The Chief Cornerstone — A.W. Tozer

It has been, I've tried to figure out how many years since I've been here, but I do remember what happened the last time I was here, VJ Day, and they took the rationing off gasoline, and everybody on the camp ducked out to get a tank full.

Now, that's been a long time ago, hasn't it? I have been invited numbers of times, but couldn't come, and I hope I can make up for it now. The 118th Psalm, Psalm 118, two verses, has become the headstone, and it is Mark, 1 Peter, 2nd chapter.

Christ the Rejected Stone and Chief Cornerstone

...has done to a living stone, indeed of men, but precious. Ye also, spiritual sacrifice acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, lay in Zion a cheap cornerstone, elect precious. And he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.

Unto you, therefore, which believe he is precious, but unto them which be disobedient, the builders disallowed in the head of the corner, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient. I want to also take a little of my preaching time to pray, so please let up this morning.

...order deal, an outline, we put the needle down and start to play back and trust the machinery. We have no confidence in the flesh, our confidence is in thee, in thy Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost to come.

We pray that thou wilt penetrate, many are here today that have been coming so long they can't remember, and a lot of them haven't got a thing, twelve years to come with their minds made up. She got up and played the record, went back and it was over, and everybody said we had a good time.

Father, save us from that this year, do something unusual, if it's usual it'll be ours, and if it's unusual it's more likely to be thine, so do something for it. There comes a sense of the Shekinah descending on this, and upon us who labor here.

Father Bailey, during the afternoons, and Father Mason who will preach at night, the missionaries, the children's workers and young peoples, don't let anything be routinely crazy. Break up all our routines for functory and dry way.

We'd rather, Lord, be complete failures, flop completely and be sent home with somebody to look after us, and to stand up and go through the routine because we know how. God deliver us, let the Holy Ghost come on us in an unusual way.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. A passage which I read from the Psalms, and later from Peter, a principle which governs divine procedure, that is, it's the way God does things. And the importance of this, represented by the appearance of it again, once and twice by Luke, by Peter, and I think also Paul in Ephesians, had that in mind when he talked about the stone.

There was a figure of speech used here to set forth a principle, the way God does things. And this, I say, is the principle of procedure, and he's not building it the way somebody must have built some of these cottages.

Woke up, had a bad dream, went back and finished it. But, excuse the expression, brother, but you're going to tear him down so I can say that about him now. But God never builds whimsically, he builds according to eternal purposes.

God never plays by ear, he never improvises or doodles. There's so much religious going on, it's just doodling. When it's over, it's obvious that it was. But the building of God is done according to the deep, eternal laws, as fundamental as the laws of nature, the laws of weight and mass and numbers, molecular attraction and gravitation, or any of the other recognized laws by which everything operates.

That's the first thing. God is building, but he's building his way. Someday we'll thank him that it's his way. Now, we're puzzled. But that day, when we know as we're known, we'll tell him a thousand, thousand times how glad we are he built his way.

But the religious leaders of his Christ-time, and I'm going to say of our time, are trying to help God build, God's little helpers. But they don't know God's eternal laws, the way he does things, so they're building according to their way of doing.

And they introduce laws which are not God's laws, methods which are not God's methods, ways which are not God's ways, and they find a stone, a peculiar stone, and they turn it over and say, that doesn't fit anywhere, does it?

Well, it does, but they don't know that it does. It doesn't fit into their building, but it fits into God's building. It doesn't fit into the plans that they've laid down, so they reject it. God picks it up and makes it the headstone of the corner.

Now, God does this in order that he might show his wondrous power. God takes the rejected stone, the stone which man, in his ignorance, has said is no good, and he confounds the ways of man and the wisdom of man, and he makes the headstone the important stone to be the one that man, in his ignorance, couldn't endure.

Now, this is the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in our time. And in doing it, God vindicates his own ways, and he establishes his own fundamental laws, and his own eternal, the welfare of mankind, he assures it, and he repudiates the flesh.

I suppose there isn't any more fleshly man, by inclination and vent, ever lived in the world than I am. But there isn't anybody that hates flesh worse, and is more completely certain that flesh will never get you anyplace but the grave.

And God, in his working and in his building, is working so as to repudiate all the claims of the flesh, all the claims of the flesh, whether it be ignorant flesh or learned flesh, whatever kind of flesh it is.

