Coming Alive Unto God

Coming Alive Unto God

by Reginald (Reg) Goff

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Every time I hear somebody get up and say, “Stand up, stand up, you can’t sing that sitting down,” I think of a story of a dear friend of ours, very dear friend of ours, now with his Lord. He was a converted Texan cowboy, couldn’t read or write his own name at 19, and became one of the greatest ministers the United States has ever known. But when he was young and in his prime, in the days of the old camp meeting days, they had some people in those camp meetings that were pretty narrow sometimes in their ideas of what you can do and can’t do. So one day they were sitting at a camp meeting, and the maid came along, and the waitress said to Uncle Buddy, “Coffee, Uncle Buddy? Coffee, Uncle Buddy?” He said, “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,” he listened. He said, “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.” And a dear old lady, who had more judgment than religion, looked across the table to him and said, “Uncle Buddy, I don’t see how you can drink coffee and be a Christian.” Uncle Buddy said, “Sister, if you just watch, I’ll kill you.”

I’ve enjoyed being here, even if I have had a long face and couldn’t smile very much. But I have enjoyed being with you, and I honestly hope that sometime you invite me back. Because today, people kept coming all day long and asking me to speak on certain things tonight. And we only had one service.

I have two or three other subjects I could speak on if you’d invite me back. One of them is healing. I am greatly distressed in the healing program. I really am. I think I’ve gone through about five different distinct levels in my healing growth. From almost disbelief as a minister after 22 years of ministry, then having God force me to believe in healing, and that’s a story in itself. Then to have had tremendous healings in my own body and every one of our family, and then to have seen healings of any disease you could mention. We have seen it in our church. Then I’ve gone through the idea of psychoanalysis and all this idea of mind over body until I almost got to the place where I thought we could psychoanalyze anybody out of sickness. But I discovered you can’t. Then I went through another period when I had to come back and say, “But God is all-powerful. No matter what their mind is, God is all-powerful.” And now I’m halfway between those two things. Back down the ladder. I don’t know just where. Sometimes I think we can help people mentally, and their mind can begin to think correctly, and their body will release and work properly. There are those who do not seem to be able to do that, and there must be the divine action of God, which is a miracle.

We don’t always know those things. I’ll have something more to say about that later on when we come to that time of the service. But I want to talk tonight on a subject that is perhaps the dearest thing to my life today. You know, we always have some new thing boiling in our mind, in our theology, in our life, in our Christian experience. Always some new thing that’s just on edge in your life. Well, this is it for me today.

It’s the most amazing thing, and I want to talk to you about coming alive under God. It’s the most amazing thing how people live. And people live by choice more than anything else. The story is told back in these horrible days when white men went into the jungles and by force stole men away from their children and their wives and their homes and their tribes and put them in chains and drove them to the coast and there put them in ships where a lot of them died and then made slaves out of them. One day, as they were traipsing a great group of these toward the coast, and they were sullen and angry and hungry and had been hurt and abused physically, but there was one young man in this group, in this chain gang, that didn’t act like the rest. He walked erect. He kept his head up. He didn’t react with sullen hate like the others. And then finally, one of the top men said to one of the slave drivers, “What is it that makes that young man act different than all the rest?” And the slave driver turned to him and said, “Sir, he cannot forget that he’s a chieftain’s son.”

I am living for the day when God’s people cannot forget that they are children of God and that they have no right to be under bondage to all the things that other people are. So tonight I want to talk to you about coming alive unto God.

Up at… What’s the northern New York camp? No, the northern one. Warwick. When we were in Warwick, a doctor from Rochester, whom some of you know, brought with him one… And I don’t know any other way to say it, and I always hate to use these terms with men, but one of the darlingest little old men you ever saw. He was an Orthodox Jew. Had been an Orthodox Jew all his life. This man had really been a devout worshiper of Jehovah. This man ordered his life according to what he thought God wanted him to be. He really was about as high a level of a person as you could be. Then he met some people that were very happy. And they had fun. And they were full of smiles. And they weren’t always just trying to serve God. And there was a joy about their lives. And he began to ask, “What are these people?” And they said, “Oh, they’re Christians.” And he said, “Who are Christians?” Well, they said, “They believed that Jesus the Christ was the Son of God. And they worshiped Jesus.” This bothered him. Because he knew Jehovah God was the God. And there wasn’t any question about it. He had served Him all his life. He talked to Him. He prayed to Him. He had conversations with Him every day. He knew that God was Jehovah, not Jesus Christ. And this bothered him and bothered him. But these people were so wonderful, he couldn’t keep away from them. And then one day, in great turmoil of soul, he went to prayer. And he said, “God, Jehovah, I know You are God. I know You are the Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and my Father. And I love You, and You know how I try to serve You. But God, I’m troubled. What about this Jesus they talk about?” And he says that God said to him, “I am Jehovah God. Jesus is My Son. And if you’re going to love Me, you’re going to have to love My Son also.” So this man became a lover of Jesus and Jehovah. And he goes to worship Jehovah on the Sabbath day. And he goes on Sunday to worship Jesus. And it’s the biggest time in your life. He’s got double religion.

