God Is Worthy of Worship — Leonard Ravenhill

The Lamb Worthy to Open the Book

Hear much about, and that is the privilege, and that's a very dull word to use for it, the privilege of worship. I want to read part of the book of the Revelation in the fifth chapter, Revelation 5, reading from verse 1, and I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne, a book written within, on the back, sealed with seven seals.

And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy to open the book and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven or earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.

And I wept much because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not. Behold, a lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book and to loose the seven seals thereof.

And I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne, and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, to the Lamb that had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth.

And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne, and when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them hearts and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints.

And they sang a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book and to open the seals thereof, for thou was slain and hast redeemed us to God by thine own blood, out of thy every kindred and tongue and people and nation.

The Majesty, Holiness, and Loveliness of Christ

Some years ago, as a matter of fact about 200, so it's before my time, there was a biographer in England. He was a kind of, well he was partly a biographer and partly a historian, and he was a Christian.

And he found out that a businessman in London was going to Scotland, not to see the historic site, not to see where the covenanters were persecuted and buried, but he went to hear preachers. And it was a risk, because he went by stagecoach, and Edinburgh would be about, I suppose, 250, maybe 300 miles from London, and that was a hazardous job.

They used to mug people in those days, did you know that? Except the folk were nicer, they wore velvet jackets and they had diamonds on the daggers, so it was much more exciting. And yet John Wesley said that though he traveled 240 ,000 miles, can you imagine that on horseback?

And many times at night, never once was he stopped by a highwayman. That's a pretty good record, isn't it? Sounds as though God keeps his promise. He'll give his angels charge concerning us. This man by the name of Woodrow went to see the man who had been on his wonderful vacation in London, in Scotland, and asked him what he thought about the preaching there.

And he said, I went to St Andrew's Cathedral and I heard a man by the name of Robert Blair, and he showed me the majesty of God. Scotland did have, Scotland still has, some of the greatest preachers in the world.

I forgot the name of the man who, for the moment, was offered the chair as the president of one of the most prestigious universities in the world, Edinburgh University, and he turned it down at 40 years of age to just take a pastorate up the road in the fields amongst a few ordinary, ordinary people.

They still have some great giants in the pulpit. And he said, I went and I heard this marvellous man Blair, he showed me the majesty of God. The next I saw a proper old man. Well, all men are usually proper, but this one was old, and he said, well favoured, I suppose he's a little more weight than I have.

And he said, I was thinking at the time of the revelation I got from Blair of the majesty of God, that David Dixon, I have one of his reprint books, said he showed me all my heart. Now, that's a big come down from seeing the majesty of God.

And then he said, I stayed a little longer and I went and heard a little fair man by the name of Samuel Rutherford. Maybe some of you have read his life story. If you haven't, you should get it. He, he wasn't the author, but out of his many writings, a lady called Mrs Cousins wrote that hymn, the sands of time are sinking, the dawn of heaven breaks.

He has a lovely stanza in that hymn in which he says, I've never noticed if this is true, I've checked. The bride eyes not her garments, but her dear bridegroom's face. I will not gaze on glory, but on the king of grace.

Not at the crown he gifteth, but on his pierced hand. When found where glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land. I listened, he said, almost tremblingly to Blair as he showed me the awesome majesty of God. I listened with fear as Dixon unveiled to me my own heart.

But I listened with my eyes just swollen and my face running with tears as Samuel Rutherford showed me the loveliness of Christ. Now, maybe when you've been to church Sunday morning, you'll be able to check up and see which revelation you got from your preacher.

Would it be the loveliness of Christ? Would it be that he took you by your fingers and took you down into the deep parts of your being? That is one mandate to say, search all my heart, the secret springs, the motives that control, the chambers where I polluted things, hold empire all the soul.

Search till thy fiery glance hath cast its holy light through all, and I by grace am brought at last before thy face to fall. I'm afraid very often we go out of church as we went in, don't you think so?

There's been no deep impact on our spirit. We're not eternity conscious anymore. We've not been bathing in the great revelation of the holiness of God. You know, as we were singing tonight, crown me with, I love that hymn, not because it's English, but Matthew Bridges wrote it, crown me with many crowns.

The Consequences of Taking Christ’s Name in Vain

I knew as I sang that, I thought, one day God is going to take vengeance on every sinner in the world. For everybody who's blasphemed the name of Jesus today, for everyone who's cheated on his name, who call themselves by his name, and we're not to take the name of the Lord our God in vain.

