James 4 - Backsliding Prevention by Recovery — Richard Owen Roberts

James 4: Conflict, Worldliness, and Submission to God

James 4 What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source of your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?

Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the spirit which he is made to dwell in us, but he gives a greater grace.

Therefore, it says, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Submit, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Be miserable, and mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and he will exalt you. Do not speak against one another, brethren.

He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge of it. There is only one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and to destroy.

But who are you who judge your neighbor? Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.

You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that. But as it is, you boast in your arrogance.

All such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him, it is sin. May God add his blessings to the reading, hearing, and in a few moments to the preaching of this passage as well.

Let's stand together and sing Majestic Sweetness Sits Enthroned.

The Decline of the Church Prayer Meeting

Certainly one of the clearest evidences of the need of revival in the American church, and doubtless in other parts of the world as well, is the decline of the prayer meeting in so many churches. But I want to ask you a question.

Have you ever weighed carefully why prayer meetings are in decline? Be interesting to just turn this into a back and forth and hear your statements as to why you think the prayer meeting is in decline.

I don't think anybody's ever gathered the statistics and carefully evaluated this matter. But we know that in a general sense, if a church has 10 ,000 in attendance on a Sunday, and that's not uncommon.

I've preached in a number myself, much larger than that, and of course most of that size wouldn't be willing to listen to me under any circumstance, but a church of 10 ,000 Sunday morning, how many are they likely to have in prayer meeting if they have a prayer meeting at all?

I was giving a series in one of the Christian colleges a while back, and they were daytime meetings and some evening meetings. But the arrangers knew that I was not scheduled to speak on the Wednesday night, and they asked if I would be willing to speak in one of the churches of the area on Wednesday night at the prayer meeting.

And of course, I was delighted to do so. Well, someone drove me there, and when we drove onto the church grounds, it was this huge facility and vast parking lots with huge numbers of cars. And I was getting quite perked up and thinking, well, this is a better opportunity even than I thought.

And they led me to this very small room, and told me that that's where the prayer meeting would be. And maybe 20 elderly people came. One of them led it, and I asked, where are the pastors? The pastors never come to prayer meeting.

So they had basketball practice and choir practice and all kinds of activities. I don't need prayer when you're so inventive and so capable of drawing crowds. But I didn't feel very good about it. Not that I was grieved by the people who were there, but immensely grieved by the many who weren't.

I ask you, have you ever weighed the question, why is the prayer meeting in decline? 10 ,000 on Sunday, 20 in the prayer meeting. No, I don't think that this is precise, but I think you could accurately say for the most part, the bigger the church, the lower the percentage of the people in the prayer meeting, if there is one at all.

In a typical church that has still carried on the prayer meeting, the ratio would be something like this. If there are 1 ,000 Sunday morning, there are 100 Sunday night. In the unlikely event they still have a Sunday night meeting, and then 10 or 20 in the prayer meeting.

But I'm asking you, have you thought why this decline is so rampant in the church? I don't think that we ought to pass over staggering things without thought. I think we ought to have some explanation of what's taking place.

And to assist you in your thinking in that regard, I want to read a very small portion. I won't tell you where it's from. I'm going to ask you after I've read it to tell me where it's from. Lord, God of hosts, how long will thou be angry with the prayers of thy people?

Thou has fed them with the bread of tears, and thou has made them to drink tears in large measure. Where have I read from? Yes, Psalm 80. Somewhere along the line, yesterday or today, I suggested some passages that might be carefully looked at.

Psalm 80 was one of those. But let's take a bit of time now at the beginning of this gathering to examine the words I have just read. Let me repeat. This is Psalm 80, verses 4 and 5. Lord, God of hosts, how long will thou be angry with the prayer of thy people?

First, let me ask you, are you alert to the fact that prayer can and does anger God? No, I listen to some people speak, and they say, God always hears and answers prayer. That's quite a nice notion, isn't it?

But is it a valid notion? Is there any biblical basis for that kind of thinking? Well, we know perfectly well that God himself said, if you regard iniquity in your heart, I will not hear you. So right off, we know that that is a statement that is a lie and not a statement of truth.

