneness of all his attributes, and God's infinity and perfection.

The Mystery of Christ's Suffering and Atonement

We wonder about God's suffering, for God can suffer, and how he can suffer is a deep mystery to me, and a mystery I would suppose to any Christian thinker, since God is perfect and self-contained and self-sufficient.

I wonder, then, how God can suffer, for God does suffer. He sent his Son to suffer, and so I can only say, by paraphrasing the language of Faber, and use it and read it like this, how thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God thou art, is darkness to my intellect, but sunshine to my heart.

Now, my brother, the least important thing about use your head, now, I'd just like to tell you that tonight, and I hope you won't be offended by it, but the least important thing about use your head, God gave you a head and he wants you to use your head.

I've used mine, I've used mine quite a little in my time, and some think I overuse it. But I would like to say this to you, that's the least, least important thing about you. To use your head is all right, it's all right to have a hat on and keep your glasses in place, and it's otherwise useful, I suppose, but let me tell you that that which is darkness to your intellect can become sunshine to your heart.

And there's that in my head which knows nothing, and that in my heart which knows all. For we all know, says Paul, and ye know the mind of Christ. The unsaved man, says Paul, knows little, knows nothing, as he ought to know, but we know the mind of Christ.

And so I go about a man utterly ignorant and yet completely happy, because there's sunshine in my heart. I know, I know that justice hath sentenced me to death, I know it. The soul that's in it shall die, and I know that I should die, and I know that hell should swallow me up.

But I also know that one dark morning when the sun refused to shine, a man bearing my image and lineaments and bodily form and bearing in his veins my blood and your blood, human blood, and carrying out to the cross a body that was a human body, I know that he went out there and in darkness did something, and I don't know what he did.

I don't know what he did, and I'm afraid of the man who's too pat about the atonement. I'm afraid of the man who can explain it too well, for surely it was the mystery of godliness. Surely what he did can never enter the mind of man.

Surely what he did that awful dark morning when it became as dark as a thousand midnights in a cypress swamp, Jesus Christ our Lord, who being the infinite God and being also man and joining man and God in atoning death and resurrection, he did in that awful hour something that he never can explain.

And Peter, God bless him, who had thought about it as much as you and me, and had lived with Jesus three years, and saw him go out to die and saw him after he was dead and after he had risen from the dead, this Peter said in odd language that angels desire to look into these things.

The angels above desire to know about it. I don't know about that atonement, I don't know what he did, but I know that whatever he did satisfied the heart of God forever. I know that whatever he did turned my iniquity into righteousness, it turned my inequity into equity, and it turned the sentence of death into a judgment of life.

I know it did that, I know it did that. So I can only stand before him and say how thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God thou art. It is darkness to my intellect, but it is sunshine to my heart.

So don't ask your head about it. If you can't think it out, get on your knees and say, Thou knowest, O my Lord and my God. Maybe someday in that bright tomorrow, when we know as we are known, and this poor, this poor be muddled head of ours is suddenly glorified and made like his, who died for us, and maybe with clearer eye and brighter vision we'll look upon the wonder of atonement and know what it meant.

But if we don't now, then we never can know. Not the Augustians and the Anselms and the Hodges and the Youngs and the Strongs and the Calvins, none of them can explain it. They can only stand before him and say he gave himself just for the unjust that he might bring us to God.

And when we've said that, we've said it. When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count it loss and poor contempt on all my pride. And I am rather happy to know, and I don't understand the mystery of it, but I know the joy and the sunshine of its effects upon me and my friends and those who know God.

God's Nearness and Compassion as a Father

You know, I'd like to add a little word about the nearness of God in mercy. As a father pities his children, as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear him. A father pities his children, it doesn't say a mother.

A mother pities, it takes that for granted. But as a father pities his children, and you know fathers pity their children a whole lot more than they get credit for, but they've been brought up from the time they were three years old to think that it was weak to shed a tear or to act touched in any way, or sympathetic.

So we men, we go around a lifetime behind a mask of sternness. Once during the Second World War, I was traveling across the continent from Chicago to, where was it, one of the western, one of the west coast cities, on a train that was packed, of course, they always were, everywhere.