God’s Way of Salvation Through Jesus Christ

Now, this is seen the most clearly in Jesus Christ's mighty work to accomplish, and that work might be some salvaging of a sunken human race, and the defeat of that old enemy, the devil, with a terrible problem of sin, and to justify a guilty race unjust.

Now, God had this to do, and God knew how to do it. He was able to do it, but he had to do it his way. He wouldn't do it any other way but his own. He sent Jesus Christ to come after his own law and after his own way of doing, and Jesus came and worked according to God's eternal plans, the laws of deep God-wisdom and strength in man's ignorance and sinfulness.

So Jesus came, and he was the scandal of all the religious builders who appeared in Galilee and in Judea. He was the scandal. We don't like that word, scandal, in our time. We like to stand in well with everybody.

We call it public relations. We are willing to pay a man to make the world like us, the same world that spat in the face of our Savior Jesus Christ, whom we claim to follow. But Jesus was the scandal of the religious world.

Now, those religious leaders were just like our religious leaders. They had their human philosophy. They weren't wholly bad. Let's not be too hard on the Pharisees and the scribes. They weren't too bad.

They weren't wholly bad. They were just wholly wrong. They had their interpretation of things, but it was wholly wrong interpretation. They had their opinion of themselves, but it was a wholly wrong opinion.

They had the idea of how God would work, but it was a wholly wrong idea. And the result was, they found themselves in the embarrassing position of claiming to be the very God-appointed religious leaders of their generation, working in flat contradiction to God.

Because, you see, God was working according to his laws, and they were working according to man's laws. So because this was true, the ways of the religious leaders of Jesus' day and Jesus' ways flatly intersected each other, and the result was Christ was crucified and the religious leaders had their way for the time being.

Now, everything that Jesus does, he does according to the eternal plans and deep laws of God. That puts man where he belongs, down, and it puts God where he belongs, up, and it puts and establishes righteousness forever and forever.

Now, because the ways of God and the ways of man intersect each other and do not parallel each other, but are contrary to each other, those of the religious leaders of Jesus' day examined Jesus, and I think they examined him with some objectivity.

We preachers like to curse, you know. We get up and curse Pharisees, and Judas, and Jonah, and Saul, and the rest. It's just a mild form of cursing. But I don't think we ought to do it, because those men weren't wholly bad.

Maybe Judas was, but the rest weren't. They were just wrong, just wholly wrong. And there are so many good men now that are good men, but they're just wrong. They're not bad, they're just wrong. And because they're good, people say, well, they're good men, they ought to be right.

You can be good and not be right. That is, you can be good and still be wrong in your viewpoint. And they were here because they were following the laws of man. They were doing things the way man does it.

And they forgot that God had said, my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts, they're contrary to one to the other. So they disallowed Jesus. He came in humility. You know, Jesus was one of the oddest fellows that ever touched the world, one of the oddest men that ever came to the world.

We're busy now trying to fit Jesus into our civilization. Bruce Barton wrote a book saying that Jesus was the world's greatest salesman, and we otherwise try to integrate Jesus into our scheme. If it's the Lords, Jesus is one of the finest members.

And if it's Congress, Jesus, of course, is one of the finest lawmakers. Whatever it is, they try to integrate Jesus into it. But the fact is, Jesus couldn't be integrated into anything that was earthly or human, because all of that was run according to earthly laws, fallen earthly principles, and Jesus Christ was working according to the laws of God.

So Jesus came in humility, born to an unknown maiden, in a stable in a tiny village, reared as a carpenter's son and a peasant, and had no friends among the great. He had no money, he had no education.

If Jesus would appear in the streets of Chicago for a little while, they'd run him in for vagrancy and put him in jail and send him to the bride well for ten days for vagrancy. He had no money, he had no social position, he had no army, he had no authority in the state.

He was on the side of babies and penitent harlots and repentant publicans and sinners, and he was against religious pretenders and learned bigwigs and pious work jockeys and boasters. He was against all of them, and finally he failed and died in weakness.

They would have said, well, he was a failure. They killed him, poor fellow. He evidently thought he was all right and wasn't, and so they slew him. It was too bad. It was a bad way to end. But brethren, the scripture says that God made him the head of the corner.

