And the blessing that I haven't seen, that others have seen, and the things that we have never seen on this side of eternity. If they are achieved as people of God doing His work in God's way, that is the important thing. My job is to preach the gospel. It's God's job to save. I have to know when my work ends and His takes over. I can't save anything. Sometimes we get so frustrated because we're not seeing the success that we would like to see. We begin to use gimmicks and all sorts of things in order to achieve some kind of success. Well, I'll grant you that revival is not the need of the day. It's not even the need of the hour. It's the need of the moment. It truly is. But you know when you're in a pond up to your ears and crocodiles, it's almost too late to talk about draining it out. And we're pretty far along the line to talk about all sorts of gimmicks to get things going right. The only thing I know is that the church has got to get back to God and be honest about it. Brother, and I tell you what we need to do. We need to get real about sin in our life. I tell you, you don't hear preachers talk much about sin anymore. You don't even know how to hear a sermon about hell anymore because they always act like they don't think anybody's going there. In fact, you don't even hear too much about heaven. They don't hear too much about sin. It just seems like if you once make a profession, it doesn't make a particle of the difference what you do. As long as nobody catches on, nobody finds out, just go on your happy way. You can't do that with God. When Achan sinned and hid that thing, that accursed thing in the bottom of his tent, Israel didn't know it until they went out to face the enemy and they couldn't face the enemy. God says there's sin in the camp and they had to get busy and find out what it was and where it was and deal with it. You know, I can say, and this is not a boasting thing, I don't think it's even but less somebody might think it is. I want to say that I never sit down. at a worship meeting without I have a real judging session in my life about sin in my life. Sometimes I wait till I get to the meeting, I'll admit. But I've got a lot of things that I've got to check out on here. Listen, brother, I got so much going on here that ought to be going on here. I don't have time to check you out. If you're going to get checked out, you're going to have to do it yourself. I don't have time for you. Before the church gets the commission to go ye, I think we need the commission that the Lord gave. He says, carry ye. We need to do a little carrying. We need to do a little self-just. There's too many of us today that have got a lot of little hidden Amalekites and things hidden in our lives, and we think because nobody knows about them, it doesn't make any difference. Brethren, you can't allow anything to come into one's life without it affecting the spirituality, the sum total, the spirituality of the whole assembly. Brother, I would wonder what would happen if there would be a company of people on God's green earth today in which every single member in that assembly was in right relationship with God on a fellowship basis. I wonder, brethren, what would happen? We're so used to traveling second class that we just can't hardly believe that the church can travel first class today. I guess we could say we're sick and we don't know, and that's the worst kind of sickness. I got a dewy faucet on the side of my nose, and everybody came up and says, what do you got? Cancer? Well, it wasn't cancer, and I went to the doctor, and he did something with it, and it's all disappeared, and now nobody says anything anymore, because you can't see it. But I'll tell you what, I'm not so scared about the things I can see is the things that I don't see. It's the things that are hidden in out of sight that it's saffron their spiritual vitality and the strength of the church. It's not our form, brethren. We've got that down to a man's eyelash. We're functioning good. You come out and look at our church board there. You can see we've got all the meetings all scheduled good. And didn't you hear Brother Jones get up and tell we're going to give tracks tomorrow morning and we've got a women's deal going and we've got a prayer meeting with it. What more can we do? Well, listen, you haven't got one solitary thing on Israel. They had all of that and then some. Why they had their feast days, and they had their other days, and they had their half-moon days, and the whole days ahead. The whole thing, and God says, I'm sick and tired of smelling your sacrifice. You forgot about your relationship with me inwardly. You've got to get it straightened out. I don't care about your feast. We can be very orthodox. We can be very fundamental, whatever that means. And we can be so far from God. that we couldn't even hear him if he's a shot. Brother, I don't expect to get an Oscar or an Emmy when I leave here today. I do think I will get enough money to fill my tank with gas so they can get this man to thunder out of Oklahoma. I don't expect an Oscar. But I'm going to tell you this. You can't phony with God. That I found out. Brother Tom and I went to Detroit, Michigan a number of years ago, and we had meetings and schoolcraft, and I'll tell you, Tom and I preached. He with a sixteen-inch guns in my with my pea shooter, we preached for five weeks, and you know we didn't see a ripple on the water, and Big Tom said to me, Len, he says, I don't know whether it's worthwhile going on. I says, I'm about ready to quit anytime you are, just give the word, and I'm with you, and we'll get out of here. And we're ready to bail out. And some of the brethren came and says, don't quit yet, go on another week. And Tom said, well, he says, we've already gone five. He says, give them one more week. Now, let me say, preaching five weeks and never seen even a little ripple on the water is pretty hard going. And I was home sick the day I left, Wichita, and to go on another week, just seemed like utter foolishness. These brethren said, look, We've got sons