Threefold Vision (Alternative 2) — Leonard Ravenhill

I'm not going to use it for myself. I have to publish a book, and I don't have any publishers, so I guess my next book might cost about ten or twelve thousand dollars. And if you covered that tonight, I'm grateful.

And if you didn't, you'll be back tomorrow night, so that should make up the slack. But I do not get a penny out of my book, or out of the tape, and give all the prophets permission. So you won't be helping me in any way.

You might be helping to fulfill the song you just sang. Prophecy of Isaiah chapter 6. Prophecy of Isaiah chapter 6, reading from verse 1 into verse 9. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Isaiah's Vision of God's Holiness

Above it stood a set of fins, each one had six wings. With train, or with two, he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two did he fly. And one cried unto another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And the pulse of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, woe is me, for I am undone, because I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the set of fins unto me, having a life coal in his hand, which he had taken with a tongue from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this has touched thy lips.

Thine iniquity is taken away, and my sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, here am I, send me. And he said, Go. There is an automatic division in my judgment in this short reading.

There are three words in verses 5, 7, and 9. It's so simple even a preacher could remember them. Verse 5, the word woe. Verse 7, the word love. Verse 9, the word go. The first is the word of a man. The second is the word of a set of fins.

The third is the word of God. The first is a word of confession, woe is me. The second is a word of cleansing, lo, this has touched thy lips. And the third is a word of commission, go. An unusual feature about this wonderful chapter is this, that it is dated for us in the year that King Uzziah died.

We mentioned a couple of nights ago that when the king was anointed in Israel it was with pomp and circumstance. He was the anointed of God. You remember Saul, the king of Israel, was anointed and the Spirit of God entered him and he got gifts of the Spirit because he prophesied.

But he ended up a suicide. This man was anointed to be king of Israel and he died with a leper's rag on his leg. And Isaiah said, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up.

It isn't what we know that disturbs us, it's what we see that disturbs us. After the meeting last night, if you were here, there was a strange brooding of the Spirit, and a very lovely young lady came to me afterwards, tears running down her face, and said, Mr. Ravner, did it hurt you to preach like you preached tonight?

I said, it sure did. She said, it hurt me. I said, well you were hurt, I was hurt, but I'll tell you something more. God was hurt. He was hurt because people disobeyed him. Well I went to bed. I didn't sleep, which is not unusual.

I got up, went to bed about three o 'clock this morning, got up at seven, and in the early hours of the morning I said, now Lord tell me why, why, why a lot of people were disobedient last night. And he gave me the answer shortly, just like that, right from heaven.

They have no vision. Here is a vision, a free-fall vision, a vision of God, a vision of a lost world, a vision of the man himself. Isaiah had a very wonderful ministry. He had a very wonderful friendship with Uzziah.

Uzziah was a great king. He established a lot of reforms. Isaiah was almost blue-blooded. He was an aristocrat. If you read the first chapter and the first verse you'll discover that he reigned, he ministered, he prophesied through the reign of four kings.

But he says, in the day that Uzziah went out with a leper's rag, when he died I saw the This man again is in this, I'll use the word, I don't like to use it, but I'll use it, this very fabulous character, very fabulous classification of being a prophet.

Prophetic Ministry and the Cost of Obedience

Prophets are God's emergency men for crisis hours. Prophets are men who live with God. And God had given a revelation to this man, and he doesn't give revelations to many, maybe, but he gave a revelation to this man.

He said to Isaiah, the son of Amos, go and lose the sackcloth from off thy loins and put off thy shoe from my foot. And he did so walking naked and barefoot. And the Lord said, like as my servant Isaiah walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia.

Can you imagine the humiliation of it? Read it when you go home, that's in the twentieth chapter. In the second chapter, God said of Israel, a rebellious nation had become like Sodom and Gomorrah. And the only way for him to draw attention to God's anger against the nation was that he humiliated himself naked there in some public place.

You preachers dare not do that, of course. You haven't enough passion to do it anyhow, most of us. Of course, you'd get dressed up to be Santa Claus at Christmas. You'd act a fool at a Halloween party in your church.

And if you'd stripped yourself and laid naked in the shopping plaza these days, they'd arrest you. If you did it on the beach, they'd photograph you. But you see, these men are men of intense passion.