God does not always hear and answer prayer. He's certainly not going to answer what he has refused to hear. But now, in this 80th Psalm, we have read a question. How long will you be angry with the prayer of thy people?

And I want to ask you, what kind of prayer, not only is guaranteed God will not answer, at least not in the way wanted, but what kind of prayer will actually anger God? Have you thought about that? Well, I know that this is not the normal setting for the preacher to be asking questions.

So you're hardly used to responding in evening gatherings of this sort. But I'm really asking not so much for your answer as to provoke your thinking. What kind of prayers anger God? And anger him to such an extent that the following words are appropriate.

Thou hast fed them with the bread of tears. Thou hast made them to drink tears in large measure. Now, again, another question for you to think about. Direct your focus now not to your immediate family, but to your extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc.

And let me ask you this, in your own personal extended family, do you have any cause for tears? Honestly, I don't know a single honest family that speaks the truth. But what if they were talking about it, would say, we've got a lot of tears in our family.

I had very godly parents, and that was of incredible blessedness to me. I have one brother and two sisters, and all of them are genuine believers. But I have an assortment of nieces and nephews who are a perpetual source of tears.

I don't think it's speculative to say that this matter that we're looking at at the moment is not some irrelevant issue from the past. But indeed, it's a very vital issue of the moment. So I come back then to the earlier question, what kind of prayer so angers God that instead of sending what is asked for, he sends tears to drink in large measure?

And I remind you of what I just said. We know that this is happening in our day, because so many honest families are acknowledging the cause of tears in their own family. I have a niece, a lovely girl in many ways, but she was raped by her brother, married three times, loaded with difficulty.

We had a family reunion while my parents were still alive. One of my sisters is married to a man of above average means, and he has an estate in New York, and a large tent was rented. And so the family reunion, we were all able to eat together under the tent.

But on the Saturday night of that reunion, some of the believing young people came up to me, oh, probably along about 10 in the evening, and they said, Uncle Dick, what are we doing by way of church in the morning?

Well, I said, you understand that I'm the younger brother, and I'm not in charge, and I didn't make the arrangements. But I have been led to believe that my parents have requested that we go together to their church in the morning.

And they said, oh, Uncle Dick, couldn't we have a meeting here under the tent? Well, I said, I told you, I'm not in charge. Well, you could preach, couldn't you? We know you could, but I'm not in charge.

Well, what should we do? I said, go ask my elder brother. So they traipsed off and found him and said, Uncle Earl, could we have a meeting under the tent in the morning? And he looked at them, and he said, well, now listen.

Well, it's true that I'm a preacher. I'm not a drop of the hat kind of a preacher. I couldn't possibly prepare. But if you went and talked to my brother, he can always preach at the drop of a hat. So with great smiles, they came back and said, Uncle Earl approves, and you're supposed to preach.

Well, obviously, I didn't have a lot of time to pray and think, not at that hour of the night, but enough time to say, Lord, what should I do? And I felt clearly I should speak about that verse Brother John made reference to this afternoon, Psalm 73, at the end.

The nearness of God is my God. And I opened up the psalm, explained its setting, and then said, let me describe to you how some in our family have found the nearness of God to be our good. I described some of the grievous situations my parents had been in, but how the nearness of God had been so great a help.

I described the time when my brother had been a missionary in Nigeria. He was on the battlefront during that Biafra conflict, ministering to the troops. And his wife and three of his sons went with one of the natives driving to the airport in Lagos to pick up a missionary family returning to Nigeria.

And somehow, this driver veered across the highway and plowed into one of these big lorries. Two sons were killed instantly, and the wife and the third son dumped on the floor in a hospital in Lagos and left to die.

But the Shell Oil Company learned of this, sent men to the front lines to find my brother, brought him back, put them in a corporate airplane, flew them to London where they received medical treatment.

And both the wife, who was somewhat crippled, and the son, who recovered fully, lived. And how the nearness of God had carried them through. Well, I'll not repeat the sermon, just trying to give you a feel for it.