And that man is one of the most radiant people I have ever met in all my travels. When he speaks, you actually almost look around the corner and see if it isn’t Jesus really that’s there instead of him. I believe that this is the kind of thing that needs to happen to every one of us. I think we need to become alive to God. Knowing theology doesn’t make you alive to God. Being a member of the church does not make you alive to God. Going through all kinds of ritual does not make you alive to God. I believe that life is much like a checker game or chess, whichever you want to use. You know, when one man makes a move, then he cannot move anymore until the other person moves. Then he can move. Now, I have found it in my life, whether this is theologically correct or not, I don’t care. But in my life, it’s just this way. When God makes a move in my life, then He seems to wait until I make a move. And when I have made a move, then He’s ready with another move. And when I’m ready with another move, He’s ready with another move. And this is the way I grow spiritually. Now, I believe that God has made His first move.

Man fell. Man is full of lots of things that aren’t very Christ-like. And then God gave His Son that we might be redeemed and come back into the fellowship of God the Father. And then it’s our move. And what you become is totally dependent upon how you respond in your move. Your life tonight and my life tonight is the exact sum total of our response to God. Exactly. If you are happy and gay, if you are close to God, it’s because you have responded more to Him. Not because God loves you more than anybody else. And if you are cold, and if you do not know the warmth of the love of the presence of God in your life, it’s because you have not responded to that life which God has already offered to you. It may shock some of you, and I did not know this myself, though I thought I was a Bible student. I did not know until recently that the Scripture tells us, and Jesus it was who said it, in John 10 and verse 34, Jesus said, “Does not your Scripture say that ye are gods?” Boy, this shook me when I read this. “Does not your Scripture say that ye are gods?” God’s.

Now, that doesn’t go with old-fashioned theology very well. Where we put God up here and man down here, you know. But somehow I believe that what Jesus was meaning here, to me at least, that’s what it means. That as I open my life and respond to God, I am literally becoming a part of God, and He is literally becoming into my life, and I can respond, more and more and more and more and more in the very actual presence of God in my life. I think this is borne out in lives. We know this. We see it day by day. You’ve seen lives come alive. Surely you’ve seen lives that were dead and come alive to God until they radiated the very presence of Jesus Christ or the presence of God, any way you want to put it. I think this explains what a saint is. Not that a saint is any better than anybody else. But a saint is the person who has made a more full response to God than anybody else around them. And this is why they are saints, not because they’re better in any respect. In fact, the most thrilling people that I am meeting today is the new breed, and I call them just that, because there is a total new breed of Christian being born in America today that has been almost non-existent for 50 years.

There is a new breed of people who are responding to God in a more wonderful, beautiful way than I have ever seen all my life. These are the people who are becoming more radiant, more vital with the awareness of God. They’re literally living on tiptoe. They are people who are responding to persons with a different way of response. They respond to everything in life, the sunset, the rose, the kitten playing at your knee, a good meal, a well-played musical score, and to the very presence of God. These are the people who have found new life in prayer. These are the people who are finding new life in doing things for God. These are the people who are letting God shine through them. A kid said, went to know to see a great cathedral. The next day the teacher said, “What is a saint?” Well, he’d seen these stained glass windows. He said, “I don’t know what a saint is. I don’t know what a saint is.” He said, “What? A saint is somebody who lets the light through.” Huh, how good that was. A saint is someone who let the light through. How true this is. And I believe that this is what these people are who are now responding to God in a tremendous way.

Did you ever realize how everything in nature responded to Jesus when He was here on earth? Did you ever stop to think about it? Let me refresh your memory in just a little way, if I may. You can let it run for the next six months. Do you remember when Jesus had been speaking and He was tired? And they got into a boat to start to cross the lake. And Jesus went over and lay down on some pillows in the bottom of the boat and went to sleep. The waves got worse and worse. The boat began to rock and toss. The disciples got frightened, not knowing which wave next would come right over the boat and sink the whole bunch. But Jesus was unafraid. He didn’t wake up. He wasn’t worried. Finally, they went and shook Him and they said, “Jesus, we’re going to drown. Get up, do something.” And Jesus got up without any apparent scare or fright. The waves didn’t bother Him. He walked over to the edge of the boat and looked out at the waves and spoke to them as a mother would speak to a child, making too much noise, and said, “Be still.” And they were.

The inanimate responding perfectly to Jesus. Just beautifully. And then you remember the story of the fig tree. Now a lot of people don’t understand this story of the fig tree. Why Jesus could curse a fig tree and make it disappear. Well, I’m going to tell you. We have fig trees in our backyard. I shouldn’t say that. We have one. We cut one out through the day. We have a fig tree in our backyard. And I’ve learned the lesson of the fig tree. Because early in December, or the very beginning of January, the first figs start to come on the tree long before the leaves. Little tiny nubbins of figs start all over the tree. And there will be figs still on that tree in some stage of development when the leaves are all gone and it’s there again, as it is perhaps about now. But there will still be figs in the tree. Figs grow all the time. They’re always coming on. There’s always some green, always some ripe, and so it is all down. And there’s always figs on those trees. And if there are leaves on a fig tree, there are figs. Period. Because some will be too green if anybody take off and they’ll still be there. But Jesus saw this tree and there were no figs.

