Ten Shekels and a Shirt (High Quality) — Paris Reidhead

Micah’s Idolatry and the Levite’s Compromise

And today I'd like to speak to you from the theme, Ten Shekels and a Shirt, as we find it here in Chapter 17, Judges Chapter 17. I'll read the chapter and then I will read a portion also from the 18th to the 19th chapters that the background might be clear in our minds.

And there was a man of Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah. A little background, if you please. There was a situation where the Amorites refused to allow the people of the tribe of Dan any freedom, access to Jerusalem.

And they crowded them up into Mount Ephraim. A sad thing when the people of God allow the world to crowd them into an awkward position. And so they were unable to get to Jerusalem and we find that out of this comes the problem we're about to see.

There was a man of Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah and he said unto his mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursest, and fakest of also in mine ears, Behold, the silver is with me, I took it.

And his mother said, Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son. And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto the Lord from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten image.

Now therefore I will restore it unto thee. Yet he restored the money unto his mother. And his mother took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image.

And they were in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had an house of gods and made an ephod and a teraphim. This is incidentally the images that Rachel brought, you remember. The images is literally the word.

And he consecrated one of his sons who became his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And there was a young man out of Bethlehem, Judah, the family of Judah, who was a Levite.

And he sojourned there. And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehem, Judah, to sojourn where he could find a place. And he came to Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, as he journeyed. And Micah said unto him, Whence comest thou?

And he said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehem, Judah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place. And Micah said unto him, Dwell with me, and be unto me a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year, and a suit of apparel, and thy vituals.

So the Levite went in. And the Levite was content to dwell with the man, and the young man was unto him as one of his sons. And Micah consecrated the Levite, and the young man became his priest and was in the house of Micah.

Then said Micah, Now I know that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest. In those days there was no king in Israel, and in those days the tribe of the Danites taught them an inheritance to dwell in, for unto that day all their inheritance had not fallen unto them among the tribes of Israel.

And the children of Dan sent of their family five men from their coasts, men of valor, from Zorah and from Ashtael, to spy out the land and to search it. And they said unto them, Go, search the land, who, when they came to Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, they lodged there.

When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the young man, the Levite. And they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither, and what makest thou in this place, and what hast thou here?

And he said unto them, Doth and doth dealeth Micah with me, and hath hired me, and I am his priest. And they said unto him, Ask, how shall we pray thee of God, that we may know whether our way which we go shall be prosperous?

And the priest said unto them, Go in peace, before the Lord is your way, wherein ye go. And now if you will go over to the latter part of the chapter, verse fourteen. And answered the five men that went to spy out the country of Laish, and said unto their brethren, Do ye know that there is in these houses an ephod, and tarithim, and a graven image, and a molten image?

Now therefore consider what we have to do. And they turned thitherward, and came to the house of the young man, the Levite, even unto the house of Micah, and saluted him. And the six hundred men appointed with their weapons of war, which were of the children of Dan, stood by the entering of the gate.

And the five men that went to spy out the land went up, and came in thither, and took the graven image, and the ephod, and the tarithim, and the molten image. And the priest stood in the entering of the gate, where the six hundred men were appointed with weapons of war.

And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image, the ephod, the tarithim, and the molten image. Then said the priest unto them, What do ye? And they said unto him, Hold thy peace, lay thine hand upon thy mouth, and go with us, and be to us a father and a priest.

It is better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel. And the priest's heart was glad. And he took the ephod, and the tarithim, and the graven image, and went in the midst of the people.

So they turned, and departed, and put the little one, and the cattle, and the carriage before them. Well, there's the story. This isn't part of the actual history of the judges. This is a gathering together of some accounts that enable us to see the social conditions in that period, when every man did as seemed right in his own eyes, and there was no king in Israel.

And so we understand that Micah was unable to get to Jerusalem, and perhaps for some kind of devout reason, he decided he would build a replica of the temple on his own property. And so he built what he thought would be an appropriate building, and he made the instruments of the tabernacle, for this was part of the furnishing, the ephod included among them.

But then he also gathered some of the things and the people around him, the tarithim, the images, which God had forbidden. But you see, nevertheless, there was a desire to get along as best he could, so he took a little bit of the world, and a little bit of Israel, and that which had been revealed by God, and he sort of mixed them up until he had something that he thought might please the Lord.

And then, of course, he was delighted beyond words when a wandering young preacher came along from Bethlehem, Judah. He was a Levite, his mother was of the tribe of Judah, though he himself was a Levite.

