Suffering With Jesus Christ — Leonard Ravenhill

We were singing was written by William Williams, a Welshman. And when it was first printed there was a misprint in it. And instead of being land me safe on Canaan's side, they printed land my safe on Canaan's side.

But you can't take it with you. All right, this is the second course. You've had the first course already. And this morning we want to meditate on the greatest prayer ever prayed by the greatest man that ever lived.

Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John 17

John chapter 17. There are, you may remember, 26 verses in this wonderful chapter. I remember that Dr. Tozer began preaching the first Sunday morning of a new year on this prayer. And he finished the last Sunday morning.

Preached 52 sermons on the 26 verses. And so my friend Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in London preached 52 Sundays on John 3 .16 without repeating himself. Takes a lot of doing. Again, it at least suggests to me what one man said many, many, many years ago.

The Bible is like the ocean. It's so shallow at the edge that a lamb can frisk in it, and it gets so deep that an elephant can swim around in it. Again I remember hearing Dr. G. Campbell Morgan say on one occasion, he was about 70 years of age and he had written 60 books on the Bible.

And he said without any modesty, I know so little about the Word of God. The man who knows most about it graduated last June with a diploma and is looking for a church worthy of him. But the man who studies it most recognizes how little he really knows of this profound Word of God.

If you approach John chapter 17 as I approach it, I think you'll feel like Moses. You want to slip your shoes off your feet. For this certainly is holy ground. Now notice it is the Lord's Prayer. Someone told us yesterday to pray the Lord's Prayer.

You can't pray the Lord's Prayer. You can pray the disciples' prayer. Jesus could not pray the disciples' prayer. The disciples could not pray the Lord's Prayer. This is essentially the prayer of the Lord Jesus himself.

I don't think it's the longest prayer he prayed, because we're told that often he spent whole nights in prayer. But it certainly is the longest recorded prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's good to keep reminding ourselves that Jesus was an incarnation.

He was not a reincarnation. He existed before he became a man, but he did not exist as a man before he became a man. He existed as God. And in this chapter he's praying about the glory he had with the Father before the world was.

But since he came from another world, with the power of another world, his whole life was a dramatic life. It was not theatrical, but it was dramatic. Jesus never sought publicity. He ran away from it.

Those boys that you listened to yesterday morning on TV, the big evangelists, they seek it and seek it and try and get another station and get more popular. Jesus did the very opposite. When he raised the daughter of Jairus from the dead, he said don't tell anybody about it.

When they'd been on the Mount of Transfiguration, he said you don't share this. When he had even declared that he was the Son of God, he said tell no man. And then right after that he rode on a donkey into Jerusalem.

And it seemed a contradiction. But you see, this wonderful prayer begins with, Father the hour has come. This is the seventh time in this version of the Gospel. There are not four Gospels. There's one Gospel told by four different people.

And it is the seventh time that Jesus has used this phrase, or as it's recorded by John, the hour has come. If I could write another beatitude, it would be, blessed is the man that knows God's timetable in his own life.

Nobody pushed Jesus around. He pushed everybody else around. God is never in a hurry. But he's never late, either. The life of Jesus was full of drama. I would like to have been with Jesus on all occasions, but some outstanding occasions.

I would like to have seen Jesus raised from the dead. That would be quite exciting. I would like to have seen him straightened withered arms and unplugged ears. I would like to have seen him walk on the water.

That would be quite interesting. But if I had my choice, of all the events in the life of the Lord Jesus, I would like to have heard Jesus pray. I believe it's true of Jesus, as it's true of you and me, that nobody is greater than my prayer life.

This, the Lord Jesus, was read to John Knox every day for the, I think, the last three weeks of his amazing life. He said, I want to get saturated in this prayer of the Lord Jesus. It really is the holy of holies in the place of prayer.

John’s Gospel and the Uniqueness of John 17

The famous preachers around will tell you that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of John is called the synoptic Gospel. It's unique because ninety-two percent of what John says has not been said by anybody else.

Sure, you've got wonderful things in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but there is no parallel to the seventeenth chapter of John. There is no parallel to the fifteenth chapter of John, the message of the vine.

And as I said, I think Saturday night for the few that came, and that was very fine, but I shared this thought that there is no such thing as people in a church under the best minister in the world. They do not all develop the same.

A friend of mine told me something recently that was very interesting. He had been up the west coast of this country where, as I guess you know, there are many vineyards. And as you go up the coast it says, stay here.