Well, afterward, this niece stepped up to me, tears streaming down her face. And I looked at her with great compassion. And I said to her, calling her by her name, Isn't it time for you to know the nearness of God as your good?

And she burst into an awful roar of tears. And she gasped out, Oh, Uncle Dick, I wish I could! And I said, Why don't you come to Chicago? Spend a few days with us. Oh, you wouldn't want me? Now, listen here.

Did I not just ask you to come? Oh, yes, but you wouldn't want me? Oh, but I said we would. We would cherish it if you would come. And she did. And she found the nearness of God was her good. Radically transformed.

But it doesn't always go that way. Some of you are probably carrying on your own heart now the great load of an unsaved child or grandchild. And I'm asking you, Why does the Lord our God, the God of loving kindness, the God of tender mercies, why are there occasions when instead of answering our prayers in the way that we are longing for him to do, he sends us tears to drink in great measure?

Now, this is a huge question. And we haven't got but a couple of hours tonight. And it would be quite grievous to keep you here past midnight dealing with this subject. But at least I can give you a little taste of the incredible truth that's involved in this important matter.

God is a just God. And the justice of God requires him to act just. Now, we don't really have any near and adequate sense of justice because we live in a nation that has so thoroughly corrupted the issue of justice that it's hard to push aside all the grievous things we know about the court system of America and come to grips with the reality of God's justice.

But now, one thing you can certainly agree with without any question, God is never late in his administration of justice. The timeliness of God's justice is absolutely assured. And we have some very powerful biblical examples of this.

And I want to take a moment to mention just one of these examples. When King David deliberately stayed home from the battle at a time when it was customary for the king to be present, and he lay abed all day.

And then he rose in the afternoon, went up on the roof where he had reason to believe a beautiful woman would be taking a bath. And then he sent an order for her to appear in his bedchamber. When did God exercise judicial timeliness in terms of King David?

Well, if you're a careless reader and you're working your way through the historical books of Samuel, you remember having read that after the child was born, Nathan the prophet came, told the king a little story about the rich man that had a guest come.

And so instead of sending a servant to his own flock to get a lamb to be slaughtered and fixed and served to the guest, the servant that is went at the man's orders to a poor man's home. A poor man that had a single ewe lamb that he carried about in his arms like an infant, probably a pet of the children, though that's a speculative statement.

And he robbed the poor man of his single lamb and that was served to the guest. When David heard the story, you remember he arose in indignation. And then the prophet took his bony finger and poked it in the king's face and said, Thou art the man.

Is that when God judged David? At least nine months after the event, well, some of you are as well aware as I am that some of the Psalms were written by King David and relate directly to the event I have spoken of.

For instance, Psalm 32. Again, Psalm 38. And certainly, once more, Psalm 51. And what does David say in these Psalms? Why, he speaks about his lips being parched, his limbs being broken. He speaks about a separation from God.

Listen. The day David sinned and did not judge himself, God judged him. Now, some of us confuse issues because we do not understand the judgments of God. And I know some of you have this trait, but I fear some of you do not, and for the sake of the do-nots, I repeat a matter that the do's are acquainted with.

When you study the judgments of God in Scripture, you find that they are in two basic forms. And for the want of any better terms, we refer to them as the remedial judgments of God and the final judgments of God.

Now, again, for the sake of those who are not yet clear, let me spell this out. Do you know the word remedial? Well, I expect it's not in the daily vocabulary of most of us, but some have children in the public school system, perhaps.

Some may have a background as a teacher, and you have heard about remedial reading classes. Now, what is a remedial reading class? It's a special class for the children who are behind in their reading skills.

It is a class intended to help them to catch up with their classmates in their reading skills. I have described the judgments of God as falling into one of two groups. Remedial, final. A remedial judgment is a judgment designed by God to enable a sinner to catch up with God, to return to God, to be reestablished in a right relationship with God.

It can be and often is referred to as a gracious judgment. But then a final judgment is a judgment in which there is neither time nor opportunity to catch up. It's a destructive judgment, often, in fact, for the most part, including death.