God had given permission through Moses that the Levites might marry into other tribes, and they might join themselves to other tribes. So this young man didn't like the living, and every Levite was provided for, but he had wanderlust and an itching foot, and so he started off to see if he couldn't do better for himself than was being done.

He felt that being a Levite was good, but there should be opportunities associated with it. And so he came to the house of Micah, and there he waited, there he was invited in and asked to become the priest.

And Micah made a deal with him. He said, "'If you'll be my priest, be my father and priest, then I'll give you ten shekels and a shirt.'". It says a suit, but you understand that the people of the day wore what would be called a jalapeo, a long sort of an outsized, well, I was going to say nightgown, I don't know if that's exactly what it is, but it's appropriate at least, something like that.

And so he gave him a suit of clothes or a change of apparel and his food and ten shekels a year. This was pretty good living for him, and so he decided that he would stay there and enter into the mixture of idolatry and so on that was in the house of Micah.

But the people of Dan came along. They were supposed to have driven out the Amorites, but the Amorites were too difficult, so they wanted to find someone that was a little easier to get out, to move. And they came to, as you've read, to Micah's house, and the Levi told them to go ahead, and then you find that they discovered that there were some people to the manner of the Zidonians at Laish, and they were peaceful and no one was there to protect them, so they figured this would be a very good place to take some land for themselves.

And when they came with the men that were set out to conquer this area, they figured that since they'd found the land through the young Levite, it would be splendid to have his assistance. And so they went into the house of Micah, took all the things that he had made, and it cost a good bit of money because at least two hundred shekels had been given for this one piece of furniture.

And so they just took it all, made it theirs, and took the Levite. But you'll notice that the young Levite was able to adjust himself to this. It was amazing how flexible he was and how easily he could accommodate himself to such changes when there was a little rationalization along the way.

As soon as he could begin to see that it was far more important to serve a tribe than a one-man family, and he could minister to so many more, why, he could see the wisdom of this and he could justify it.

And so with no real strain of conscience, he could make the adjustment, hold his hand over his mouth while they took the furniture out of the little chapel that Micah had built. But he was a wise man nonetheless.

Rather than go along at the front, which put him in a place of danger, or at the rear, which put him in a place of danger, I say he was a wise man. He put himself right in the middle so that if Micah sent any of his servants to get him, he was safe with soldiers on every side.

Pragmatism and the False Measure of Ministry

What can we call this and how will it apply to our day and generation? Would I be out of line and order if I were to talk to you for a little while about utilitarian religion, and expedient Christianity, and a useful God?

I would like to call attention to the fact that our day is a day which the ruling philosophy is pragmatism. You understand what I mean by pragmatism. Perhaps pragmatism means if it works, it's true. If it succeeds, it's good.

And the test of all practices, all principles, all truth, so-called, all teaching, is do they work? Do they work? Now according to pragmatism, the greatest failures of the ages have been some of the men God has honored most.

For instance, whereas Noah was a mighty good shipbuilder, his main occupation wasn't shipbuilding, it was preaching. He was a terrible failure as a preacher. His wife and three children of their wives was all he had.

Seven converts in 120 years, you wouldn't call that particularly effective. Most mission boards would ask the missionaries to withdraw long before this. I say as a shipbuilder he did quite well, but as a preacher he was a failure.

And then we come down across the years to another man by the name of Jeremiah. He was a mighty effective preacher, but ineffective as far as results were concerned. If you were to measure statistically how successful Jeremiah was, he would probably get a large cipher.

But we find that he lost out with the people, he lost out with royalty, even the ministerial assassination voted against him and wouldn't have anything to do with him. He had everything and everything failed.

The only one he seemed to be able to please was God, but otherwise he was a distinct failure. And then we come to another well-known person, the Lord Jesus Christ. It was a failure judging from all the standards.

He never succeeded in organizing a church or denomination. He wasn't able to build a school. He didn't succeed in getting a mission board established. He never had a book printed. He never was able to get any of the various criteria or instruments that we find and are so useful.

I'm not being sarcastic at all. They are useful. And our Lord preached for three years, healed thousands of people, fed thousands of people. And yet when it was all over, there were 120 or 500 that he could reveal himself after his resurrection.

And the day that he was taken, one man said, If all the others forsake you, I am willing to die for you. And he looked at this one and said, Peter, you don't know your own heart. You're going to deny me three times before the cock crows this morning.

