The church is not a building of brick and stone, but a company of believers, God's building, founded on Jesus Christ. While God the Father, Son, and Spirit are the ultimate builders of the whole body of Christ, individuals are called to be builders in local assemblies, taking heed how they build with materials that will endure the fire of judgment. The sermon emphasizes that true building is done with gold, silver, and precious stones, representing permanent, Christ-centered work, rather than wood, hay, and stubble, which are temporary and will be burned up. It warns against unscriptural practices and false professions, urging believers to build with integrity and purity, ensuring their work receives a reward at the judgment seat of Christ.
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I want to turn with you this afternoon to First Corinthians chapter three again and continue that study in some of the figures that are used concerning the church. And I'm thinking particularly of the local church, the local company of believers, what we usually refer to as assemblies. It's all the same word. Perhaps the word assembly expresses a little better what it stands for. Too many times we get to use the wrong meaning. I know the use of a word determines its meaning, but this one has gone way out in left field.
People now talk about a church as though it was a building of brick and stone and wood. And this is not true, of course, never was true. It is a called-out company, and the local expression should stand for the whole. That is, we should be able to see in any company of believers exactly what the Lord wants to see in the whole company of believers, all believers from the day of Pentecost on down to the return of the Lord. Now, First Corinthians chapter three is often used as a picture of the judgment seat of Christ for the individual.
I have no complaint about that at all. You can apply all passages of Scripture in a multiplicity of ways. But the true meaning, very evidently, is that of the church. It is the local company of believers that have to stand to test. This test may take place now, it may take place at the judgment seat of Christ. We read in the first few verses, first eight and a half verses, almost all of the night, about the Lord's work in the present day as being pictured by a garden or a farm.
But at the close of verse nine, he says something else, ye are God's building. Now, we are a husbandry, that means a tillage, a farm, an orchard, a garden, a greenhouse, almost anything. It's wherever something has grown. But then, he says, you are God's building. According to the grace of God, which is given unto me, as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation. and another buildeth thereon. Now notice the terms another, every man, any man, and so on as we read through this passage.
I have laid the foundation. Now certainly this could not be true of the church which is his body. The Lord Jesus himself is both the foundation and the builder. He says in Matthew sixteen upon this rock I will build my church. The Lord is the true builder of the church. But there is a sense in which God, the Father, Son, and Spirit work together in the building of the church. A great deal of the work in the building of the whole body of Christ in this present age is done by the Spirit of God, because he is the one who makes the word real to each individual. He is the one who baptizes into the one body.
There the figures change again. That's the same principle, same idea. the Spirit of God puts us together into one body. Then it is the Father who gives all of us and the whole Church to the Lord Jesus. But it is also himself, according to the fifth chapter of Ephesians, who presents the Church to himself. So Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inextricably united in the building of this present work called the Church. In the building of a local work, there is another builder. In fact, a number of builders. And this is where you and I come in.
Now there is the master builder. That is, he's the job superintendent. He's the contractor. Or in many cases, he's just the owner. The Lord Jesus was certainly the owner, and so Paul could not be that. Paul was not a contractor in the sense of having a contract to receive a certain amount for the work that he did. That, of course, is written against in many of his passages, and he calls such money which is demanded for work which is done, filthy lucre. And we are warned against being greedy of filthy lucre. So Paul was certainly not one who did that. He worked at Corinth the same place, and he said, I wouldn't even take your money.
Forgive me, he said, but if I come back, I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm not going to take your money. Some Christians are not fit to give. That's a good thing for preachers to learn. Some Christians are not fit to give. They have no right to give. Their money may be dirty. Their money may be coveted by themselves. They may do it grudgingly. The Lord doesn't want anything that's given grudgingly. He wants you to give hilariously. He wants you to give because you love to do it. One of the paraphrases of the twentyth chapter of Acts, that verse that says, It is more blessed to give than to receive, it reads like this.
It is happier to give than to get. Now, if you're happier to give than to get, you're in line for a privilege, and the Lord will... be glad and godly men will be glad to receive what you have. But if you begrudge it, you might as well keep it. You might as well keep it. A man came to a friend of mine at the Kansas City Conference many, many years ago. I don't know what possessed the fellow, but he handed some money to my friend and he said, here's a little filthy lucre for you. And my friend said, if it's filthy lucre, you can keep it. And the man said, what?
Never been turned down before, you know. He said, I said, if it's filthy lucre, you can keep it. God doesn't want filthy lucre. He wants an odor of a sweet smell. He wants what is given from the heart. He wants what is given because you love the Lord and because you love his people and because you love his work. And if it's filthy lucre, keep it. And the man kept it. And I don't think my friend had any regrets at all. Paul was not working for what he could get. He didn't go to Corinth to accumulate. He went to Corinth to lay a foundation. And he went to many other places to lay foundations.