Then God began to build by the Holy Ghost and the truth, and upon this chief cornerstone, God built the great edifice that has been going for 1900 years and will soon be glorified, that we call the church.

The Church Built According to Heavenly Principles

About this church, you know, if you and I had been planning to build a church, we'd never have built it the way Jesus planned it, because we're too dumb, and he is too wise. You couldn't have got Jesus' ideas accepted by any conference in the Christian Missionary Alliance.

You couldn't have got them to adopt it. They'd have voted it down because it sounds screwy. The way Jesus did things didn't sound right, because Jesus had come down from above and was building according to the laws of heaven.

Man was down below, building according to the laws of earth. Man always votes according to his own laws and carries things through according to his own plans. So you couldn't have got anybody to accept Jesus Christ.

There isn't a way of doing things. There isn't a committee anywhere that would try to establish church the way Jesus tried to do it. There was the Founder himself, I say, born in a manger, crucified as a criminal, and all of his disciples were fishermen mostly.

There was only one big shot among them, and he was bad. And then there was that early church. Look at them. It consisted of outcasts, fanatics, the poor and the ignorant, and they didn't have any learned people or any great people, any moneyed people.

Paul was the first fellow that had any brains, and God had to knock them out before he could get Paul going. He was the first man that amounted very much, and yet God moved right along. So, you see, what I'm trying to establish is that there are two ways of doing religious work.

One is God's way, and one is man's way. Man can be a nice chap and give demissions and cry when he prays and be a nice boy, and still be building according to man's ways. And what he builds will be wood, hay, and stubble in the great day of Jesus, and will go down and perish and be cut before the wind.

Well, this method God has of humbling people by doing things contrary to man's ways, and in ways that make it look as if they ought to fail. Everything God does when first starts out looks as if it was slated for failure.

That's the way God gets around man's flesh. If it looked as if it was going to succeed, if you could predict that it would succeed, God wouldn't be in it. When God works, he always works so as to glorify himself and humble man's flesh, always down the years.

Why it was that way back there with, even when God picked big men, he had to reduce them and cut them down to size. There was that man Moses. He was learned in all the ways of the Egyptians and was a great man.

He'd been reared at court and, of course, knew all about the big shots, and many a big king or emperor or potentate or plenipotentiary had had Moses on his lap, no doubt. And Moses was known far and wide, but before God could use him, he had to send him out the wilderness for forty years, and then humbling at the burning bush until he took his shoes off and cried unto God for mercy.

So God had reduced Moses. Then there was Isaiah. Isaiah was a poet, no doubt, and he was a cousin of the king and was quite familiar with royal things. But before God could use Isaiah, he had to show him himself high and lifted up with his string filling the temple.

He had to zip by his head down, look inside of him and see what a terrible rotten mess there was in that fine young poet, and have him cry out, I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips. Then when God had reduced him to size and had bumped him from being a general down to being a private, then he could use him.

Same with Ezekiel, same with Paul. God had to take Paul at that head of the Sanhedrin fellow, the Supreme Court fellow, had to take him, humble him down. Here he was, here was this great jurist, if you please, one of the Supreme Court of Israel, sitting there blind on Damascus Road, feeling around, didn't even have a white red chain, feeling around in blindness, asking for help.

Later on, a fellow that didn't mount too much and was never heard much after came down and said, Brother Saul, the Lord God will fill you with the Holy Ghost. And so this little man led this big man into the spiritual experience.

That's the way God does it, you know. Then in post-biblical times, look how God worked. God always, if God takes a nobody, he can use him. If he gets a somebody, he always has to bump him back to a nobody before he can use him.

There was John Newton, he was a nobody, and God used him. There was John Bunyan, he was a nobody, and God used him. There was Moody, and he was a nobody, and God used him. There was Roberts, and he was a Welsh nobody, and God used him.

And wherever he got a hold of a little man, he lifted him up often, if the man was a praying man, and used him. But when God got a hold of a big man, he always reduced the big man. There was Luther. He was no little man.

Luther was a learned man, and he was a doctor, if you please, and a big shot. And God had to reduce Luther until he beat on his own chest and cried out for God to have mercy on him. He had to take his place like the humblest little old calf-eating sinner that ever lay in the straw and howled for mercy.

And then there was Wesley. Now, if you think that John and Charles Wesley and the rest of the Wesleys were just ordinary men on the street, you're mistaken about that. John Wesley was an Oxonian. He was a graduate of Oxford, and he knew many languages, and he was a learned man.