And Jesus knew that this tree was not responding to what God intended it to do. And Jesus spoke to it and it withered away. How marvelously nature responded to Jesus. Then I see Jesus one day coming down the road and they came running to Him and they said, “Peter’s mother-in-law is terribly sick with a fever. Oh, she’s hopeful sick. Come quickly, hurry.” Jesus went to the home. Went into the room where Peter’s wife’s mother was sick, lying upon her bed in sickness. And He spoke not to Peter’s mother-in-law, but to the fever.

And this fever immediately left. And she was well. And she arose and got supper for them. Nature, the inanimate, and the animate, both responding beautifully to God as it should be. I have a friend of mine. I just came from a city in Kansas. And there’s a lady there that I just get such a kick out of. She doesn’t like too well being a mother. Well, she likes being a mother. I didn’t quite mean that. But she doesn’t like housework. She’d rather drive a tractor. And she heard me talking one time about this. And she came back the next day just glowing. Her face was just radiant. She was just… You’d think somebody turned the light on inside. And she said, “You know, I know today what you said last night. I know what you mean about coming alive to God.” I said, “How do you know?” She said, “I was driving the tractor yesterday, seeding wheat. And I was having the biggest time driving that tractor straight down across that mile. And I was just… Oh, I was just making the straight line. Just beautiful. And suddenly it dawned on me that I was putting wheat in the ground. And if it didn’t respond to Jesus, I wasn’t going to get a crop next year.”

She said, “I just came alive. I saw that nature responds to God. Therefore, I ought to respond with more alacrity and more wonderful love than the wheat in the ground. Yet if it doesn’t respond, man would starve.” Isn’t it an amazing thing how God seems to have power over everything in the universe and that respond to Him beautifully. Our son, when he takes atoms and puts them in a cyclotron and bombards them with other atoms and breaks them all up and forms new materials. But listen, they respond exactly the same way every time or he couldn’t have an experiment.

Everything, even to the electron and the proton, is responding so beautifully to God. And yet you and I, who claim to be His highest creation that we know of in this world, and we are afraid of everything, going through life, afraid of almost everything we see. Somebody sneezes, “Oh, I’m going to get the cold,” you know. Somebody’s sick, “I’m going to get sick,” you know. Drought. “Oh, there’s nothing to eat, the crops will be terrible,” you know. Too much rain, “Oh, everything’s going to be flooded out.” The wind blows, “There’s going to be a cyclone.” We just live scared. Just live scared. We, who ought to walk through our lives unafraid of anything the world could ever give us. Unafraid. That we’re just running, hiding, all the time. Afraid of everything. And then there are these who kind of live with apathy and indifference and lack of love and no response to God and just kind of get through life.

I always want to stick a pin in them enough to go on right away quick. Because all that’s inside them is air just balloon anyway. Then there’s the astute, the clever, the brilliant, the one who says, “My mind can’t accept this stuff. My intellect can’t believe this kind of stuff.” One day, a boy, you can guess who it was, a physicist in the college was listening to an atheist shoot off about the fact that he couldn’t, you know, accept this. “My intellect can’t accept that.” Just so happened that his intellect was almost a full point higher than the atheist. And this Christian boy walked up to him and said, “So you can’t accept this kind of thing.” “No,” he said, “my intellect can’t accept this type of God.” He said, “Mine can.”

Mine can. And his was higher, see. You know, it means something to know how to respond to God. Do you remember in the stories of the Bible? Those who Jesus came at with the nearest to caustic answers and the nearest to anger that Jesus ever showed was against the upright, the legalist, those who loudly claimed, “Lord, Lord,” in the temple, but who He described as whited sepulchers, dead men’s bones within them. And why did He say this? It was very simple. These people had so gone away from responding to God that, listen to this, they had lost the power to respond to God. And when Jesus, the Son of God, came, they didn’t even recognize Him. They could respond to the hymns and the ritual. They could respond to the temple worship. But they couldn’t respond to the living Christ.

And these are the ones today, I’m afraid, that God has something to say to also. You see, our church has drifted terribly. For the last 50 years, we have lived on the awful assumption that just because I’m not doing terribly bad deeds, I’m good. Just because I don’t run around to somebody else’s wife and I don’t get drunk in the line of the gutter and I don’t cheat people out of their money, just because of this, I’m good. When did goodness ever become negative? Or when did the negation of awful outward sin make a man good? Goodness is positive. Goodness is righteousness. Goodness is doing. Goodness is loving. Goodness is responding to God. Jesus came into this world to do two things. And He said it very clearly. One, to reveal to us what God the Father was like.

And the second, to open the door to the Father that we could come to Him and know Him. And the gap could be bridged and the broken fences could be made again. Listen, if this was Jesus’ job on earth, He didn’t quite get it done, did He? No, because when He died only a very few men knew about the Father. When He died, only a few had come and accepted salvation through Christ. So the job wasn’t done, was it? And Jesus handed to His disciples, a little handful of them, and said, “I give you the job of bringing to the world these two things.” Now let me ask you a question that I hope you’ll go out asking yourself for a long time.

Does my life reveal what God is like to my neighbor? Does my life reveal to my partners in business what God is like? Does my life reveal to my son or my daughter or my little child what God is like?