I would think that some young men would be ashamed of themselves that they want to move in on some established assembly and then just live off the fathom of the land, figuratively speak. They just want to enjoy what somebody else has already done. They don't want to build. They don't want to lay foundations. For a number of years at Camp Elam in Colorado, the Colorado Springs Assembly and others have worked with them in it also, but especially the meetings there, five meetings in our city, our area, have been working together on a young people's training camp.
And we believe... With all due apologies to Brother Harper, I think he agrees with me. I know most of the men that have been working with the Mass would say the same thing. That a Bible school is really only a substitute for what assemblies ought to do. Every local company of believers ought to be concerned about training their young people. And I was involved in that for eight years at least. I realized that... the teaching, the simple teaching on how to go out and establish an assembly was totally foreign to most of these young people. They didn't have the slightest idea how to go about it. And yet, after giving that series of studies, year after year, I can tell you that the last six assemblies in Colorado have been founded by young people under thirty years of age.
And they haven't done it on their own. They haven't done it independently. They haven't ignored any of us that are older. In fact, they've been on our trail constantly to get us to help them. They want all the help that they can get. They want all the advice that they can get. But they're willing to do the legwork themselves. They're willing to do the work of a master builder. Now, he says, as a master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereon. thereupon. How? It's not the what, so much as it is the how. Do you realize the place that Modes have in the New Testament?
Sometimes we say the Book of Galatians is a dissertation on law and grace, and of course it is. But do you know that the Book of Galatians is the greatest treatise in the world on Modes? You know what that's really what it's about? The problem was not what the people of Galatia were doing and not doing. They weren't like the Corinthians. They weren't involved in immorality. They were righteous, but they were looking down their holy noses at everybody else because they realized that they were righteous. And what they were doing was not out of love for the Lord at all.
Now, the Apostle Paul said... Let another, let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. That ought to forever put out of the minds of any who may have such a notion. This notion that Peter was the foundation. A man was preaching in Ireland. I didn't talk to him, but I talked to a man who was present. He said he was a man who could think on his feet. And it's a good thing you can do that in the South of Ireland because the Irishmen give you plenty of chances to talk on your feet.
They heckle a great deal when anybody's preaching there. And this man was preaching and a fellow in the audience said, what did the Lord Jesus say to Peter in Matthew sixteen? And he turned to him and he said, he said, get thee behind me, Satan. That's right. That's in the same chapter, you know. And the man was pretty much non-plus. That wasn't exactly the answer you wanted. Now, you can't expect to have anything built with stability on a man who is rebuked by the Lord in the same chapter by such a say. No, Peter was certainly not the foundation stone.
In fact, I think that's why he says in First Peter chapter two, and you also... you also as living stone. It's not simply that the Lord Jesus was the living stone and we also are, but that Peter was a stone in that building. Not the same word, of course, but a word which indicates that he was a smaller piece, a feminine form. He was a smaller piece that sit on the foundation stone. The foundation stone is Christ. And thank God this is our foundation stone. Thank God we're not built on Peter. Thank God we're not built on any human being. A friend of mine in Colorado Springs, I've been trying to talk to him for a good while about this, and he still retains a pastorate for which he is paid.
Talk about filthy lucre. He said himself, he never heard of anybody getting a call to a church that paid less money. Strange, isn't it? And he knew that he was there because of that. But he said, I don't see why you have a ticket, this kind of thing. I don't see why you want to put me down just because I do as I do. And I said to him, well, why do you do what you do? Well, he thought he was serving the Lord. So I said, well, now, tell me this. How often do you remember the Lord? Well, he said, I know you folks do it every Sunday, but we think that's too many times.
It's too often, becomes too commonplace, so we just do it once a month. I said, how in the world can you get along with one collection a month and run that big church? He said, where'd you get the idea we have one collection a month? He said, we take a collection every meeting sometimes, two or three times in the meeting. And he was in the trap, and he knew it right now. And I said to him, yeah. All right, take your medicine. You remember the Lord because you love him, right? Well, he said, that's the idea. All right. You do that because you love him. You love him enough to do it once a month. Now, who do you take collections for?
So happened he was the only paid man on the team. He had some other people working with him, but he was the only one that received any salary. And this was a big part of the budget. And he had to admit, the collection is for me. The Lord's Supper is for him. The collection is for me. We're awfully imbalanced. Awfully imbalanced. And when Peter got out of touch with the Lord, he showed that he was no person to be dependent upon. I don't put Peter down either. I thank God that he was restored. I thank God that he did what the Lord told him to do after he was restored.