And there was a sailor, he was a shore patrol, one of those cops, you know, with a band on his arm. It was his business to keep order. And he was the meanest looking fellow I think I ever saw, nearly the meanest looking fellow.

He wasn't very big, but brother, did he look tough. He looked tougher than a fighting rooster. And he'd look sternly at the other soldiers, sailors, he had nothing to do with soldiers, sailors. And we stopped once, and we got off, and one sailor stepped down off, stepped off, and as soon as he stepped on the platform, this fellow said, back on the train, you're not in uniform.

And all he had, he had his hat and his tie. He said, you're not in uniform. He got back on, he was walking up and down the aisle, he was looking, bring him on, let him in, I want to eat him up, you know, tough as could be.

And out from one of the seats came a little doll of a baby girl, curly haired, you know, and shining eyes, and she didn't know a big tough cop from anybody else. And she went smiling up the aisle. His face was hard as a bone, but when he came to her, he reached over, patted her little curly head three or four times, and went on his way.

And some woman ahead of me burst out roaring with laughter. She said, I knew he was a phony, I knew he was a phony, said I knew it, that he was just trying to be tough. But as soon as they saw the baby melted up and patted her curly head.

And we men have been taught to know that it's just not manly to be tender. But God, who knows people, said as a father pities his children. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear him.

During the great famine in Europe after the First World War, when Herbert Hoover was then, I don't remember what they called him, but it was his job to coordinate all the giving of Europe and Canada and the United States and all, and get it to the poor there in Europe.

It was only the orphans, only the orphans that could get any help at all. And this, they told this in the newspapers, I read it, that a man had come in leading a little girl. He was very pale and thin, and looked as if he was sick and weak, and was leading his little girl.

And he said, I'd like to have my little girl enrolled, that she might have food. She looked sick too. And they said to him, well, we're sorry, but it's just not possible. Our funds are limited, and there are so many full orphans that we can't give any help to a half-orphan.

But he said, the mother is dead. She died in the war. Yes, but they said, you're alive. Yes, but he said, I can't work. I'm sick. I can't work. And they said, well, but it's technically impossible for us to enroll your little girl.

If she had no father, it would be different. He said, you mean if she had no father, you would enroll my little girl so that she could eat and not starve? And they said, yes, if she had no father, she has no mother, and if she had no father, if you were dead, we would take her.

And he put her hand in the hand of the officer and straightened up with great dignity, and said, sir, it can be arranged, and walked out to suicide, that he might leave his little girl a legacy that he couldn't give her while he lived.

Now, I don't know about suicide, but I do know that there was compassion and there was pity, and God is the Father of all mercy and all compassion, and though fallen and lost, all pity and all compassion come from God.

God is near to us in his mercy. Where high the heavenly temple stands, the house of God not made with hands, a great high priest our nature wears, the guardian of mankind appears. Though now ascended up on high, he bends on earth a brother's eye, partaker of our human frame, he knows human name, he knows the frailty of our frame.

Our fellow sufferer yet retains a fellow feeling for our pains and still remembers in the skies his tears, his agonies and cries. That man who walked the humble, lowly ways of earth and lived with common, plain and sometimes poor people, and himself at one place had nowhere to lay his head, in every pain that rends the heart the man of sorrows has a part, he sympathizes with our griefs and to the sufferer sends relief.

Mercy's Open Door for Every People

The mercy of God is more than theological doctrine to me, the mercy of God is my life and my breath, I breathe it. The mercy of God, that God is compassionate, that he stoops to pity and have mercy upon his people.

We used to sing a song, there is a gate that stands ajar and from through its portals gleaming a radiance from the cross of fire, the Savior's love revealing, oh, depths of mercy can it be that gate was left ajar for me.

That gate ajar stands free for all who seek through its salvation, the rich, the poor, the great, the small of every tribe and nation. Oh, the patronizing attitude we take toward people of other colors and people who haven't advanced in what we call civilization so far, as far as we have.

What a patronizing attitude we take. We say of people like Olga Donel, how wonderful, how noble, that you leave your fine, modern Canadian home and go to the naked, dirty, smelly islands. Oh, God doesn't see it like that, friends.