It kind of gets home, doesn’t it? For mine doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I don’t know about yours. I’m not your judge, but I sure know about mine. Oh, I’d love to go on there. We may not. I keep saying that loving man or the love between a man and a woman is identical between the love between a man and God. If it’s love, it’s of God’s. You see, the Bible doesn’t say that God has love. It says that God is love. And if you have love, then you have part of God.

Now, you can’t get rid of that and you can’t deny it. All right. What about love in this world? Surely, none of us are so old and decrepit and our minds have gone to pieces so badly that we can’t remember when we were in love? Oh, I mean when you were young, not this old love with moss on it. I mean young love that’s shiny and beautiful. True love. Listen, any person that falls in love with another person simply cannot rest, simply cannot be satisfied, simply cannot find fulfillment until, as far as possible, they become equated with the object of their love until they become identified with that thing which they love. You know, I don’t get mad at all when they look at me and say, “Oh, are you Verla’s husband?” That’s my wife. Doesn’t make me mad at all. Norman could have said that and I’d still love them. Yeah, “Oh, you’re Verla’s husband.” Now, that’s not generally in the case where you ought to speak to a man. But I get it said to me, people have heard her and think she’s wonderful and they kind of wonder what kind of a character would marry her and they find out that I was the guy. And then they, “Oh, are you Verla’s husband?”

Now, listen, my friends, I’m kind of proud of that. You know why? Because I love her. Yeah, I’m proud of that. You’ve said all you want to be me. It makes me happy. Why? Because I want to be identified with that which I love.

And I don’t think it bothers her to admit to say, “Oh, are you Reg’s wife?” Well, I don’t think it makes her mad. She never comes home in a fury because somebody said that to her. Why? Because I think she’s happy to be identified with that which she loves. Now, let me ask you a question. Do you love God?

When people see you, do they identify you with God? Or do they identify you as a nice person? You know, a jolly good sort. Slap you in the back, you know. What about? Do they identify you with God? You know, there are too many people in the world that want to be identified with goodness without being identified with Jesus.

This is not what Jesus taught. Now, I want to say that this thing of identification is tremendous. I’d like to have an hour on that, too. Maybe we have to run the meeting to midnight tonight. Listen, Jesus, our disciples were in a boat going across that same lake we talked about a few moments ago. And they saw something on top of the water. And you know, it got near. And pretty soon they saw it was a ghost. What would you do if you were out in the boat at night and saw a ghost coming towards on top of the water? Well, I’d like to get down under the gunwale and hide and pull a rug over me. What would you do if you saw a ghost walking towards you? You’d be scared. Don’t kid yourself a minute. You’d be scared. And so were the disciples. Who? Oh, a ghost walking here was a creature walking around across the top of the water. But when He drew nearer, suddenly somebody cried out and said, “It’s Jesus.” Oh, that changed the picture, didn’t it? It was Jesus. And Peter, this impulsive guy you can’t help but like but you wish you could whittle him down too sometimes. This Peter said, “Jesus, I want to walk on the water.”

Listen, what was he saying? Listen to this. What was Peter saying when he said, “I want to walk on the water”? He was saying, “I want to be identified with You.” Wasn’t he? Nobody else had ever walked on the water that he knew about. And now the rest of the disciples were getting out and trying to walk on top of the water. Peter wanted to be identified at that moment with Jesus. And Jesus said, “All right, come on.” And Peter got out and walked on the water so the Bible tells us and I believe it. Listen to this now. As long as Peter identified himself with Jesus, he walked on the water. But the moment he turned his face down to the angry waves and identified himself with fear, then he went. And it had not been for Jesus, he would have drowned. Now let me ask you something. This has got much to do with our later service. What are you identifying yourself with? Sickness? Disease? Old age? The creak in the neck or the creak in the back you got? What about it? I hope you’ll remember this when you come to the alternate night for a blessing. I hope you will see and be able to identify yourself with the living wholeness of Christ.

There could be miracles by the dozen tonight. If you can identify yourself with the living, loving, forgiving, healing, empowering Jesus Christ. And that’s all it takes. That’s all it takes. And so Peter identified himself with Christ and did the impossible. But when he identified himself with nature which he was afraid of, he lost. Now I’m going to say something and I hope you people who believe the Bible and maybe who believe an old-fashioned religion, which I do too, I hope you don’t throw me out and go away and misquote me tonight. I’ve had this happen. Please don’t do that. I am simply giving you something here tonight that I want you to think about. And you can forget the theology, but let me give you something. And I dare you in the next few weeks to do some real thinking about it. Sometimes these playwrights and people that maybe aren’t, we would say maybe not too Christian. I don’t know. Sometimes they give us insights that we don’t seem to find ourselves. I think Georges Bernanos gave us something here that I want to give to you and I want you to think about it. “Won’t damnation be the tardy discovery, all too late after death, of a soul completely unused, carefully folded up and spoiled, the way certain kinds of silk, all folded up and left unused for a long time, and therefore become ruined?”

My mother was given a very priceless piece of silk one time to have a dress made, but in her loveliness and loving this so much she never quite got the nerve to make it up, and she’d take it out and look at it and show it to people, but she never took it to the dressmakers, and one day when she took it out to look at it, it fell in pieces.