The man Jeremiah, I was reading about him today, and remember what he did? Even the prophets ganged up on him, and the priests ganged up on him. And the wages he got for, as they even declared, he delivered the message of God.

And so they sank him into a pit. It was a drainage place where all human excrement and silk went, and he sank down in it and was almost about to drown until they rescued him, and those were his wages.

Now, of course, you'd get filled with the Holy Ghost and become a millionaire in two years. If you don't, you didn't get the baptism. You see, the Apostle Paul never aspired for greatness or riches, even after what you would call maybe one of the most, perhaps the most successful ministry of all time.

And he's still saying, after he's raised the dead, after he's raised hell, after he's been to the greatest festival in the world, he began in intellectual capital, pardon me, he began in the historic capital of the world where he was born, Tartus.

He ended up in the intellectual, he ended up in the military capital of the world, Rome. In between he went to the religious capital of the world, Jerusalem. He went to the intellectual capital of the world, Acts 17, and argued with the philosophers and poets and stoics and philosophers.

And he went to the immoral capital of the world, Corinth. Then there were sewers of hell ran through the city. And he didn't stage a healing meeting. And he didn't rent the Colosseum there that seated a hundred thousand people.

He could have put it on himself, I am the Apostle Paul, I am the rightful inheritor of the ministry of Jesus. Everything Jesus did, did I do. Because he did. He raised the dead, he cast out devils, he got people who are lunatics straightened out, he unplugged their ears, he took the scales off their eyes, but he never capitalized on it.

All our healers need big meetings and big offerings. They came to the apostolic. I don't find any apostolic preacher ever went in a building anyhow. Nobody would take them in, they were afraid to be identified with them.

There's an old, old hymn that says, blessed are the men of broken hearts who mourn for sin with inward smiles. And I wouldn't be impressed with your eloquence or the greatness of your best ministry in your church.

Tell me, do you know anything about the fellowship of his suffering? To use a common phrase, you'll get bellyache or really heartache over the condition of America tonight. We're pretty near Sodom and Gomorrah stage or else we've passed it.

Judgment, Revival, and Eternity Consciousness

Sodom hadn't one Bible. Sodom hadn't a church. Sodom hadn't a preacher. Sodom hadn't a prayer meeting. Sodom had nobody to carry its sin. You say Sodom was destroyed because it was rotten. Sodom was destroyed because the church failed.

There were not ten righteous in the city. And God blew the whistle on them and ended the game because there were not ten righteous, not because of the iniquity merely. I reminded you the other night of this saying by that great German who said many years ago that Christianity is a very simple but a very sublime thing, to live in time for eternity.

And my gripe with Christianity today is we're not eternity conscious people. We're self-conscious, money conscious, position conscious, possession conscious, eternity conscious. I believe tonight the greatest need that we have is this threefold vision.

And you know what? I believe there's everybody in this meeting tonight that God wants in all America to be here. There's nobody missing. He gathers people. Where two or three are gathered, he gathered you.

He brought you in directly by his desire and his will. And before you shoot a pride to heaven and say Lord give me this threefold vision, I want a vision of my holiness. I want a vision of my helplessness.

I want a vision of the world's hopelessness. Before you do that, let me try to remind you in some way of the cost of it. You see, I'm sure that Isaiah could have had this vision a long while before this, but obstructing his vision there was a person in the way.

There was a friend in the way. But immediately God took that friend out of his life. Suddenly he has a full revelation of God. You'd better not pray tonight, because it may cost you a dearest friend, it may cost you a job, it may cost you some other thing to get this threefold vision.

Notice again these beautiful words, wall, wall, go. The first a word of confession, the second a word of cleansing, the third a word of commission. Keep them in that order. The wall is me, I'm undone.

I'm unseen. The visiting angel, coming with a life call, touches him and cleanses him. You see, it was a vision of height, because he saw the Lord high and lifted up. Answer this simple question. How often do you go to church to meet God?

Did you come here tonight to meet God, or hear a sermon about him? I hear people say, oh, the Holy Ghost, come into the meeting. If he did, most of us would run for that door. We'd do it in about nine, a hundred yards in nine seconds.

