Exceeding Sinfulness of Sin — Leonard Ravenhill

Reading from verse 1 into verse 13. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgression before thee, my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in my sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold thou desirest truth in inward parts, and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

The Hidden Sinfulness of the Human Heart

D .L. Moody said on one occasion, he was the evangelist to the singer you heard about, Sankey, and he said on one occasion, if God would give a man the ability to take a photograph of our hearts, none of us would sit for a picture, and if we got it, we wouldn't show it to anybody.

Is that true in your heart and mine? The Bible contains 70 books. If you went to Bible school, they told you 66, but they don't know much of Bible schools anyhow. You see, the book of Psalms is the Hebrew hymn book, and it is divided into five books.

So if you add four to 66 books, you have 70. If you take the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the fifth book is a recap of the other four. If you go into the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then you come to the Acts of the Apostles.

What is the Acts of the Apostles? It's the church doing everything Jesus did, isn't it? The church, the living church, my, that always kind of tingles my flesh, because you see, one morning in England, one of our sleeply clergymen had had a pretty bad weekend, and Monday isn't a good day for preachers, usually, and he turned round in his swivel chair and he reached just blindly for a book, and he got his New Testament, and it opened at the Acts of the Apostles, and he read it, and suddenly it exploded.

And from that, J .B. Phillips began to give his great exposition, his translation of the New Testament. It is a translation. It's not a transliteration. It's not this dirty thing down here, Living Bible, a paraphrase, a bit of guesswork that a man had when he was sick, I think.

Phillips is a scholarly translation. It's got teeth in it, and when he read the first few chapters of the New Testament church, this is what he said. This is the church of Jesus Christ before it became fat and short of breath by prosperity.

This is the church before it became muscle-bound by over-organization. This is the church where they did not say prayers. They prayed in the Holy Ghost. This is the church where they did not gather together a group of people to study psychosomatic medicine.

They healed the sick. My prayer is for this church. I pray for this church every day of my life, and never come back again. I'll still go on praying that God will make it a New Testament church, and if it does, maybe the preacher gets thrown out.

But anyhow, the thing is a lot of you get thrown out. You know, everybody wants revival. Isn't that why they want revival? To fill up the vacant pews. Many revivals empty the church before they fill them.

God empties before he fills. He strips before he clothes. He casts us down before he lifts us up. He wounds us before he heals us. Well, that's free. It won't cost anything, but it's not in the message.

David’s Penitence in Psalm 51

The book of Psalms has 150 psalms, roughly 75 of them are written by David. Many of the psalms are prophetic, some are historic, and some are biographical. Out of the 75 he wrote, 18 of them are autobiographical psalms.

Out of the 18, 8 of them are penitential psalms. Out of the 18, out of the 8, one is the greatest psalm. This is the greatest psalm ever written as far as I'm concerned. It's an amazing psalm in its construction, though we don't have time to deal with it all.

But in the first two verses you have two different words, pardon me, you have three different words for sin in the first two verses. You have three different words for cleansing in the first two verses.

Three times in this psalm brokenness is mentioned. Three times in this psalm the spirit is mentioned, twice of the Holy Spirit and once of the human spirit. Three times in this psalm sacrifice is mentioned.

Three times in this psalm burnt offerings are mentioned. Did you notice that I tried to put an emphasis in reading it? The unique thing amongst others about this psalm is this, that it's a monologue. In the life of David, one hand is stained with adultery and the other hand is stained with murder.

And he doesn't go looking at the woman that nakedly sported herself. He doesn't obliquely refer to Bathsheba, not directly. He says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgression, wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, cleanse me from my sin, acknowledge my transgression, my sin is ever before me.

Now if you want to put into practice the commitment you made a little while ago, maybe the thing is to draw a circle and stand in the middle of it and say, Lord, start revival right inside this circle.

You know what's wrong with the deacons in your church, the pastor, somebody else, do you know what's wrong with yourself? It's easy to go out looking for scapegoats, but David is not doing that. David here says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgression.

Oh, David, don't get too worried about this. The man that wrote this psalm was a monarch. But do you know what he says? He had one of the most blessed experiences in the world, and the blessedness was he was miserable about his sin.

