(Reformation Within Protestantism): Real and Practical Beliefs — A.W. Tozer

Radical Reformation and Practical Beliefs

Again, more or less, I'm not preaching from a text exactly any time, any night, but I certainly am weaving plenty of Scripture in all the time. But remember I gave you a text, Zechariah 4 .6, not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.

And my thesis is for these nights that radical reformation is the present imperative in Protestant circles. And I defined reformation last Sunday night as being the removal of faults and abuses and the restoration to a former good state.

And that's my thesis, that we need this, need it desperately bad now in Protestant circles. Now, one area of our thinking that needs to be reformed, that is, needs to be changed by the removal of abuses and faults and restored again to its former bright and good state, is this.

We must reform our practical beliefs about God's design for mankind. Now, I say practical beliefs because there is a difference between nominal beliefs and practical beliefs. The nominal belief is what you hold in name, and the practical belief is what you hold in reality and what holds you.

And while there probably isn't as much fault to be found with the nominal beliefs, there is a great deal to be found with the practical beliefs. And it's these practical beliefs, particularly in our circles, that need to be restored again to their happy and bright state with the faults and abuses purged out of them.

God’s Unchanging Plan Amid Radical World Change

Now, it has been a long time since Jesus was born in Bethlehem and died on a cross and rose again the third day and ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty and sent the Holy Ghost to establish his Church.

I say it has been a long time. And since those days, there have been changes in the world, changes so radical and sweeping and all-pervading and revolutionary as to be entirely incredible to anybody living in Jesus' day and entirely and unimaginable to the world of those times.

Now, have these changes forced God to modify his plans for his Church and for mankind? And here is where we have fallen by the wayside, and here is where we need to have a reformation, a purgation, a removal of the faults and a restoration again of the faith of Christians to a belief in the truth.

Now, I say, have these changes that have come forced God to modify his plans for his Church and for the world? Now, a large number of professing Christians say, yes, without a question. They say, yes, that's true, or I suppose they wouldn't like to have it put up to them like that.

They don't like, people don't like to have the most realistic construction put on things. What they would say, and they are the liberals and the modernists, question mark after both words, but they wouldn't like to stand right up if you backed them into a corner and took all the little lapels and said, do you think God has been forced to change his mind?

I don't think anybody would quite have the courage to say, yes. But nevertheless, they do say it, and here is what they say in effect. They say it little by little and here a little and there a little until it's brainwashed their people.

They say that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of new developments. That a book that was written in the day when men wore togas and Mother Hubbards and when they rode on mule backs, that a Bible or any book written at that time necessarily has to be reinterpreted in the day when women wear what they wear now and when you ride in airplanes.

And they say that the prophets and the apostles were mistaken about God's purposes, that God hasn't changed his mind, maybe, but the prophets and the apostles were mistaken about what God had intended to do.

And they say the Bible is outmoded and largely irrelevant. Irrelevant is a word which if you don't use, you haven't been to school at all. And the more you use it, the more for longer you've been in school.

They say that the Bible is outmoded and irrelevant. Irrelevant, of course, as you know, means it isn't related to anything. And outmoded means that we have new modes now, modes of thinking and living, and the Bible is outmoded.

It's a back-number magazine. And they say that we must, therefore, reassess its teachings and rethink our beliefs and our hopes. Now, I'm not overstating this at all. This is what we're being taught right along.

It gets into the newspapers and people are saying it, that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of all these changes which I have mentioned, and that the prophets and the apostles were mistaken.

They had ideas which were good and advanced for their day, but not advanced for our day. And that, therefore, we must reassess the Bible's teaching and we must rethink our beliefs and our hopes. Now, they say that we're more advanced than they were in those days, that we know more about ourselves and more about human motivation and more about the nature of things than we did in those days.

Therefore, a book written at a time when people thought that the earth was flat and that the sun went around the earth, rose in the morning and crossed over and went down into the sea behind, that no book written in a time when men believed those things that it can possibly be taken too seriously.