It was a vision of height. He saw the Lord high. It was a vision of depth. He saw into the recesses of his own nature. It was a vision of breadth. He saw lost world. It was a vision of deity. He saw God in his holiness.

It was a vision of depravity. He saw himself. It was a vision of beauty. He saw lost world. The cherubim and seraphim were not singing about the attributes of God, omnipotent or omnipresent or omniscient.

Those are the attributes of God. They were singing about the essential nature of God. They were singing, holy, holy, holy, and Revelation says they cease not to say by day or by night. Endlessly they cry, holy, holy, holy is the Lord, and the greatest need of the Church of Jesus Christ tonight is to see the holiness of God afresh.

He lost all sense of his majesty. I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Well, of course, when you start talking about vision, somebody gives you a medicine and says, now, you'd better be careful about this, you know.

Don't get too spiritual. Nor do Christians ever warn you about getting too rich, did they? Particularly Baptists. Nobody ever said, now, watch it, you might get too rich. Did anybody ever say to you, don't study too much, you might become too wise?

But people, if you start pursuing holiness, not just the gifts of the Spirit, but the very character of God himself, somebody says, hey, watch it, watch it. And they've got nice little cliches you can hear here.

I've heard them in Australia and around the world. And they say something like this, you know, you can be so heavenly minded in the earthly youth. Very sweet. But I want to tell you, the Church of Jesus Christ is within ten million miles of becoming so heavenly minded she's so earthly minded she's no heavenly youth.

You see, if you have a vision without a task, you'll be a visionary. If you have a task without a vision, that's drudgery. You know, some of you poor preachers say, oh boy, Friday tomorrow, I have to start getting two more sermons.

Well, if they make you tired, do you want them to make the congregation tired? Two more sermons. Oh dear. The man that lives in the secret place of the Most High. You see, we're in a shocking state these days.

Prayer, Pastoral Calling, and Mission

Do you know why America is sick? Because the Church is sick. Do you know why the Church is sick? Because you preachers are sick. That's right. You become an errand boy for the Church. You repair the bus ministry.

You repair the buses. You repair this. You do that. You do the other. And you've no time to pray. You've only two things to do if you're a man of God. Just two if you're a pastor. Give yourself continually to prayer and to the Word of God.

Well, what about the sick? Let the deacons visit them. What about the dead? Let the deacons bury them. It's good to say. Let the dead bury the dead. But after all, I thought that was a deacon going out, but it isn't.

You see, the preacher has become a burden. You rent him like you rent a donkey. When McLaren went to Manchester, he was the king of the pulpit. And when he went to that great sepulchre of a church that was empty, they offered him a new house.

They offered him a big stipend. They offered him a carriage and horses. And he said he'd accept it, if they accepted his terms. What are your terms? Well, he said, you want my head and my feet. You can have one or the other, not both.

The result was he never went in anybody's home. But he spent hours in prostration before God, and when he came there, people were hanging almost on the chandeliers to hear him. We've got a paralysis in the pulpit.

We've too many dead men giving out dead sermons to dead people. If you have a vision without a task, you'll be a visionary. If you have a task without a vision, that is drudgery. But if you have a task wedged to a vision, you'll be a missionary.

And I get disturbed about people who will give money for the foreign field. For people, you're on the other side of the world, and your neighbor on the other side of the street, you're under hell, and you've never been after them.

I don't believe there's a church in America that needs a bus service. You pay for buses, you maintain them, you insure them, you pay for gas. Do you know how to get rid of them? Get enough compassion to fill the empty seats in your car twice on Sunday.

You won't need a bus service. You might get some fleas. That's for the few dirty people, and maybe the kids will get sick in it. Those very empty seats in your automobile will rise in judgment against you at the judgment day.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his prayer instilled a temple. My, that must have been some vision. But you see, when you get a vision like that, it's totally transforming.

The vision of the holiness of God, which we'll come to in a few minutes, was totally overwhelming. There used to be a preacher in England, and if you preachers haven't read him, you should have. His name was P .T. Forsythe.

And if you've got out of the playpen, you know, you don't need to read Run, Baby, Run, or Cross with a Switchblade, but you're a bit more grown up than that. Read P .T. Forsythe. And read his book on prayer.

It's fabulous. I've forgotten the title for the moment. But he has a book called The Justification of God. And I remember a few years ago going to hear a man who had been an outstanding socialist in England.

He was a rebel. He was going to pull the monarchy down. He was going to transform England. And then somehow, just like on that Damascus road, God laid hold of him. And D .R. Davies got marvelously converted.

He had already written a book called Socialist Saturday Night. He tells of the socialism, Fabian socialism, you know, Bernard Shaw stuff and H .G. Wells, the guys who were going to turn the world upside down.

That was the answer. And God showed him it was easy for him to sit in authority over others when his own life was in the state of rebellion. He got marvelously saved. He became a great preacher. And I heard him more than once.

And he wrote the introduction to this book, The Justification of God. Let me read it. I haven't memorized it. In its foreword he says this. I find this book deeply moving. That's the book, The Justification of God.

Forsythe had seen once and for all the agony of God in Jesus Christ crucified. And that abysmal vision convinced him that the material progress of society, and he wrote this about 70 years ago, the material progress of society was only trough cast up by the sea whose undercurrent is tragedy.

Hence his insistence on the holiness of God and the historic fatality of the cross. Forsythe in his one determination to keep saying no to history, even when events were seemingly confirming human pretensions.

You see this whirligig we're going right now about making a new world order. I happened to hear that nearly 60 years ago. I happen to remember that these men were aspiring and they were putting the church in the garbage can.

And H .G. Wells says we can have a new world order without the church, without Jesus Christ. He did not talk about repentance and sin. He talked about the sufficiency of man and the adequacy of materialism and the inevitability of progress.

And he said we'll bring in a new world. We'll pull down the hills of wealth, fill in the valleys of poverty, make the crooked places safe. We'll cast a magic spell of politics over the world and we'll bring in the Millennium.

That's what he said in 1912, two years before World War II. At the end of World War II, that same man who had already written his history of the world and written Tracta Antarctica and what not, he was standing there on the edge of a world that was shaking to pieces.

And instead of saying by political power and our maneuvering and our skill we'll bring in a new world order, at the end of 1939 and 45 wars, H .G. Wells was standing stricken and paralyzed and saying this.

It's all captured in the title of his last book, Mind, at the end of its heather. He said like Jean-Paul Sartre, that we're in an impasse and there is no way out. I noticed somebody asked this political aspirant just the other day, Jackson, well what about the political, pardon me, what about the crime in the country?

We can't do a thing about it, he said. All we can do is build bigger jails. There's no way of transforming men, he's right. Apart from regeneration, there is no way to transform men. And the only way to have regeneration is to have revival.

Repentance, Revival, and the Holiness of God

You see, you don't. Look, be kind to yourselves tonight. You're out as dumb as you came in. Stick to your nice little pew, dweller. Pay your tithes, pastor will love you. You'll make it to heaven, just about.

But if you want a vision, you're very careful about it. You see, a little later this man is crying there before God in the 64th chapter of this book. You see, God has so pruned him of every ambition and so purified him that you'll find him there, he sees the sin of the nation, he sees the holiness of God, and God must do one of two things with sin.

Either purge it, pardon it, or punish it. And he prays one of the greatest prayers. And I don't care if you can raise the dead if you can't pray. Do you know what he prayed? To that God he'd seen in his holiness and majesty, he says, Oh, but thou wouldst rend the heavens and David Garrick once heard George Whitfield cry that word out.

He said, I'd give ten thousand golden sovereigns if I could say it like that, and I'm supposed to be the greatest actor in the world. I can't say, Oh, like George Whitfield says it. I wonder what he would have given to hear Jeremiah say it.

When he says, Oh, but my head will water. Or if you've heard David saying it, when he says, Oh, Absalom my son, tell me this, did you ever cry? Get to the place where you go, language, and all you say is, Oh.

And it traveled a million trillion miles into eternity, and God heard it? Well, that's how he prayed because he had this vision. Oh, but my head will water. A man would never have become a major prophet and written a book like this with our sixty-six chapters in it.

It has been criticized, analyzed, attacked more than any book in the Bible. You find even a lot of fundamentalists declare there were two Isaiahs and something they attended to. There was one Isaiah. This book is divided right down the middle.

Chapters one to, where, thirty-nine make the first part of the book. Chapters forty to sixty-six are the second part. And do you know why the same man wrote them? Because this man has more concept of the holiness of God than all the other prophets put together.

In the first chapters, one to thirty-nine, you find twelve times he talks about the holiness of God. In the second part of the book, chapters forty to sixty-six, he mentions the holiness of God seventeen times.

And the only times that this is mentioned again, the holiness of God is mentioned by that great prophet Jeremiah on two occasions and three times in the psalm. He's overwhelmed with the holiness of God.

He's unholierized unto the holy iniquity. Well, God in heaven must be thinking about the cesspool you and I live in tonight. Remember when people talked about prostitutes? We don't talk that ugly word now.

They call them tall girls. I can remember when you used to shudder if somebody talked about sodomy. Now you can be a homosexual and be accepted in the ministry. How much longer do you think God is going to accept the stink that comes up from America and England, the modern Sodom and Gomorrah?

How long do you think he's going to do it? And here is a man who says he wondered. He wondered. God said he wondered, but there was no intercessor. And he said, Lord, I'll stand in a gap. I will be the intercessor.

He had a vision of God. He had a vision of himself. He had a vision of the lost world. I don't have time tonight to stay with all these things, for sure. But I want to remind you again, let's take the last vision first, the vision.

I don't know if that hymn moved you tonight. It moved me. Oh Zion, haste! Oh Zion, hurry up! That's why Jeremiah worked. He said, listen, before very long we're going to be howling when the invader comes.

We're going to be crying, the harvest is past. The summer has ended and we're not saved. And they said, forget it. We live in the strongest nation in the world. We have more fruit stored up than any other nation.

We can meet anybody that's coming. And all that happened was a smart military diplomat who changed the course of the river, and the enemy got in and they stole the city and everything that was around.

And there came a day when the whole nation, that tribe or the evangelist, preached on it in your church. It's not the tribe and individual, it's the tribe and nation. The harvest is past. The summer has ended.

The other day on that lovely event, Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Beauty on a donkey. Didn't he? And didn't he talk about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Was it the triumphal entry or was it a tearful exit?

It says the people cried with honor. He cried over the city. Why? Because he had reason. I'm going to tell you, I believe in the judgment that I find this, that when Jesus went into that city, he could see Titus coming up the road.

He was going to spill that city with blood. I believe he could see the Jews at Buchenwald and Dachau being liquidated by Hitler. You don't give God a brush-off whether an individual or a nation. They thought they could get by on their own strength.

I was reading, what is it, 49th chapter of Jeremiah this afternoon, where it says, Go, you get up there among the stars and set your place up in the sky. The eagle builds a nest. And you know what? The symbol of this blessed, wonderful country we live in is an eagle.

But do you remember it was also the symbol of the Roman Empire? And at one time it was a symbol of Russia. And when I was a little boy in England we used to sing about the Kaiser eating currant buns while the eagle on his hat flew away.

It was a symbol of strong Germany. And every nation that has had an eagle as its symbol has gone down. It is inevitable that America does that yet again, unless the church repents. I remind you again in the Old Testament God's problem was not the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites.

God Almighty's problem was Israel. In the New Testament, after Matthew, Mark and Luke, the whole balance of the New Testament is to the church, not to the world. If you had lived in England a number of years ago, two hundred maybe, if the guy knew the city of London he'd take you to this intersection and that, he'd show you a place, a market where somebody was burned to death.

But if he knew London he would say, now come tomorrow morning, and as the clock gets to eleven, a big handsome man comes down the street. Physically he's tall, intellectually he's tall, spiritually he's tall.

His name was Thomas Binney. As far as I know he only wrote one hymn, Eternal Life, Eternal Life, how pure the soul must be. When placed within my certain sight it shrinks not, but with calm delight can live and look on thee.

And then he says, the spirits that surround my soul, the cherubim and seraphim in this chapter, they may bear that burning bliss. The holiness of God is so majestic that even cherubim put their wings, they hide, they can't look on him.