In the heart of God and in the eyes of God there is no distinction between a polished, cultured, clipped-speeched Canadian in a Cadillac and a naked Islander. He sees us all the same. That gate ajar stands free for all who seek through its salvation, the rich, the poor, the great, the small of every tribe and nation.

Brother, there is that in us which is neither old nor young, rich nor poor, great nor small, educated nor uneducated. There is that in us which is neither Caucasian nor Oriental. There is that in us which is not Anglo-Saxon nor Latin.

There is that in us which is not white nor black. There is that in us which is just human, just human, and it is the human we that Christ died for. He died for the human us. He died for us in our humanity.

You can polish and polish, but it is the same we, the same us. And so the rich, the poor, the great, the small of every tribe and nation. That gate stands ajar, and it is there tonight, and it is wide open, it is wide open.

The Prodigal Son and the Father's Welcome

Jesus told that story in order to illustrate it, that story of the man who had two sons. You know it too well for me to repeat it tonight. When that boy had spent all and had come to himself and seen what a fool he was, and found himself in filth and dirt among the swine, he said, I'll arise and go back to my father.

And all justice would have had the door closed and the light out, and all justice would have said, he left of his own accord, let him stay. I told the story of the prodigal son to a little boy whose mother was dead and who was being reared by a father who later committed suicide in bed, and let the little boy find him dead.

And I said to that little half-grown lad, I was teaching a Sunday school class, I said, Jerry, what would you, I made this mistake, don't do this, I made this mistake, I assumed that he had a good father.

And I said, I told about the prodigal son, and how when the prodigal came back the father received him, and I said, what would your father have done? He said, he'd have kicked me out. He knew his father, but he didn't know our father.

But he never kicked anybody out yet, and that's why Jesus told that wondrous story. He ran to meet him, threw his arms around him, loved him clean, put a ring on his finger, the seal of repentance, and then sent out a hasty word, kill that fatted calf.

Every day he'd gone out there and fed that calf, every day. And that calf was all round and fat and slick and shiny. He didn't know what he was being treated so wonderfully well for, but deep in the heart of that father he knew, oh, it's just a calf, he said, one little tap on the head and his pains are over, but oh, my boy's got eternity to live.

So they killed that fatted calf, and they had a great big feast, and there was dancing and music and song, and the hero of the feast, who was it? The hero of the feast should have been the father, but the hero of the feast was the boy.

He was the boy because the father insisted that it be the boy. I have a coming-home party from a boy. This, my son, was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. Found himself, you remember, when he came to himself.

Found himself. And the Lord found him, and he came back. I wish you'd see this. I don't know, I feel foolish standing up here talking about it, really. But I wish that you'd see this, how approachable the mercy of God is, how accessible it is, and how completely gracious God is, and how God has no pleasure in the death of anybody, particularly the wicked.

And he's the father of mercies, and he's very pitiful and full of tender mercy, and he's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Don't we have a message to tell the world?

Proclaiming the Message of Mercy and Salvation

Don't we have a witness to give the world? Should we go to the world and ask them what to tell the world again? Should we send our preachers to the schools to be taught what to tell the world? No, we're sent to tell the world that which they'd never hear if we didn't tell them.

You don't learn in universities what we're sent to tell the world. We're sent to tell the world that God is merciful and gracious and slow to anger and full of loving kindness. And he sent his Son to die, so there's a door open, and it's a door of mercy, and it's open wide for us.

We tell the world this, and keep telling the world this, until some here and some there and one here and one there and two here and one over there and three over yonder will hear it and will come home, and then the bells of heaven will ring.

That's our message we go tell the world that. We don't go to the world and say, Now, what would you like to hear? We go to the world with a message that says, Thus saith God, this is the kind of God we have.

This is our God. And whether the Church is revived or not revived, this is our God. And whether we're living in an age of rockets and space or whether we're living in the day of the horse and buggy, this is the way our God is.

We're out to tell you, Come home, come home, because our God waits to receive you. And I'd just like to add this one little word to any who may be backslidden. I don't like the word, but there are people who backslide, there are those who turn back and lose their first love and their joy, and I'd like to say to you that he still remembers in the skies his tears, his agonies and cries.

And he pities you and wants you back home, and the door is open and has never been closed and it will never be closed, while Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father. What about it tonight? Oh, the mercy of God.