You know, this is where we raise certain grapes. You know, I would think that logically Jesus would have said, I am the vine and ye are the grapes, and he didn't say that. Supposedly not fruitful enough.

But anyhow, he didn't say, I am the vine and ye are the grapes. Because you see, grapes are useful even if they're bad. You can make vinegar out of them. Of course there's a lot of Christians like that too.

And then grapes, if they get ripe, are luscious, they're beautiful. And grapes, if they get overripe, make raisins. You can use grapes in any stage. You can't use Christians like that. The type of a Christian is the type of salt.

If it loses its flavor, it's not only a curse to itself, it kills everything else. You put dead salt on your garden, even if it's dead, it will kill your garden. It's useless. And so are Christians that lose the anointing of God.

And my friend said to the man in the vineyard, I'm interested in the vine. And he told him a lot of things. I want to pass one on to you. He said, you know, well how many bottles do you make out of a crop?

And he said, so many. Then he said, well of course if you get, you know, a whole vineyard, and you take all those vines, and those grapes, and you crush them, and you make wine, and you bottle it, then of course all that wine, if you're 15 ,000 bottles, it's all the same.

He said, not two bottles are the same. Well he said, how is that? He said, I don't know. Oh, you're not, you've not been in the game very long. I've been in the game all my life, but nobody knows the reason.

They all get the same rain, they all get the same sunshine, they all get the same fertilizing, they all get the same pruning, and they all get squashed up in the same machine, and the juice runs out down there, and it gets bottled.

And you could take 15 bottles, and somebody with a very delicate taste, I don't know a thing about wine, but somebody with a delicate taste would say, not one of these bottles are the same. Why? I don't know.

Sometimes we wonder if some bottles are thicker than others, and they let more light in. Sometimes we think that maybe there's a little too much air at the top. Sometimes, he said, the bottles will stay there so long, and you go in and they burst and splash the walls and everything.

Are they bottles? You could plant them, leave them there for centuries, they won't move. Like a lot of Christians, you can't get them moving anyhow. But the fact is, you see, that it doesn't matter how you treat the grapes, give them all the same treatment, again prune them all the same, give all the grapes the same sunshine, give them all the same pruning, give them all the same fertilizing, bottle the wine in the same temperature, and they're all different.

That's true of Christians. Some people can sit under a ministry and they blossom, and they bear fruit, and they become lovely, and others are dried up old sticks. They can sit under a ministry and apparently not move at all.

Personal Responsibility and Hunger for God

As I said yesterday, you see, there is a human dependence. The Lord's going to take care of me. Nonsense. What do you mean? I mean what the Bible says. It says keep yourself in the love of God. It says you lay aside every race.

It tells us over and over again in Hebrews, let us, let us, let us do this, let us do that, let us do something else. God has made all the provision in the world for you to be one of the greatest saints that ever lived.

And look where you are today. I mean, and think of all the land that the rest of us possess. The whole secret again is in that marvelous sermon which we may begin tomorrow, the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst.

Many of us don't, we're not hungry, we're just an appetite. They're not thirsty, we're just dry. How dry. But you see, it all depends on your appetite. As I said yesterday, no man that ever lived ever had a bigger Bible than you have.

Nobody ever had more resources to God than you have. God's very fair. In fact the Gospel is the only fair thing in the world. Taxation isn't, and the government for sure, but the Word of God is. And as I reminded you yesterday, and this has got to me so much in the last few months, that with all the talk we have about the Holy Spirit and gifts and everything, you know, honest to God, before the Lord, I don't see many giants coming out of our group these days.

And yet a little fellow like Spurgeon, fifteen years of age, got saved. And in four years' time, without going to Bible school, without access to many books, in four years, from fifteen years of age to nineteen, at nineteen they built him a tabernacle seating five thousand people, and he packed it twice a day for the rest of his life.

And then you have some smart little guy around the corner with a little two-by-four experience, and a two-by-four church, and he says, you know, it's a pity he didn't speak in tongues. I mean, how sour can you get?

There are lots of things that Spurgeon didn't do. There are lots of things he did that we don't even touch. Somebody said there were more people healed through Spurgeon's ministry than all the doctors and hospitals in London.

And he never preached divine healing. You know, if you join a church today, they have a list, and at the bottom they say, you agree with what we agree with? Oh well, you're great. Sign on the dotted line you're one of us.