He went out and fed and shepherded and cared for the Lord's sheep and lambs. And that's more than some of us are doing. He did care about them, but he was just a man. Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if any man, any man, not just Paul. Paul didn't stay there all the time. Apollus went there. Some said they were of Peter. So Peter must have gone there. And there were a number of others not named who lived there at Corinth. They must have been doing some building because both of the epistles rebuked them because they were not building correctly.
Any man can build in the local church. You know, you start a new work and you guard it carefully. I've had the privilege of doing this a few times, and you carefully watch to see that the right things are taught. And then suddenly some man shows up, and he teaches something that isn't right, and he just tears you apart. You know exactly how the mother of the true mother of the child felt when Solomon said, bring me a sword. and cut this child in two and give half of it to each mother, each professed mother.
And the true mother said, no, give it to her. Don't divide the child. You know just how she felt when you see a company of the Lord's people divided by someone who brings in either wrong doctrine or wrong methods or wrong attitudes, something of this kind. And they don't build good material into the local building. You know how it makes you feel. And you know how Paul must have felt. And yet he said, if any man... You can't forbid. You can't say that a man can't teach the word. Unless, of course, something has happened that he has to be disciplined. If any man build on this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble...
I don't think the division is there so much between the qualities in one category or the other, but between the categories themselves. Some are flammable and some are permanent. And it's going to be tried. If any man's work abide, no, the fire, excuse me, verse thirteen, every man's work should be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire. And the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is, not how much it is. Hay is getting pretty expensive out in Colorado. We've had a great demand for it, and hay is not as cheap as it used to be, but hay is still cheaper than wood.
It's also more expensive than stubble, but it's all flammable. Gold, silver, and precious stones. They're all valuable, and they're all permanent. They'll all stand the test of fire. So you can build something that's permanent, or you can build something that is temporary. Too many things are thought to be temporary. Listen to me, young men. You want to help in the local assembly. Don't introduce anything that you don't intend to be permanent, because it's liable to be just that. It's liable to stay right there, where you put it. It may be wrong, totally wrong, but once people accept the thing, it's so hard to deprive them of it.
Take, for example, the business meeting. I know I'll get taken for this, but I feel I have an obligation to tell you that there is absolutely nothing about a business meeting in the Bible. Not one single phrase. The Lord intended for the government of the local assembly to be by elders, not a town hall meeting. We all know that the Presbyterian form of government, the Episcopalian form of government, are wrong. What we don't know is that so is the congregational form of government, just as wrong as the other. God never instituted any one of the three.
He instituted government by the head of the church. through his vicar on earth, the Holy Spirit, who raises up men, according to the twentieth of Acts, and makes them to be overseers, leaders, over the house of God. And the temporal work, while it branches over into spiritual things as well, preaching and so on, but really the care of the church in a local way and of its temporal facilities should be by deacon. And God instituted only these two offices, if you can call them that. They're really not offices. They're works. He instituted these two kinds of works in the local church.
And government should be by elders, and the work should be done by deacons. But somebody out of the Church of England brought, a hundred and twenty-five years ago, over into companies like ours, a business meeting. It's still conducted in the Episcopalian churches and in the churches of England. They still have that. They call it the, what is it they call it? It doesn't matter anyway. It's a monthly get-together and all the men of the church are invited. And all the men of the church are supposed to come and put in their nickels worth. And then the vicar will give this back to the bishop and it will be taken into consideration in the next year.
It was just brought whole out of the Church of England. And if your assembly is operated by a town hall meeting, for goodness sakes, get rid of it. It has no place in the local church. And I don't apologize at all for saying that in the presence of young people. They ought to be dissatisfied if you order ones are not. Don't let anybody build anything into the local church that you don't intend to be permanent, because it's just liable to be that very thing. Now, when the fire tries the work, it shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide, which he has built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss. Notice that the building is the sum total of the believers. Individuals, every man, any man, these are the individuals who helped to build the local church. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. Now, there may be some problem in your mind about temples and buildings and places that we call the Lord's house. I've heard this, I think, four or five times in prayer or in public speaking.
within meetings of this time in the last year. And in every case, I've managed to get to the man who said it and point out to him that he is using a wrong term. This building is not the house of God. Definitely not. This building is a lovely building. I'm glad that you have it. I'm glad that it's the place where people can come and hear the Word of God. I'm glad it's the place where the Lord's people can assemble together. but it is not God's house, except in the sense that you have given it to him, and you should have given your own house just as equally with this. Anything that we own should be held for him. This is all his. In the Old Testament, the Lord, first of all, made a dwelling place in a tent called the Tabernacle.