And so all men forsook him and fled. And by every standard of our generation or any generation, our Lord was a signal failure. The question comes then to this, what is the standard of success? And by what are we going to judge our lives and our ministry?

And the question that you're going to ask yourself is, is God an end or is he a means? And you have to decide very early in your Christian life whether you're viewing God as an end or a means. Our generation is prepared to honor with signal honor anyone that's successful, regardless of whether they've settled this problem or not.

As long as they can get things done or get the job done or, well, it's working, isn't it? Then our generation is prepared to say, well, you've got to reckon with this. And so we've got to ask ourselves at the very outset of our ministry and our pilgrimage and our walk, are we going to be Levites who serve God for ten shekels and a shirt?

Serve men, perhaps, in the name of God rather than God, for though he was a Levite and performed religious activities, he was looking for a place, a place which would give him recognition, a place which would give him acceptance, a place which would give him security, a place where he could shine in terms of those values which were important to him.

All his whole business was serving in religious activities, and so it had to be a religious job, and he was very happy when he found that Micah had an opening. But he had decided that he was worth ten shekels and a shirt, and he was prepared to sell himself to anyone who would give that much.

Somebody came along and gave more, he'd sell himself to them, but he'd put a value upon himself, and he figured then that his religious service and his activities was just a means to an end, and by the same token, God was the means to an end.

Humanism’s Invasion of Christianity

Now, in order to understand the implications of that in the twentieth century, we've got to go back a hundred and fifty years, a hundred years at least, to a conflict that attacked Christianity. Just after the great revivals in America with Phineas, the Spirit of God having been marvelously outpoured upon certain portions of our country, there came an open attack on our faith in Europe under the higher critics.

Darwin had postulated his theory of evolution. Certain philosophers had adapted it to their philosophies, and theologians had applied it to the scripture. And so about 1850, you could mark the opening of a frontal attack upon the Word of God.

Satan had always been insidiously attacking it, but now it was open season on the book, open season on the church, and Voltaire could declare that he would live to see the Bible become a relic and just have its place only in museums, that it would be utterly destroyed by the arguments that he was so forcefully presenting against it.

Well, what was the effect of this? The philosophy of the day became humanism, and you can define humanism this way. Humanism is a philosophical statement that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man.

The reason for existence is man's happiness. Now, according to humanism, salvation is simply a matter of getting all the happiness you can out of life. If you're influenced by someone like Nietzsche, who says that the only true satisfaction in life is power, and that the power is its own justification, and that, after all, the world is a jungle, and it is therefore up to the man who would be happy to become powerful, and become powerful by any means he can use, for it is only in this position of ascendancy, or as we saw last night in the worship of Moloch, that one can be happy.

And this would produce in due course a Hitler, who would take the philosophy of Nietzsche as his working operating principles and guide, and would say of his people that we are destined to rule the world, and therefore any means we can use to achieve this is our salvation.

Somebody else turns around and says, well no, the end of all being is happiness, but happiness doesn't come from authority over people, happiness comes from sensual experience, and so you would have the type of existentialism that characterizes France today, that's given rise to beatnikism in America, and to the gross sensuality of our country.

That since man is essentially a glandular animal whose highest moments of ecstasy come from the exercise of his glands, the salvation is simply defined the most desirable way to gratify this part of a person.

And so this became the effect of humanism, that the end of all being is the happiness of man, and John Dewey, then an American philosopher influencing education, was able to persuade the educators that there were no absolute standards, and children shouldn't be brought to any particular standard, that the end of education was simply to allow the child to express himself, and expand on what he is, and find his happiness in being what he wants to be.

And so we had cultural lawlessness, when every man could do what seemed right in his own eyes, and no God to rule over him. The Bible had been discounted, and disallowed, and disproved according to what they said, and God had been dethroned, he didn't exist, he had no personal relationship to individuals, Jesus Christ was either a myth or just a man, and so they taught, and therefore the whole end of being was happiness, as the individual would establish the standards of his happiness and interpret it.