and daughters here that aren't saved. We've got unsaved people sitting in this audience and they're not saved. Brethren, you can't leave. And so we stayed on. And we always had a prayer meeting before the gospel meeting. Real nice prayer meeting. I tell you, you heard some awful nice praying. Very nicely prayed. I says, Tom, if I could preach like those men pray, I'd have it, me. Oh, God. Oh, real preacher voice. Really good. But one night, I heard some strange friends. I heard one of the men on his knees suddenly cry out in a broken, strangled kind of voice. He says, oh, God. I looked over. I thought, what's that man? Is he getting a heart attack or what? I heard him stop, and then he started in again, and he stopped, and then I heard him sobbing. He says, oh, God, I've got a boy, eighteen years old. He's not saved. And, Lord, if he doesn't get saved this week, he says, I may never see him saved. And then that man crawled over on his knees to her brother down on the other side of the table. And he says, Listen, he says, I've had something in my heart against you for six years. And he said, I can't hold it any longer. He says, My boy may not get saved. He says, Would you forgive me? And we watched that thing in amazement. And that man says, Yes, certainly. And listen, by the way, he says, I've hated you for, and it wasn't very long. I'm not kidding you. The saints of God were broken down. And I heard confession. There wasn't a thing about saving anybody. Lord, look at what I've been. What a hypocrite I've been. Oh, brethren, can you? And did you know, brethren, after that, God began to work. We stayed on another week of soul, and there was a big harvest of soul, say, one of the best we ever saw in our life. I'll tell you, some of those men are going on for God today. And I think of. that it could have been just that unconfessed sin that kept those people from hearing and getting saved. Friends, when we get through playing with this thing and getting down to business about it, I know God's ready to do business. The early church, with great power gave the apostles witness. This is what we need to say today. Well, let's look on it one more, please. Over to the eighth chapter. They walked before God in the fear of the living God. They were a company of people that knew great power. Now look at this one in Acts chapter eight. And verse eight. And there was great, what? Joy in that city. Isn't that nice? Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that a precious thing? Now, wherever there's the walking in the fear of the Lord, there's going to be the power of God evident. And where the power of God is evident, the reality of his working, then there's going to be great joy. It can't be any other way. Wouldn't you be happy if you saw God working? Oh, yeah. You say, that'd be real good. Well, I tell you that'd be great. I'd love that. It certainly is a wonderful thing. Now, I think that the church has all the spiritual equipment necessary for real joy. In fact, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace. What a sandwich that is. Love sandwich in between, or joy sandwich in between, love on the one side and peace on the other. Isn't that a nice thing? You just don't say, well, I like that thing, joy. I want to be happy. I'm going to go around with a big pepsin and grin on my face and everybody think I'm happy. But inside a man can be just as miserable as the devil can make. No, sir. This thing is real and God's joys can be known. Just quickly to one little portion in the Old Testament in First Kings chapter fourteen. Now this for the sake of time has to do with the reign of a king by the name of Rehoboam. I read from verse twenty-five. It came to pass in the fifth year of King Rehoboam. And by the way, Rehoboam led the people of God into some of the deepest apostasy that they ever knew. He was, to put it in the vernacular of the day, he was an unholy stinker, to say the least. And it says in the fifth year of this man's reign that Sheeshach, king of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem. Now that was a sad thing, because they were not ready to face this king. And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord. You might know that the king of Egypt would do that. When God's people are weak and not enjoying the Lord, the enemy will come in and steal away the things they don't value. The devil will never overpower the church and rob the church by horse, but he will always take away the treasures that God's people do not value. He'll take them away. And notice what he did. And the treasures of the king's house. He even took away all. And he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made. And I think Solomon had... a hundred and some shields that were made out of solid gold. And they set them up on festive occasions. And oh, how these gold shields would shine. When the armies came back after a victorious battle, they had the shields up there. And oh, they showed. And they came back. And they saw those shining shields. And they knew that the people were waiting. And oh, the joy that must have been in their heart. But you know, this ungodly rascal came in. and took away the golden shield. And instead of Rehoboam saying, Oh God, we've gotten away from you, Lord God, we need to get back to you and restored into fellowship. Instead of that, he did the most wicked thing he could do. It says in verse twenty seven that King Rehoboam made in their stead brazen shields and committed them into the hands of the chief of the guard which kept the door of the king's house. And it was so when the king went into the house of the Lord that the guards bare them and brought them back into the guard chamber. He made shields out of brass. Now, there's a tremendous difference between gold and brass. The intrinsic value of gold and brass, no comparison. He said, did you know you could shine a brass shield or it would shine just as brightly as a gold shield so that from a distance you might not be able to tell him. But when the expert came up, and tested the metal that gave forth