Ask for the old paths, where is
the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
— Jeremiah 6:16.
NEXT Sunday the oldest, the greatest, the happiest
organization in the world celebrates its birthday, when Christians in
all corners of the globe come together to commemorate Pentecost. On
that day, nineteen cen-turies ago, the Church of Jesus Christ began its
blessed work, when the Holy Spirit, in tongues of living fire,
de-scended upon the first disciples, and when they, endued with that
power, preached the message of sin and grace into the hearts of three
thousand converts.
For nineteen hundred years the Church has had the
same sacred commission of bringing Christ to men and men to Christ; for
nineteen hundred years the Church has been directed to push through to
the very ends of the earth and bring its message to all colors, creeds,
and classes; for nineteen hundred years the Church has been challenged
to sound forth in clear, clarion tones the one message that can save
and transform the souls of men by its priceless, peerless, timeless,
endless pledge, “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten
Son, that whosoever be-lieveth in Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life.”
While it would seem that these nineteen centuries
have been long enough, and the work of the Church during this period
impressive enough, to ingrain into the living con-sciousness of all who
are called Christians this truth, that the saving of souls by the
preaching of the shed blood of Jesus Christ should be the plan and
program of the Church today, there are unfortunately wide-spread and
far -reaching influences at work in this novelty-seeking, in-novation
craving age that would revolutionize the work of the Church, introduce
what people like to call “modern messages” and “twentieth-century
methods,” and desert the time-honored roads along which the saints of
God have plodded on their path to glory.
IT IS STILL THE OLD PATH.
But tonight, as we approach the anniversary of the
founding of the Church, the Word of God calls out to us, “Ask for the
old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.” And I think it
would be difficult to find a mes-sage that is more sorely needed in the
churches of America to-day than this command of God for a revival of
the old, but ever new principles upon which the Church is built. People
today have forgotten the most fundamental facts relative to the Church
and its work. They have forgotten that the very word church comes from
a Greek expression which means “the house of the Lord.” They have
forgotten the real significance of Pentecost and its message to the
Church today. And the result? Oh, if St. John in the Apocalypse was
driven to write his seven letters of warning and encouragement to the
churches of Asia Minor, how much more sorely do we today need the
inspired message from God to remind us of the follies that have helped
to deform the modern American Church!
Among the 232,000 church-buildings in the United
States there are uncounted hundreds that are anything but houses of the
Lord. They have degenerated into mere houses of men, where human
theories, with all the incon-sistencies of their ever-changing
philosophies, rule out the Word of God as too antiquated for our 1931
brand of enlightenment. With preachers in American pulpits who are not
sure of the existence of God, but who are sure that the Bible is not
the inerrant and divine revelation; with teachers in American divinity
schools who with genial condescension ridicule the fundamental
doctrines of Christian faith; and with the lavishly financed
away-from-God movement to support all this, unnumbered churches in our
own country have given up the old paths and sought new ways; sacrificed
their spiritual integrity, forfeited their right to existence, and
loaded upon themselves the iniquity of stifling men’s souls into
hopelessness. In this hour of apostasy we must utterly condemn this
high treason against God Almighty on the part of those who claim to be
His ambassadors and tell them, “You have made His Church, the house of
the Lord, a habitation of darkness and death.”
But within the ranks of those who still claim
faithful adherence to the Bible there are many churches in which the
virile ideals of Biblical Christianity have surrendered to the spirit
of modern sensationalism, churches which, forsaking the old paths, have
degenerated into social centers, where bizarre novelties and
sensational attractions have invaded the sanctuary in order to attract
large and curious congregations. Thus we have preachers with more zeal
than knowledge who have sought to denounce evolution by pulling a
mangy, wriggling monkey into their pulpits; others who have taken the
time which God has given them to work on men’s souls and used it to
smash whisky bottles or denounce liquor laws in what they call the
house of the Lord. Or, far worse, there is the prostitution of the
bride of Christ, by which churches compete with theaters, featur-ing
drama services, vaudeville programs, and motion-pictures instead of the
Word. Glance over your newspaper on Monday morning, and you will find
accounts of bare-footed girls dancing in pagan tableaux in the house of
the Lord; professional pugilists boxing in the house of the Lord, seven
or eight-year-old child preachers, girl min-isters, and other similar
flagrancies in the house of the Lord.