Now religion then had to exist, because there were so many people that made their living at it, and so they had to find some way to justify their existence, so back about, at that time in 1850, the church divided into two groups, the one group was the liberals, who said, who accepted the philosophy of humanism, and tried to find some relevance by saying something like this to their generation, we don't know that there's a heaven, we don't know that there's a hell, but we do know this, you've got to live for 70 years, and we know that there's a great deal of benefit from poetry, from high thoughts and noble aspirations, and therefore it's important for you to come to church on Sunday, so that we can read some poetry, that we can give you some little adages and axioms and rules to live by, and we can't say anything about what's going to happen when you die, but we'll tell you this, if you'll come every week and pay and help and stay with us, we'll put springs on your wagon and your trip will be more comfortable, and so we can't guarantee anything about what's going to happen when you die, but we say that if you'll come along with us, we'll make you happier while you're alive, and so this became the essence of liberalism, it has simply nothing more than to try and put a little sugar in the bitter coffee of the journey, and sweeten it up for a time, this was all that it could say, well now the philosophy of the atmosphere is humanism, the chief end of being is the happiness of man, there's another group of people that have taken umbrage with the liberals, this group of my people, the fundamentalists that say, we believe in the inspiration of the bible, we believe in the deity of Jesus Christ, we believe in hell, we believe in heaven, we believe in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, but remember the atmosphere is that of humanism, and humanism says the chief end of being is the happiness of man, and humanism is like a miasma out of a pit, it just permeates every place, and humanism is like an infection, an epidemic, it just goes everywhere, and so it wasn't long until we had this, the fundamentalists knew each other because they said we believe these things, they were men for the most part that had met God, but you see it wasn't long until having said these are the things that establish us as fundamentalists, the second generation said, this is how we become a fundamentalist, believe in the inspiration of the bible, believe in the deity of Christ, believe in his death, burial and resurrection, and thereby become a fundamentalist, and so it wasn't long until it got to our generation, where the whole plan of salvation was to give intellectual assent to a few statements of doctrine, and a person was considered a Christian because he could say uh-huh, at four or five places that he was asked to, and if he knew where to say uh-huh, someone would pat him on the back, shake his hand, smile broadly and say, brother, you're safe, and so it had gotten down to the place where salvation was nothing more than an assent to a scheme or a formula, and the end of this salvation was the happiness of man, because humanism has penetrated, and so if you were to analyze the fundamentalism in contrast to liberalism of a hundred years ago, as it's developed, where I'm not pinpointing at any time, it would be like this, the liberal says the end of religion is to make man happy while he's alive, and the fundamentalist says the end of religion is to make man happy when he dies, but again, the end of all of the religion that was proclaimed was the happiness of man, and whereas the liberal says by social change and political order we're going to do away with slums, we're going to do away with alcoholism and dope addiction and poverty, and we're going to make heaven on earth, and make you happy while you're alive, we don't know anything about after that, but we want you to be happy while you're alive, they went ahead to try to do it, only to be brought up with a terrifying shock at the first world war, and utterly staggered to the second world war, because they seemed to be getting nowhere fast, and then the fundamentalists along the line are now tuning in on the same wavelength of humanism, until we find it something like this, accept Jesus so you can go to heaven, you don't want to go to that old filthy nasty burning hell when there's a beautiful heaven up there, now come to Jesus so that you can go to heaven, and the appeal could be as much to selfishness as a couple of men sitting in a coffee shop, deciding to go to rob a bank to get something for nothing, and there's a way that you can give an invitation to sinners, that just sounds for all the world like a plot to take up a filling station proprietor's Saturday night earnings, without working for them, and humanism is I believe the most deadly and disastrous of all the philosophical stanchions that's crept up through the grating over the pit of hell, and it has penetrated so much of our religion, and it is in utter and total contrast with Christianity, and unfortunately it's seldom seen, and here we find Micah wants to have a little chapel, and he wants to have a priest, and he wants to have prayer, and he wants to have devotion, because I know the Lord will do me good, and this is selfishness, and this is sin, and the Levite comes along and falls right in with it, because he wants a place, he wants ten shekels and a shirt and his food, and so in order that he can have what he wants, and Micah can have what they want, they sell out God for ten shekels and a shirt, and this is the betrayal of the ages, and it's the betrayal in which we live, and I don't see how God can revive it until we come back to Christianity, as in direct and total contrast with the vengeful humanism that's perpetrated in our generation in the name of Christ, and I'm afraid that it's become so subtle that it goes everywhere, what is it?

In essence it's this, that this philosophical postulate that the end of all being is the happiness of man, has been sort of covered over with evangelical terms and biblical doctrine, until God reigns in heaven for the happiness of man, Jesus Christ is incarnate for the happiness of man, all the angels exist in the whole, everything is for the happiness of man, and I submit to you that this is unchristian, isn't man happy?