It had not been used and therefore had become ruined. I’m a lapidarius and you can take opals and you can let opals be by themselves and they will actually become drab, but you can let them touch a human body for as little as a half a minute and they scintillate and become alive, and that’s why the opal is nearly always worn where it can touch your skin, not on its cloth, but against your neck or against a wrist or a finger. And it comes alive.

Now what I’m saying here tonight is, isn’t it possible that the inevitable result of living too little may be a bigger sin in God’s eyes than a few mistakes? Let me be real harsh here tonight. Is it possible that a person knowing about God and knowing about his soul and refusing to use it is worse than the person who falls in the gutter having made a big blunder with sin?

Which does the most damage to those around it? I don’t know. I can’t judge this. But I’m asking you the question. Is it possible that punishment might come to us in severity more as a result of having lived too little than having lived too much?

I wonder. In fact, the matter is, this is bothering me very much. As I see Christian people 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years and cannot look to one soul that they have ever led to Jesus Christ.

Is it possible that punishment may come more severe for not having done the things that God gave you the chance to do such as witness and tell the story of the good news than the fact of breaking the Ten Commandments in a few places?

We better think about this. The church better begin to think about this. You know, we have too many people in our church. They’re like the little boy. Fell out of bed after he’d gone to sleep. Banged his head on the floor. Wakened up and started to howl and yell. And his mother came in and picked him up and put him back in bed and tucked him in. Sat down on the side of the bed and stroked his brow. Tried to get him to sleep. And she said, “Johnny, what happened to you anyway?” “Oh,” he said, “Mama, I don’t know. Except maybe I just stayed too close to where I got in.”

I don’t doubt that the church is full of people that have got in. But if they don’t have bump and sore heads, I don’t know anything. “Preacher never came to call on me.” Bump. You see. “I don’t like the way that preacher says,” Bump. “I don’t like the version he uses.” Bump. Everything else. I could take an hour on that because I’ve seen those things. Now listen. I’m asking you tonight, what makes a great person? Now I’m going to shock some of you. What makes a great person?

I don’t think you’ve got a good example of if I may use her over here, Pat. I think you’ve got a good example of what I’m trying to talk about. What makes a great personality? I’ll tell you. The person who never can be satisfied with milquetoast living.

But the trouble is that these people, if they are sinners, boy, they’re big sinners. But when they become Christian, they’re big Christians. Why? Not because big sinning makes you a big Christian at all, like I’ve heard in olden days. That if you go out and sow your wild oats and really do a lot of things, boy, you might become a great evangelist someday. No, that’s not so. Now, the most great evangelists were those kind of people. But it wasn’t… They didn’t become great evangelists because they were great sinners. They were great sinners and great evangelists because of the same thing. They were unwilling to live life half. And if they were in the camp of sin, they were big sinners. If they were in the camp of Christ, they were great Christians. Why? Because they made a great response to whatever they did.

And I believe today that this thing of living life to the hilt, this thing of being unsatisfied to just live, is what Jesus said when He said, “I came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” “I came that you might have life, that you may have it in all its fullness,” another version says. And another one which I like best of all says, “I came that you might have life and that you might have it far greater than you have ever had it before.”

Isn’t that a good one? You see, lots of people sit around and you talk about it by their life. “Oh, I’m a Christian. I’m all right. I’m a Christian.” I got lots of them. But this version says, “I came that you might have life and have it far greater than you have ever had it before.”

Now that takes every one of us in, doesn’t it? Everybody. From the bottom, if there is such a thing, to the top. And Jesus is saying here tonight, He’s saying it to you, He’s whispering it while I’m talking too loud, but He’s whispering in every heart tonight, “Son, daughter, I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”

I was up, my wife and I, holding a retreat at that beautiful place, Shady Brook Farm, just out of Cleveland. We were doing some experimenting there in silences and things which I’m tremendously interested in at this time in my life. I hope to know more about it before I see you the next time.

And we went into the silences and we have a long period of silence and part of the day over a night, part of the next day. There was a woman there who had been very, very unhappy. Her face was everything but joy. It just radiated sadness and despondency. And we went into the silences and lo and behold you, when the next day came and people were gathered together at breakfast tables, still silent, this woman was positively radiant. Nobody had spoken, no preaching, no services, no altar calls, no communion, nothing. But she was just as if somebody had turned a light on in her life. And when the silence was broken and we said to them, “Does anybody have anything to say?” Everybody knew who was going to say something. We didn’t have to be told who was going to speak first. And this woman said, “I do!” And listen, do you know what she said? “I came to this retreat terribly broken because for two years I have been fighting God. I have been afraid that if I would give myself totally to God, He’d make me something I didn’t want to be.” Now before you criticize this woman too much, just do a little bit thinking about yourself. How many of us have been afraid to go all the way with God for fear somebody would brand us as a fanatic?