Now, somewhere along the line, there was a comment made about Ananias and Sapphira, and that is an excellent illustration. Did Peter say first to Ananias, Now, look, Ananias, if you go over this way and back that way, you'll find a doorway to the right.

Go through there. There's a prayer chamber. Go over to the prayer chamber and see if you can't find some cause for repentance. No. No. The lie is told. The lie is verified. The judgment of God falls. Now, let's just bring that into focus concerning our day.

National Judgment and the Church’s Prayers

We're looking at a couple of verses talking about prayer. I've asked you, have you thought through why the prayer meeting is disappearing from the church? I've asked you if you've thought about prayers that anger God.

And result in tears to drink in great measure. Well, dear friends, God is just. Do you think God likes to hear nonsense prayers? Do you think he's pleased when we beg him for physical benefits and are living in violation of his clear-cut orders, remedial judgments?

Give them tears to drink in great measure or send them plagues of locusts like the Book of Joel or send them a drought with the locusts, again, like the Book of Joel. So think, if you will, carefully about these two remedial judgments, final judgments, and then answer in your own mind this next question.

Where is America in relationship to these matters? Have we been destroyed? Is everybody dead? Have we been turned over to our enemies by God himself? No. No, there's an incredible increase of what we refer to as natural disasters.

Unfortunately, my mind's not all that sharp, but a while back I read some statistics compiled by a German insurance company. Now, insurance companies are interested in natural disasters, obviously, because it affects their wallets very directly.

And this insurance company, as I say, I don't have the exact facts, don't even remember the name of the company, but they said there had been a tenfold increase in natural disasters over a period, I think, of approximately 20 years.

And all of us are alert to this. Are we not constantly amazed at the floods? Here's a whole region of the country that has had not a drop of rain for ever so long, and suddenly the clouds open up and seven inches of rain fall in 12 hours.

And of course it doesn't do any good, because the ground can't receive it that fast, and so it runs and destroys homes and businesses. Is that an accident, or is there a God in charge? I'll not go into further detail.

I'm just asking you to think with me about this issue. God is holy. He cannot tolerate unholiness. He has laid out his principles and his requirements. He has told us what to do. We will not do what he tells us, and so he brings us under judgment.

Because of his grace, he has begun with remedial judgments. But surely you must understand, if a people will not heed the remedial judgments, eventually the remedial judgments turn into final judgments.

All of that to say to you, dear people, we don't have a lot of time to waste. We are on the edge of the greatest calamity this nation has ever known. But God, in incredible mercy, has told us he is not satisfied.

He has sent a series of remedial judgments, and those judgments include rotten politicians, so thoroughly corrupt, so absolutely blind to moral and eternal issues that they pass law after law after law that leads us further and further and further down the path of destruction.

Now, it's easy to hurl accusations at others, but what unconverted politician was ever on prayer ground? It's not his prayers that have been judged. He doesn't even make them. It's the prayers of God's people that offend God.

Now, I did ask you to consider what kind of praying does result in the anger of God and in these judgments. Well, again, time forbids me to be lengthy. I'm just trying to get you thinking seriously along Bible lines.

If God has sent a remedial judgment, it is very offensive to God when you ask him to lift that judgment. That judgment was sent with a purpose, and we ought to ask God to accomplish his purpose. And we ought indeed to even plead, don't lift the judgment until your purpose is accomplished.

But that's not the way the church looks at things. So as I said at some point yesterday, the church prayer meeting is marked by all kinds of prayers for God to lift judgments, and not prayers for God to accomplish his purpose.

Is it clear to you that no one ought ever to ask for deliverance from a problem until they have first been sure that God accomplished his purpose in the problem? Now, these are sobering thoughts, are they not?

James 4 and the Power of God’s Presence in Prayer

But with those thoughts in our minds, let us then turn to the passage before us this evening in James chapter 4. Our dear brother Anthony has read the passage, but that was at the beginning of the service, and a few of you were not able to get here on time.

And others of you are like I am, not all that good at remembering things. Well, I'm not going to read the chapter through again, but I do want to go over the portions that accompany the text before we come to the text itself.

So verse 1 of James 4, What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You're envious and you cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because you ask amiss. Now, I asked you in the beginning, why is the prayer meeting in the American church in decline? Who wants to go to a prayer meeting where you're basically talking to yourself?

A prayer meeting where God is present beats everything else in the human existence. I don't know anything more wonderful than a prayer meeting where God is present. There was a time in our lives, Maggie and mine, when we had unscheduled prayer meetings in our home.

Just every once in a while, I would feel stirred, and I'd send out a notice to about two dozen men that we were going to meet for prayer and give the date. Sometimes a single day, sometimes two days. At that time, we lived in a large facility and could easily accommodate a couple of dozen.

Now, some of you men may know exactly what I'm speaking about. Every once in a while, my dear wife Maggie slips up to me, reaches in my pocket, takes out my appointment book, looks through it, makes notes, because I'm not all as good as I ought to be in telling her what's on the schedule.

She's leafing through it, and she says to me, and what is this prayer meeting? And she names the date. Oh, I said, it's one of our periodic days of prayer. And did you tell the men when you invited them that it was a day of fasting?

No. Then you are expecting that these men will be fed? Yes. And you didn't think it necessary to consult me? No. I have other commitments that day. I'm sorry, Maggie. I'm sure that we have some friends who would be glad to care for this.

This is my home. I am the hostess here. When there are guests, they are my pleasure and responsibility. I'll cancel my plans and be here. Oh, you don't need to do that. That's the way I do things. Well, it was gentle and kind, but it was pretty clear.

So the men gather. And in meetings of that sort, you never do quite know what to expect. There were not a lot. I think maybe 18 or 20 who came. We started, I think, at 7 in the morning, and along about 8 o 'clock, one of the brothers launched into a prayer.

Now, sir, you do go to prayer meetings occasionally. Were you ever in a prayer meeting when you thought, I wish that person would sit down and shut up? Oh, don't answer, because I don't want you to embarrass yourself or anybody else.

But I think at least some of you know what I'm talking about. Well, now, on this occasion, this brother launches into prayer, and I keep saying, Lord, don't let him quit! Don't let him quit! Don't let him...

I mean, it's all inside. He wasn't shouting it, but my word, heaven came down. The roof came off. God was present. It was glorious. In the midst of that prayer, which might have been 45 minutes long, there was a commotion, but we were too intent on the Lord to pay any attention.

And then, after a spell, that urgency of prayer lifted, and I glanced at my watch, and it said 3 in the afternoon. And I thought, oh, no, Maggie has canceled her plans. She has stayed home. She has prepared lunch, and we prayed right through the lunch hour.

I went looking for her. I found her in a distant part of the house, and she was humming a Christian song and had this great smile on her face, and I tried to apologize, and she made it clear, you don't need to apologize to me.

Well, my dear, you stayed home to prepare lunch. That doesn't matter, and this is what she said to me. I knew the Lord had come. Are you engaged in prayer meetings like that? A few weeks later, one of the men who prayed with us regularly in those days came and called and asked if he could come and have a day of my time, and we made an arrangement, and we came, and he and I were deep in discussion about a very significant spiritual matter, and then I noticed that his eyes were tracing the movement of something on the carpet, and he wasn't really focused anymore on the conversation, and I glanced, and there's a big bug crawling across the floor, and he said, well, let me get up and remove it, and I said, oh, think nothing of it.

We're in the woods here, and we have lots of bugs at this season of the year, and I stood up, and I crushed that bug under my heel. Not the very good thing for the carpet, but that's what happened. Then after a bit, my wife rang the lunch bell, and so we went to the lunchroom, and he said, Miss Maggie, I do not want to embarrass you, but something happened this morning that brought a flood of memories back to me.

While Dick and I were deep in conversation, a big bug walked across the carpet. He got up and crushed it under his heel, and once again, I was back in the prayer meeting when God came, and I fell on the floor, and Christ crushed me under his heel, and I died, only to be raised immediately as a new man in Christ.

Now, when prayer meetings are such that God can come, they're marvelous, but when they provoke God to anger and tears, that's another matter, and I'm pleading with you now. Take this matter seriously.

Set your heart to become the kind of a praying person that God will delight to come to. Will you look at the end of this chapter now and notice the last verse of this passage? Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.

We've heard about the sins of omission. We've heard about the sins of commission, but this last verse of the fourth chapter of James is speaking of an aggravated sin. Are you aware of that term? An aggravated sin.

Well, you say, Mr. Roberts, what is that? A sin made the worse by the circumstances in which it appears to him that knows to do good and does not do it. To him it is sin. We all know the immense importance of vital, earnest, real, unhypocritical prayer.

The prayer that rejoices God's heart. The prayer that permits God to unleash the flood of his spirit upon a people and upon a land. And the one thing that has hope in it we set aside as inconsequential.

And your situation tonight is more dangerous because I took this time to speak this way than it was before you came. For you've had another slant now. Some of you have heard this type of thing before, but now you've had a refresher course in this matter.

Our responsibility has increased. And can the old preacher hope that these moments were not wasted? Now, the purpose specifically of using James for tonight we have not yet approached. But here we are at the heart of the passage.

Seven Preservatives Against Backsliding

I spoke some already about backsliding. And all of us who have experienced backsliding know what a loathsome thing it is. And how damaging it is to those who have been harmed by our backsliding. And how hateful it is to God.

But we have in front of us tonight an incredibly wonderful preservative against backsliding. Will you let that register in your heart? Some of you know that old hymn prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.

I doubt that there are any genuine Christians here who have felt something of the tug of backsliding. And maybe have gone some distance backward before by God's grace recovery occurred. We have tonight a list of seven preservatives against backsliding.

But in addition to there being a list of seven preservatives against backsliding there are the same seven helps for the backslider in returning to God. And what backsliding must have happened to it. But also in that the great theme of our gathering these days is revival.

These same seven things are wonderful, wonderful issues in our fulfilling the plan and the purpose of God in preparing the way of the Lord as we were looking at it out of Luke 3 yesterday. So let me read now the section that we focus upon.

The whole chapter is wonderfully tied together but in verses 7 to 10 we have a list of seven immensely consequential matters that can be of very great help to everyone here. As I said already as a preservative against backsliding as a great assistance in returning from backsliding and as a glorious way of preparing the way of the Lord so that indeed the sunrise from on high may visit us.

Verses 7 to 10. Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Be miserable and mourn and weep and let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and he will exalt you. What a wonderful list. So eminently practical.

So greatly needed. So wonderfully designed by God for multiple purposes. Number one. Submit to God. Some of you were able to be present this afternoon when our dear brother John gave us a lengthy reading from Exodus, the last portion, and he noted many times in which it was clearly said Moses did precisely what the Lord commanded.

A difficulty of great numbers of believers is that they think doing approximately what the Lord commanded is adequate, but approximately is no good. It is not acceptable. We must do precisely what God commands.

Some of you can remember that incident recorded in 2 Samuel 6. The Ark of the Covenant had been missing from its rightful place for somewhere in the range of 70 years. At the time of the priesthood of Eli, that father of rotten sons who failed to deal with his sons as a man of God ought, the Ark of the Covenant was carried off by the Philistines, and for all the rest of the years of Samuel's ministry during the whole reign of Saul and in the early part of David's reign as king, the Ark of the Covenant was missing from its rightful place.

Then David came under the burden to bring the Ark of God home. And so he took a vast crowd of men with him and they went down and laid hold of the Ark and to get it home easily they got a new cart and they had it drawn by an animal and they set out to bring the Ark home and the dumb farm boy accompanying the Ark when it hit the rough part of the road reached out and touched the Ark and God struck that boy dead and as we were informed this afternoon and rightly so, David burst out in great anger and called the place Perez Azza because God had made a breach.

But later David came to his senses and understood you don't do God's commandments approximately you do them exactly. And you remember in the account that they had to leave the Ark for a season and the place where it was left the great blessing of God came but eventually they went down again and got it but this time not approximately but exactly.

For you remember that the commandment was very specific the Ark must be carried on the shoulders of the Kohites not on a new cart and where did the notion of a new cart come from? The same source as most of the novelties in today's church.