Don't forget to type. And that's nice. And I think sometimes the difference between the Christians of today and the Christians of the New Testament is this, that we sign articles of faith, and they acted in faith.

Makes all the difference. There's a great chasm between. Now you don't look too joyful, so I'd better get on with this reading right here. Luther had a famous friend. I think sometimes he was his secretary.

At least he worked with him a lot. Melanchthon. And he said about these 26 verses here in John, that this is the most holy, the most fruitful, and the most sublime chapter in the whole of the Word of God.

Somebody has said it's the most sublime thing that was ever written. And we approach it with, almost with fear. If you want to study the prayer life of Jesus, you would read the gospel that was recorded by Luke.

Because in every event in the life of Jesus, Luke always puts prayer there. Jesus was in the Jordan and the Spirit descended upon him. But Luke says it was while he was praying the Spirit descended upon him.

The other evangelists say that Jesus was crucified, and John says that even while he was crucified he was praying. Father forgive them. The other evangelists say that he was on the Mount of Transfiguration, and John says that it was while he was praying he was transfigured.

Every incident in the life of Jesus, Luke gets prayer attached to that situation. It was after he had spent all the night in prayer that he chose twelve disciples. Wouldn't it be nice if every church spent all night before it ever chose deacons?

Most of them wouldn't get in. But that's the way Jesus did it. You see. Luke of course is showing Jesus Christ as a man. Matthew shows Jesus as a king. Mark shows Jesus as a servant. Luke shows him as the man, totally dependent on God.

John shows him as deity. Jesus was not divine. You and I are divine. If we are born of God we are made partakers of the divine nature. But he was beyond being divine, he was deity. In fact I think the whole of this marvelous gospel of John is capsuled in that first verse in chapter 1.

In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All right, in the beginning is eternity. The Word was with God equality. The Word was God deity. Now there's enough for you to chew on for a week.

It's all pushed as it were into that one amazing verse, in the beginning. Not the beginning of his life, in the beginning there. Not just the beginning of time, but way, way, way, way back in the ages of the ages that we don't know anything about.

He was God. Very God of very God. Now amazingly enough, while he shows the majesty of Jesus in prayer, he does not record, as the other evangelists do, what we do call the Lord's Prayer. It's a misnomer.

The disciples' prayer. He taught the disciples to pray, but John doesn't mention that prayer. I don't even remember the greatest prayer of all. My own opinion is that the greatest human privilege ever offered to men was to go share Gethsemane with Jesus when they fell asleep.

Don't you think that was a heartbreak for him? Peter? It's not long since he said, Lord you can't depend on Thomas. He's always doubting, and you know the others. But me? Oh you can depend on me. I remember a lady who said I could often die for him.

It's living for him that's the job. That's the hardest thing. A lot of people would like the Lord to come today, be raptured. But it's only because they're too worried and anxious, and there's too many bills.

They didn't love the Lord so much, they'd get out of a lot of mess if he came today. That's why most of them, and in case a tidal wave comes, it would be nice to get away, wouldn't it? The great mysterious prayer of Jesus in the garden.

And yet John does not record it. He mentions he went into the garden, but he doesn't mention his sweat and his grief. The place where he's praying in that prophetic psalm, all my billows have gone over me.

Prayer, Revival, and the Fellowship of Christ’s Suffering

When I was pastoring a church, I pastored one or two, that I was a young man full of enthusiasm. We had a lively church. People used to line up on a Sunday night to get in like a movie house. And for three years we had revival.

Not because I was a good preacher, but because I had a marvelous bunch of old saints in 70 and 80 years of age, that had travailed for 40 years for revival to come to that city. And we went to a city and raised a church of 700 people in six weeks.

Right from the grassroots. And it's still existing today. That was 1934. And we had some outstanding people of prayer. That's the thing that really sticks in my mind about that fellowship of people. We inherited the prayers of these great saints, who for years and traveled, they prayed.

We had an old man that used to come to the prayer meeting, and I loved to see him come. I didn't care if he came Sundays, I couldn't teach him much anyhow. You know I remember one Sunday morning when there was a real wonderful atmosphere.

And I just felt I was the king of the world, you know. Oh man, look at this great crowd, and I was having a marvelous time, and the Lord just hit me like that. I felt like saying, will you please go home.

You know the Lord told me, in the middle of a marvelous meeting, when I'm having an anointing, everybody's listening breathlessly. The Lord said to me, son you're not the most spiritual man in this church.