Or our friends would leave us? Or the club wouldn’t want us? Or the church might not even want us? Quite a lot of people are getting kicked out of the church today, you know, because they’ve got a little extra in spots. Of course the trouble is they’ve got it in one spot. It’s a big bump and people don’t like that. We like them smooth in the church, you know. No bumps. But listen, this woman said this, “In the middle of the night last night, in the darkness of my room, suddenly I felt my body becoming warm and beginning to tingle as though somebody turned on an electric blanket.” And she said, “I came awake and I looked and there standing by my bedside in full length was Jesus Christ. And He smiled at me and this is what He said. ‘Daughter, I don’t want to annihilate you. I want to fulfill you.’” And she said, “I suddenly saw that the greatest potential there is to man, the greatest open door there is to man or woman is to let God bring them to fulfillment, the thing for which they were made. God was not trying to destroy me. God was trying to make me and I didn’t know it.” And that woman literally came alive.

She’s still that way today after many years. “I don’t want to annihilate you, daughter. I want to fulfill you.” I think I’ll tell a story here and close. I like to brag on my kids, don’t you? Yeah, my kids are just as nice as yours. I just like to brag on our kids. And we have a daughter that is a darling. Anybody in this group ever met her? Well, you’re not all… You haven’t been educated yet then. Because she’s something. Wherever she is, Bishop Goodson says, wherever that kid is, something’s happening. And that’s the truth.

Ruthie, in her junior year, went into a period of despondency such as I never dreamed anybody in our family could get into because we’re not a despondent bunch. Even if they have got me for daddy. But this girl went into despondency so great that she left school, came home from college, and wasn’t going back. We’ve never been one to force our kids like that and those things where they actually got to be half adults. So we didn’t say she had to go back. But this lovely, vivacious, bouncing, billowy kid that just everybody liked was the very opposite. Sad, morose, just everything wrong. Nobody could have any fun with her. Didn’t want to go anywhere. Didn’t want to do anything. I couldn’t get through to her. Her mother couldn’t get through to her. Nobody else could. Finally, one day, I took her out in the car. We parked on the side of the road. And I said, “Ruthie, I’ve got something to say to you. Neither your mother nor I have tried to make you tell us what’s wrong. And we’re not going to. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s your business.” But I said, “Ruthie, you are my daughter.

And the Goffs just aren’t quitters. Period. Something happened at school which you don’t want to talk about. And you quit. Now, we’re not quitters. Now, I’m going to ask you one favor. I want you to go back to school for one semester. And only one. And if… and face whatever it is. And at the end of the semester, if you want to leave that school and go to any college in the United States,” and she could have gone because she’s a scholar. Anybody glad to have her. Boston Theological Seminary offered her $1,500 a year to come and go to school there.

I said, “Ruthie, we’ll help you go to any college in America. You can choose it and pick it and we’ll be with you. But just go back and face whatever this thing is.” She thought for a little while. She looked up at me and she said, “Okay, I’ll take you.” Now, she knew she was going to move to a new college and go somewhere else. She thought, “Well, this is the way out.” So she kind of brightened up, said, “Okay, I’ll take you.” Back to school she went at the end of the semester and started again. I was going east in Ohio and because of freeways and things, I was making better time than I expected to and I perhaps driven longer days than I’d planned and I found that I had more than a half a day, more than I needed to get to my next appointment and I could go and see her at the college if I just hurried around down to see her and go on up. And so I had no way to tell her I was coming and so I went down to the college and drove into the big semicircle there in front of the girls’ dorm and there was my daughter running across the grass and I knew when I saw Ruthie something had happened.

She was her old self because she was in hi to everybody and I was, “Hi, Ruthie, hi, everybody,” you know, she was just her old self. And I said, “Boy, something was happening to Ruthie.” I stopped the car and I got out and I hollered across but she wasn’t very gentlemanly like but I hollered across and I said, “Hey, Ruthie,” and she saw me and she just spilled her books. She started running across and her books went every direction and she came across there and she fell in my arms and she bawled and bawled. I said, “Ruthie, hush up, I want to talk to you. I’ve only got an hour or two and I can’t sit around and do anything if you’re bawling, wake dry up here, let’s get talking.” She said, “Daddy, I’m going with you.” I said, She said, “No, you can’t go with me.” I said, “No, that makes sense.” So she ran off, got excused, threw a few things in the suitcase, not saying how, but put them in the suitcase, and came running out, threw them in the suitcase, in the car, and we got off. This is about the story, as she told it later. She said, “You know, I have been raised in a Christian home, and I had accepted Jesus as I thought I was a little tiny child.

And she said, I grew up loving Jesus. I grew up loving the church. I grew up loving goodness.” And her mother, who was raised a Quaker, and that’s a pretty good recommendation, she said, “I accepted what my mother was, and what my mother believed, and how she lived. And I just accepted my mother’s standard, and I wanted to be like Mother. Mother, because I thought, this is Christian. I wanted to be like Mother. Now,” she said, “I did everything I could, all through grade school and high school and up through college. But suddenly, one day,” she said, “it dawned on me that I was not living what I was professing, that I was in love with goodness and a standard of purity, but not in love with Jesus.

“Oh,” she said, “it just shook me. When I realized that I was not what I was saying I had been for years.” And some of you people are going to find yourself in this story. And she said, “I realized that I had a chosen standard. I’d accepted it. And to me, this was Christian.