And while it certainly contains some beautiful poetry and some marvelously inspiring thoughts about human nature and the world in which we live, nevertheless, all this is to be understood, and it is to be reinterpreted and reassessed and rethought.

Now, I just want to put this in, it isn't really part of the sermon, but I can't possibly keep myself from saying it, that I challenge the truth of this idea that we are advanced. I challenge it, even though I know that 99 of the modern educators and the modern newspaper men and TV men and radio men and politicians and all the rest, 98 anyhow, don't agree with me.

Nevertheless, I challenge that we're any further advanced than they were in the day of Jesus. If we are so far advanced, then I want to ask you some questions. Why did we kill 850 human beings made in the image of God?

If we're advanced in this day, and we know so much, and because we can ride automobiles instead of mulebacks, therefore we're advanced, why was it that we used those automobiles to kill 850 human beings in one country alone?

And if we are so advanced in this day, I want to ask you why it is that our penitentiaries are packed absolutely full and our mental hospitals are crowded to the doors. If we are so far advanced, I want to ask you, why then is the whole world a powder keg, and a man in Ottawa or Washington or Berlin or London or Moscow, if he says the wrong thing, may blow up the world?

It wasn't so in the day of Jesus. Save your whole life, you couldn't have had anything but a brash fire war in that day, but you can have a war now that will blow up the world and leave nothing but puffs of white ash around where you used to be.

And if we're so far advanced, I want to ask you, why is it that we not only killed 850 human beings celebrating Christmas in one country of the world, and we'd have to add other countries on, but why is it that we, one country, one advanced nation, has spent $40 ,000 million, that's $40 billion, to defend itself from other advanced nations?

Now, if we've advanced so far, and the fact that we're riding automobiles instead of the backs of mules, if that proves that we're so far advanced, then why did the United States have to spend $40 billion, that's $40 ,000 million, not $40 ,000 or $400 ,000 or $40 million, but $40 ,000 million to protect itself from other nations that are also so far advanced?

And if we're so far advanced in our day, then how is it that for the first time we have weapons of destruction now that can annihilate the world? You know, they began with the fist, and if one man was mad at another one, he just poked him with his fist.

And then somebody thought up how to take a stone and make it sharp and bop him over the head with that stone. And then somebody else thought that they could take something and sharpen it and shoot it and get him when he wasn't close enough to bop back.

And so they had the bow and arrow and the spear. Then they went on from that, you know, to gunpowder, which was invented by the Chinese, and then on to our present weapons, the terrible, awful weapons that can annihilate cities and nations and the world if we don't watch.

Well, why is it that it's in this advanced period when we are so far advanced in every way, so far advanced that the Bible is now outmoded and irrelevant? Why is it this is the first time we've got a hold of this devil weapon?

I ask you again, if we are so far advanced in our day, why is it that women don't dare walk in the parks anymore? And now I don't want you to tell it, but I say there are men who don't walk in parks either, and I'm one of them.

When I go to New York City, I don't, I like Central Park, beautiful place, but I don't walk in Central Park, particularly after the sun's down, because I don't want to be mugged, that's a modern word, that's Greek, mugged.

Because I don't want to be mugged and have my little money taken away from me and my watch and my credit card and flying card. I don't want to lose that, so I stay out of Central Park. Why is it that in Chicago, Illinois, they had a great, beautiful park there with a hedge all the way around it, and so many perverts hid in the hedges and jumped out on women that they had to cut the hedge level with the ground so everybody could see all the way, and if anybody saw a pervert on the way, he could duck around some other way and miss him.

Why is it, why is it that happened in this beautiful advanced age when we know so much about ourselves and therefore we're so far advanced over those men who wrote the Bible? Why is it I want to ask you why nurses who get out at midnight never walk home anymore but take taxis, three or four together, and split the price in order that they might be able to get home safely?