the shine, the reflection he'd find out was only brass. Brethren, what is shining in our fellowship today? Is our joy the reflection of the gold, the deity that our God, His Son, Jesus Christ, is at home in the fellowship of God's people? Or have we shined up an imitation brass shield and say, Who will know the difference? One thing you can't really imitate deep inside is joy. You know, the world today is geared to give us happiness, but it's not real happiness. You know, you can get in front of a television machine today, and one program after another, I can't stand to be in a room where they got these dippy things on that are supposed to make people laugh and be happy. And they spend millions of dollars to get people just to smile a little bit. I was in the YMCA day before yesterday, and there was a person sitting in front of the TV, and there was one that was supposed to be a comic program on, and they had these hired laughers there, you know, that laugh and yell and scream that's supposed to be funny, and that's supposed to bait you so you'll laugh. Of course, you know that. And they had it turned up so high, and I looked over, and there was just one person sitting there, and he was sitting like this, I think he grinned about three times, and then the thing was over, and he went on, turned it off, and he went out, that's all. Brass, it's all it was. It was nothing from the inside. Why is the church settling for all of these superficial things today when we could have that kind of joy, which is the fruit of the Spirit? I don't have to go around and look for something to make me happy. I don't even have to go around and see whether Carl and Jones and I are in good terms so I can be happy. Why? Because the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace. We already have the joy. It's just that we need to realize it and enjoy the joy of the Spirit of the Lord. We can. We go back to the first thing where there's real judgment in self. Let's get away from this business of judging one another. I know we're going to judge angels and we ought to be good at it because we've had a lot of practice here judging one another. But let's get down to something really novel and that is get off somewhere and really start looking into our own life. I remember hearing one of a holiness fellow years ago and never forget it. He said he'd gotten away from God and he said he went out in the woods. And he said he threw himself down across an old stump. He was out there in Arkansas. He threw himself across an old stump. He says, Lord, he says, I'm on the altar for repairs. I tell you that's pretty good. I thought of it many times. I'm on the altar for repairs. And he drapes himself against a row of that old stump. I think we need some repair work done inside. And whenever that's done inside, then there's the power and then there's the joy. Well, we have a hard job to realize, I guess, the state that we're in, but it makes me think of this woman that came in to see a psychiatrist. I read this somewhere. I don't know where it was, but it stuck to me like glue. She went in, and they said that she had a fried egg on her head, and two pieces of bacon curled around her ears to see this psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist looked at her in amazement, and he says, what can I do for him? staring at the fried egg on her head and the two pieces of brown bacon hanging around her ears. She said, oh, it isn't for me. She said, I bought my brown. Now, she didn't need any help. We ought to take a look in the scriptural mirror and see that we've got several eggs on our head and a lot of things curl around our ears. Not me, oh Lord, the other guy. I'm mine. You know, talking about joy and contentment in the things of the Lord, do you ever hear an old fellow by the name of Bud Robinson, old Uncle Bud Robinson? I never met him. I've read some of the things about him, but old Uncle Bud must have been a character. I'd like to have met him, I'd like to have heard him, but I read a few of his old statements. But you know, there was a bunch of Christians one day that decided that Uncle Bud was just too serious about the things of God. He enjoyed nothing but God in his word and God's people. So they said, look, Uncle Bud, we think that you ought to really see what the rest of the world is like. He says, well, brethren, do you really think so? Yes, they said, we think you ought to. So we have arranged to send you all away to New York City. And at all expenses paid, and we want you to see New York City. He says, well, brethren, he said, if you feel that's what I need, he says, well, he says, I'll go. And so away he went. And he went to New York City. He stayed there several days and saw everything. Came back home and they're all anxious to hear what old Uncle Bud had to say. He says, well, brethren, he says, you know, he says, I got to New York City and I saw those great big old elevated things going. He says, I saw those big harbors and all those big ships coming in. He saw all those great big old skyscrapers. He says, you know, I wouldn't have missed seeing all those things, but he says, Best of all. And everybody here was crying to hear what it was. Best of all, he says, when I went to bed after the first day of sightseeing, I said, Lord, I want to thank you for letting me see all that skyscrapers and all those big boats and all those big museums and all those big things that go so fast above the street. I want to thank you for letting me see all that. But most of all, Lord, I want to thank you that there's not one thing here that I really want. I thought that was tremendously sweet. Not one thing here that I really want. But old Bud came home because he had everything that his heart really wants. Church today is trying to be happy in two worlds. Trying to be happy serving two gone. Trying to be happy telling two stories. Trying to be happy living two lives under two standards. It won't work. It won't work. We ever got back to the gold standard and get off of the brass standard. We ever get back to the genuine and