It was in the wilderness, and it was portable. It was carried around, and in the twenty-fifth chapter of Exodus, he said, See that you make it according to the pattern showed thee in the mount. Don't make any mistakes. Make it exactly like I showed you in the mouth. Mr. C.W. Ross in Kansas City, who was a great help to me when I was a younger man, had a chart made by a sign writer, a very good artist, but not a very good reader. And when he got this chart made, first of all, Mr. Ross said to him, Now see that you make it according to the pattern you showed you in the mouth. That is, you follow the Old Testament instructions from the twenty-fifth to the end of Exodus and see that you make it just like that.
When he brought it back to him, he had the main tabernacle looking pretty decent, but then down along the bottom he had the pieces of furniture in little frames, and one of these was the altar of burnt offering. Instead of having a square, and it plainly says that several times, instead of having a square, he had it rectangular. And Mr. Ross, of course, that caught his eye the very first thing. And he said, well, young man, I see you didn't make it according to the pattern you showed me in the mouth. He said, what's wrong? And so he showed him this, and then he opened his Bible and read to it. Oh, he says, I'll take it right back. No, he said, you won't. Every time I preach on that, I'm going to tell people about your mistake.
And you know, that impressed us a lot more than if he hadn't had that thing. He'd say, now, look, this is wrong. That shows the danger of not doing it according to the pattern showed me in the mouth. Moses could have made that mistake, but he didn't. And you could make that same mistake, and I hope you don't. Now later on, and we're told this in First Kings chapter eight, Solomon at the dedication of the temple said to the Lord, I've made a house for you to live in, a place where you can dwell forever. Now, it wasn't forever. You know, of course, that that temple was destroyed and subsequent temples were destroyed. And there is no temple now on earth, none that God would own.
And there will be a temple, again, probably two of them, probably the temple that the Antichrist will put up during the first three months, three and a half years of the seven-year period. And then there will be the temple following that. when the Lord sets up his kingdom here on this earth. And I think this is described in the last eight chapters of the book of Ezekiel. The temple was a permanent building, supposedly, but it failed. Now twice in the Acts of the Apostles, and you can remember these because they both have the seven in them, seven and seventeen.
Look up the verses yourself. Chapters seven and seventeen say two different times, God dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Anytime anybody says, here is God's house. Here is God's temple. Just remember those verses. God does not dwell there. An Irishman saw a beautiful cathedral that had been built. And the man said, you see, we want to honor God. Our church has built him a beautiful cathedral. And this is God's house. And the Irishman said, sure, and you'll be doing fine if you get him inside of it. He knew a little more about it than the official.
Many a house has been built for God, but they never got him inside of it. God's not going to allow people to put him in a box in this age, and in the present time the Lord does not dwell there. Where does he dwell? Well, a number of passages tell us about this. You might keep your finger here and look at Ephesians chapter two. And this is a very wonderful passage regarding the building of this temple or church. Ephesians the end of verse chapter or end of chapter one, verse twenty two, and have put all things under his feet.
and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. Now that's one figure, but look at the end of the next chapter. Verse twenty. And are built, ye are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. That is the same foundation on which they are built, belonging to them, I think. Jesus Christ himself being the chief coroner. Now, this is not a cornerstone in the sense of a hollow piece that's put into one corner of a building, and some artifacts and printing and so on that put in there, but it's the main foundation stone.
And we are built together on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself, being the chief or the main stone, the main corner, in whom all the building... fitly framed together, groweth into an holy temple in the Lord. Now this is not the local church. The local church at Ephesus was intended to be an expression of this. And later on in the exhorting part of this epistle, you have these words. But here he is looking at the whole building, in whom ye also, that is you Ephesians, also are built together for inhabitation of God through the Spirit.
I'll turn the tape over. The rest of this message is on the other side. to hop out, as the young people say. We no longer are going to take the responsibility. In fact, one man wrote to my friend Bill McDonald when he was at Emmaus, and he showed me the letter. This man said, Now, we just don't have the time to do the work of elders here in this local assembly, but we do have plenty of money.
And so we're going to make it very comfortable or any young man that you can send to us. If you have someone graduating in the spring that you can recommend to us, we would like to make a kind of a deal with him. We want to bring him in here, and we'll pay him a certain amount, and we'll furnish him a house, and we'll furnish him a car. And we're just no longer going to try to do this thing. We're not doing it very well, and we're too busy, but we've got the money. Now, that is an unscriptural innovation. I don't care who does it. I don't care how much they deny that it's told. I know one certain place where they say, we don't have a pastor.