The trouble was, he tried to do God's work according to what he'd learned at Oxford. And God let him come over to this country and break his nose against the impossibilities over here, then took him back and let poor little old Peter Bowler, I don't know whether he'd ever seen the book, but he let him lead him to the Lord.

So, when he had bumped Wesley down from being a self-conscious general to being a pilot, then he was Wesley. There was Zinzendorf, the count, that great rich German count, and God had to make him of no account before he could use him.

And we can take our own Dr. Simpson. You can go up and down the line, and you'll find that God always has to reduce a man, bump him down. If he's down as far as he can get, God lifts him up. If he's up, God'll put him down as far as he can get.

That's the way the Lord works. The stone which the builder ejected, I've made head of the corner, and the stone which the builder tried to build with, I've pushed down and wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Rejecting Worldly Success in Evangelicalism

You know, it's a terrible thought, my brethren, that we are busy building according to our plans. Evangelicalism is building according to man's plans. We're doing things the way men are doing them, and the result is it all fall apart when it's all over.

All fall apart. I see there's a good many older people here. Now, nobody's old, but some are older, and there are some older people here. Now, your years of the days of the years of Europe won't be extended yet for another century, so you'd better begin to think about doing something that will last.

I'd rather have a doghouse that would last than to have a mansion that would burn up at the judgment seat of Christ. I'd rather have a little church with twelve members that would go through the fire, and bold would they stand in that great day, as the poet said, than to have a great, vast following that would all go up in chat in the great day of Christ.

So, we want to look out for one of the most destructive errors in the evangelical world today. I'm not talking about the modernists. I never kick a dead dog. So, I am not talking about modernists. I'm talking about the evangelicals, and the bible church people, and the holiness people, and the full gospel people, and the lions, wherever we are.

So, there's a great error abroad, my brethren. It is that we proceed on the philosophy contrary to God's, and we write in the books, and we write articles about it, and get used to it, and everybody accepts it, and we never stop to examine whether it's God's way of doing a thing or not.

And so, one of the ways that where I see it, you know, every disease has its symptom, and one of the symptoms that I see in modern evangelical circles is we're seeking help from the great. There's a whole spiritual philosophy in evangelical circles.

I run into it wherever I go. I run into it, and I blow it just as high as I can blow it, and still they invite me back. I guess they don't believe me or something, but I tell them what I think of them everywhere I go.

But, you know, nowadays we're trying to get on the side of rich men. One of the biggest curses that could ever happen to the Christian missionary alliances is for us to get a hold of a lot of rich men.

They'd curse us. They'd blast us. They'd keep us from praying. They'd help us to trust in the flesh. We'd lean on their filthy lucre, lick their hand, and run around after them like Mary's little lamb.

The result, we wouldn't be prophets anymore. We'd be hand lickers. Sycophants, they call those. That's the big name for it. I think hand lickers sound better. It means the same thing. But then there's the royalty, and senators, and actors, and famous people, and learned people, and the socially elite.

We want to get them on our side now. One man goes about boasting how many physicians he has in his congregation, but I don't know whether the great physician attends or not. But he's got some MDs, and that's good in case anybody falls in a faint.

But we proceed according to man's way of doing things. And, you know, I charge it on us, brethren, that we're committed to principles that aren't biblical, that aren't spiritual, that aren't book of acts, and so we've rejected the eternal cornerstone.

I don't mean we've rejected Christ outright, but I mean that we have rejected his way of doing things. And the result is we get on all right, and things look all right now, and I am not so much concerned by how things look now.

I'm concerned by how things will be 20 minutes from now, or 20 years from now. That's what concerns me. Well, now, what personal application can I make of this? You know, if you get a reputation for being something, why, people call you all around over the country asking you to put on your show.

If you're a chalk talk artist, why, they want you to come put on chalk talk. If you're known as a great praying man, they want you to come around talk on prayer. And if you're a great prophetic speaker, never read the Schofield Bible thoroughly, they want you to come around and preach on prophecy.

And if you're a deeper life man, they want you to come and give talks on deeper life, and that's my label. I get called among the Baptists and Presbyterians and what have you asking me to give talks on the deeper life, and at Keswick and so on.