away from the flim fans and the phonies and the gimmicks and all that sort of thing and get back to God and get back to reality and get back to Christ and tell him the story out in a simple way. You know, we might know a little more about power and a lot more about joy. And the last thing I want to talk to you about and then I'll be finished here and our brother will get his plane in plenty of time. is over in the fourth chapter again and the thirty-third verse. And I want to close here. Acts four, thirty-three. It says, And with great power gave the apostle witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great, what is it? Great grace was upon them all. I think this has got to be the beauty of a church that's in fellowship with her God. Great grace was upon them all. You know, Daniel was a man as an individual that exemplified the grace of God upon him. That man was so in touch with God, so filled with his God, so alive to his God, so sensitive to what his God wanted him to do or not to do. that the enemy said the only way we can find anything wrong with this man David we're going to have to find something wrong with his God they won't have to look too far today to find something wrong with me maybe not too far in your life to find something wrong with you but you know when you see the church that's walking in the fear of the Lord in great power in great joy then you see a church that's walking in the beauty of the Lord. You know, I've always marveled that the very thing that God used to save me in my sin, in my rebellion, and in my rotten, the thing that he used to reach down and save me, extricate me, lift me up, redeem me, and put my feet on the solid rock, the grace of God is the one thing that I know the least about. And I find that the thing that ought to characterize the church the most, brethren, you listen to me, is the thing which characterizes the church at this late day the least. If God's people ought to be recognized by any feature, it would have to be the grace of God. Now you tell me something. Why is it? that we're less known for our grace than we are for our grievance. Why we're less known for our grace than we are for our knowledge. Because grace minimizes self and lifts up the other. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, how that it is rich, and yet for our sake it became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich. That's what grace does. Grace is an expert in personal poverty so that the others may be rich. Grace is that kind of character which sees in his brother not an enemy but a friend. Grace is that sort of spirit my friend which when I see my brother stumble and fall I don't jump on and say that's good enough for you but grace means that I lift him up before God. Grace means that I live with him, I love with him and I feel with him. I think that God will not be too severe on us if we haven't memorized all the Bible, if we're not totally familiar with all the doctrines, if we're not really clear on the pre, the post, and the millennial positions, if we're not altogether sure about the prophetic structures of Scripture and the deep things that many are struggling so hard to understand. if he were to see in you and me those that were professionals majoring in grace. Abner was a man that was a real fire. Abner was a good fire, but Abner was not a good lover of David. When all is over, brethren, You and I are not going to be recognized as to how militant we've been able to live the life, but how gracious we've been able to live it and display the beauty of the Spirit of God in our fellowship. This is something which the stranger feels and senses when he comes through the door. They don't understand our doctrine, but they can understand a warm handshake and they can understand a warm heart. I don't have time to go into it, but I would like to have gone over to the book of Corinthians and shown you something from the twelfth chapter of how the grace of God made the early church very beautiful, and they were all functioning as God had put them in the body. And no one could say, well, I don't count because I'm not this. It wasn't the spirit of defeat there. Not the spirit of superiority. Well, you know, I can do it all type of thing, or I have no need of these. But God has placed every member in the body as it has pleased him. And what is more wonderful than to see a body that's complete and full and function? That's the beauty of a body. And the Olympics, we see these runners. come up to the starting tape, and you look at them, you say, my, look at them. They've spent weeks and months preparing for a hundred-yard dash. Takes less than ten seconds to run, and these men spent months depriving themselves of personal gratification, strenuous hours out running, all for a ten-second dash. And you look at that body, say, Ma, I wish you had a body like that. His friend you didn't need it. He didn't get a body like that wishing that he had it. You and I aren't going to become spiritual and lovely in the sight of God just wishing. You sister can stand in front of a mirror and wish till doomsday that you look like, I don't know whatever some of these movie actresses are now. Can you name a good looking one? You can stand and wish all day and it won't make you a bit better looking. You've got to do something about it. You got to do, you know. Work at, work at, work at it. The women are working at it, and the men are too. I stop in my car at the stoplight, and here's a guy, you know, he's got nice long hair and everything like that, and he takes his comb out, just looks in the mirror, just working at it, working at it. Are we really working at it? One can say, I have no need of thee. I need you and you need me. You need me to come here and give you a little needling down there, see, in a loving kind of way. And I'll close with this one little story about dear old brother T. Ernest Wilson. I thought this was a classic. You know, it said, we can never get to the point where we think we don't need one another. That's wishful thinking. We need one another.