Fellowship with God
No man has a real desire to walk with God until he has been redeemed Dy the blood of Christ, and so has been brought into fellowship with God. If we have turned away from the sanctuaiy and have neglected the statutes of God, and find our intellectual and spiritual food outside of the Bible and good literature, and are seeking satisfaction in the amusements of the world, we are certainly not in fellowship with God.
We read in the eighth Psalm that “no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.” If God is withholding His good things from us, let us pause and find out what is keeping us from ending the blessing of God, why it is that we have lost power and have not had success in our Christian life. A good many people say that the Christian life has not been what they expected it would be when they started out. Others say that it has been a great many times better. Now, what is the trouble?
I believe that we are living in a glorious daj?”; but there is a tendency among some people to get away from the old gospel. They say that we must give up preaching repentance and the atonement, and there is where a great many get off the track. If we give up the old doctrine of repentance, what are we to put in its place? If a man steals and wants to get right again, he must repent and be converted just as much now as he had to years ago. If a man is to become a child of God, and Jesus Christ is to set up His kingdom in that man’s heart, it must be done just as it was done five hundred years ago. If it is a fact that Jesus Christ died for sinners, then we don’t want to change the doctrine of the atonement or any other teaching of God’s Word. A man who has broken away from the great fundamental doctrines is like a blasted tree in the desert: there is no life and no power in him.
SEPARATION FROM THE WORLD. In the sixth chapter of Jeremiah and the sixteenth verse we read, “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” If a man is going to walk with God he must walk in the old paths, for God has not changed one whit. He is unchangeable. What we need is to go back to the old gospel, for “it is the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believelh.”
Now, if we want to walk with God we must not try to bring Him around to our terms; we must go over to His terms. Here are some of them:
In II Corinthians vi: 14, we read: “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for whatf ellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols?.. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. And 1 will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”
I do not believe that there is any doctrine more needed to-day in the Christian church in America than the doctrine of separation. AVe have lost power because the line between the church and the world has been almost obliterated. A good mam7 people profess Christianity, but their profession does not mean much; the result is that the world does not know what Christians really believe. For every unconverted man that reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me; and if they see us hand-in-glove with the ungodly they are not going to have any confidence in our professions.
“Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” How does that strike Christians who are joined to the Odd Fellows and Free Masons? How is it with matrimony? How many ministers would marry a godly woman to an ungodly man? Why not take a stand and say you will not be a party to it? The courts are filled with divorce cases because Christian men and women have been yoked with unbelievers. Look at the mothers whose children have been unequally yoked with infidels and men of the world! My friends, if we want the power of God we must obey God’s word, cost us what it may.
How is it about your life? Are you hand-in-glove with the world? If you are, how can you expect God to fill you with the Holy Spirit? I believe that the cause of Christ is suffering more from this one thing than any other ten things put together. God cannot give us power, because we are allied with the ungodty. The mirth that satisfies the world will not satisfy the true child of God, and yet how many of us are just looking to the world for our pleasure. If we walk with God, we will not be asking, What is the harm of this and that? the question will be, “What is the good’* If a thing does not help us we will give it up for something better.
SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS.
Right here I want to saT that I don’t see how any Christian man or woman can touch the Sunday newspapers. You may go to church regularhr, but I do not believe that Gabriel himself could hold an audience that has been reading the Sunday newspaper before they came to church. The time has come when the nation should rise up and cry aloud to God to stop this iniquitous thing. It is doing more harm to-day than any other one thing in literature. You can get along without it one day in the week, and I believe you are dishonoring God by having anything to do with it. If persons would rather read the Sunday newspaper than the Bible, if they cannot get along without the opera and the theatre, God have mercy upon them. A lady told me that she made a bargain with her husband that if he would go to church every Sunday with her, she would go to the theatre with him, but she lost all her influence over her husband by her compromise. A man or a woman never lets down the standard without losing more than they gain.
Keep the standard high and let God have the first place, and then He will withhold no good thing from you. Let the world call you a bigot — I would not give much for Christianity if the world had nothing to say against it. “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.” If the world has nothing to say against you, Jesus Christ will probably have nothing to saT for you.
If you want power, my friends, keep as far from conformity with the world as you can. “Be ye separate.” If the kingdom of G od is to be extended, we must have separated men and women, not card-plajang, theatre-going, dancing Christians. That kind of Christians will never accomplish much for God in this world. “Be ye separate.”
Jesus taught His disciples that they must be in the world but not of it. A Christian in the woild is one thing, and the world in a Christian is quite a another thing. A ship in the water is all right, but when the water gets into the ship, it is quite a different thing. The churches are full of men and women who have no power at all. “Where did they lose it? It was when they formed an alliance with the world.
Some people say that if you take that ground, you will stand alone, but I would rather be alone with God than to be with the whole world without God: A man who is with God is always in the majority. I do not believe a man ever got a thing by the sacrifice of principle that did not bring ruin.
My friends, if you want power with God, and with men, keep as separate from the world as you can. We have but a little while to live in this world, and our position ought to be that of men and women sent into the world to represent Christ to mankind. If we are Christians, we have been redeemed from this world. Our home is in heaven, and we are only here as our Lord’s representatives. “He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk even as He walked.”