Seek Jesus Himself — Hans R. Waldvogel

Why should I wander an alien from thee, or cry in the desert for bread? Some time ago I was in Cairo in a Pentecostal mission among the Bedouins, and they're an interesting lot. They dress differently than we do.

They wear what I would call long nightgowns, white nightgowns down to the bottom. That's about all they wear. And then they have a red phase on their head, and they keep them on in church. And in their missions, the mission looks like a pen in a zoo.

There's a big wall in the middle. Men and women are separated. They're not allowed to look at one another. Only the preacher is allowed to see them both. The pope is in the midst, over the wall. And so one great revelation was their singing.

Something that I suppose they called singing. We wouldn't call. We'd call it howling. You've heard of the howling dervishes. Well, it seems to come from down here somewhere. And they open their mouths just as wide as they can, and something comes out.

It sounds like the rushing waters of Niagara. And you don't know where they come from or where they're going to. You couldn't distinguish music. All the brother bar tried to accompany them with the piano.

But he leaned over to me, and he said, They're singing, O thou in whose presence my soul takes delight. And then they sang, So nimm denn meine Hände und führe mich. They really had it in need of a Führer.

But they sang that song, and every time I sing that verse, Oh, why, why should I wander an alien from thee? I see myself transported into a little room with bare walls in Benton Harbor where I had one of my first evangelistic campaigns.

Seeking Jesus Rather Than Religious Success

And I didn't want to preach. I didn't want to hold meetings. I wanted to find Jesus. I had been told what Miss Schuette said a while ago. If you had any idea what is in store for those that receive a larger vision of Jesus Christ, you'd cry day and night, and that's what I did.

I cried day and night to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection. And I used to go into that room after meetings. The meetings lasted till almost midnight, and then I had to sleep with a fat preacher, and I didn't sleep very well, so I thought, Well, I might as well pray.

And I'd stay in that little room. I'd walk up and down, and I'd say, Oh, why should I wander an alien from thee? I couldn't understand why I shouldn't know Jesus, why I shouldn't have an experience of him, why I shouldn't possess him.

And so every time I sing that verse, I see that room before me because something happened to me in that room. A wonderful thing I discovered that everyone that seeketh findeth. Oh, when you seek him, I know that they seek people like that that tell you how to get atomic power by fasting or by chastening yourself, and people will do that.

But it's a different thing when you seek for Jesus, when you seek for the beloved of your soul, when you've caught a vision of the glory of the Son of God, and when you've heard his voice like the voice of the bridegroom, and your heart has begun to burn within you, and you dread someone to be found, someone that has been seeking you.

Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and base things of the world has God chosen to confound the things that are mighty, and things that are despised has God chosen, and things that are not.

Oh, Jesus, bridegroom of all the sons of heaven, pale into utter blackness, why did you ever choose me? And why did you save me? And why does God say, delight thyself also in the Lord? Our hearts and our affections depend on ourselves.

You will want him. When you really buy the beauty of the Son of God, there will rise within your heart a homesickness, a cry to know him, and the power of his resurrection, and when you begin to seek him like that, you'll think he'll never be found of you.

Discovering the Difference Between Knowing About Christ and Knowing Christ

I experienced once, as soon as I honestly began to seek for him, I've been very religious, and I've been able to preach sometimes in the power of God, and I'd have a very blessed and successful ministry, but I didn't have him in his fullness.

I didn't know him. It wasn't Christ. It was myself. My spiritual self, maybe. My powerful self, maybe. Or wasn't he? The greatest thing that God can do for any human being is to make him cry out for him alone.

Just Jesus Christ. And when God began to do that for me, I thought I'd never find him. I suddenly discovered that I didn't know him, like Mary and Joseph when they came away from Jerusalem and they left the 12-year-old Jesus there.

They thought he was in the company. I always thought he was there. I didn't bother to find out, and I didn't realize that I hadn't him in all his fullness. It was something about him. I knew a lot about him.

I loved to sing songs about him. I loved to quote poetry. I thought he was in the company, and presently I discovered he wasn't there. I began to seek for him, and then I thought he didn't want me anymore.

I thought the heavens were brass. And I discovered something else. As I sought and sought and sought, I discovered that he was seeking me, that he was there to be found. And I found out that I had to find him in my heart, let go, and believe in him.