“And,” she said, “when I saw it,” she said, “I’d like to broke my heart.” And she said, “I slipped to my knees. And I looked up into the face of God. And I said, ‘God, I’m sorry. I’ve been calling myself a Christian all these years. But I haven’t loved You. I’ve loved a standard. Goodness, purity. But not Jesus.’” And then with tears running down her face as she told the story, she said, “I looked up into the face of Jesus and said, ‘Jesus, I wish I could love You. But I don’t. I really don’t. I want to, but I don’t.’” And then only a college kid would say the next thing she said. For she said, “Jesus, right now, I give You the right to court me. I give You the right to court me.” And then as I said, with tears running down her face, she could hardly talk. She said, “Boy, what a lover He turned out to be.” And that girl’s life literally became alive in every avenue of her life. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen. Of course, I was closer to it to see it. But I don’t think I have ever seen a life come so alive to God as that girl did. I could keep you here for 15 minutes telling you nothing but the stories that the housemothers and the students and everything else at college told us about her.

Just let me give you two quick ones. One night she wrote me a letter. And then she signed it off. She said, “Dad, I got to quit. God told me to go up to the library. The library’s closed, but God told me to go to the library.” So she just signed off, sealed the letter, dropped it in the mail as she went to the library. But when she got to the library, here in the darkness and the shadow of those big steps were two girls sitting crying their eyes out. They were in trouble and didn’t know who to turn to or who to help them. And God brought Ruthie right along just when she needed. I was away up in the northwest and a lady came to me and she said, “Do you remember me?” I said, “No, ma’am. I don’t think I do.” She said, “You ought to.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Your daughter introduced me to you.” “Oh,” I said, “Now I remember.” And I gave her name. She said, “I didn’t come here tonight to hear you preach.” That’s an awful thing to say to a speaker. “I didn’t come here tonight to hear you preach.” She’s like Norman. And she said, “You know why I came here?” She’d driven a hundred miles.

I said, “Why?” “I came to tell you that my daughter would have been shipped from college twice if it were not for the fact that your daughter took her under her wing and even went in to live with her in a room when she didn’t want to shepherd her and to help her. I came to tell you what a wonderful girl Ruthie is and what it meant to our family.” You see, when a person… You can be Christian and be wonderful and almost do nothing for God. But when you begin to respond to Him as a person, not as a goodness, not as an ideal, not as a dream, not as a standard, but as a living Lord who comes and lives within you like a lover, you literally come alive.

And I am saying tonight, if you do not know this thing I’m talking about tonight, you can get it tonight at the altar. Yes, you can. Because we’re not going to have a blessing service here for sick people tonight. Now, I know that’s what you asked for, but you’re not going to get it. I am getting a little perturbed about becoming identified with sickness. Yes, I am.

And I want tonight for you to identify yourself with wholeness. And that means body, soul, and spirit. If there’s need in your body, that’s a part of it. But don’t get your eyes on it. Because whatever gets your attention, gets you. So let’s get our eyes tonight on the loving Christ, who walked about and made eyes to see, and lame to walk, and ears to hear, and broken people to come alive to Christ.

And Jesus is going to ask or offer to every one of you tonight the privilege of coming here to this home. For wholeness, not healing. I want you to identify yourself tonight with wholeness. Please forget the pain. And you may have one. Please forget the brokenness of your heart. Please forget the troubles and the tragedies that are all about us. And see tonight, if you’ve never seen it before, a living Christ.

With healing in His wings, yes. With forgiveness in His heart, yes. With everything, and if you have anything out of your past that is bleeding and making you broken, and you just keep at it year after year, in the name of Jesus Christ, bring it to the altar and leave it here. And never mention it again to anybody. I was preaching in Fort Worth, Texas, Carter Memorial Church, and I had talked about forgiveness. And by the way, you ought to buy my book for nothing else but that one chapter on forgiveness.

Oh, churches have bought that pamphlet, 200 and a bunch for their people. Because I have learned that the average church member does not know how to get forgiveness. And now, in this whole thing, as we come, identifying ourselves with forgiveness, I said this thing, I said, “You know, God takes our sins and casts them into the sea of forgetfulness.” And I left it there. When I got done with the service, a man came up to me and he said, “You know, I’d like to add a point to your service.” I said, “Go ahead, I’m looking for them.” “Well,” he said, “I heard somebody say that when God takes our sins and casts them into the sea of forgetfulness, He goes out and puts up a sign at the edge of the water, ‘No fishing.’”

Say amen, Pat. No fishing. Let me say something that I learned as a fisherman. We used to keep our fish in the water, you know, while they’re on a string or on a chain or something, you know, until we got more and got more and quit fishing. And listen, if you happen to leave them in there overnight and then took them out the next morning, they weren’t very nice.