Why is it in this advanced age that dope and violence and illegitimacy and divorce are soaring? Well, that's not part of the sermon, but I thought I'd put that in, because I've been told that the Bible is irrelevant and outmoded because we know so much now and we're so far advanced.

You see, there's a type of mind that thinks that every motion is progress. Every time you make a move, you're progressing. Then there's a type of mind that thinks that every time you move in a straight line, you're going forward, forgetting that you can move in a straight line and be going backward, but of course that's old-fashioned and obscurantist.

I've been called obscurantist. You know, they haven't really named me, but they've drawn a picture in this mind. They said, every time we move, we move forward, and so we're moving forward toward full penitentiaries and mental hospitals crowded.

We're moving forward toward the killing of so many people on the highway that it's a disgrace on the North American continent and all over the world. We have moved forward to a place where the world's a powder keg, and if Jack Kennedy or Nick of the Crew Chef get up some morning, or John Diefenbaker or Mr. Green, and they have had a bad night of it and say the wrong thing, they can blow up the world.

Why is it we've moved forward to that? And we've moved forward to the place where we don't dare walk anymore, where we can't walk on the street. All right, we've moved forward, yes. Now, the tragedy of the century is that the Protestants have accepted this progress and move-forward thing and actually believe it.

The Collapse of Protestant Moral Protest

And if anybody calls up a preacher, he's sure to say this. They want him to say it, you see, they call him up. I get called up occasionally by the newspapers and want my poor little two cents worth. And there's not much use, because I don't believe what they want me to believe, and I don't say what they expect me to say.

They wanted me to go on TV over in Ottawa, and I wouldn't do it, because I knew that what I would say wouldn't be the thing that they wanted at all, and I would simply be, I have a name for it but can't use it tonight, and I wouldn't want to spoil their party for them.

Now, the tragedy, I say, of the century is that the Protestants, the sons of the great Protest, the sons of the great Protest, the sons of the Reformation, have been brainwashed and re-indoctrinated by these who believe that changes have made a difference in God's plans and a difference in Christianity and a difference in Christ, and that we can't read the Bible as we used to, face-to-book, but that we have to read it through colored glasses, colored by the changed, the ones who've made the changes.

And they have been hypnotized, so by that old serpent, the devil, into believing that we no longer have a trustworthy Bible, and so Protestantism is no longer a moral force in the world. I hope I'm talking to a congregation of people that have too much backbone and too much intelligence to believe that Protestantism is a force in the world anymore.

Protestantism is not a force in the world. Protestantism has sold out to the brainwashers, and instead of being the sons and daughters of the great Protest, we are now yes-men and yes-women. Women, I saw a cartoon one time of a fellow standing in the middle of an office, and he was saying, Yes, yes, yes, yes!

And he was saying, No, no, no, no, no, no, no! And somebody said, What's the matter with that fellow? He said, He's a yes-man on his vacation. And we are now having yes-men in the churches of Christ, yes-men everywhere.

We're training them in the schools and sending out little yes-men who bob their head yes like a plastic duck, like what in the 10th Century. Up and down goes their little heads, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

But the great Protest that could stand in moral protest of what was going on in the world and say, This is what God says! That day is over almost in Protestantism. And we now have, running the Protestant world, a lot of people who talk very solemnly about Christ but don't mean what the Bible means, talk about God but don't mean what the Bible means, talk about revelation but don't mean what the Bible means, talk about inspiration but don't mean what our Fathers meant.

And the gospel churches, and this is the second great tragedy, that the gospel churches are all so confused and intimidated. They're confused and intimidated by numbers, and they accept the belief that there has been a change and that Christians must adjust to the change.

The word we have now all the time is adjustment. They say, You've got to get adjusted. Forgetting that the world has, wherever the world has been blessed, it's always been blessed by the man who wasn't adjusted.