That doesn't mean on your lips. It means if you profess to be a Christian, that you do a substandard act, you've taken his name in vain. Because somebody says, if that's Christianity, I don't want it anyhow.

I still believe the most awesome thing in the world, in this twisted rotten age in which we live, is to profess to be a Christian. Now, one day God is going to take vengeance on this world. I can't wait.

I've been waiting over 70 years, nearly 76 now, and you know, it gets more exciting as I get nearer the goal. I used to have an assistant pastor, and he would say at the end of the day, well brother Len, a day's march nearer home.

That's an old hymn, you won't remember that many of you. A day's march nearer home. Three things in the life of a Christian. Number one, one exercise is prayer, which again is preoccupation with our needs.

Prayer, Praise, and Worship

Praise, which is preoccupation with our blessings. And worship, which is preoccupation with God. Remember Jesus met that woman at the well, and she was worshiping. He didn't argue about that. But he said, you worship, you know not what.

They commanded at least twice in two great Psalms to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. In the 45th Psalm, the psalmist says, all thy garments, in his speaking of Jesus Christ, all thy garments smell of myrrh and of aloes and of kaffir.

Now there's a mixture for you. Pungent, aromatic, almost take your breath away. Indeed they would take your breath away, but he's considering the beauty of Christ. You see, he appeals on the level that we poor mortals live.

We see things, we smell things, we taste things. Oh, taste and see. He says that the Lord is good. Now the Lord, as we've reminded ourselves during these days, at least in the European concepts of worship, usually we stand to sing all hymns.

Visitors to America can never understand why we sit down all the time. Oh, we're always sitting in our cars, we sit at home, so why not sit in church? But I'll tell you an advantage of standing. If you're sitting, you can be looking around like this, but if you're standing, somehow you concentrate more.

So we stand to sing and we kneel to pray and we prostrate ourselves to worship. At least we should. In one of my many private interviews with Dr. Tozer, he said to me one day, Len, let others do as they like.

You and I will worship God face downward. Not far from where I lived in England, there's a little place called Durstal. There's a room there. It didn't look much longer than this back door. Maybe it was 10 by 10 by 10 by 10.

It hadn't got a window in it, and it was used by an associate of John Wesley, a man by the name of John Nelson. And he would not have any windows in his study because they'd distract, he said. He might look at the bird or the flower or some other.

So he shut himself up in that little room. He had a chair a bit higher than this with a hard back and he'd have a shelf at the back. That wasn't to serve his meal on either. He carried that to the village and he turned the chair around and he preached and put his Bible on the back of it.

And he said one day some men knocked him out of the chair and they had clogs. They have a brass cap on the toe and they have ribs of iron underneath. And he said, they jumped on me and jumped on my chest and said, we'll kick the Holy Ghost out of you.

And he said, I was very sore but I just got up and prayed. Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. Most of us would expect somebody to write a book about us. But anyhow, that was the way of life.

But he did not want any distraction or subtraction. Now we mentioned, was it last time we were here, we mentioned about the woman who brought an alabaster box of ointment which was very precious. And she came, in my judgment, just for one thing.

She came to worship the Lord. How do you get to that conclusion? Because number one, she never said a word. Number two, she brought the most costly thing that she had. And worship is costly. And true worship means it's a combination, as far as I'm concerned, it's a combination of concentration and adoration and contemplation and meditation and fascination.

The Cost of True Worship

Adoration is excessive praise, delirious joy. Now come on, let me put you under some pressure here. When last were you deliriously joy with the reality of the risen Son of God? Oh, it's easy to say we have a home eternally in the heavens, not made with hands.

So what? Supposing you had a mansion somewhere in this great state of Dallas, I was going to say, this great state of Texas, and you were going to inherit everything you wanted to run it. You were going to be able to live there for a hundred years with servants and every adequate thing that you needed.

I think you might get a little excited about it. We have a home eternally in the heavens, prepared, according to John 14, again prepared by none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I said we fall down, we fall down to worship.

Write through the book of Revelation. If you want to take these down, you can do it, or you can get a take on this. You get this again. I'm not going to give you the quotes, just the scriptures. Revelation 1 .17, Revelation 5 .8, Revelation 5 .14, Revelation 7 .11, Revelation 11 .16, Revelation 19 .4, and Revelation 22 .8.