Can God intend to make man happy? Yes. But as a by-product, and not a prime product. What is? It was that good man that's so admired by the fuzzy thinkers of our day, out there in Africa, dear Dr. Schweitzer, bless his heart, he's a brilliant man, a philosopher, a doctor, a musician, a composer, undoubtedly a brilliant man, but Dr. Schweitzer is no more Christian than this rose, and he would call it a personal insult if he were to say he was a Christian, because he doesn't see Christ as having any relevance to his philosophy or life.

The Glory of God Rather Than Human Happiness

Dr. Schweitzer is a humanist. Dr. Schweitzer was sitting on the bow of the boat going up the broad Congo River toward his station, watching the Belgian government officials with their high-powered rifles shooting at the crocodiles sunning on the mud flats along the river, and they were expert marksmen, and as they would use these dum-dum bullets that would explode inside the crocodile and just send them spinning up into the air from the contraction of muscles, and he said, how do you know so much about it?

Well, to my shame, I was guilty of the same thing in the Nile. And they were there, and this was what their sport was. They'd bag them, and they'd keep cows, and they'd put strings around the place where their gun was, they'd have a little place for the gun, and then they'd tie knots so that they could see how many crocodiles they killed.

A colossal waste of life. And it was there that Schweitzer saw the essence of his philosophy. And do you know what it is? Three words. Reverence for life. Reverence for life! Crocodile life. Human life.

And other kinds of life. My friend George Klein, who was with us last week going back to the Gaboon, was just about 50 or 60 miles away from Dr. Schweitzer's station. You know, Dr. Schweitzer is so convinced of the reverence of life that he doesn't like to sterilize his surgery.

He has the dirtiest surgery in Africa because bacteria are life, and he doesn't want any of the good bacteria with the bad, so he sort of lets them all grow together. His organ broke. Someone had sent him out an organ and the means of playing it.

So Mr. Klein is an expert organist and an organ repairer as well. So he went over to see Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Schweitzer said, George, do you think you could fix my organ? He said, I wouldn't be surprised.

Let me try it. So he took the back off, and to his amazement he discovered a huge nest of cockroaches. With characteristic American enthusiasm and zeal, George started toppling all over the cockroaches, not to let a one of them get away.

And the good doctor came out, his hair standing straighter than it had for a long time, and because of his anger, and he said, you stop that right now. George said, why? They're hurting your organ. He said, that's all right.

They were just being true to their nature. He said, you can't kill those. So one of the boys came in and said, it's all right, Mr. Klein. He reached down very tenderly and picked them up and put them in a little bag and crimped the top, and he put each cockroach in, and they took them out in the jungle and let them loose.

Now here was a man that believed his philosophy. Reverence for life. Utterly committed to it. Utterly consistent. Even when it came to the matter of a cockroach, or a microbe. Do you see? This is humanism.

This is consistency. I ask you, what is the philosophy of mission? What is the philosophy of evangelism? What is the philosophy of a Christian? If you'll ask me why I went to Africa, I'll tell you I went primarily to improve on the justice of God.

I didn't think it was right for anybody to go to hell without a chance to be saved. And so I went to give poor sinners a chance to go to heaven. Now I hadn't put it in so many words, but if you'll analyze what I've just told you, do you know what it is?

It's humanism. That I was simply using the provisions of Jesus Christ as a means to improve upon human conditions of suffering and misery. And when I got to Africa, I discovered that they weren't poor ignorant little heathen running around in the woods waiting for, looking for someone to tell them how to go to heaven.

That they were monsters of iniquity. They were living in honor and total defiance of far more knowledge of God than I ever dreamed they had. They deserved hell because they utterly refused to walk in the light of their conscience and the light of the law written upon their heart and the testimony of nature and the truth they knew.

And when I found that out, I assure you, I was so angry with God that one occasion in prayer I told him that it was a mighty little thing he'd done, sending me out there to reach these people that were waiting to be told how to go to heaven.

And when I got there, I found out they knew about heaven, didn't want to go there. And they loved their sin and wanted to stay in it. I went out there motivated by humanism. I'd seen pictures of lepers.

I'd seen pictures of ulcers. I'd seen pictures of native funerals. And I didn't want my fellow human beings to suffer in hell eternally after such a miserable existence on earth. But it was there in Africa that God began to tear through the overlay of this humanism.