The poor little guy that gets adjusted, he can't do much anyhow, and he's not worth having around. The great men who stood, the great men who stood in Canada and helped make her a world power, were the men who didn't bow.

They stood and protested and dared to, If you're going to be any adjusted, let them come around to me, they said. Same almost everywhere in every field of human endeavor where there has been any progress that has been made, that progress has been made by those who stood up and said, I will not adjust to the world.

Now, if you don't adjust, you'll get a complex or something. If you don't adjust, you'll have to go to a psychiatrist after a while. I said one time in a college that Jesus was among the most maladjusted men of his generation, and they wrote in their paper afterward and said, I rocked the theologians onto their heels with that one.

But they should have rocked onto their heels because Jesus Christ our Lord never pretended to adjust to the world. He came to die for the world and to call the world to him, but the adjustment had to be on the other side.

If there was any adjustment, it had to be on their part, it wouldn't be on his. He was right in the first place. And because he was right in the first place, he would make no adjustment. But they said, we just, every poor little guy, we start with him when he hasn't cut his first tooth yet, trying to get him to adjust to the world.

And one of the most all-embracing, omnibus compliments that a teacher can pay to a child is that she adjusts beautifully, he adjusts beautifully, forgetting that the great composers and the great poets and the great architects were people that wouldn't adjust at all.

There's a certain college, I won't mention it, but it's a religious college, and they say that a student is never any good unless he's kicked out of it. That he goes to it, but if he graduates the regular way, they have brainwashed him until he'll never amount to anything.

But if he has the courage to stand up and get kicked out, he'll amount to something. And I know a number that got kicked out and they amounted to something. I don't know the cause and effect relationship, but I assume it's pretty close.

But now they say, let's get adjusted, and so we're all busy trying to get adjusted. Some of you people that starved out poor, shivering sheep with every kind of sheep disease known to man, you had it in some denomination that was brainwashed, where they taught you that the Bible had to be reinterpreted in this new day, and that it was outmoded and largely irrelevant.

And then you go to some gospel church and you're not there three months until you're trying to introduce the very baloney that you ran away from into the church where you went for help. What's the matter with us anyhow?

Are we holding our heads? If we ran away from death and we ran away from unbelief and we ran away from this phony advanced stuff and get to a church where they love God and believe the Bible, then we start making changes, because we have been confused and intimidated by the changes.

We've accepted those changes. Now the contemporary world, I don't mind telling you, is the result of radical changes down the generation. Changes amounting to a revolution. Let's look again, the scientific revolution.

Scientific, Industrial, and Communicational Revolutions

That is, we're learning to control the world instead of being controlled by the world. That's at the base of the scientific revolution. And then there's the industrial revolution. It means that goods are now made in factories instead of in your house.

Every man used to make his own shoes, and every woman her own clothes, and the clothes of her family. Now they wouldn't do it and don't do it. They make them in factories. That's industrial. You see, every man used to go out and cut down trees and saw them up and get his own wood, and now they have unions and they dig coal or get oil, and that's the way we get our heat and our light and our power.

So that's the industrial revolution. Then there's the communicational revolution. I was reading along with my wife in a section of the book of 2 Kings the other day, and it came upon those runners. They used to send a runner out right on this continent, right in this country, 200 years ago, 150 years ago.

If they wanted to get a message to somebody, they picked a long, lean, wiry Indian and said, Now, dogleg, big chief, you go on the run. So dogleg takes out with a message, and away he goes. He's a runner.

Some of those runners could run 20, 30, 40 miles, you know, and hardly be puffing when they got there. They went there with their message. Now those were the runners. But what do you do now? You step to the radio, two-way radio, and call up and tell the fellow, and there's been nothing but the union used up about one-fourteenth of one watt.

There's a difference now. They say, See, that's the communicational difference. Then there's the philosophical difference. I might mention that communication business. Some of you, I don't know who you are, but some of you have gone to somebody's home or had in your own home shortwave radio and have talked to your friends in other parts of the world, HCJB, the Christian station down in the Andes.