And you remember perhaps in Genesis 17, there came a servant, there came somebody rather, in dazzling splendor to the tent that Abraham was in. And Abraham fell down at his feet. Jesus went into the upper room at his resurrection, and again, they fell down at his feet.

There's an experience in grace, which I guess most of us have had, I hope so, called justification. Thus God, in his infinite mercy, when we've repented of our sins and asked his forgiveness, he eradicates all the record of our sin.

And to play on the word, as we do to children sometimes, justification is just as if I'd never done it. He's wiped the record feet. But here is justification, and sanctification is as high above justification as justification is above the sinner's state.

By the same token, there's an experience in God, an experience of prayer. And prayer is on this level, but intercession is as high above prayer, as adoration is above praise. I don't think many people ever enter into this experience to tell you the truth.

Worship is my conscience quickened by the holiness of God. Worship is my response to the activation of the Spirit in my heart. Therefore, if I'm dull of comprehension about the things of God, he's not going to provoke me.

He can't provoke me, because I don't have the spiritual susceptibility to respond to the things that God is saying in his word. Now, I don't know how you get on with the book of the Revelation. It still mystifies me.

To me, it's a book of mystery. It's a book of majesty, and it's a book of misery, because it shows me the ultimate doom of the wicked. You know, somebody has said, I've said this before maybe, that in this day in which we live, there are just three kinds of people in the world.

Those who are afraid, those who don't know enough to be afraid, and those who know their bibles. How in the world of people get through a world like this, unless they have a foundation that cannot be shaken?

The Unshakable Kingdom and the Worthiness of the Lamb

Remember at the end of Hebrews 11, everything that can be shaken will be shaken, that the kingdom that cannot be shaken may remain. God is going to break up this universe. He's going to break up all world systems in order that he may glorify his Son.

Everybody has owed their life to Jesus Christ, whether they're living or they've been dead a thousand years. They owe that life to God, and at the end of the journey, he's going to make everybody pay for their deficiencies, for their sin, for their selfishness, for everything else that just jammed up their lives, instead of yielding that life to God.

Now, I think this is one of the most awesome chapters in the book of the Revelation. Revelation 5, I saw in the right hand of him that sat upon the throne, a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven fields.

Notice the angel, I noticed a strong angel crying with a loud voice. Thirteen times in the book of the Revelation, it mentions crying with a loud voice. There's nothing secretive about it. This is everything as we sing in an old hymn, or we used to sing in an old hymn.

When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more. It's going to be someday when God blows out the sun, when God brings every army, every government, every system to a standstill, that finally we may stand there before his eternal throne.

It's breathtaking to see this, because I think of all the things in eternity, this is one of the most awesome things. An angel proclaimed with a loud voice and says, who is worthy to look on the book, to open the book, and to lose the seals thereof?

Now, no man in heaven or earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book. Now what is the book? In my judgment, the book is the type of deeds of the universe. They were forfeited by Adam when he sinned.

And the scripture is very clear that this world is in the lap of the evil one. The scripture calls him the prince of this world. The scripture calls him the god of this world. And it says there was no man who was found worthy to open the book.

You know, men have tried to put this world back together again so many times. If I said to you before, that nursery rhyme, you know, you called it so easily to children, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

That's theology. You wonder the child didn't understand that you don't, so how could he understand it? Unless I told you, of course, you've been illuminated. But Humpty Dumpty is actually, is mankind for, it's a picture of an egg, of course, and Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall.

And as we say so often, anybody can scramble eggs who can unscramble them. Once there was a fall, the fall of man, Humpty Dumpty fell off and broke to pieces. We've been trying to put him back together again.

The Babylonians said they'd do it. Remember that great city of Babylon was built at the, by permission of Alexander the Great? The king at that time, the king of Babylon, had a wife who was used to living in mountains, and it was very flat.

So you may remember anyhow, not the fact, but you remember the historic fact that he had a mountain built in the middle of the city for her. And one of the seven wonders of the world, at least the old world, I don't know about today, but one of the seven wonders of the world was the hanging gardens that were the hanging gardens of Babylon.

And Babylon thought it could put mankind together again, and it ended up in all its devilry. It's a slur now to say a city's like Babylon. They couldn't do it. The Greeks thought they could do it with their intellectual splendor.

And yet, you know, most of those leading Greeks, those scholars that we are always talking about were homosexuals, and Greece couldn't put it back together again. And then Rome came with its strong arm.

My dear sweetheart and I used to live in the city of Bath in England. It was founded in 55 BC. There's a bath there, the only hot spring in England, and around it you have the statues of Tiberius Caesar and Julius Caesar and Caligula and all the other famous guys.

But they couldn't put it right again. You know, in 1912 there was a class of people in England called the Fabian Socialists. And I remember every time we picked up newspapers, or my folk did, and I heard people talking.

They were talking about H .G. Wells, a red-bearded rebel by the name of George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, the Webs, just an elite group of super intellectuals, who in 1912 said, we can put the world right.

We don't need the church or the Bible or Christ. We can pull down the hills of wealth, fill in the valleys of poverty, make the crooked faces. We can change the world by intellectual and biological processes.

That was two years before World War I. At the end of the World War I, 1919, they weren't very sure. 1919 to 1939, 20 years in which the church, I believe, had the greatest opportunity she's had since Pentecost, and she'd muffed the whole thing.

1939, up came Hitler. Remember Nostradamus had said that in 1939, he said in the 1500s there'll be a war in Europe led by a man by the name of Hister. Well, he wasn't far out. I'll give him an A for that.

Not Hister, he said. It would be Hister, but it was Hitler. And we had a war till 1945. At the end of the war in 1945, the man was going to put the world right by intellectual and biological processes, and changing the educational system.

By 1945, he wrote his last book, Mind at the End of its Tether, he said. And he said, there's no hope for humanity. What a dismal thing. He'd written his outline of the world history, he'd written crux and farda that got him into trouble with the Roman church.

But you see, these men have all felt that somehow. You remember Swindon? Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things. And there's some people still foolish enough to think that somehow we're going to pull, to say again, a rabbit out of the bag.

Human nature is totally incurable. We were down in an area, and I won't say where it is, I might get into more trouble, but it's where all of the millionaires came in the yachts. The Christian brother came in his yacht, one and a quarter million dollars.

Heaven helped him at the judgment seat. He ripped a sail, the sails cost half a million dollars on that soupy yacht. Had a crew of 23. You know, I looked around those folk, I didn't envy them one thing, not one thing.

They rushed to the taverns at night, they run to the dance halls at night. They could not find comfort. They're just mesmerized, like so many Christians are, with materialism. You know, when I sing a hymn like, crown him with many crowns, I never sing it through.

I always think of my good friend John there, he likes that hymn. Crown him with many crowns, crown him the lord of peace. People say today, we've lived so long through so many wars, is there no answer?

Sure there's an answer. The answer is in the prince of peace. The answer is in the greatest remedy that was ever given to man in the Sermon on the Mount, the most majestic thing ever uttered by the most majestic man who ever lived.

Have you ever wondered how it is that the world can accept you so easily when it couldn't accept him? The holiest man that ever lived never did one wrong thing all his life, and yet they were booting him, kicking him around, spitting on him, cast him out of his home, cast him out of the synagogue, and yet you and I somehow expect to be treated so nice, so comfortable.

There's an old hymn that says, is this vile world a friend to grace to help me unto God? You see, the scripture is very explicit, and I can't preach it all obviously, but it says, if we suffer we shall also reign with him.

Humanity’s Failure to Restore What Sin Destroyed

Now all of life is over here in this first chapter. Here's somebody on the throne, he has the title deeds of the universe, and no man, listen to it, no man. Don't you think Alexander the Great could do that?

He conquered the world by the time he was 27. What about some of these great men down here? What about Hezekiah, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel? What about the apostle Paul? Surely here's a he-man, here's a strong man in the spirit.

Can't he walk up? Can't he volunteer, and bow the knee, and say, Jesus I'll take the book out of your hand, or the one on the throne? And he says, no man was found worthy. And then he says, I wept much.

You know that word is only used twice? The grief word there, wept. It isn't somebody who's just feeling a little hurt, it's somebody weeping with anguish. It's the same word that's used of Jesus when he looked at a city called Jerusalem, and he's saying in his heart, you mad insane people, almighty God has given you the greatest men that ever lived.

You've had Isaiah, you've had Jeremiah, you've had major prophets, you've had minor prophets, and you've destroyed every one of them. Oh Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets. And he wept over his stupidity.

You tell your preacher from me that a wet-eyed preacher will never preach dry sermons. The trouble people come to the altar without being broken is the preachers are not broken, and they've no right to demand brokenness unless they're broken.

In God's name, is there anything more exciting? Is there anything greater in the world to preach from the gospel of the grace of God? Oh, I had a couple of fellows come to see me this week. They rubbed my nose in the dust.

They didn't know they were doing it. One was going to come back tonight. He hasn't come, but he's living in Thailand now. He's a young man from India. God told him to come here and link up, and I hope we can link up with him.

God gave him a vision there in poor India that the 24th of April next year, better put it down there, Betty and the other Betty and all the rest of you, 24th of April next year is to be a day of prayer and fasting for worldwide revival.

Great. He said, look, I've got a letter here from Dr. Cho. Dr. Cho is preaching, I think, this week actually in Dallas. He's the man who has a nice little church there in Korea in Seoul. He passed 250 ,000 members.

I don't think that's a church, that's a denomination. 250 ,000 people, and he showed me the letter in which he said, Brother John, I cannot be in the prayer meeting myself, but we shall pray with you because every night in our church, every night of every day in the year of family, every night in the year is a whole night of prayer in our church.

Dear God, do you know a church in America where they pray all once a week? When I was a boy, we used to pray for Korea in all its heathen darkness and superstition and all that, and now they have prayer meetings every night in the week, and then they have a prayer mountain with about 4 ,000 people on the prayer mountain every night in the week.

Oh, I felt like saying, could you shut up for a minute? We build our churches. Why in God's name do we build them so big? A lady wrote me this week, we're going to build an auditorium, a new auditorium, seating 9 ,000 people.

For what? To use it an hour Sunday morning? Because you can be sure of your own life. If they have 9 ,000 Sunday morning, they won't have 1 ,000 Sunday night. If you want to know how popular the church is, you go Sunday morning.

If you want to know how popular the preacher is, you go Sunday night. If you want to know how popular God is, you go to the prayer meeting, and he loses every time. Well, that was part of my misery. The other misery was, a man came in from Africa.

He'd been in Nigeria. I said, how are things there? Oh, brother, you'd love to go to Nigeria. He said, if the service starts at seven o 'clock, the congregation comes at five. Two hours, they come in their hundreds, and they pray, and they worship, and they have their adoration, and man, you, oh mercy, anybody could preach there.

An atmosphere prepared for two hours with prayer, and intercession, and supplication, and an expectation. Do you know why so often nothing happens when we go to church? Because we have no expectations.

It's going to be like last Sunday, pretty dry, and your faith's rewarded. Does it have to be that way? Are we going to have to take shiploads of our pastors to Nigeria, where people walk 10 miles to the meeting?

And he said, brother, they pray. Oh, you should hear them pray. Now, you should hear them pray for two hours, and then the meeting starts at seven, and then it finishes between nine and ten, and then they slip home, and there's a curfew on the city because they've had some trouble, and he said, they slip home, and leave the wife and children, or leave the husband and the children, and then they slip back to church, and you can't go out till six the next morning, so they go back to church at 11 o 'clock, and they pray till six in the morning.

Oh, Lord. We kind of want God to bless us because we give him a dollar in the Sunday morning offering. Huh? Lord, you die for me, but I'm not dying for you. We say, Lord, help me to live for you. He doesn't want you to live for him.

He wants you to die for him. If he can get you to die for him, he'll see about the living part. Won't be any problem about that. Now, come on, here is John. John's in this awesome situation. Oh, look, look, look, again.

Confrontation With God in Worship

When did you last go to the sanctuary? And again, somebody like Mr. Blair showed you the majesty of God. We very, very, very seldom have an unveiling of God. As I said before, when did you last tiptoe out of the church Sunday morning, breathless, because you had a confrontation with God?

Or, as I said before, and I say every meeting I go to, did you even come to this meeting tonight? Did you come here to meet God, or did you come to hear a sermon about him? Do you go to church actually to have a confrontation with deity, with holiness?

Hmm? Or do you go because you're in the choir, or your daddy's a pastor, or a deacon? I mean, is your really a love relationship? We borrow crutches in our worship. Charles Wesley's wonderful hymn, Jesu, lover of my soul.

Thou, O Christ, art all I want. Dear God, if he was, we'd turn the world upside down. He isn't all we want. We want so many other periphery things, perishing things of prayer, as I think A. B. Simpson called them.

John has had a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ. What is he like? Terrible, terrible. Oh, I think when I see him it'll be wonderful. No, no, no. You sang tonight, lo, the tokens of his passion, though in glory still he bears.

On the resurrection, they didn't know it was him. He showed them his hands and his feet. They were pierced, and I believe those are eternal, eternal monuments. Every time we see him, hail thou once despised Jesus, hail thou Galilean king.

We're going to see him in all his glory. John laid his head on the bosom of Jesus and heard that divine heartbeat, and he knew, you say, God doesn't have favorites. Sure, he has favorites. Always did and always will.

When he went to the to the death chamber of Jairus's daughter, he took with him who? Peter, James and John. When he went on the Mount of Transfiguration, he took with him Peter, James and John. And then it's John who declares that out of Peter, James and John, there was a special affinity between him and the Savior, that disciple whom Jesus loved.

And yet that same man who had leaned, he'd slept with Jesus, eaten with Jesus, fasted with Jesus, cast out demons with Jesus, and every other thing he'd shared in the majesty of Jesus. And when he sees him in resurrection splendor, he says, I tell you, Peter's dead.

Well, he'll ask you in God's name, what do you think you and I are going to do? Oh, Dr. Dillard told me, he used to say to me, Len, if there's anything it irritates me, these fellows who think they're going to buddy-buddy with Jesus when they see him.

I served you for 20 years. I won so many souls. I gave out so many thousands of tracts. I did this, that and the other. I believe that worship is adoration. I believe it's speechless adoration. John sees him, his hair as white as snow, his feet are like burnished brass, his face is like the sun in its strength, his eyes are like living coals.

Can you imagine that? I've heard people say, I don't like to look so-and-so in the eye, his eyes go right through me. Oh my, his eyes will go right through us in that day. Hmm? Hail, thou once despised Jesus.

Hail, thou Galilean king. The head that once was crowned with thorns is crowned with glory now. God is going to get every bit of praise that he should have had out of every redeemed person, even though they were not redeemed.

He's going to say, well, all that you missed in your lifetime, you're going to have to pay it back in worship and adoration once before you go to eternal hell. I've worked much. Isaiah's let me down, Jeremiah's let me down, the apostle Paul can't do it.

Is there no man can do it? No one was found worthy to open the book. And one of the elders said unto me, weep not, the line of the tribe of Judah hath prevailed to open the book, and loose the seals thereof.

And I beheld the six in the low, in the midst of the throne, and of the four beasts in the midst of the elders, to the lamb as it had been slain. I think that lamb is mentioned 27 times in this marvelous book of Revelation.

Christ as the Passover Lamb

Well, the book of Revelation is not only the end book, at the end of the book, but it's about things that happen after the end of the book, and after the end of time. And I'm sure that this John was there when John Baptist said away there in the wilderness, behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.

And he's seen Christ as a sacrificial lamb, as the Passover lamb. Weep not, as one was prevailed, and he came, verse 7, and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne. That word there, lamb, is very interesting because it's used again in Greek only twice in the New Testament.

Lovest thou me? Lord, you know I love thee, feed my sheep. Lovest thou me? Peter's a bit itchy about this, he doesn't like the pressure. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you really love me? Yes, feed my lambs.

You remember in the Old Testament, they used to have to keep a lamb for three or four days. They could keep it in the house and then they shed its blood. The actually Greek, I guess here, actually means my pet lamb.

My pet lamb alone is able, because it's not only the lamb, it's the lion. I'm told that there's nothing that celebrates, if you want to call it that, celebrates its anger more furiously with greater power than an infuriated ram.

It's more fierce than the lion. That is in its air, in its capacity. Jesus Christ is the pet lamb. He is the Passover lamb. He's to take the burden. Think of it. By one man's sin, by one man's disobedience, that was it.

No, he didn't commit adultery, or no, he didn't steal. No, he didn't beat somebody up. One man's disobedience. You see, we think people have to commit vulgar sins, horrible sins, sins that you couldn't even mention the name.

Well, maybe you could these days on TV or something. They're just bloody, and they're horrible, sexual, perversion. Yuck! They almost make you want to throw up. And yet, the greatest sin in the world isn't one of those.