Take Hold of God!
By Vance Havner
I N the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is longing for a mani festation of God: “ Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence.” He knows that God is able, that His re sources are unlimited:“ For since the be ginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, 0 God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him.” , Isaiah knows that God will do busi ness with anyone who means business: “ Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that re member thee in thy ways.” But there is a hindrance: “We have sinned.” More than that, “We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” Mind you, it is not our sins here but our righteousnesses, the best that we are and can do in our selves, that are filthy rags—“ rags be cause they do not cover us and filthy rags because they only defile us.” There is another reason why God is not coming down in mighty power and with that we are concerned just now: “ There is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee.” We are living in a tired age. Every body is tired. “ That tired feeling” has become one of our standard expressions. We wake up tired and go to bed tired. We take a pill to put us to sleep and another pill next morning to keep us awake. We are always resting but we never get rested. We take a vacation in order to recuperate and then we need another vacation to recuperate from our vacation. We are physically tired and mentally tired and then we are drowsy with what this same prophet Isaiah called a “ spirit of deep sleep.” The devil has chloroformed the moral and spiritual atmosphere of our time and most of us are living in a stupor. We go through the motions of living but we are walking in our sleep. Of course the unsaved world is dead in trespasses and sins and all around us are thousands of animated corpses. They might not appreciate such a de scription but dead they are. “ She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth” is the way God’s Word puts it. Some of these corpses get around pretty
our minds are busy with something else and our hearts get nothing. We read the Bible but Satan hangs a veil over the sacred page and if asked “What did you just read?” we could not tell. Some of us know our plight but will not rouse ourselves to apply the remedy. Sometime ago I awoke in the night. The weather had changed and I was cold. There was a blanket at the foot of the bed but I was too sleepy to rouse my self sufficiently to pull up the blanket. I knew my condition and I knew the remedy was at hand but I went around next day with a crick in my neck because I did not stir up myself to take hold of the blanket. Some of you know your spiritual state and the remedy but you do not stir up yourselves to take hold of God. We need to be aroused. A woman had taken an overdose of a sedative. The physician ordered that someone walk the floor with her and not allow her to rest until the effect of the drug wore off. She pleaded, “ Please let me sleep,” but they knew better. Too many modem churches want pastors to be bedtime story tellers and lullaby crooners when we need floorwalkers to keep the saints from settling into hopeless slumber. But the saints need to rouse them selves to take hold of God. Notice that our text does not say, “ There is none that . . . stirreth up himself”—period. That is only a means to an end. Too much of the “ rousements” in our re ligious, life today are only the stirring up of our poor selves. It ends there and we get nowhere. We know that something is wrong and we add more activity and excitement, but we do not take hold of God. With more picnics, more meetings, more rallies, more projects, more en thusiasm, we whip our jaded selves into a glorified St. Vitus dance, but we are doing it all in our sleep. Soon we are more exhausted than ever but we do not get through to God. The church has never whooped it up so much as now. We have never stirred up ourselves so much as now. The dignified churches have done it by stepping up their activi ties until there is something doing at church every night and nobody has time to stay at home with the family. The emotional churches have done it by go ing off the deep end in sanctified epilep sies. But it is all the stirring up of self that does not take hold of God. The
fast and appear anything but dead but dead they are, dead to God, dead to salvation, dead to eternal life. To all such God says, “ Awake thou that sleep- est, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” But I am thinking now of Christians who have heard God’s all-animating voice and have awakened to salvation, but who have fallen victims to the hyp notic languor of these days and who need to awake to righteousness and sin not. I am concerned about these slum bering saints who sleep the sleep of the slothful like the sluggard in Proverbs: “How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that traveleth, and thy want as an armed man.” Like the disciples in Gethsemane we sleep while our Lord suffers and He asks, “What, could y e .not watch with me one hour?” “ Sleep on now, and take your rest” He said to these slumberers and some of us take Him pretty literal ly on that today! But do not forget that He added, “ Rise, let us be going!” No wonder the Bible continually urges us to “watch and pray,” “ stir up the gift of God,” “ awake out of sleep” and “gird up the loins of your minds.” We sleep late and waste hours that would give us a working knowledge of the Bihle. We hurry to bed with a thoughtless prayer—or none. We sit in church listless and critical. We stay away from prayer meeting while the devil packs the show places of sin. We deliberately disobey God by forsaking the assembling of ourselves together. We take our rest at God’s expense. Church members sit for hours in thea tres and weep over the glycerin tears of Hollywood divorcees but at church they complain, “ Behold, what a weari ness is it!” “ There is none . . . that stirreth up himself to take hold of . . . [God].” There is nothing more dangerous than our present-day comfortable disinclina tion to take hold of God. “It is high time to awake out of sleep,” for most of us Christians are semiconscious. We sing hymns and do not know what we sing. We hear sermons and we don’t hear them. Our ears may register vocal sounds emanating from the pulpit but
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