Sometimes a missionary will get on down there, and he'll talk to somebody in Canada or the United States or somewhere. Beautiful, you know. You don't have to stand a runner or wait three months for a sailship.

You just radio the thing. And then there's philosophical revolution, and I could, I suppose, talk for 20 hours on that subject. But at the bottom, it just means that men think, men are man-centered in their thinking now instead of God-centered.

That's the difference. Men are man-centered instead of God-centered. Then there's been the social revolution. That is, there's a new and radical change that has come, a new attitude completely, and a new attitude toward marriage, and a new attitude toward sex, and a new attitude toward parenthood, and a new and radical attitude toward work.

There was a day when men worked and were proud of it. Even in my grandfather's day, we had an old rocking chair made by my grandfather, a very comfortable old rocking chair. The old boy made it himself, cut down the trees and made it himself, you know, and they were glad to have it.

And it came down to us and then finally got lost. You know, we got one of these functional, we got these functional chairs now, you know, that make you feel like a potted flower when you get down into them.

But anyhow, they used to make things and enjoy making them and keep them for two or three hundred years. Say, my great-great grandfather made that. That was when work meant something. Women made jelly and pick a lily and all the rest and were proud of it.

I'm telling my wife today about my old mother. She made butter and sold it in a little town nearby, and she had a reputation for making good butter. She never let it get rancid. It was always just the right, everything was good.

My mother was really and properly and pardonably proud of the fact that people, when they came to the store, said, we'd like a couple of pounds of butter. Have you got any made by Mrs. Tozer? And she was proud of it, God bless her little old heart.

She was proud of the fact she could make butter. You've never even seen the cow that gave them milk that your butter came from. You've got no pride in your butter now. You've got no pride in your jelly.

We buy jelly that says, Made in Scotland, of all things, you know. Not jelly, but what do you call this stuff you put on food? Marmalade. Made in Scotland. Work used to be something you could be proud of.

It's something you get through with as fast as you can now in order to get the money out of it, in order that you can go play. So there's been a radical change in our views of work, and a radical change in our views of money.

I was mentioning to somebody recently of the first penny I ever owned, I remember, ever earned, I remembered. First penny, not dollar, penny, I remember it. I went out and helped a fellow pull weeds out of a corn patch.

I was a little sawed-off fellow. And I never earned a penny in my life. And I helped him with his weeds, and he gave me a penny. I didn't keep it, I wish I had, but I think I know probably what I did with it.

I would dash off, and it was a mile and a half to the store, and I had to go across, and I'd buy a penny's worth of candy. I got a handful in those days, and I always kept some for my mother, I remember that.

No, I'd no more do it than I'd cut my own head off, eat all the candy. It was sticky and it was dirty the time Mother got it, and it was usually, I pulled it out of a pant pocket covered with lint. But Mother got a little of it anyhow, and God bless her, she was too smart to ever let me see her eat it or ever know that she didn't.

But I rather suspect that she didn't, or at least washed it first. But that was a day when money meant something to somebody, but money doesn't mean anything to anybody now much. You get enough of it and away it goes.

There's been a radical change in our attitude toward our reason for living. Our old Presbyterian friend said man was born to glorify God and enjoy him forever, but now we've changed it so nobody knows why he was born.

And our human goals and heaven and eternity in the world to come, vastly different attitude toward that now. You remember the old poem written by a long fellow, the village smithy beneath the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands, and in one place he says about the old village smithy with his hard hands and his soft heart, he went on Sunday to the church and sat among the boys.

He heard his daughter's voice singing in the village choir, and it made him think of her mother's voice singing in paradise. And with his hard rough hand he wiped a tear out of his eye. But we're not thinking so much about that now.

The churches are not thinking about heaven. They're thinking about whether we should have the atom bomb in Canada, and whether capital punishment is right or wrong, and whether we should or should not live with Khrushchev.