They look through their wings like you look through your lenses when you put your shades down, and it's very funny. And even the eyes of cherubim can't bear the holiness of God, and they filter his majesty as it were, his holiness, through their wings.

And they can't bear him to look on them, and so they cover themselves with their wings, they try and hide. And yet he says, the spirits that surround my soul may bear that burning bliss, but that is surely theirs alone, since they have never, never known a fallen world like this.

And another hymn writer says that it's not spare thine only son that gave sin for the world, and that a fallen world like this two hundred years ago. You couldn't have found a piece of pornographically serious illiterate.

You couldn't have found X-rated films. You couldn't have found the dirty rotten lousy things that bequeath young people. And don't blame them, because after all the kids don't control the brewery industry, and the teenagers don't publish all the lousy playboys and all the other girly magazines.

And the kids don't make the dirty films. The older people make them, and they trap young people, and the kids end up in jail and end up in hell. I spent two years in the sewers of New York with David Wilkerson when he, right at the beginning, when he was almost nobody.

I've seen girls so beautiful you'd stare at them for their beauty, not just their figures, their faces. They weren't all gutter girls. They had some of them two, three, four degrees. They'd been to Vassar and Smith and the best universities, then somebody fooled them.

Somebody introduced them to a drug. Somebody introduced them to sex, and they got that kick, and they ended up in the river. You'd have girls coming out of office, and the next thing you'd hear, that girl that stayed two weeks.

You remember that gorgeous looking girl? They dragged her out of the East River last night. She'd been assaulted sexually. She'd been half, clothes taken off her. Don't blame the kids for it. We talk about delinquent kids.

You've got to go a bit further back than that. I think the trouble is delinquent parents. That's where it started. It's a big world, isn't it? Because I've asked you more than once these days, because I'm at least trying to get some, trying to make you uncomfortable, you see.

Is that when you wrote off 50 million people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, did it cost you a tear? Or was that the night you had a chicken supper at church? Or was that the Sunday you got excited because your juniors beat the Nazarene juniors or something at baseball?

Did it cost you a tear that 50 million people went into captivity? Did you feel as though a mule kicked you in your stomach when Mr. Ford signed the rights of Helsinki for Russia to keep every captive she has?

And do you think Almighty God didn't take record, and do you think he won't pay the price for it? You can't maneuver God, either financially or politically in any other way. And we're hell-bent for destruction right now, unless God is a miracle.

Now don't get worried about it. I want to tell you something. I'm not a supreme optimist. No, sir, I'm more than that. I've got faith. I happen to have a God that sits on the circle of the earth tonight.

This man goes on to talk about this God as the high and lofty and he inhabits eternity. This earth is merely his footstool, the clouds are the dust of his feet. And God has one great big gripe in his heart, and that is that we're blaspheming the name of his son.

And God keeps his promise. I like that hymn that says, forever and ever, not for a day, he keepeth his promise forever. And I've got a little thing tucked away in my mind and in my heart, and that is this, enjoy to God and the poor artist's spirit.

Every article I pick up, quote 2 Chronicles 7 14, let my people who are called by name humble themselves. I don't believe that's the word for today. Preachers do, because it pushes all the responsibility on the pew.

So they whip you about it. Well, I've got news for you. The holdup of revival isn't in the pew, it's in the pulpit. The key to revival is Joel 1, 13, 2, 13, 3, 13. What did he say? Let the priests weep between the altar and the doorpost.

Let them wring their hearts and not their garments. Let them cry to heaven. The holdup, the blockage, is in the pulpit, not in the pew. Some of you men have wished to God you'd never even been a preacher when you stand at the judgment seat.

You bow beneath a carnal deacon. You scratch people's backs just to get a few dollars. As I say, sometimes this is a day when people have itching ears, but I've no commission from God to scratch them.

I might scratch you, but not your ears. Do you know at this point in history of this, I don't know what the date is tonight, a couple of days off, first of May, are we? But do you know at this point in history, the two most serious things are, number one, to be a Christian, and number two, to be a preacher.

The Lost World and the Missionary Burden

Do you know that tonight there are more lost people in the world than at any point in history? More unsaved people. You know, people think it's real nice to be a preacher. Well, I was silly enough to believe that for years.