We try to get people saved and don't even believe they're lost. We try to get people to come to Christ as though Jesus is in heaven, wringing his hands, hoping you'll give him a vote. Forget it. You can go to hell as far as he's concerned, and I mean that.

Because when he hung between two thieves on the cross, he never said a word to them. You say to people, Jesus is living in heaven to make intercession for you. No, he's not. I don't believe he is for sinners, it's for saints he's doing that.

He's made an offering for sin. Once in the end of the age, he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. Now David here has a thousand things tearing his spirit. It's worse than a cancer in his breast.

It's worse than a fire in his bones. It's worse than the weight that's crushing him. My sin is ever before me. You see, when he looked out of his palace window, there was a guard. And he remembered that the captain of that guard he'd put to death because he'd stolen the wife of that captain.

And he heard a baby cry somewhere there, a certain girl's baby cried. And he remembered the sin that he'd fathered a child with Bathsheba. And so his sin was ever before him. His sin came in his ears.

His sin came before his eyes. His sin burned in his conscience like a living flame. That's just about norm for revival. We want an all the night sweeping in. Now I'm not saying God can't do that, but every revival I've discovered is this.

That there's been a gradual approach to that. And something like a disease has spread amongst people and they've had to say, eventually foul I till that fountain fly, wash me, Savior, or I die. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.

You know, I'm very slow on the uptake. I guess you've already discovered that anyhow, not being too humble about that. But you know, as I read that psalm again, I felt something kind of turning inside of me tonight.

The Holy Spirit, Saul, and the Peril of Lost Anointing

When David says, take not thy Holy Spirit from me, do you know I never discovered that until fairly recently, two or three years ago. Why does he say, take not thy Holy Spirit from me? Now notice, will you, that he mentions the Holy Spirit at least twice.

The Holy Spirit is exactly that. He's the spirit of holiness and he convicts of unholiness. He's a spirit of life. He convicts of death. He's a spirit of power. He convicts of weakness. He's a spirit of fire.

He convicts of coldness. He's a spirit of purity. He convicts of an impurity. Now David says, take not my Holy Spirit from me. Why? Well, just before David, there had been a king by the name of Saul. You see in America, we love to think we don't have a monarch, we don't have a king.

But I'll tell you what, at the coronation of a British king, there are more Americans looking on than anybody anyhow. You like to see the pomp and the circumstance and the queen's chariot come drawn with the six horses and all the rest of it.

But oh, when they anointed a king in Israel, it was far more than a social thing. It wasn't something that somebody was at the top of the pyramid. It was God's selection and he had selected a man who in the poet's language was tall and dark and handsome, apart from Goliath, maybe the biggest man in the world.

But tall, handsome Saul, the king of Israel, and millions of people gathered and he was anointed. They took the horn of an animal and cut the end of it and filled it with oil and the priest took it there and he dropped the oil on the head of the king, who was also the priest in this instance, at least at the moment.

He had the anointing. Oil is a type, a permanent type of the Holy Spirit. And Saul, the king of Israel, is anointed and it says the Spirit of the Lord rested upon him and he had gifts of the Spirit because he prophesied, but he died a suicide.

You wonder, the Scripture says, how the mighty fallen, you know the road of Christian living is strewn with a wreckage of has-beens, men who want might in God. My wife and I were in a certain place, I think it was California we were when I received a call from the president of a famous school in this country and he asked me to go and teach for a month and then he asked me to join the staff.

After they'd heard me preach a month, they didn't renew the invitation, but that's alright. I said to him, but my accent on the Holy Spirit is not on gifts, it's on character. He said, that's what we want.

And he went down the list, he said, remember so-and-so? That man used to get ten, twelve thousand people in his tent, do you know how he died? Do you know so-and-so? That man would have a great healing meeting and phone for a call, girl, on the way home.

Do you know so-and-so? And he went down the list and he said, we need more than just terms and phrases and gifts, we need holy living, holy character. And holiness is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

If you're not holy, you'll never make it to heaven. God says, nothing but the father shall enter into heaven. David saw that king, the man who stood and prophesied in the name of God, the man with great authority, the people got so thrilled they wrote songs about him, Saul had slain his thousands.