You will find that too frequently the preaching of
the Gospel to the sin-sick world is so completely overlooked that there
is as little room for Christ in these churches as there is in a
Mohammedan mosque or in a Hindu shrine. And against all who thus in any
way contribute to tear the Church from its spiritual basis and make the
sacred edifices, once dedicated to the worship of the Almighty, mere
cen-ters of social functions, the Savior, were He with us in the flesh,
would utter this indictment, “Ye have made My house, the house of the
Lord, a worldly house of worldly men.”
Or there is the new path taken by the commercial
Church, the Church which tries to sell salvation in an end-less chain
of money-making enterprises, which ruthlessly dis-regards the law of
the land by instituting crude forms of gambling; the Church which the
Savior condemns in His warning of old, “Ye have made My house a house
of thieves” There is the police Church, which thinks it has been called
into existence to make this country a Christian nation by force, to
promote political lobbies in the effort to carry through a political
program, or to employ here, as it has employed in other countries in
ages past, rack, fire, and sword. Let such churches ponder over the
Savior’s warn-ing, “They that take the sword shall perish with the
sword,” as He says, in effect, “Ye have made My house, the house of the
Lord, a police court of inquisition.” There is, among the new types of
churches, one that is more dangerous than all of these, the cold,
self-satisfied, fashionable, and elite Church with its aristocratic
aloofness, the Church that takes its talent, the golden opportunities
that God has placed before it, wraps it up in the napkin of
exclusiveness, and buries it in the cemetery of self-conceit. To such
churches the Savior, of whose devotion to the Church the Scriptures
prophesy, “The zeal of Thine house bath eaten Me up,” would say, “Ye
have made My house, ‘a house of prayer for all people,’ a cold and
closed assembly of a chosen few.”
Against the encroachment of these and a dozen other
innovations that sap the vigor of the Church and chill its ardor,
twentieth-century Christianity must hark back to the old paths, to the
spirit of the first Pentecost. Today we do not need new architectural
features and new cathedral-like edifices; we do not need new liturgies
and the pomp and pageantry of new orders of service; we do not need the
new Bibles which a score of publishers are endeavoring to foist upon
the Church in the form of modern translations and special edition; we
do not need new systems and modernized methods; we do not need new
ideas in the pulpit and new opinions in the pew. We do not need
anything new.
But what we do need is the old path, the path that
leads backward past all the failures and fancies of modern and deluded
minds, through all the tinseled attractions and tarnished novelties of
this vauntingly modern present day, back to the first Pentecost. As the
Holy Spirit descended upon those disciples, so, after nineteen
centuries, the Church must realize that its strength still comes from
above, a gift of the Holy Spirit. As Peter and the first preachers of
the Church were filled with that Spirit, so to-day the minister of the
Gospel must be filled, not with Shaw and Dostoievsky, not with
sociology and psychology, but with the Holy Spirit and the intimacy of
His illuminat-ing and renewing presence. As the message of that
power-ful Pentecost sermon in the second chapter of Acts was based on
the full Word of God, so to-day pulpits that have been transformed into
agencies for militaristic or pacifist propaganda, churches that have
sold their birth-right for a pottage of unholy publicity, preachers who
have produced a ministry of dry bones, feeding their followers stones
of sensationalism instead of the living bread, — all these must cast
off this masquerade Christianity and con-sider prayerfully the
thought-provoking admonition of St. Paul, “Preach the Word.” As Peter
preached the Law in all its blighting severity, telling his hearers
that their wicked hands had nailed Jesus to the cross, so today sin,
hideously rampant in this godless age, yet strangely un-known in many
man-pleasing pulpits, must be denounced by fearless men of God, who
call out to this forgetful, self- indulgent generation, as Peter called
out, “Repent!” But as that first Pentecost sermon preached the pure
promise of that boundless grace to sixteen national groups assembled in
Jerusalem, and as all could hear and understand that Jesus died for
their sins and that this full and free salva-tion was sealed by His
victorious resurrection, so today, by following this old path, wherein
is the good way, through the debris of disintegrating society to
Golgotha’s brow, men must be told that they are saved for time and
eternity, not by their character, not by their money, not by their
brains, not by the best that they have and the best that they are, but,
thank God! by the profoundest sacrifice of which history knows, by the
love of Christ, who “humbled Him-self and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross”; by that love of which the Scriptures
testify to every one of us to-night when they tell us, “Ye know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your
sakes He became poor that ye through His poverty might be rich.”
The glory-crowned heights to which the old paths
lead were shown on that first Pentecost Day when three thou-sand
acknowledged Jesus as their Savior and were bap-tized. Three thousand
men and women won for Christ without any pulpit gymnastics, without any
sensational sermon topics, without any high-powered publicity, without
theological or philosophical doctors in the pulpit, but simply by the
plain, direct testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Therein lies the
Church’s power today; therein lies an appeal to that part of the
American ministry that has left the main issues of the King’s business
and dedicated its energies to the passing fancies of a fleeting hour.
The only successful churches today are those which are soundly
confessional, conscientiously loyal.
IT IS THE PATH TO SOUL REST.
For, according to our text, by taking the old path,
we have the promise, “Ye shall find rest for your souls.” And when you
husbands who have your religion in your wife’s name, you young folks
who think that you are getting along quite well without Christ and
without the Church, you fathers and mothers who keep on postponing the
day when you are going to come to church with your children and to give
your stifled souls a chance to come out of the cramp into which you
have pressed them, when you ask, “Why should I join the Church?” “What
can the Church do for me?” let me tell you to-night, as I ask you who
have never acknowledged Christ to join with us, and plead with you who
have left the Church to return and stand shoulder to shoulder with us,
that the Church will bring you the biggest and best blessing that can
ever come into your life. It will give you rest because it will lead
you to the rest-giving Savior, who tonight calls out to you in the
tenderness of that beautiful invitation, “Come unto Me, all ye that
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
I ask you: Do you need rest from an accusing
con-science that heaps up before you the mountain of sinful impulses
and emotions that abound in every life? Do you crave for rest from the
overpowering forces of the un-sympathetic and relentless world in which
you are fighting a losing battle to maintain your self-respect and
self-preser-vation? Are you desperately in need of rest from pain and
sorrow, from weakness and disappointment, from bruises of the body and
bruises of the soul? Remember, human agencies are but broken reeds and
human remedies but false consolations. Men have given their most
priceless possessions in the search for soul rest; they have offered up
their own flesh and blood; they have made their life a long and painful
series of penances; they have tried to purchase rest. But humanity
alone has never found rest. Here, however, in the Church of Jesus
Christ, in its prayers, its hymns, its reading and exposition of the
Scrip-tures, its Sacraments, its messages of comfort in bereave-ment,
of happiness in sorrow, you have the fulfilment of this sacred promise,
“Ye shall find rest for your souls.” You have the soul rest in the same
promise which Jesus repeats six hundred years after Jeremiah’s time,
“Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in
heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”
If some of you within the range of these words
tonight live in an area in which the Church of Jesus Christ is not
represented; if some of you have access only to churches that do not
dispense this rest and peace and comfort; and if you want to have the
blessings of the Gospel and be identified with the Church, — the great
body of Lutheran Christians maintaining this radio ministry will
consider it a privilege to bring this message of rest to you if you
will but send us particulars. In thus offering you the divine source of
all rest and happiness on earth this message will prepare you for the
one rest that yet remaineth for the saints of God, the serenity and
restful beauty of Christ’s glorious heaven. Amen.
[The preceding sermon
first aired in 1931, and is included in the book, “The Lutheran Hour”.]