Isn't that delicious? You just look at that old man there. He was praying before you were born. Look at that little lady, and she did wear a bonnet with springs on it. That woman knows more about prevailing prayer than you've ever learned, and ever read about.

My, that was a great thing to inherit, a situation like that. The thing I was going to say was this. I was going down the street in that town one day. I remember it was five o 'clock at night. It was a summer night, and as I went past the house, the door opened, and the lady said, come in pastor.

I said, I'm sorry I don't have time. I've got to be home in five minutes. You don't want to come in, eh? Because I'm poor. Well, that wasn't the problem. The problem wasn't poor. She was so dirty, that's why I didn't want to go in.

She had a house that would have won a world championship in silk. She'd give you anything, particularly fleece. And I went in, and she said, now I know you don't have long to stay, but you'll take a cup of tea.

I said, no, no, I'm just going home for tea. We call it, like you say, supper. We're going home. I'm going home for tea. You don't want to drink in my house. Oh, I said, okay. And it was a little house, and there was a sink here, and it was stacked up with dishes.

Now how she got them all isn't my business, because she lived by herself. But they'd been there for weeks, or maybe months, and they were dirty, and she had a teapot that didn't look too good. Now I like tea.

I don't like it too strong or too weak, and I like cream in it, and I like a little sugar in it. That's the way we have it in England usually. And she said, all right. And she reached in the sink for a cup.

You could see all the juice running down the side, you know, as she hadn't washed it. And there were some tea leaves inside that didn't look too good. They certainly weren't young. And then she reached for the teapot, and she poured this black liquid that looked like oil from the sump of your automobile.

And she said, do you take cream? I said, yes. She said, well I don't have any. You take sugar? Yes. And she gave me just a little sugar. Here you are. And it was nearly cold, and I don't like cold tea.

And I just looked round that, and I thought, what a stinking hole this is. She hadn't been washed, honestly, for days. Everything smelled in the house. And she gave me this dirty cup with black cold tea in it.

And the rim marked where she had drunk. And I took that cup, and she was talking. She said, drink! And she lifted her cup, and she drank. And I lifted this cup, and as I did, you know, as the tea came back, I saw those dirty horrible leaves at the bottom.

And I noticed the juice marks round the side, and I thought, yuck. Fancy giving some, and you know, speaking about the Lord, say, wait a minute. And I learned one of the great lessons of my life. As I lifted that filthy cup to my lips, my mind went two thousand miles away from England, two thousand years back, and I saw a man in a garden drinking a cup with all the filth of the world in it.

And it so revolted the purest man that ever lived, and he said, Father, if it be possible, let it go! But he drank it. You know, I didn't have any problem drinking that dirty stuff after that. I just drank it.

And I did do what you said in everything. I gave thanks for it too. It was a very simple lesson. You see, that section is so great that God won't even let us know about it. I remember going to Dr. Joseph's church in 1951, and talking with one of the deacons there, J. F. Chase, the great American artist, wonderful man of God.

And he said, we're glad to have you, so forth and so on. I said, well, I'm glad to come and get in this famous church just to meet the doctor and talk with him, and I hope we'll get some prayer. And he said, Bela Ravenhill, I suppose you'd be surprised to know Dr. Joseph never comes to a prayer meeting.

I said, never comes to a prayer meeting? What do you mean? Well, he used to come to a prayer meeting. And he would bring, he'd get us to sing some lovely hymn about prayer. He'd bring a dissertation on prayer, usually very, very penetrating.

And then he would say, let us pray. We got, he said, about 70 people to the prayer meeting, he would say, let us pray. They waited and waited, and finally the doctor prayed. And there was silence. Nobody prayed after it.

They were afraid to pray before he prayed, and they were scared to pray after he prayed, because he prayed in a dimension that they didn't understand. He prayed with a depth, he prayed with a power, he prayed with a penetration, that everybody else felt they might as well say A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J.

That was all they knew in prayer. And so for the sake of the congregation, he stayed away from the prayer meeting. I suggest to you, you see, I cannot find any record in the Word of God where Jesus ever prayed with his disciples.

Do you know one? It's told they prayed in an area that these people never knew. Well what about the Son of God? I said to the pastor, and I mean this, in a church like this, you should have, if you have advanced classes, you have classes for this, you should have an advanced prayer meeting.

You should by now have some people that pray in a higher grade if you like, or in a deeper grade, or with a more fervent passion. And people know something about the fellowship of his suffering. You see everybody wants to be filled with the Spirit, for kinks, for joy, for ecstasy, for thrills.

Oh I go to a group and boy we have a marvelous time. You ever get on your belly and groan for a world that's damned? We feel good and pious when we sing, Oh to be like thee, blessed Redeemer. Do you mean you'd like forty days in the wilderness to be battered by the devil?

Would you like a Judas in your life? Would you like a Gethsemane? You want to be like him. Where? Where you pick and choose. I think outside of reading the Word of God itself, there's nothing more profitable than reading the biographies of great men.

How many of you read the life of Howells, Rhys Howells intercessor? Good, good, good. Great book. I preached at his college a number of times in Wales, and the last time I was there Mrs. Howells said after the morning session, Brother Raymond come, come.

And we walked up the staircase of that fine old millionaire's home that is now a college. And when we got on the veranda looking over the Welsh coast there she said, Brother Raymond help. Norman Grubb did a great job on writing my husband's life, but she said I want to tell you something.

You see that little door there? She said my husband went into that room at six o 'clock in the morning, and stayed there till six o 'clock at night, every day for eleven months. Twelve hours alone with God, every day for eleven months.

The only time he went out was when his mother died. You see, all our ideas so often about the Spirit is full of energy and life and overflow, and you're struck and show yourself and say how you were healed and say this.

Look, if you haven't had forty days somewhere quiet with God, you haven't got it made yet, you'll be amazed how many letters I get. I get quite a lot. I get an awful lot from students. I get an awful lot from men who say, well I've only so many weeks in seminary, and I've done Bible school, and I've got my grades this way.

But Brother Raymond, I'm not ready to go out. I don't feel adequate. I don't feel I can go out into the world and face the job I've been training for, for seven or six years, whatever it is. What do you suggest?

I say go to a farm and tell a man you'll work for nothing if he gives you a glass of milk and a few things, and spend as many hours as you can alone with. Stay there three months. Stick your head in a haystack as I say to them.

And if the fire is still burning at the end of that isolation, you know you've got what God wants you to have. If you haven't got it, well either seek it or quit. Don't become a liability to God. You see, so many people are trying to get on a kind of escalator or an assembly line, and you do this and don't do that.

You get this gift and you don't do that. And you do something of very fine, but it's not the answer. As I said, I think Saturday night, you see, in the 11th chapter of Matthew, verse 28, it says, Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Fine, fine. And then you cross the bridge to the second half of the text, which says, Take my yoke upon you. You say the spirits in life is freedom, the spirits in life is bondage. We were snorting down a railroad track a while ago, and I said to the conductor, My, this train's really going.

What's it, what's it doing? He said, Well, this is the straightest, fastest stretch we're doing between 80 and 90 miles an hour. And I said, I hope it stays on the track. Oh boy, he said, so do I. Now the only reason it could keep up that speed was, it was in bondage to the track.

If it got off the track, disaster. As a matter of fact, we were going to a village and I noticed there was a kind of a loop line, and I said, Boy, I'm glad he got through that fork. If he jumped the track, we'd have shot through and demolished the village.

You see, if you have power, you need power not to use that power. People are prodigal with power. Ah, but you see, he says we should be witnesses. Well, that isn't witnessing as you think of it. That word there is martyrs.

The ability to suffer for him. If we suffer, we shall also reign. Do you think anybody's going to pay five dollars to go to a banquet or a breakfast to hear a message on suffering? Huh? I've been to two meetings in the last three years, I guess, where, where they guaranteed me certain crowds.

I didn't go for that. I felt I had a message. And at least 300 people and another hundred standing the place will be packed. And when I got there, there were 15 people. This has never happened in our monthly meeting.

Oh, if we get somebody coming with courage, and I'm not knocking the charismatics not a bit. I'm showing you that we've got an unbalance. I was going to preach on revival and holiness, and they'd no appetite for it.

I went to another place where they said, Oh, there'll be far more than 400 people every meeting, twice a day for the next three, four days. They're just crowding. People have read your books and this, that, and they'll come.

And we never mustered a hundred any day. You see, there are two sides to the coin. And this is no day for spiritual dwarfs. And this is no day for people who, we've got to be infants, admittedly, and growing great.