Well, I tell them there, just as I'm telling you here, that all that can be just as shallow as thin skin, and never get any deeper than that. All these seminars on the deeper life, you can come and sit and take notes and never get anywhere, because you go out from there to do the religious work after the manner of the flesh.

Humility, Self-Denial, and Cleansing the House

Well, what are we going to have to do? We're going to have to clean house, one thing. Out goes pride. Pride is a cursed thing, and it's a dangerous thing. It can not only harm you spiritually, it can harm you mentally.

Pride is a dangerous thing, and then there's self-confidence. Nowadays, people are afraid to be humble, lest they have an inferiority complex. The fellow that invented that term, Jung, I believe his name was, that psychologist, a sidekick of Freud and Mortimer, Adler, and the rest of them.

Why, my brethren, the Bible knew all about the inferiority complex long before these men ever had been conceived in their mother's womb. An inferiority complex, if it's the right kind of one, is just a knowledge of how little you amount to.

You know what could happen? The earth could swallow us up right here and now. The earth could begin to shake and convulse itself, and we could fall down the crack into a crater and never be heard of again.

Three weeks from now, there wouldn't be anybody who remembers or know anything about us. We don't amount to very much. Pride is a terrible thing. The bandy rooster and his pride. Never was a rooster that cocked his neck, arched it more proudly, nor that tried harder than the bandy.

Now, as a farmer boy in this very state, we used to have bandy roosters. Big old roosters weighing 10 or 12 pounds, they were bases. They'd arch their necks and let go with a bass baritone solo, and that would tee off the little bandy weighing about half a pound, and he'd arch his little neck and let go with a treble solo.

But he imagined that he was just as big as the other, but he wasn't. Most of us are spandums, and it's a good thing to find it out. One nice thing about these camp meetings, you know, where they put you in wet buildings and your towels never get dry for 10 days, and all that kind of thing, and you shine on your shoe, it disappears the third day, never comes back.

It's a good thing for a lot of us because it helps us to get humble and to realize we don't amount to much anyhow. Over in my church, I haven't got any physicians, but I've got some pretty good people, you know, pretty high class, and I get ashamed of them every once in a while.

I go preaching a mission where it smells bad. I do. I tell them so, too. I tell them that they're nice, white-handed people that never got their hands dirty, and that I'm ashamed of them, and I go and preach missions where they have lice all around to kill the cooties, and where strange-looking fellows with faraway looks in their eyes who haven't breathed a sober breath since the first Roosevelt was in office.

Bombs. No good. I like to get down among them, walk around among them, hope that there won't be a transmission of animal life from them to me. But if there is, it won't kill me. I do it because I like to humble myself occasionally.

You know, you can become an ivory tower Christian, and some of us are. Each can't beat himself to get us out of our ivory tower and get us down on the earth. Self-confidence has got to go. The love of fame has got to go.

Self-admiration has got to go. When I see a fine young fellow with great, broad shoulders that doesn't need padding in his coat, and a good-looking face, and six feet too tall, weigh 195 pounds, and not have an ounce of fat, I can understand how he can admire himself.

And when I see a beautiful young woman as grateful as a willow and pink complexion that doesn't need any help from Walgreens drugstore, I can see how she, in the time she's got, can admire herself. But God help me, what do the rest of you admire in yourselves?

How fat and rubbery we get, or how lean and dry we get, or how bent over we get, or how bald and weird we get, we still admire ourselves. I can imagine the man who's got several degrees from recognized universities and knows all about Plato and Shakespeare, he might admire himself, but what about the rest of us?

What do we admire in yet? We do. The man can get victory over his mirror, and a woman too, he's got at least a little way on the road toward the celestial city. Self-admiration. Dear God help us, how we admire ourselves.

We preachers cock our ears waiting for somebody to say, I enjoyed that. And if the 14 people don't come up after you preach and say, I enjoyed it, we go away licking our wounds and say, well, I failed that time.

And there's self-promotion, self-confidence, and all the rest. Out that has to go. Now, I hope you didn't come here to learn something. Outside of a few of the younger people, you know enough already.

In Sunday school, you know enough already. You didn't come here to learn. I trust you came here to get your house clean, and your life straightened out, and your ways brought into harmony with God's ways, so you won't be working one way while God works another.