They saw him cringing at the feet of a miserable spiritist, saying, bring up Saul. And when Saul came up, you remember, he said, the Lord, no, he said, call upon my God, not my God, not our God, thy God.

He said, listen, the Lord has forsaken me. And the prophet didn't say, now, of course, he won't do that with you, particularly you being a king. You being the anointed one, he never does that. He never forsakes his own.

Ah, you can use scriptures and distort them, can't you? When the man said, the king said, the Lord hath departed from me, do you remember the answer of the prophet? He said, the Lord hath departed from me.

Do you know the most miserable, do you know the man who needs to be pitied most in America tonight or anywhere in the world? He's not the man feeling his way down the road in total blindness. He's not those poor forgotten heroes in our VA hospitals that have been there from World War II, minus legs, minus eyes, minus arms, and they get nothing for it but misery.

He's not the man who lost his all on the stock market the other week, no sirree. The man who is the most pitiful object in America tonight is the man who once had the anointing of God and he lost it. There is no money we'll bring it back.

There is no way you can manipulate it for him. I often pray and thank God that the Holy Ghost is incorruptible. Some of you, if the pastor said tonight, I have a special privilege, I want you to be filled with the Holy Ghost, it'll cost you a thousand dollars, you'd have whipped a checkbook out and signed a thousand dollars but he still says your money perished with you.

David’s Brokenness and the Call to Holiness

David had seen the misery of this man that God had left. And he says, take not thy Holy Spirit from me. This is the young man that sat on the hills of Bethlehem playing a harp, wrote maybe the most beautiful psalm of all, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's nice shepherd I'll not want.

If you want to hear it sung, you'd have to go to Scotland, it's their national anthem. Boy, they can sing it. Like nobody on earth, the Lord's nice shepherd I'll not want, and he gets so brave he says even the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil.

You remember what he did in Psalm 139, he takes his harp out and he says, search me O God and know my heart, try me and know my thought. I dare you to say that right now to a holy God, not to me, throw it up to heaven right where you're sitting.

Me, as you search Jerusalem with a candle, search me, search all my thoughts, the secret springs, the motives that control. The chambers where polluted things hold empire all the soul, search till thy fiery glance hath cast its holy light through all, and I thy grace am brought at last before thy face to fall.

Alrighty he says, there in that psalm he's brave, he's living as near to God as he ever lived. He was living in the fullness of blessing, and therefore he says, search me O God and know my heart, try me and know my thought, and see if there be any wicked way in me.

He doesn't say that to God here, he says hide thy face from my sins, come near to me I'm already tormented. What a tragic situation that this man is found like this. He wrote this 23rd psalm with its balm, its healing.

He wrote the 139th psalm with its boldness. He writes Psalm 51 with his brokenness, this psalm isn't written on paper, it isn't written with ink, it's written with blood and tears, it isn't punctuated with periods and commas, it's punctuated with grief and psalms and groans.

And I believe that the groans of penitent men and women make more music in heaven than all the singing Gali Gertie ever offered, than all the music Handel ever put together. When a man loathes himself, woe is me, I'm undone, I'm unclean.

God says that man's getting some place. I think one of the great tragedies of present Christianity is that we're, well, we've such a shallow conception of sin. We tell people to get rid of sin because it'll get rid of you, but the first point is you should get rid of sin because it hurts God.

Not that it hurts you and hurts the folk you sin with, it hurts God first of all. And after all what's this book about from beginning to end, it only has one subject, the subject of sin, the subject of redemption, the fall of man, the recovery of man.

It's simplified very easily, there are two ways, the broad way and the narrow way. There are two gates, there are two masters, there are two kingdoms, not three, two. You're in one, you're in the other.

Sacrifice, Mission, and the Cost of Discipleship

There's a broad way that leads us to destruction. Dear pastor was saying tonight about sacrifice, my God, I'm honest before God, we don't know a thing about it. You've got some ungodly neighbors, you say we've got some drunken filthy folk around us.

We've got some adulterers and liars and cheats and thieves and they fight and they swear and they shoot and all the rest of it. Okay, did you ever think to ask them if they tithe? To who? To the devil.

Do you think an ungodly man says, well of course I take out my billfold, I only give the devil a tenth of what I've got on gambling and smokes and drink and nightclubs and all the rest. I never give more than a tenth.