And it was that day in my bedroom with the door locked that I wrestled with God. For I hear I was coming to grips with the fact that the people that I thought were ignorant and wanted to know how to go to heaven and were saying, someone come and teach us, actually didn't want to take time to talk with me or anybody else.

They had no interest in the Bible and no interest in Christ. And they loved their sin and wanted to continue in it. And I was to the place at that time where I felt the whole thing was a sham and a mockery and I'd been sold a bill of goods.

And I wanted to come home. And there alone in my bedroom, as I faced God honestly with what my heart tells, it seemed to me I heard Him say, yes, will not the judge of all the earth do right? The heathen are lost.

And they're going to go to hell, not because they haven't heard the gospel. They're going to go to hell because they are sinners who love their sin. And because they deserve hell. I didn't send you out there for them.

I didn't send you out there for their sake. And I heard as clearly as I've ever heard, though it wasn't with physical voice, but it was the echo of truth of the ages finding its way into an open heart.

I heard God say to my heart that day something like this, I didn't send you to Africa for the sake of the heathen. I sent you to Africa for my sake. They deserve hell, but I love them. And I endured the agonies of hell for them.

I didn't send you out there for them. I sent you out there for me. Do I not deserve the reward of my suffering? Don't I deserve those for whom I died? And it reversed it all and changed it all and righted it all.

And I wasn't any longer working for Micah in ten shekels and a shire, but I was serving the living God. And I was there not for the sake of the heathen. I was there for the Savior that endured the agonies of hell for the heathen who didn't deserve it.

But He deserved them because He died for them. Do you see? Let me epitomize. Let me summarize. Christianity says the end of all being is the glory of God. Humanism says the end of all being is the happiness of man.

And one was born in hell, the deification of man. And the other was born in heaven, the glorification of God. And one is Levi serving Micah and the other is a heart that's unworthy serving the living God because of the highest honor in the universe.

Repentance on Biblical Terms

What about you? Why did you repent? I'd like to see some people repent on biblical terms again. And would George Whitfield know it? He stood on Boston Common speaking to 20 ,000 people and he said, Listen, sinners, you're monsters.

Monsters of iniquity who deserve hell. And the worst of your crimes is that criminals, though you've been, you haven't had the good grace to see it. He said, If you will not weep for your sins and your crimes against the holy God, George Whitfield will weep for you.

That man would put his head back and he would sob like a baby. Why? Because they were in danger of hell. No. But because they were monsters of iniquity that didn't even see their inner care about their crimes.

Do you see the difference? Do you see the difference? The difference is here is somebody trembling because he's going to be hurt in hell. And he has no sense of the enormity of his guilt. And no sense of the enormity of his crimes.

And no sense of his insult against deity. He's only trembling because his skin is about to be singed. He's afraid. And I submit to you that whereas fear is this good office work in preparing us for grace, it's no place to stop.

The Holy Ghost doesn't stop there. And that's the reason why no one can savingly receive Christ until they've repented. And no one can repent until they've been convicted. And conviction is the work of the Holy Ghost that helps a sinner to see that he is a criminal before God and deserves all of God's wrath.

And if God were to send him to the lowest corner of a devil's hell forever and ten eternities, that he deserves it all and a hundredfold more. Because he's seen his crimes. He's not been convinced he's caught, but he has seen his crimes.

And this is the difference between twentieth century preaching and the preaching of John Wesley. Wesley was a preacher of righteousness that exalted the holiness of God. And when he would stand there with the two to three hour sermons that he was accustomed to deliver in the open air, and he would exalt the holiness of God and the law of God and the righteousness of God and the justice of God and the wisdom of his requirements and the justice of his wrath and his anger, and then he would turn to sinners and tell them of the enormity of their crimes and their open rebellion and their treason and their anarchy.

The power of God would so descend upon the company that on one occasion it is reliably reported that when the people dispersed there were eighteen hundred people lying on the ground utterly unconscious because they'd had a revelation of the holiness of God and in the light of that they'd seen the enormity of their sin.

And God had so penetrated their minds and hearts that they had fallen to the ground. It wasn't only in Wesley's day. It was also in America. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale. A man by the name of John Wesley Redfield had continuous ministry for three years in and around New Haven culminating in the great meetings in the Yale Ball, the first of the Yale Balls back in the eighteenth century.

And the policemen were accustomed during those days if they saw someone lying on the ground to go up and smell his breath because if he had alcohol in his breath they'd lock him up. But if he didn't, he had Wesley Redfield's disease.