They think about earthly things, and the views of men have to do with earth. The views of the church in the early church had to do with heaven and God. And now it has to do with this world. The communists have made us ashamed.

They have said, you're not worried about people now, you're looking for pie in the sky. And because these poor creatures were only half-saved to begin with, they allowed themselves to get intimidated by the mocking shout, pie in the sky, pie in the sky.

Well, if any commie ever came up to me and said, you're selling pie in the sky, I'd say three things. First, I'm not selling pie. Second, I'm not selling anything in the sky. And third, I'm not selling anything.

But I believe in heaven and God and the future nevertheless. But these changes have come. Now, as far as the liberals are concerned, they've outright said, we've got to face them and we've got to adjust to them, and we can't be the way our fathers were.

And we can't expect Christians to be the kind of Christians they were in those early days. They were simple-hearted, childlike people with no knowledge of astronomy and no knowledge of science and no knowledge of themselves, no knowledge of human motives or the nature of the universe.

And they just took things simply and naively like children. We've got to be different now. Now, I want to ask you, Avenue Road Church and you that listen to me, I want to ask you this night, in God's name, choose you this day, are we going to accept, that is, accept in act if not in creed, in act if not in creed, are we going to accept the belief that the Bible must be interpreted anew in the light of the new development?

Are we going to allow ourselves to accept the doctrine that the prophets and apostles were mistaken about God? Are we going to allow them to tell us that the Bible is outmoded and largely irrelevant and must therefore be reassessed in the light of modern advancements?

Are we going to do it? If we are, then, God help us, for it is already written across our door, which way shall we go here? Has God changed? Are we going to accept it? Is there a change in the purpose of God?

Have these changes in human society, have they startled God? Have they shocked him? Have they brought him to heel? Have they changed the everlasting God, the creator of heaven and the earth? Is Jesus Christ who said, I'm the same yesterday, today and forever, is he changed?

Is he now chiefly useful to the name to be used when you baptize your baby or at Christmas time or Easter? Or is Jesus Christ what the apostles and who the apostles said he was? Have the scientists now been able to do and the industrialists, have they been able to do what Jesus said the gates of hell couldn't do, prevail against the Church?

And is the day of miracles past? Must we, in order to keep intellectually respectable and have good standing with these who doubt the word, must we humbly say, Well, I don't believe in miracles. You're right, Doctor, you're right, Doctor, I don't believe in miracles anymore.

Or have we got enough left of our Protestant protest and enough of our courage to stand up and say, I believe in miracles, whenever God Almighty wants to perform them. And I believe that whenever God wants to do anything that's out of the ordinary and contrary, or at least above the common processes of nature, God's able to do it.

And I believe the miracles of Jesus Christ. I believe they were real miracles. I believe the miracles of the Old Testament. I believe they were real miracles. But are we going to allow ourselves to be brainwashed along with all the rest?

Or are we going to dare to stand in protest and be known around this country as being Protestants indeed, and gospel Christians, and men who refuse to adjust, but who make the world adjust to us? I was converted when I was 17, I've told this before.

Conversion, Courage, and Refusing Worldly Adjustment

I was converted when I was 17 years old, converted because I was sick and thought I might die. I wasn't sick enough to die, but I was scared. So I just went to God and plain scared and said, Oh, God, here I am, I'm a miserable little sinner, and if I die I'll be lost, and the Lord Jesus will save me.

I had a fellow preach on the street and he told me how to get saved. No theologian would have allowed it, but I got converted on it and I've been converted ever since. Well, I got converted, and here I lived in a home.

My mother was there, my father, and my brothers and sisters, and a lot of boarders they'd taken in because the town where we lived, Akron, Ohio, was jam-packed full, and they were knocking on doors trying to get places for young fellows to stay.