Do you think he says, well of course I'd like to go out for the night but I'm always in bed by half past ten so, oh no. Go through Las Vegas and see if they ever go to sleep. Kentucky Derby this week I noticed, man people go from the ends of the earth to watch a bit of horse flesh run for about three minutes or less than that.

And it'll cost them thousands of dollars. Do you remember the apostle Paul going down the, that fantastic man, oh I don't know how you read him brother Peter but I, I always finish up on my face when I read about Paul.

He began in the ancient capital of the world, Tarsus. He ended up in the military capital of the world, Rome. In between he went to the religious capital of the world, Jerusalem. He went to the intellectual capital of the world, Athens.

He went to the rotten capital of the world, capital of sin, Corinth. But do you remember in Athens he argued with the intellectuals there, he knew their poetry, history, philosophy, so forth and so on.

That when he went down the street he said, I saw altars to unknown gods. And in the sleepy Elizabethan English, which is still the best translation, the King James by the way is still the purest of all the translations.

And in the King James version it says that when he went down that street his spirit was stirred within him. I like the amplified where it agrees with me. And it agrees with me in that 17th chapter because it says he was angry in his spirit.

Why? You go down the street, oh I see there's a new kingdom hall there, isn't it pretty? You ought to hold your nose and vomit. Beautiful Catholic church, so what? Tells me that the Virgin is equal with Jesus, co-redemptory, forget it, blasphemy.

You go down another street and you see something else, it doesn't move us. You go to Washington for the bicentenary, most likely you'll go to the 30 million dollar Roman church and look around it and some other thing.

But when he saw these rivalries, you see he was so madly in love with Jesus he hated the devil's possession of every man and every woman, every thought, every desire they had. It'll take that brother Peter to get men on fire for God.

You say that's pretty intolerant, sure it is. Now it's going to get worse, better I hope. Jesus is intolerant, didn't kiss the Pharisees as far as I know, did he? Didn't put his arms around the neck of the high priest.

I preached at the great Carrizal convention for missionaries in Japan a few years ago. And afterwards, maybe two years after, I saw a man's name mentioned and I said to Martha Sweetie, the director of that great conference is in town, let's go see him.

So we went along. And after the meeting I said to him, well how are you going? And he said, fine. I said, where were you yesterday? He said, well these marvelous days, I was in Japan. Did you have a good trip?

Yeah, yeah, I wasn't feeling too good. Oh, what upset you? Body, stomach, time lack? No, no, no, no. No, I thought, Japan things are a bit cheaper, I'll get a haircut. So he said, I got my haircut and the man said, you know, snipping away, are you a Yankee?

No, yeah, no, I'm not really a Yankee, I'm American. Oh, oh, I see, I see. Businessman? No. Tourist? No. Well, what are you? I'm a missionary. Oh, good, he said. I am a missionary too. Oh, I thought you were a barber.

Oh, yeah, I'm a barber from eight in the morning till five. Then I go home for supper and I bathe. And then at seven o 'clock I go out and I have a little attachment and I have some material and I have some phonograph records and I go from house to house.

You know this new philosophy they have, Sagagaki, which is a combination of religion and politics. And I go from door to door and I go in a house and I sit down there and I play my records and I give them instruction and I move on and I move on and I move on from seven at night until two in the morning.

How many nights a week? Seven. You don't go to bed till two in the morning. I didn't say that. You said that you were out from seven at night till two in the morning. I don't go to bed there. I go home and for two hours I go in a little shrine and I kneel down and I renew my strength.

It sounds a bit like Isaiah 41, they that wait upon the Lord. And I spend two o 'clock till four o 'clock every morning. And the missionary said I began to feel pretty mad about this. Here's a heathen propagating a devilish doctrine and he starts at seven o 'clock at night till two in the morning.

Then he needs two hours to recover and he gets into bed at four and he's out of bed by seven and he's at business by eight. And I said well how long have you done this? He said for seven years. Does that make you feel bad or sad or mad or glad or what?

You don't have a deacon in your church as fiery as that do you? Some of you pastors can't remember the last night you stayed out of bed. You know I'm convinced of this. If the church has anything she better say it right now because nobody else is saying anything.