Out, I say, must go those things, but in must come unbounded confidence in God, and humility, and willingness to take the lonely road, and resignation to the lonely road, to be alone. Maybe while I'm here I'll preach a sermon.

Preached one time and wrote it up, and it appeared in Eternity Magazine called, The Saint Must Walk Alone. Maybe I'll preach that. But you know the way of God is a lonely way, a lonely way. You've got to be willing to take that lonely road, but it's the way of power, it's the way of victory.

Reformation Before Revival

And God says, hey, the humble way, the way of humility, the upside-down way, the way that starts with nothing, the way that builds on a shoestring, and trusting God. God says, I'll build that up, and I'll use that kind of a rock, but the other kind I won't use.

But I wonder if we'll ever get back to it again. I wonder, do you believe we'll ever have a revival, brethren? Do you think we'll ever have a revival? I don't know. There was a day when I used to preach on revival, and I'd never seen one, but I'd read some books.

And I preached on revival with considerable eloquence, but nobody ever hears me peep about revival anymore. I'm talking about reformation, getting straightened out, getting straightened up, and repenting, and cleaning out.

And then, if God sends a revival, we'll be ready for it. But I can't tell you about revivals, and I don't know whether the Lord's coming, or revival's coming, or what. I don't know. But I do know all this religious activity we see throughout the country isn't revival.

It's just religious activity, because we're taking man's way. And the stone which God has given us to build with, we reject, and we're using our own blueprint instead of God's. The Lord is searching for wise people.

You don't have to have college degrees, just wise people. Some of the wisest, sharpest, keenest, most penetrating souls I've ever met. They had an anointing. God poured eyesight on their eyes, and they can see through the fog, see their way through.

God's looking for people like that. Maybe he'll find some here, some at Grove, and maybe they'll be little enough and no good enough. God can lift them up, and dust them off, and pour oil on them, and send them out to help teach the poor, staggering, yin and yang, dying church how to build after the pulls of death.

Something doesn't happen like that pretty soon. Another 25 years, what is now evangelicalism will be liberalism. Right in our doctrine, if we don't keep right in our souls, right in our eyes. I feel I'd like to see once before I die, before the Lord comes, I'd like to see God do something so big and grand and wonderful, nobody could figure it out, wouldn't you?

Every religious thing now can be figured out. Psychologists can figure it out, and roper surveyors can figure it out, and learned people can tell us how we did it. I'd like to see God Almighty descend and do something nobody can figure out.

You know, stood there with his rod and his miracles. Everything Moses did, they had some fake to do the same thing. Finally, Moses did a wonderful thing, and the fakes all disappeared in the bushes. He said, no, we can't match that.

We don't know how that happened. God did that. Now, I'd like to see God do something yet, at home and abroad, so obviously divine that no psychologist would ever dare dust off his typewriter stack or write about it.

Bible Knowledge Must Lead to Obedience

He'd fall flat on his face and say, how wonderful all this is. It's the Lord's doing, and it's wonderful in our eyes. Wanted somebody to teach Bible, just teach Bible, got the wrong boy. Because I believe with Phinney that Bible teaching without application is sinful.

Just to learn more Bible and go on out and do nothing about it, sinful. Bible was given to be obeyed, not to be learned. So while I'll have lots of Bible in it, I'm going to make it hard on you. So don't come expecting to lean back with your Bible under your arm and take notes while soothe your troubled heart.

I won't do anything of the sort. Don't plan to do it. This isn't the time for it. This is the time for seeing our sins and doing something about them, getting straightened out, getting right with God, cleaning house, getting our eyes on the future, and stop thinking about the past.

Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Now, Father, we pray that thou would help us. Temptation will be to just loaf around among the trees. Loafing, Satan's working. We're loafing, Khrushchev's busy. People are busy trying to destroy the church, destroy human liberty and dignity, take away everything good and decent from the world.

They're doing it while we sleep. Please make our beds hard. Choke us up so we can't eat too much. And help us that we might pray during these days, not be parasites living off the preachers, participators and partakers, sharing with them, not only in our giving, but in our praying and in our bearing of the load.

We ask this in Jesus' precious name. Amen. It has been, I've tried to figure out how many years since I've been here, but I do remember what happened last time I was here. VJ, say, and they took the rationing off gasoline, and everybody on the camp ducked out to get a tank full.

Now, that's been a long time ago, hasn't it?