There Is a War Going On — Rolfe Barnard

I have the honor to be the evangelist of this church, have been for many years. Much interest is being placed these days on what a church is. And one characteristic of a New Testament church would be that it would have an evangelist.

But most of us don't. So I'm glad that every month I get a check from this church, just like a lot of missionaries in Africa or somewhere. And it helps me, and it helps them, and it helps your church if you would just quickly pick your text that you like and begin to pay attention to the book.

We've had a Bible with us quite a while, but we don't pay great attention to it. It's always a joy to be in this pulpit. We have a lot of Bibles here back in the old days. We've seen lots of water run under the bridges.

This is the 14th or 15th session of the first church, I guess, in America. We have an annual conference basically around the initial and foundational truth in the book of 1 Corinthians, chapter 2. I'm not the teacher this morning.

The Conference's Foundational Truth in 1 Corinthians 2

One of the most profound teachers on the God's earth, or on the God's sky, is Brother E. W. Johnson. What I do is he puts in that little paper. I get a lot of that stuff and work it over and fix it up so it's right.

But I can get one of his papers and preach a year from it, and what he preaches in one message. I don't know. I thank God for it. I've got that little one-eyed Jew over in Jerusalem, done this last week, made a statement on Aaron out of him.

I'm going to stand guard and hope that that little Jew doesn't come over and conquer America before he gets through this morning. But we've seen history in the last few days. I was a little bothered when Brother Johnson announced his text, down in Texas there was a Jackson Couple and these brethren there.

Last February we had a conference and had a fool preach there by the name of McDonnell. He preached there last year. He had three messages in the morning and three at night. I never got to religious and all.

I'll tell you what, in fact, anybody who hasn't got more sense than that ought to be shocked. I was the last speaker, the last time, and a certain preacher named LeMahan got up and announced my sermon.

I came with my message all prepared. I was going to preach on White Christ's side. Of course, I had an Orthodox sermon. It's just three points. That's all you can have. You're going to be Orthodox. This fool LeMahan got up and preached four points.

One of them down after the show. And I had picked out while he was popping off, you know, and get me another message. And I called him a thief publicly, and I said, I'll call you one day, Brother Johnson, except the fact that I'd come just for a word of let me read the first three, four verses of the first book of Corinthians.

And I sat there and said, maybe this will be a conference. I don't know whether we've had any like it or not, where only one thing is said. And the first speaker has certainly hit it right where it has in the face.

And if we could get one thing said and believed in our hearts and can't leave from public the practical practice, that would be a conference that God Almighty would be greatly pleased with. So I want to go a little bit with this tremendous Bible message as a background or a foundation to stand on, and I'll read verses 1 -5 of 1 Corinthians 2.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellence as teacher of wisdom, declaring, not explaining, but declaring, not debating, but declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I discerned not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness and fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and the power. In order that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of the best or the poorest, any kind, in the wisdom of men, in the power of God.

Christ's Sovereignty Challenged in a Lawless Age

This is a day, a clear day. His challenge concerning his sovereignty and power. The force of this world and humanity is dead sure on the march today. In this lawless period of challenging, this Christ of whom we heard from Brother Johnson, is being tossed and taken out, and you can't cover it up anymore in every realm of life, social and social-wise.

Political is the time. We shall not seek to prove doctrine for doctrine's sake. Sin shall be borne out of the issues before Christ in a given day. Nothing to be argued or proved. On the face of the earth today are coming some Catholic bishops.

It seems that the only people professing the name of Christ, that God's able to get in on a word in their drive. If you think I'm crazy, it's because you do not read what's being written today. If you think I'm crazy, it's because you do not visit the hospitals in the back alleys of our cities.

If you think I'm crazy, it's because you do not visit the hospitals in the back alleys of our cities. We shall not speak to Balaam's cracked ass while he might speak to a Catholic Priest. If Bishop Payne has made a prophetic statement that anti-Christ is here, it will be a personified.

Moving Beyond Doctrinal Self-Congratulation

The Brotherhood spent this morning on a question. There are so many questions that we will not have time to answer because we can't answer them. We are not speaking as an evangelist. I recognize that a man's gifts shall make room for him, and I recognize the tremendous need for all of the gifted ministries of the Risen Lord, but I'm not going to be able to answer much of what I suggest this morning, because I'm deathly afraid that we're fighting battles we're already interested in, especially we of the grace, persuasion, and reverse to the preceding message, being together to congratulate ourselves on how sound our doctrine is to the other fellows.

I want you to know we'll meet on Sunday morning and congratulate ourselves on our victory. I'm always interested in history. I have made it my business to try to find out if this statement I'm going to make is not so.