If she's got anything she better stand up speak up or shut up. And when you've tried to find fault with this that and the other and where the weakness is the whole problem in the church of the living God tonight as well as the world is the problem of sin.

The one thing that God desires of his people is that they be pure in heart. Blessed are the pure in heart. Not that they shall see God. They do see God. They see him now. They see him in his majesty. They see him working.

God made his ways known unto Israel his way his acts known unto Israel and his ways unto Moses. All right there are many threes in this chapter I've already quoted. Let's let's say there are three prayers in it.

The Prayer of the Sinner and the Mercy of God

The first prayer is the prayer of a sinner. I don't like David's sin. I'm sure you don't. Adultery and murder. But I like his confession. He begins in this first verse by saying what? Have mercy upon me.

That's a great great word mercy isn't it? Oh go to Scotland and hear them sing the 23rd time. Go to Wales and hear them sing Kumbh Melanda. And stay there until they sing the deep deep love of Jesus. And then when you're just about saturated wait until they sing another beautiful hymn.

Great God of wonders all thy ways display thy attributes divine. But countless acts of pardoning grace above all other wonders shine. Who is a pardoning God like thee? Or who has grace so rich and free?

I said last night wouldn't it be awesome to have been that wonderful man John Baptist when he was the only man in the world with the truth of God. Well I want to put it on you tonight. You know it's equally as responsible that you're a Christian with the only true message of salvation in the whole world.

Every other thing's a fake. There is none other name given on the heaven whereby men can be saved. And if you say you know I'm looking for Jesus coming. He may come tonight. You forget it. He won't come tonight.

Why won't he? Because the gospel must first be preached to all nations and we're not even pushing the gospel. There are more heathen people at this given point of time tonight than in all the periods of history.

And this generation of Christians is, I S, is responsible for this generation of heathen. David here says have mercy upon me oh God. Oh we think of sin we classify it so many ways. But let me just leap over and say this.

Do you remember that the Apostle Paul used this very word? No no no no he wasn't an adulterer. He was a man of impeccable morality. He was of the tribe of Benjamin of the seed of Abraham a Pharisee of the Pharisees.

He belonged the greatest holy club in the world and they guarded it day and night that nobody unclean would get in. And with all that pedigree yet he writes one day to a young friend and he says but God who is rich in mercy.

So maybe God needs more grace with Pharisees than he does with adulterers and unclean people. They're going to get there on their own merits, on their own righteousness, on their own goodness. As we were singing tonight I was thinking of one night I one afternoon I preached at a Catholic convention in London England in a church called Orange Grove.

It's a beautiful old gothic church with stained glass windows the pulpits all magnificently carved. And I got hold of that pulpit like this and I rubbed my feet there and and I gripped there and said to myself you know this is this is nice to stand here because the pastor of the church was a man by the name of Toplady many years back.

And he wrote that lovely hymn Rock of Ages cleft for me let me hide myself in thee. And he has such a conception of sin because this is what sin does. You either get rid of it or it gets rid of you. And when he saw what it was he says foul I to that fountain fly wash me Savior or I die.

Now if you die with sin in your heart you won't go to a third class heaven because there isn't one. You'll go right back to hell itself. You don't hear much hellfire preaching over your pretty Sunday morning groups do you?

Those pretty boys that want your money and have nice little girls swinging their hips and clapping their hands and saying to a world that's doomed and damned something good is going to happen to you. The biggest lie ever told but they tell it every week.

We're heading for judgment. We've had more light than any people in history. Oh yes sir I spent two years in the subculture of New York with David Wilkinson amongst prostitutes and jailbirds and yuck.

Thought that had sex relation with animals every devilish thing. But I'll tell you one thing you never had to get them to you never had to prove to them they were sinners. And I remember going in the chapel one morning usually I just had the privilege of talking to the staff twice a week and they said would you take the chapel this morning and I went in and this side of the room was filled with girls and this side with young men.

Some of those girls were the prettiest girls you'll find in New York and the most expensive prostitutes. And a little Puerto Rican fellow there. I remember he stood up that morning his face radiant and he and you know he talked very quickly and he said well praise the Lord here we are this morning but the rain is going to stop isn't it wonderful to be here and let's stand up and sing our song.