You got anything like that? That you’ve been dunking, leaving overnight and dragging up the next day each day? About ready to fall off the hook by now? Listen, Jesus forgives and forgets. Oh, please give me five minutes. God taught me a lesson one time in a preacher’s home. Here was a lovely preacher’s wife who came to me broken and said, “Reverend Goff, I’ve got to talk to you.” You see, preacher’s wives don’t have anybody to talk to they can trust. She said to me, “I’ve got to talk to you.” I said, “Good. What’s the matter?” Well, she’s had family problems. I said, “Will your husband come too?” She said, “I don’t know.” She did know. He wouldn’t and he didn’t. Anyway, she came. After she poured out her woes of 30 years of unhappy married life, bitterness, hurts, unfulfilled dreams, broken hopes. And she sat there and cried and cried. And then she said, “I want you to know I’ve asked God to forgive me a thousand times.” I said, “Oh, have you?” She said, “Yes, I have.” I said, “Then why aren’t you forgiven?” She said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Let’s look at this. How do you know you aren’t forgiven?” “Well,” she said, “it all comes back to me the next day.”

“Oh, is that the reason?” Now, I said, “Doesn’t the Bible tell us that God forgets when He forgives?” “Well,” she said, “yeah, I guess so.” Then I said, “It couldn’t be God that brings it back.” Because she had said God brought it back, see. God was condemning her. I said, “Then it can’t be God, can it?” “Well,” she said, “I guess not.” If He forgets it, how can He bring it back? I said, “It can’t be God.” I said, “Who is it?” “Well,” she said, “it’s me.” I said, “Oh, no, it’s not you.” I said, “Are you human?” She looked at me and all. I said, “You got as much sense as a fish worm, an angleworm?” She said, “Of course I have.” I said, “I doubt it.” I said, “Let me prove it to you. When I was a kid in school, we had, which was a kind of a stock experiment we used to use.” I said, “We’d take, make a maze out of glass so we could see what was happening in it. And we’d take an earthworm and we’d put it in there. And we made three paths. One was highly polished glass. One was nice, soft earth. And one was sandpaper.” Now, I said, “If that worm started out over the sandpaper, he just barely got onto it and it tickled his feet and he backed up.

“Now, my, now, a worm doesn’t have brains. It only has sensory nerves. But he’d back off there and wouldn’t try it again. No, sir. Now,” I said, “if he started out over the slick glass, he’d get about half his length over and he’d start to lose traction. And he’d back up and get back in there and he wouldn’t try that glass again. But if he went out on the soft earth, he’d go back and forth all he wanted to. Now,” I said, “if an earthworm won’t go back and do that which is destroying it or hurting it, just because of purely a sensory level, then if you, then you aren’t hurting yourself. You’re not bringing it back.” “Well,” she said, “who is it?” “Well,” I said, “you’re a Bible student. The Bible tells you who.” She said, “Who?” I said, “Who does the Bible say is the accuser of the saints?” “Oh,” she said, “yeah.” I said, “Who?” She said, “Satan.” I’m awfully sorry for people that have given up Satan because they’ve got nobody to blame anything on anymore.

I said, “Satan. That’s right. The Bible says that Satan is the accuser of the saints.” Now, please don’t take this too seriously and don’t get mad at me. This actually happened and this is the way God works for me. I can’t help. I guess He’s got a screwball to work with. He can’t help but work funny ways.

I looked at her and I said to her, “By the way, when Satan comes back, you ask him to forgive you. God doesn’t bring it back. You don’t bring it back. Satan brings it back.” Now, I said, “Why don’t you look at Satan when he brings it back and just tell him to go to hell?”

A Methodist preacher talking to a Methodist minister’s wife and telling her to go to hell. She looked so shocked, you’d think I slapped her in the face. And I said, “Well, honey, that isn’t really saying anything very bad. It’s just telling her to go home.”

I wouldn’t have said that. And listen, that woman began to laugh. And she cried and laughed at the same time. It completely unlocked her as though you had taken a key and unlocked all the years of sadness in her life. She saw herself in relationship to God and Satan. And that woman has written me many letters since. And she does manuscript work, beautiful typing. Just a joy to look at her letters. But twice in her letters, down in the corner in ink, after she had typed written the beautiful letter telling me of her victories, she wrote in the corner, “And I’m learning to tell the devil to go to hell.”

Now, what I’m saying tonight is God wants to forgive tonight. And more of us are ill tonight because of something that needs to be forgiven than anything we’ve eaten or any germ we’ve taken in. That thing which is eating us mentally is now eating us physically. That’s the second stage.

God wants to forgive tonight. And I’m asking you, in preparation for the blessing service, that you will look into your life deeply tonight. And if there is anything between you and your fellow man, even if it’s all on their side, and they’re all wrong, and you’re all right, forgive. “If ye are bringing your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother hath aught against you, leave that gift before the altar, and go and first make thyself right with thy brother, and then return with your offering to God.” May I paraphrase this? Jesus was saying in unmistakable terms, “I don’t want your gifts or even your worship if there’s anything between you and your fellow man.”

I dare you to deny that. I dare you to deny that. And so, tonight, before you come to this altar, get rid of that resentment and that bitterness, and ask God to forgive you for your part in it. You may have been hurt. The other person may be wrong. That makes no difference. You see, you only have two avenues of action as a Christian when you are hurt, and you are the one that chooses which it’ll be. You can go out to resent or redeem. And it’s your choice. Nobody can make you resent. Mm-mm. You choose to resent. And when you do, you step out of the will of God and you lose the power of God in your life to help you over this thing. Please take your hand up over the wall and around, take your hand up. Okay.