But I happen to know the man who writes the checks. And he said, I write a check for exactly the same amount every month to that man. I know that he is a paid pastor. I know that he agreed to work for us for this stipulated amount. You assume you're denying that kind of thing. If that's the setup that you have, you have crossed over the bounds and you have started to build into the local church something which is unscriptural. And you better pull it out. My wife and I were married forty-five years ago in November by a dear old man whom some of you may have heard about, some may have even met him.
J. O. Brown, John Brown. He was a good old man. He preached the gospel in rural places, particularly. I preached with him, and I was honored to have him perform the marriage for us. He and his wife were no longer able to travel in their gospel car. They didn't have trailers in those days, but they had a little four-cylinder Chevy truck, and they traveled in this, just a house built on the back of it. They gave it to us for a wedding present. The truck didn't run very well. My wife had a Model A. You can imagine hooking a trailer onto the back of a Model A. I said to my brother-in-law, is it possible?
Well, he said, I'd never seen it done, but I don't see why it couldn't be done. We have small trailers that we use on the farm, and so we put that on a chassis and pulled it behind the Model A. People would come running out of the stores to see this go by, you know. What's this? A house on wheels. The first trailer we ever saw was the one we lived in. We lived for four and a half years. in it is one that I built. When we built one, we built it eighteen feet long. And people came around and looked at it and they said, you'll never get it off the lot. Now they build them eighty feet long, fourteen feet wide. But in any case, this was a pretty big thing. And we bought this, or we received this trailer as a gift, and then we started to remodel it.
And to save my life, I couldn't find out why nothing fit. absolutely nothing fit. I put things in, and I've done a lot of carpenter work, and I certainly can saw a straight edge and a square end, but nothing fit. And I came in one night, I said, man, the jinx is on that thing for sure. I can't do anything with that trailer. Nothing will fit. And then the thought occurred to me, why don't you go out and measure the thing? And I went out and I measured it, and it was one inch shorter on one side than on the other. Now the man who built that originally, or Mr. Brown, had built it just one inch shorter.
That meant that all four corners were all square. And it meant that nothing would fit. Well, either you tear it down or you accommodate yourself, and so from then on, I added in each or subtracted in each, and I finally got the thing put back together and got it so it would work. And then when we had it all finished, my wife said, now I'm going to paper this. You've done enough work. I'm going to paper it. And she didn't know what I had done. And she came in after trying that, and she said, you're right. That thing is hudu. She said, nothing fits. And then I laughed, and I told her what had happened. That's the way some of you have built a local assembly.
You know you have. Well, maybe it isn't you. Maybe it's those who passed it on to you. But you know that's the way it's built. You know that's what's wrong. Now, what are you going to do? Well, you'll either have to accommodate yourself, and if it's a small enough factor and not strictly unscriptural or non-scriptural, I mean unscriptural, if it's not strictly against the Word of God, maybe you can live with it. Maybe you'll just have to tear the whole thing out. It's a very painful thing to see. I was just talking to a man today, and he said, I don't think that we'll ever be able to do anything in the old neighborhood where we preached. He said, I think we'll have to go some little distance from there and start all over.
Now, the sooner you get it done, the better, if that's what it takes. And then there are some who build in misfits, wrong material, in ordinances. There's a great danger today of crowding the Lord's Supper into a corner. Now, I don't think that it has anything to do with the time of day. I believe the early Christians met in the evening, as you folks do here. I think it can be done in some places. It's a good thing. But don't do it just because that's the way they do it in Fioria or some other place. Just don't do it because that's the way we used to do it back home. If it works for your neighborhood...
There really is no restriction as to what time of the day, so as long as it is the first day of the week, but there's a great danger of pushing the Lord's Supper into a corner. I know one place that started with the first meeting in the Sunday morning, and then they decided that they needed more than two meetings, and so they moved it back, and they had the first meeting was the breaking of bread, but this was at And then they had Sunday school at nine-thirty, and then they had preaching at, they allowed some time in between and had the meeting at preaching at eleven o'clock. And hardly anybody came.
So then they decided to move it in the evening. And some of the others felt that they really needed to have more teaching. And so then they PSed on the end of the teaching meeting in the evening. And half the people got up and left. before they remembered the Lord on Sunday evening. They'd had enough. You had four times, four meetings already that day. You just had it clear up to here. And they pushed the Lord's Supper totally off into a corner. There's a great danger of our pushing the two ordinances, the Lord's Supper and baptism, into a corner, of thinking that it's no longer very important.
Then there are many other things, other areas, and I don't need to go into those. There's a possibility of our pushing the subject of discipline into a corner or taking it out. A friend of mine at home, another man that I've been working with somewhat who is a pastor in a local church, I was trying to help him to see some of these things. He said, tell me this, what do you have against the church where I go? Well, I said, I don't have anything against you. Well, he said, you don't think we're right, because if you did, you'd come over there. Well, I said, you don't think we're right. If you did, you'd come over here. Well, he said, yeah, I guess that's right. He said, I can tell you what I think's wrong about you.
He's a very outspoken man, and so I said, all right, I'll tell you what I think is wrong about you. I said, in the first place, you don't have any discipline. He said, where'd you get that idea? Why, he said, of course I have discipline. I have discipline. He said, listen, if anybody does anything I don't approve of, he said, I sock it to him. I said, that's discipline? That's dictatorship. Don't you take it up with anybody else? He said, who would I take it up with? I'm the boss. He was, too. Is that discipline? Well, that isn't discipline. Well, let me tell you, I've seen companies of the Lord's people where one man unofficially did exactly that.
And you let it happen, and you're just as much to blame as he is. Older brethren ought to put down their foot when they see some one man assuming the place of a diatribe. John was a kindly old man, I think, for the time he wrote the epistles. But he still had a little of the old sons of thunder in him that the Lord had spoken about when he was newly saved. And he said, Diatribe's love to have the preeminence, And when I come, I'm going to take it up with it. I admire old John for that. Don't be afraid to tell people when they're getting too far out and left for you.
Well, there are many things like this, but I want to say something now about another type of building. We can build into the local church certain practices and doctrines, but we also build into the local church certain persons. You see, when you lead somebody to Christ, or you believe you have, or you hope you have, and then you bring that person to the elder brethren and you say, I want you to meet Joe Blow. He has recently gotten saved in the Bible study that I had. Fine, they're glad to meet him. And then they say to you, aside, you say he got saved? Yes, he got saved. Are you sure?
Yeah, I'm sure. But you're not reassured. You just don't want him to be hurt. You don't want him to be offended. You don't want him to be driven away, and you do want credit, because after all, this is the first one that you brought in for quite a little while, and so you want it to go across, and you build into the church, wood, hay, stubble. Now, getting the elders to accept a profession doesn't make the person a Christian. You know that, don't you? and taking somebody who is your child, our grandchild, to the elders, and saying, my child professes to be saved, and I believe he is.
And the elder says, Mary, you are saved, and you said, you say to the man, I told you she was. I'm going to say, well, Mary, when were you saved? And you say, it was two weeks ago last Thursday. And Mary is a dummy. She never gets a chance to say a word. She liked to. In fact, she'd like to tell them she isn't right sure, but you have forced it on them. I don't think these things don't happen. Anybody who has ever worked with children know that this happens. It happens in camps. It doesn't have to. I think that a camp can be a great blessing, great useful tool for God. But I think it can also be a very detrimental thing.
A Sunday school can be a great thing. I think it... Every company of people ought to be so concerned with children that they'll fill up the kitchen and the dining hall and all the rest of it with children and let the people eat a picnic out on the ground. I love to see children in a meeting coming up in the Sunday school. There are hope. There are future. But don't you help the devil by making false professions in those children? When we brought a new person on the staff in the children's home, one of the first things we said to them was, you let God do the work. You keep the gospel before them, but don't you ever put words into a child's mouth.
If nobody gets saved for the next year, we can get on our faces before God and acknowledge this, but let's don't substitute professions for reality. It isn't worth it. And it's a terrible harm for any person who has been led into that. Witness me, many hundreds of people have gone forward in evangelical churches and never got a thing. And now you can't touch them with a ten-foot pole. They say, well, I tried it and it didn't work. Yes, they tried it, but they didn't know the Lord Jesus and nobody ever helped them see the difference. Don't build into the local assembly just in order to increase numbers. We don't have to send the headquarters and say how many more we've got this year than we had last year.
We're not in competition in Christian Life magazine to get one of the ten biggest Sunday schools in the United States. We're here to do business for God. And if God doesn't lead by His Holy Spirit, then we better not do any business at all. So we have to be very careful about the persons that we bring in. Notice that he says you build, not that you create. You build. And stones in a building... You know, in the temple in the Old Testament, there were two things, stones and metal. Incidentally, the metal was all non-magnetic. Isn't that amazing? The Lord used iron in other things, but not in the temple.
I don't really find any record of any iron in the temple. Gold, silver, and copper, or brass, it's called, probably a bronze. These are the things that they used in the temple. Non-magnetic. Real Christians don't pull to themselves. They point to Christ. And then stones. You know, the hundred and forty-four psalm, it says, Our daughters shall be like stones in a palace, polished after the similitude of a palace. Young people, I just love to see young men and women who bear the imprint of the master's tools.
They have been shaped and formed and polished, and they reflect the beauty of the Lord Himself. There is nothing finer. There is nothing that warms my heart like that. I would hate to be in an old people's home. I don't know what I do among old people. I would hate to be in a Sun City type of place, you know, where you live among all old people. And yet so many places say, well, now one of the advantages is that we don't allow anybody in here but retired people. Just like a mausoleum. No, it really is.
I want children around me. We've had children around us all our lives. For forty years we've operated the children's home. And I've worked with young people. I started the camp work out there. I want young people around me. I feel that they are a help to me, and I know they're a great encouragement to me. And young people, go on for God. You're the only hope that we have. If the Lord doesn't come right away, most of us old fellows are going to be gone for too long, and even some who aren't so old. But you are the hope. You are the ones that must carry on the principles that you have been taught. So we ought to do this, and we ought to see to it that we ought to help you to...
to be polished and made like unto himself. Now, you know the stones in the temple were even named. There's some indication of this in the scripture. They were called precious stones. A precious stone to us, I used to be in the jewelry business, a precious stone to us, or a semi-precious stone. There's a stone that's worth a great deal, and there's a small stone and cut to some particular shape. But the stones in the temple were called precious stones because they were precious. They were imported, many of them. the facing of the temple at least. And this was a beautiful thing because of the work bestowed on it, because the stones were so carefully cut, because they could be fitted together without the sound of a tool.
And they were ornamental. They enhanced. You know, the disciples showed the stones of the temple, this was Herod's temple, showed the stones of the temple of the Lord Jesus. And they marveled at these stones. And the Lord, of course, foresaw that these stones would not be left one on another. Well, let me just close now with this. Sometimes, sometimes there are difficulties in a local assembly of believers. I realize this is a dangerous thing. I'm only applying this. I'm not saying that the fourteen chapter of Leviticus teaches this. I'm just applying this. Do you remember that leprosy could come into an individual body and he would be unclean?
And only God. We don't know exactly what the leprosy in that day was like. It doesn't seem to fit with our description today of other diseases. We've named them by other names because leprosy has a bad connotation. But we're not sure whether it's really the same leprosy or not. It is bad enough, the thing that we call leprosy. But in those days, leprosy could be in a garment or it could be in a house. Now we don't know anything about that. At least no doctor I've ever talked to knows anything about that. They say we just don't understand what it was. But we do know that a house could get leprosy in it.
We know that the first thing that they had to do was to scrape that house on the inside. Scrape all the plaster off of the stones. The walls were built of stone. And scrape that plaster off the inside of that house. And the streets in the plaster would indicate where the disease was. Many years ago there was a company of the Lord's people in another part of the country, don't try to guess where it is, and some immorality came into that particular company of people. And it was so flagrant that it couldn't be ignored. The immorality was in the sun of the oldest man in the meeting, and the man who had really started and built the work.
So some of the other men who had not been taking a very active part but felt we can't expose the old man to this, we'll have to take this up ourselves. They met together and talked about it, and then they went to see this young man. He was fairly young, and his wife knew about it, and the neighbors knew about it, and other Christians professed Christians in churches knew about it. And so they confronted him with it. And he said, well, that's all cleaned up. And then his father heard about it. And his father went over to see him, and he said to him, do you know what the men are saying about you?
That's the wrong way to start. And he said, yes, Father, I know they've been saying things about me. Well, he said, Are you guilty of this? He said, Father, you know I wouldn't do a thing like that. So he came back to the men. He said, You're all a bunch of liars. Now, the word of one man, his own son, would take the place of the word of all these men. And I'm sorry to tell you, the men backed down. They said, What can we do? The old man had even issued a threat. He said, If you put him out, I go out, too. Now, of course, this was very wrong. This was the actions of Eli, you know, with his son, or the actions with David, with his son.
He didn't say, why have you done this to one of his sons? And so he was taking the wrong stand. But I doubt very much if he would have gone out if they just hadn't lost their nerve. They did lose their nerve. And they left that man in. And that assembly immediately began a downward course. And within the next six months... Five other cases of immorality were turned up in that one assembly. That assembly doesn't exist today. Now, some of the people who were there really saved and moved away to other places. But there isn't anything. There isn't anything within miles of where that works to.
Not anything. The Lord said, you scrape those stones. You scrape them. What you say, that would result in some other people getting hurt. Some of these people really weren't in this. Some of these stones didn't have leprosy in them. Yes, but they've been in the proximity of it. They've been in the neighborhood of it, and they need a scraping too. Oh, Mr. Sheldrake, some of you older people appreciate this. Mr. Sheldrake said, there's something wrong with the horses hide when he doesn't like a curry comb. Curry comb is a pretty rough instrument to use on a horse. It pulls the old dead hairs out, and a horse will just lean into it.
I've carried many a horse. When I started to carry me, just lean into that curry comb. He wanted it. He knew that it would make him feel better, however much it might scratch and scrape. And a Christian who isn't willing to take correction from the Word of God deserves to have what he's got. Now, you take it when anyone... curries the assembly and you say, well, why doesn't he get that fellow alone and talk to him? He's the one that's doing it. I'm not doing it. Why should I have to suffer? Well, because that's the way it is. When one member suffers, they all suffer. If you're part of a company of the Lord's people, you're going to suffer along with them. And then after they took the mortar away and replastered it, if it showed up again, then he said, tear the house down and take the stones away.
Now I say I'm applying this. I don't say that that's what it teaches. The church is not in the Old Testament, but I want to apply this. The local congregation of believers may have to be scraped, and that company of believers may have to be torn down. Now, this isn't always the reason why it's torn down. Sometimes it's just been our own failure to prop the house up. Sometimes it's been our own failure to build into the next course. But sometimes a local company of believers has to be torn down, and the work started over again some other place. Serious? Yes, it is.
The Lord Jesus threatened the churches, the seven churches, in the second and third chapters of Revelation with the removal of the candlestick. That is, the removal of their testimony. And this may have to happen. Well, one of these days, brothers and sisters, we're going to be taken to the judgment seat of Christ. And then the Lord is going to go over everything that we've done. Unless. Unless you and I have done it ahead of time. About seven or eight years ago, the Lord laid me on my back.
It's been a very painful situation. I've been a strong man. I've been active all my days. And it was very, very difficult for me that he'd put on my back. He'd put on the shelf, see others doing the work that they couldn't do half as well as I could. That's conceit, I know, but the Walden's are noted for that. It was very difficult for me to see others doing what I knew I could do better. But the Lord put me there, and He kept me there. And my wife, who has not been strong at all, and who is only about half my size, had to wait on me. And she had to do my work.
And I learned the humiliation of Second Corinthians. My strength is made perfect in weakness. I don't say I'm spiritual enough to rejoice in it, but I say that I went through it, and I was able to see that it was best. During the time that I was not able to sleep, and there was a great while, where I not only had other illnesses, but I ruptured a disc in my back, and I'm paralyzed now almost from my knees down, numb all the time, have to walk with a stick. I was so much in pain. I was in traction for seven weeks, constant pain.
And I lay in my bed for hours, in the wee hours of the night. I could sleep usually until midnight, and then I was awake for two, three, four, five hours straight. Well, you've got to do something, and I'm ashamed that I had to learn this. I should have been interceding for the Lord's people. I should have been praying for the Lord's people when I wasn't. But I had something, I had to have something to do, and I began to pray for the Lord's people. Some of you here today were mentioned in those prayers. And maybe you saw a little blessing at that time. You didn't know why. Could be the Lord used me to be a help to you. I hope that he did.
But one of the things that I did during that time was to hold a number of bonfires in the presence of the Lord. The thought came to me one night, if I'm going to go to the judgment seat of Christ, and the Lord is going to pass through the fire all of my work, Why don't I get rid of some of that now and save the embarrassment of seeing it burnt in the front of you folks? I don't want you to know those things. And I got into the presence of the Lord and I was able to go over a number of things in my past life. And I'm painfully aware of the fact that there wasn't much left. Not very much. I think what there was left, I think, may merit some commendation from him in that coming day.
It may receive a little reward. Most of it went up in flames. The wood and the hay and the stubble. Now, it isn't necessarily bad. It's just the wrong thing. Sometimes I did good things and I did them for a wrong motive. I worked awfully hard. I preached awfully long hours. But some of the times I did it just to give John Walden the credit. I'm ashamed to tell you this, except that I know that it finds a response in your heart. I know that you know it. You know a lot of things have been done, and they were not done out of love to the Lord at all.
Let's burn them up. We don't need to wait for the judgment seat of Christ. Burn them up. And then let's rebuild wherever we have built wrongly. Let's do the work of the Lord. with both hands energetically because he's coming back soon. We only have a little time to do it, brothers and sisters. Let's get with it.