Letting Go of Troubled Hearts and Trusting Christ

How simple are these words. Let not your heart be troubled. Don't. As long as your heart's troubled about anything at all, you'll get no place. Believe also in me. Oh, when I look into the Bible and find him there and find the blood of the everlasting covenant provides me with a savior that displaces me, justifies me with all my affections and lusts.

Haste yourself also. And here he is, as beautiful as the sun at noontime, as marvelous as he ever was. And here he is, stretching forth beseeching hands and saying, believe also in me. Don't let your heart be troubled.

The Bible says about him, for me on the cross, what a fool I am when I occupy my time or myself and give my attention to anything outside of him. Oh, to be swallowed up by a sight of the son of God will make me forget everything else.

Will make my whole being to be enamored of God. And more than that, it'll give me himself and he'll take over. I live no more. Christ lives within me. Isn't that what creates all the trouble for us? The fact that we have to live?

Man shall see the Lord. I sought after humility, and when I thought I had grafted a little bit, then I had lost my love. And then I gave up my humility and went after love. And then when I found love, I saw I needed something else, and I gave up that.

And I remember the bat, the fruit bat I saw in the zoo. He was caught with his toes in the mesh, and he was trying to get away from that mesh, and he couldn't. He'd get one toe out, and then he got the other's caught.

And then he got the other toe out, and then he got the other's caught. He never, never got away from that. Oh, beloved, mine eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet out of the net. How simple.

How simple to let go and let God. How simple to let him undertake. How simple to give up my own self and to return unto the Lord. You know how great Jesus is. You know how wonderful he is. You know how sufficient.

Human Inability, Sin, and the Need for Divine Initiative

Sometimes he has to allow you to get acquainted with your utter inability and to show you what a great fizzle you've been, even in the work for God. What a fizzle. Oh, when you discover, then you'll be glad to let him take over and let him do all your work.

And when you find out that all your life has been defiled and spoiled and wrecked. I was thinking of a scripture where God talks about Israel. He talks about somebody that had spoiled it utterly. And he said, I'm going to annihilate you like one takes away dung until it's all gone.

That's your self. I live no more. I live no more. As in Adam, all of it. Brother Ernest talked about his children who don't like to get up to go to school. Well, they've got a double heritage, don't they?

Bad mother says, just like that. Father says, you see, the only way you can get into it, someone has said, you've got to be born into it. And every child that's born. My, when I see the multitude today coming out of Grand Central Station, I always think, my God sure started something when he made Adam and Eve.

Adam's Defilement and Christ's New Birth

He sure did. Look at humanity and marvelous creation it is. I love to look into the eyes of a babe and think, my father, what a marvelous man in your own image. And you'll never get through marveling at the great wisdom and power of God.

Every child of all the billions in the image of Adam. To be an entirely individual being with individual characteristics. What a marvelous creation. And the blood of Adam's defilement and characteristics that makes them slaves of the flesh and the world and the devil.

And they've all inherited it from Adam. And scientists tell us today that every one of us, every human being has some of the original chromosomes that came out of Adam and Eve. We're so united to them.

We're one flesh. He says he made of one blood all the nations of earth to dwell upon this earth. It's the very picture of death, isn't it? So Jesus says, no man cometh unto the Father but by me, wide into the new birth.

You cannot partake of Christ except by being born again by the Spirit of God into this family. And now, just like we partook of Adam, so we partake of the last Adam. Glory to God. Just like we became heirs of sin and of death, now we're heirs of righteousness and life.

Oh, let's believe it. Let us quit dwelling in the valley of the shadow of death. Let's come out in you as he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sin. And I found out something when I began to seek the Lord, and he began to reveal himself to me.

The Simplicity of Christ's Life and Resting in His Work

I found out something that I didn't know and that most people and so many people never find out. That the life of Jesus is utterly simple. The simplicity of a child. Glory to God. As a child that singeth with unbidden joy once was sick, now he holds me fast.

Once I had to try to live a Christian life, now he lives within me. Thank God. The wonderful thing God did when he gave us Jesus and when he made him to be sinicanty, he was delivered up to die on the cross.

And when for our justification he was raised from the dead. And you will never partake of Christ by striving in your own strength, but by coming to Jesus with an honest of goodness in him, in him within.