It was suggested, of course, by Jonathan Edwards, under whom he got it from, that the task of every generation of God's people is to determine the direction in which the Sovereign Redeemer is going in his day, the day of maturity, and then go in that direction.

He believes that every man and every movement that God has ever used, he has been able to use it because he got them to focus their attention on those issues and relate their gospel and their doctrine to those that were caught in their days.

I think I've made every mistake that can be made doctrinally and methodically in trying to get to this foundation he just talked about. It hasn't been an easy battle. It could be us three. In this awful day, the gospel Antony said in Miami the other day, and I've got a little hope, he said if the tax we share from $15 ,000 a home could be a mama's little lamb and a boy.

Christian Engagement With the Issues of the Age

But the stumbling block of this generation of non-Hebrew Catholics, such as this, we would have had nerve enough to preach in our own churches that true argument at the convention. But I like to hear that.

One of his big businessmen members came to him not long ago and said, Pastor, I'm so tired of being inspired. I've got to get my hands dirty. How could we get involved? I've been to the kitchen and told two or three of the women that last year they had too much salt on the beans.

And if they had it just yet, I'm going to start, I'm going to get involved in something. I'm so tired. I'm going to focus up. I read where the editor of one of the Southern Baptist state, Southern Baptist papers, in the paper said the other day, let's just preach in our own churches through the revolution of our hour.

And they wanted to get involved in the issues of this day, because they were afraid it would hurt our cooperative program. But you say amen to that, and we bow to your solution. We need to shift our stance to face the issues of this hour.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther and Calvin and those men, in their beginnings, those beginnings were made within a corrupted Christian society. All Christians for more than a century, Protestants, pastors, Calvin and those men and the Puritans were forced to be on the defensive, preserving the purity of their faith and worship against relentless adversaries.

The Puritans and their predecessors focused attention on the work and what they called the sacrament. But you do not get the missionary note in the Puritans. We honor the prince of the gospel. In a missionary situation, I don't care where you live, for there's no such thing as Christian anymore.

There is no such thought or verse anywhere that can be labeled as Christian, either corrupt or good. Everywhere in the world today, Christians find themselves in the middle of secular and pagan cultures, and Christians are called upon to rebel those in the schools and church and place a business with people who are utterly indifferent to our downright hostile humanity as a whole.

And they're not using sling shots. This is the day of revival, the revival of every ism that has ever spewed out of here. Communism. Paganism. The hatred between the Arabs and the Jews and the Russians and the United States, you could taste it and cut it with a knife in the last few days.

The essence of the world's geographic territory has now been crushed. Nationalism. Nationalism. The church today has been talked about. The monarchs. We could do without. I'll coin this phrase. Time created the world in which Christianity is imperative.

Time created the world in which Christianity is imperative. First America would reveal that we are a very religious people, but that our religious life is largely a matter of gratification, seldom a sacrifice.

And that is said religion in America is an umbrella to protect us from the rain, and that the safest place to hide from God now is within the membership of any of our churches. People turn to religion today as a remedy for sleeplessness, for worry, for ineffectiveness, to be free from frustrations and tensions, to become resourceful and successful.

And the presumption is that God exists to serve us, whereas our chief end in life is to serve him. And once we think of God as existing to serve us, our religion becomes very comforting and comfortable.

The Church's Apathy and Refusal to Bear the Cross

Passivity is the word that best describes us. It is amazing how well we think of ourselves because we've learned a little doctrine. This is apparent in our apathy, our complacency. You know, it takes a whole lot out of us, and then we're not aroused for very long.

We had much rather meditate on this palm than get our hands dirty in the front trenches. Who would ever charge this generation of traveling with anybody else of turning the world upside down? We are not noted for crusading or for performing zeal.

Bad men don't fear us, and evil can go on untouched. We shoulder no cross, no banners, shun commitments and causes. On to the world. Professor Mills of one of our universities makes this indicative statement, Neither preachers nor laity matter.

What they do and what they say can be readily agreed to and safely ignored. I want you to indulge me as I read a parody that they use out in the First Christian Church in San Rafael, California, a parody.

This afternoon you read the 149th and 150th psalms, great songs of psalms praised. And this parody of these two psalms was put in the bulletin of this church. It's the canted after the solemn reading of the budget, and it speaks of our non-involvement.

Here's how it reads. Oh, sing unto the Lord an old psalm, one that he hears over and over again, the song of the mighty with power and wealth, who live in fatness in the abundance of possessions, whose tents have thick carpets and hosts of electronic servants, and who say, for whom we cannot give more, we must feed our overfed children and buy overpowered cars and maintain our fantastic standards, though we don't care to reason why.