And there wasn't a Christian in the whole group, not one, nobody prayed, nobody sang a hymn, nobody went to church, nobody did anything. And here I was, 17 years old, and I got converted. Now what should I do?

Adjust? I didn't adjust. I stood, and the result was, my father adjusted and he got converted. My mother adjusted and she got converted. Two of my sisters adjusted and they got converted. Some of the boarders adjusted and they got converted.

If you adjust, you're dead. And if a church adjusts to this idea, which is everywhere abroad, that after all we mustn't be radical, we mustn't be extreme, that we've got to reassess our faith in the light of new advanced knowledge, and we've got to rethink our beliefs and our hopes in the light of new views of things.

If you adjust, sir, you're done. But if you dare to stand, the world will adjust to you, I can promise you that. Not all of them, but some of them. There will be people that adjust to you. And I ask, has Jesus Christ been defeated?

There are people right now, Americans and Canadians and Britishers and Scotsmen and all the rest, who are worried that their Communism was the great unforeseen invasion. They said nothing's been like it, and they're right, nothing like it since the history of the world.

But when Karl Marx and Lenin and the rest of them thought out Communism, it was like opening the pits and letting out their locusts. And they have taken one-third of the world's population, and they've killed Christianity wherever they've gone, except for a few that are hiding away in secret.

And some are saying to themselves, is Communism the unforeseen, unpredicted invasion? Is that thing that God didn't know about, that Christ didn't foresee? And so is Christ, after having come down a century, triumphant?

Has he at last met his waterloo? What's your answer to that? My answer is a loud, roaring, resounding, no! He's never met his waterloo, and he never will. He, the Lord Christ, is going to ride down the sky on a white horse, and upon his thigh there will be written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

And the rich men and the mighty men and the scientists and the doctors and the lords of finance will cry for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them, to hide them from the wrath of the Lamb and from the fury of his power.

Have his people at last been plucked out of his hand? He said we'd never be plucked out of his hands. But did he know enough to tell us that? Hadn't there been some new advancements and new developments he didn't foresee?

The answer again is no. Shall we surrender to the world? No. Shall we surrender to liberalism? No. Shall we surrender to apostate Protestantism? The answer is no. Shall we surrender to the brainwashed gospel churches whose preachers are afraid to stand up and talk as I am talking tonight?

And the answer again is no. Our church is going to go the way of the gospel. We're not radicals, we're not fools, we don't fast 40 days, we dress like other people and drive around and have modern homes and are human and like to laugh.

But we believe that God Almighty has not changed and Jesus Christ is the same and that he is victorious and that we don't have to apologize for him and we don't have to modify nor adjust nor edit nor amend.

He stands, that glorious Lord, and nobody needs to apologize for him. If our answer to all the questions that I've asked you is yes, then we leave to our children a heritage of death and nothing but death.

Returning to Scripture, the Creeds, and Protestant Conviction

I'm nearly finished, and I say now, shall we believe the ringing words which say, I, Jehovah, change not? I believe them. Shall we believe those words of the Lord which say, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever?

I believe them. Shall we believe the words that say, he that overcometh I will give to each of the tree of life. He that overcometh shall not be hurt at the second death. He that overcometh shall sit with me on my throne.

My dear brother and sister, we're not going to be sheep running over the precipice because other dumb sheep are running over the precipice. We see the precipice, we know it's there, and we're listening to the voice of the shepherd, not the voice of the terrified sheep.

But the terrified, intimidated sheep are going everywhere. I look at the newspaper Saturday night and I'm hurt inside of my heart. I read magazines, Christian magazines, religious magazines that ostensibly are orthodox and stand for truth, and the stuff they advertise makes me sick to my stomach because they've given up to the belief that the Bible is largely outmoded and they've got to think up some new deals in order to get anywhere, that we've got to reassess our beliefs and rethink our hopes, and that the prophets and apostles were all right in their day, but while we believe in Jesus and want to accept him and get saved, still we've got to rethink this whole thing.