But we're moving into the tightest bottleneck in history. We're moving into that period where if the church has anything, nobody else has anything. There's nobody else speaking with a voice. And if the church has anything today, well she better stand up and speak up or shut up.

Witnesses, Martyrs, and Spiritual Readiness

Isaiah says there'll be a day when a man shall be as a hiding place. A man, not a government, not a church, in the sense of a church. A man shall be as a hiding place. And people will run to that man because he has the only thing that will keep people anchored in the turbulent storm that's already breaking on the world.

The greatest storm that any human being ever entered was entered by the Lord Jesus here in this 17th chapter. You see, if you think of a river that gets deeper and deeper and deeper, you start with the 14th chapter of John.

You get deeper into the 15th, deeper into the 16th, down into the 17th, down into Gethsemane, down into the grave, the cross, and so forth, and up to the other side in the mighty resurrection. And that's exactly what life is like.

I was at theme challenge for two years, and I used to teach the staff twice a week. And our theme song was, deeper, deeper in the love of Jesus, daily let me go. Higher, higher in the school of wisdom, more of grace to know.

Oh, deeper yet I pray, and higher every day. A lot of people just want to jump from Sunday to Sunday. Oh, we're going to that meeting Wednesday night. Boy, I'm living for that. Also, you live on meetings, not on Christ's day.

As I've told you, I have a fine church, two dozen members. And I'm trying to get them to the place. I have literally about 24 people that I teach every week. That's my only church. I enjoy it. I'm not sure they enjoy me, but I enjoy them anyhow.

And I keep telling them, I want them to get so stabilized in God, that if we do end up in concentration camps, and you've no Bible, and you don't have the fellowship of the saints, and you don't have the word of God, you'll be as strong as John was on the Isle of Patmos.

You'll be able to do what the pastor said this morning. Peter and John's text. Isn't it amazing when you think of those prison epistles of the apostle Paul. He's saying to people who are having all their liberty, rejoice in the Lord.

And I say rejoice and rejoice and rejoice. Oh dear, how can you rejoice? He's in prison. He didn't get three courses to every meal. It was hardship. But he gloried in tribulation. We just put up with it.

Don't we? Honestly, don't we? If the Lord said you can go down easy street today, or I'll give you a burden ten times greater than you've ever had, which would you say? He says we glory in tribulation.

I don't just grit my teeth and say, well I'm sanctified. I suppose I'll have to put up with this, but I'm not getting a fair deal anyhow. Everything was grist to his mill. Tribulation, necessity of reproaches, imperils of the deep, imperils of mine own countrymen.

Read the end of Romans chapter 8 and he tells you things that battered his mind and battered his spirit and battered his body. And then he puts his shoulders back as though he's laughing at the devil and he says, listen, I want to tell you something.

There's nothing that you can produce on earth or in hell that can separate me from the love of God. And since I can't lose that, what else does it matter that I do lose? Now tell me this morning, have you prayed for the saints in prison this morning?

Paul talks about praying for those who are in suffering as though you were suffering with them. I try to go to the Gulag archipelago every day. Have you read Solzhenitsyn's book? Make your hair stand up.

Read it. Give you a nightmare. It's just what you need as a Christian. Time you discovered what hell holes there are in the world, as much as we're trying to sell a ship with Russia right now. We could strangle them tomorrow.

We could make a Russia bow the knee. But we'd rather give them all the wheat we have so we can sell a few machines. We could break Russia tomorrow. Hervon Kissinger says that wheat isn't a weapon, but I'm quite sure that it is, but he doesn't use it.

The great power in the world in the next two years will not be oil, it will be food. And America could make other nations bow the knee, but we won't do it. Certain boys won't. I don't see why one man anyhow should speak for the whole nation.

Like that. That's another area. It's got nothing to do with us. It's got an awful lot to do with us. When I look around, I see a sick, sick, sick world. A sick economy, a sick dollar, a sick international situation.

And the greatest tragedy in a sick world is a sick church. And if I didn't think you were interested in this, then I wasted my time coming. I don't go out preaching more than about four times a year now.

I refuse to cast my pearls, well you know the other, because fellows will phone me a thousand, two thousand miles and beg me to go. And when I preach two days, they say, a deacon called me this morning at two o 'clock.

He couldn't sleep. I said, that's great. That's great. It's worth coming to keep a deacon awake all night. But you see, we thought kind of you'd do this. I said, no, no, no, no, no. You didn't. You didn't really.