Oh, give praise unto a God who lets us get away with it, that fixes our cries of empty self-pity, not with ponderings and likenings of a God of wrath, judging his own, whose saints they can love in a world of suffering and loneliness and lostness and hostility and horrible, devastating war, and not care enough to love and give ourselves, who give thanks unto him whose only rebuke is the silence and our own conscience, great and mighty as our God, and great with the decrees, for he watches us decrease our giving, withdraw our involvement, lessen our pain, crawl into our beautiful stone shell, through the wide tearful eyes of a hundred thousand hundred children, through the narrow hostile faces of the craftsmen of international conspiracies, through the nodding sarcasm of disillusioned using, he says, our God says nothing.

Praise ye the Lord. Praise him upon the high sound and instruments, for even as we lust after the enchantments of much goods, of possessions and pledge no excellence to our faith, even so does he permit us, that though he be silent, yet that he follow after us, and an old scene is repeated, there is the sound of nails in the flesh, and the fire in the dark, and grace, establishment, reaffirmation, labored in the city of Corinth.

The Need for Spiritual Demonstration and the Living Lord

There are three things that I mention very quickly, that you ought to look at. I determine not from no word demonstration. This has come from every direction, and this priest stands here. I'm older, I guess, than any preacher here.

And under God, I don't know. So many. When you get a little older, I'm not older, but I'm older than I used to be, especially like myself, you wonder under God, if there's ever been the least bit of fruit.

I'm not being pious. I've seen so much of what I looked like was of God, and the devil tore it up in 15 minutes. So I just don't know. Preachers, they make ten million mistakes. So God, bless your heart, if they're heading in the right direction, amen.

He's spawned by a power of grace, has been the fairest of all time on earth, and in the days of Puritanism, could have been improved upon. And however young preacher listen to now, better listen to me.

Better take a man like Paul. Apostle Paul issues. Fundamentalism, I want to vomit. Arguing about the virgin birth. Apostle Paul never paid any attention to it. He didn't have to. If you believe in a living...

And there's a condition today. Samuel Rutherford wrote a friend from prison. He said, Jesus Christ came into my cell last night, and that was stoned fresh like a ruby. You're a living Lord. Sixty-two years old.

This has become the quest of my soul. So when I've got to know a living Lord, he comes with faith to set our hearts on fire under the law of action of the resurrection. He was a living Lord. Maybe the fires and deal will come back.

We can't do it the first minute each other. So much without the birth. If we sin, this Jesus Christ who came in a man's cell, be it Lord, pass away. Kingdom stands and goes forever till all our creatures on thy sway.

If we could get quick believing in the doctrine of the risen Lord, live in the glory of the Lord of the doctrines. Oh, this is all the hope now is this. When I was a young preacher, like every young preacher, I thought I could make hope in things I found out I can't.

Oh, God, for the living and the Greek, I think stands there to say that there never was a time in the experience of God when there wasn't a cross and a man hanging on it and that that man will change.

Need my dear brothers improvement. We don't need some improvement now. We need revitalization. I said I'm not going to know anything. And then that word determined, I just mentioned it in the past, the uniqueness.

He said just a matter of settled conviction. Ain't no use fooling anything else. If we don't get tossed out of here and camped here, it's the beginning of a whole war. No. Now cities should have known as a matter of fact in minutes just to wonder.

Desperate Dependence on the Holy Spirit

This is not laziness. This is the desperate need of my heart and yours that we shall become desperate about the Holy Ghost. Jesus shall please him or not and any man. The decision he made to this whole business was in the realm of the Holy Spirit.

He added no doctrine, corrected no doctrine. He himself wasn't had to clear on the atonement. He said give, give, decide over and over again and in that sense was used of God to recover what was altogether lost.

Spiritual things are spiritually designed that the natural man receive it not the things that move this Lord except with the ministry of the earth and its festivities of the word person of the Holy Ghost.

I'm so hungry for this letter be glory that I'm biting at everything that smells like it might be of the Holy Ghost. The world's being torn to pieces. I can't demonstrate coming down the mouth of nations and churches or individuals.

I can't turn this world into a city town. Riding out, riding at me taking my lock upon your hand. To the awful totality of being Lord. I can't get a corporate card. You need to test me out you can't either.

Oh God we've lost this generation. A little better sermon's not going to do it. I can't command the Holy Ghost if you're looking at one thing. I'm about to die. Oh God deal with this situation. We can't even deal with the deadness of our own heart.

The Spirit of the living God through your presence use enticing words. Through your presence and words can men listen to his heating air is the one thing he's a life giving spirit. They'll have to use the morning thing for something.

Unless they have the Holy Ghost. I just say don't rob me. The one thing I've got left and that is that I can get up every morning and say maybe this is the day when the Lord of those will come to the rescue of his church and his gospel.

Men shall see once again the things of his life.