The Holy Spirit, Silence, and the Presence of God

The reaction to the meeting this morning was similar to that of Ernest a while ago, Brother Ernest. When I first came into Pentecost, I couldn't understand these. Oh, dear Lord, this condescension of Jehovah when we don't want to breathe, when it's a sickness and something's happening on the inside.

What does it do for people? Why, it takes your attention away from things and from yourself and from people and from voices and it centers it on the invisible, eternal in God who desires so to unite you to himself through the power of the Holy Ghost.

And it doesn't come by way of the intellect. I hear not the sound of a footstep around me, but God's in my own. And the hush of my heart is as holy as the bowers where angels have flown. Long ago I was weary.

The soul could not win. Long ago I was weary of places where I met but the human and sin. Long ago I was weary of noises that shattered my soul with their being. I walked in the world with the worldly, yet I craved what the world never gave till I knelt long ago at the altar and heard a voice call me.

Since then I walk in the valley far beyond human ken. If you ask what I find in this valley, it's my trusting place with the divine. There I fell at the feet of the holy and the voice around me said, Be mine.

And there rose from my heart an echo and I have seen thoughts in the valley of me how my spirit was stirred. They were holy veils on their faces. I found the valley like virgins too pure. Christ in place with the divine.

And when you really believe in him, you're bound to become silent in his presence. You're bound to open your heart. Everything within you cries to him in great sickness, grips your soul because within you there springs forth a fountain of light and you realize it's himself and everything that pertains to the world and to self has to be silent.

Now the voice of God begins to speak to your soul. I like that track by A .B. Simpson where he tells of his experience. He was a very successful minister and he worked so hard that he had a nervous breakdown and his heart gave out and the doctor forbade him to preach when he was about 40 years of age.

A.B. Simpson's Stillness and Healing

And then a little track came into his hands written somewhere in the Middle Ages by one of the saints that had found God. And this track in simple words said why God's in your heart. He's waiting to speak to you.

Waiting to manifest himself to you. Himself. If you'll just become silent enough to hear his voice. He thought now isn't that strange. Now here was a dying man and God was in his life and in his heart and he hadn't gotten silent enough and still enough to hear his voice.

So he said well I'll get still. And he did. But he said no sooner had he shut the door and got to prayer to be still when a thousand clamoring voices clamored for attention. The voices of duty. The voice that called him to pray.

And the voice that called him to study. And all these voices and he stopped the Lord and spoke to him and said now be still. Be still. Be still. He said and it took a long time before all these voices were silent.

I sort of reflected I looked into my own heart this morning and there just didn't seem to be a picture an image a light a voice a thought nothing. Oh beloved it was in this sanctuary in the holiest of all where there was no earthly light that God Shekinah glory manifested himself.

And so when Dr. Simpson had gotten silent he said he began to hear in the depth of his soul without words he knew it was the voice of the bright room. So sweet. So powerful. He said it became to him the voice of God.

The first thing he knew he was healed of his disease. Some of us knew Dr. Simpson Mr. Shultz knew him. It was my privilege to sit at his seat several times and hear him talk about the love of Jesus. Well what did he discover?

Jesus Christ as the Source of Simpson's Ministry

Instead of discovering Dr. A .B. Simpson Ph .D. L .L .D. he discovered just Jesus. Jesus revealed himself to him and from that moment on Jesus began to minister through him. His ministry is worldwide today.

His ministry became the really the forerunner of the Pentecostal movement. And it's still going on today. Oh how many souls were saved in all parts of the world. He was the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance that sends missionaries into all the lands of the earth even to this day.

And he preached the fourfold gospel with power and God manifested himself with signs following and the wonderful thing was that Dr. Simpson said he didn't do anything. It was Christ that produced it in him and kept him in perfect rest and perfect health for the rest of his life.

And one day and I heard him tell this himself I think it was on his birthday when he got to be 50 years old he said to the Lord Jesus do something new for me today. And before he knew he sat down and he wrote his first yesterday today forever Jesus is the same all may change but Jesus never.

Glory to his name. And from that day on a great multitude of songs sprang forth from that life and when you read them you somehow feel the breath of Jehovah. Beloved I live no more. I live no more. Oh how restful when you don't have to live anymore.

That's why they inscribe our tombstone as I can.