What do you think they sang? Oh my they sang they sang they sang better than any cry you ever heard in your life. You know they sang and they sang with tears running down their faces and they sang it with their hands up they sang amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

And you know what every one of them believed it. I was lost now I'm found I was blind now I see. And we sang the last stanza. Man we've been there 10 ,000 years. A little fellow said Mr. Rennie could we sing another stanza.

I said go ahead sing all you like. And you know I look around and those girls blouses were all soaked with tears. And those boys who told me they used to pull out the switch blades and cut a man's belly open if he wouldn't give them his pocketbook.

And they'd raped women and they'd done every devilish thing and there they were standing with tears running down their faces and I'll never forget it as long as I live. Amazing grace how sweet the sound.

You see the man that wrote it used to raid the the coast of Africa and and steal slaves. And then he got so bad they made him a slave. And when he'd been to hell and back Jesus rescued him. And the trouble with that some of us we've been so good all our lives that after all we should have made heaven even without redemption.

I mean after all when your uncle's been a deacon and your grandmother bought the stained glass window in the church what much you can't do much more can you. Amazing grace. Oh then I went to a church and it wasn't about it.

Sunday morning a few months after. There's a little doll down here she was very beautiful. The Avon lady had worked on her about three days before she came to church. She did as much paint on her as the Queen Mary may be and boy I don't know whether she'd hair or a wig or what.

But one of the hairs kept straying and she was singing amazing grace. How's how's that saved a wretch like me. I once well she she was three streets behind by the time we finished the hymn. She hadn't got through the second verse hardly.

And I felt saying you dumb doll what are you singing you're you're not a wretch. If I told you you're a wretch you'd get mad if your husband told you you'd get a divorce I suppose. But you're not a wretch you're singing something doesn't mean a thing to you.

The Banner of Truth book group have recently published a or republished a book by Brownlow North. He was a grandson of Lord North and he went to the devil and eventually ended up in the gutter in Paris.

He got so bad even wicked women didn't want him and wicked men left him. And one night he went down to the River Seine there and he stood on the edge of it and he said this is the only way out. There's no other way.

Here I go. Years afterwards in Scotland there was a banner across Main Street. Come and hear Brownlow North. Brownlow North. The man went in the meeting he scribbled a note and said would you pass this to Brownlow North quickly please.

And Brownlow North was just going to come on the pulpit when they handed him a note and it said hey Brownlow this is your old buddy so and so. You stand up there tonight and I'll stand up and expose your immorality, your perversion, your lying, your depravity.

Boy will I have a time. And the man with him said he went as pale as death and he stood for a minute. Are you all right sir? Yeah I'm all right. He went up in the pulpit and he said somewhere in this great crowd there's a friend of mine just sent me a note.

He's going to tell you about my life story. Would you kindly stand up? I don't know where you are. I haven't seen you for years. Stand up. Stand up. Tell them. Tell them. Will you tell them? The fellow standing up he was shrinking down, down, down, down like this.

You know he didn't want to get up at all. He didn't want to say anything. And Brownlow North says let me tell you what he says. He says I was with the vilest women in Paris. I went with the most rotten of the prostitutes.

I drank. I spent money. I cheated. I lied. I stole. I did everything. He's right. He's right. But I want to tell you something else. That when that man pulled out on me and when I had to sleep under the arches and when I had no food or anything else and when I stood one night, a black midnight, I stood there on the edge of the river just going to jump in there and he said all right, all right, I guess it's true there must be a hell and if any man on earth deserves it I do.

Here I am with all my sin and I just leaned forward and he says I did. In loving kindness Jesus came. My soul in mercy to reclaim and from the depths of sin and shame in love he lifted me. From sinking sands he lifted me with tender hands he lifted me from shades of night to planes of light.

Yes he said. I had all the sin he mentioned and a lot he didn't know anything about. But I came to Jesus. You know we sing in all our conferences, meetings rather, Billy Graham popularized it a great deal.

That lovely old hymn just as I am without one plea. But mostly we sing the first stanza. I like the other stanza that says just as I am and waiting not to rid my soul of one dark blot to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot.