You Are My Friends

You Are My Friends

by Frank Laubach

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

It seems as though this camp, more than any that I’ve been in, perhaps ever, I don’t know, is keeping close to Jesus Christ. I had thought about this time in the week that I would talk about something else, about prayer or something, but it doesn’t seem that that’s what He wants.

I heard a… had a wonderful compliment paid to me. I overheard it. A couple of people walking down the walk night before last, and one of them said to the other one, not knowing I was behind, “Oh, if some good preacher like Billy Graham only had that sermon that he preached tonight, he’d turn the world upside down.”

Well, I felt so complimented that I decided that I would review another book tonight. This one is You Are My Friends. I haven’t reviewed it for years. But I think I will tonight. At least I think the Lord wants me to.

I’ve been asking for some more ideas about that book that must be enlarged. It’s too little, I think. Maybe it’s all right, but pretty small. Christ liveth in me, and you’ve been giving them to me. For one person said, “If Christ wants our bodies for His home, then we’d just better go to the creative rhythms and keep them real in good shape for Him.” And I suppose that’s right. Correct eating and enough sleep and good exercise and keeping His home in good condition. And then another one said, “If we surrender our will and Christ takes over and runs us, He does the talking, He does the walking, He does the doing and the seeing, then we must never take any credit or any blame for the results.” That’s a little bit radical.

Unless, of course, we didn’t let Him have complete gangway. And another one, “If Christ lives inside of us, we’ll love people for the same reason that He does, not because they’re lovable, but because they need love. We won’t look around, as we men are inclined to do, and see who are good-looking or attractive and love them for that, but we’ll love people because they’re unattractive and because they’re lonesome and because they need help.” At least that’s the way Jesus was. And then another corollary is that if He’s to inhabit us and we dwell together, and He’s senior partner and we’re working, we will study His life when He was here on earth to find out all we can about our senior partner. We will take a private walk with Him every day, an hour or so a day or perhaps at night, not necessarily walking with our legs, but walking across the pages of the Gospels. If He lives in us and His job is now our job, I mean, He and we are in partnership doing His marvelous world job, the rest of our lives will be devoted to studying His plan, His divine plan for His world.

And so, I’d like to hear the rest of your corollaries. I asked Elizabeth Crowell to give me these lovely things that she quoted from this morning. She’s going to, and someday, if that book is ever reprinted, it’ll be larger. And all of you can have a partner if you want to, because I think that’s one of the most pregnant ideas in the world. It’s not mine, of course, but we don’t know where it will all end.

It means, though, that there are just two things that a partner of Jesus Christ needs to do. One of them is to keep looking, keep your eyes upon Jesus, the inner eyes, where He is with you. And the other is to keep those outer eyes on the world. For Jesus is the great physician, and that old world is terribly sick patient.

Now, I want to talk for a few minutes about what are the ways in which we can walk with Him every day. The early disciples walked down the road, back and forth through Palestine, that little country. No automobile roads, just paths. They walked, day after day. And they wrote down, as I said yesterday morning, they wrote down what He said and did. That’s how we know about it. And so we can take these four Gospels. Gospel means good news. These four good newses about Jesus. And we can listen on these pages to what those people say He did, and what He said, and how He was, how He loved. Thus, we can walk with Him across these pages. Everybody ought to do that if he’s a follower. We’re more than followers, aren’t we? We’re partners. If we’re helping Him, we ought to take a leisurely walk with Him. He used to go away from the crowd alone with His disciples. And that’s what we ought to do. Go away from the crowd alone with Him. Every day for a while. An hour or more. And if you can’t do it in the daytime, you ought to do it at night. Women, I think, as a rule, can wait till they pack their husbands off to their jobs and their children off to school and then have a good, long, leisurely time with Jesus Christ, walking with Him and His disciples across these pages sometime after 9 o’clock, 9 to 12.

If it’s a little hard to get your work done, push that work aside. Do it some other time. At least women, I think, can most likely have this time when the children are gone and their husbands are gone. Although you have it with them, too, in the devotion of the family. But a man is away at work and he’s busy, thronged perhaps with people, or at least with figures. And so, he’s got to find another time. And every man I know of who really tries to cultivate the intimate friendship of Jesus daily so you know Him better and better, be more saturated with Him all the time, every man wonders where it’ll be. I know quite a number of people who wake up about 3 o’clock in the morning, or 4 o’clock in the morning, and have their two hours before anybody else is up and before the telephone rings. And I do that myself. I don’t know whether to recommend it, but it’s the best time I’ve been able to find. No other time with my kind of life fits excepting when everybody else is asleep. You’ve got to have some time with Jesus. Now, what will you do with that hour, or two hours?

Well, you can take the ordinary version of the Bible and read it over and over until you can see it without seeing it. Then it’s finished. Then you’ve got to do something else. I recommend that everybody memorize the four Gospels, leaving out the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke. There’s nothing about Jesus in those genealogies, but everything else is about Him. And you can memorize it. I’m not recommending what I haven’t done. I memorized it four times and forgot it three times.

And when I forget it the fourth time, I’m going to start all over. But after a while, it’s time for another version. In my opinion. We have a lot of them, fortunately. And some of them are wonderful. We’ve had the 20th Century. You remember, if you’re old enough, having read that at one time. And we have a number of others. J.B. Phillips is very fascinating. And now we have the… What do they call that? Enlarge? I forget the name of that. Amplified, yes. And I’m going to be in a book where the various English meanings of a Greek word are all put in. As much like a law book does. To be sure you got all the words in. And that’s alright too. But I’m just having the grandest time of my life right now. This one here. It just came out last year. It was put out by the British. All the big churches in Britain. And the British and foreign and the Scottish Bible Societies. All collaborated. And they put out this wonderful version. And I recommend that if you read all the others, that you now tackle this one. But if you’re like I am, you get bored after a while. The same monotonous thing. And I have a suspicion that God does too.

If you’re bored, I think He is. He likes variety. We wouldn’t have made so much of it. And so I think maybe that’s why we have so much variety in the versions of the New Testament. Now there may be some people here who want to be mighty sure that these are accurate. Well, this is as accurate as the King James Version and more so. Because the King James did not have available the most important manuscripts that are now in existence. This is the most accurate Bible that has ever been put out right there in front of me now. So if you want accuracy, you don’t need to worry on that score.

Now, in addition to reading them over in fresh English ways, if you’re like I am, you have to do more than that. In order to come up to Jesus, have a new encounter with Him in a fresh way, I once took the new Gospels and read them like this. I talked to Jesus, got a picture of Him in front of me. And then Jesus says here that You were born at Bethlehem in Judea during the reign of Herod. And it says that after Your birth, astrologers from the East arrived in Jerusalem. And they asked, it says, “Where is the child who was born to be king of the Jews?” Now, I never tried to get that one printed. But why don’t you, if you feel like doing something fresh? I suggest that if you want to get completely, totally saturated with Christ until it lasts, you can begin to approximate the prayer, all of Christ and not of self, I suggest that you write a book about it. It may never get printed. But never mind, you’re writing it for your own benefit anyhow. Write it for your own benefit and then hope that it’ll be good enough for others to want it too. I really meant that. And I really did it.

After I got through talking to Him through the pages of this Gospel, I took Dr. Goodspeed, who used to be a good friend of mine, he’s gone and out of heaven, and he allowed me to do this. I took his four Gospels and changed it into I.

Well, I’ll tell you how I used to do it. And then, Frank, on the first day of Unleavened Bread, my disciple said to me, Frank. I put my own name in there, let Him talk to me. And that’s a wonderful way to walk with Him. Do that. If you can’t think of something more brilliant to do, and at least I tell you I found that very, very stimulating. There will be a… this is a sales talk. There will be another book out called The Autobiography of Jesus. Harper’s has it. And I think it’s far enough on so you can venture to announce it. Be mighty careful when you give a book to a publisher. Never mention it until it’s in galley proof, because there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the book. And I recommend you. Don’t say anything. But I think it’s far enough on so I can announce it, because they’re already publishing the news about it. It’ll be a Christmas book. And that’s what this book is. It starts out like this. Taking the Gospel of John. “In the beginning, I was the Word. And I was with God. I dwelt with God. And what God was, I was. I, the Word, was with God at the beginning.” So a whole book like that.

Whatever God tells you to do, make it fascinating. Keep it the most successful and joyous hour of your day. And if you get any bright ideas, please send them to me, because in a year or two, I’ve just got to find something else. I’ll tell you what I’m doing right now. This is awfully… I talk about myself tonight, but I don’t know how to get across this. I won’t talk about myself much longer, but one more.

At the present time, I’m trying to write a book, again, for my own benefit, first, on the compassion of Jesus. I want to get a good, hard exposure of that. Because I’ve discovered, in all these years of working around the world with non-Christian, illiterate people, hungry people, they don’t care a fig about your theology. They don’t care what you have to say about Jesus Christ. All they want to know is whether He loves them, and what He can do for them, and what He will do for them. They want to be dead sure He’s compassionate. Having learned that from illiterates, people who are in deep trouble, and by the way, all of you who work with down-and-out people, or with people who are in terrible suffering know, it isn’t theology they want. They want to know what Jesus can do for them, and how much He loves them. So, I’m rewriting, or picking out of this book here, the passages that reveal His compassion. And then, just to keep it real, alive, I’m writing it all over in my own new spelling. I don’t recommend that you do that. Well, now, if you’re a musician, then, do like Marge does. Can’t you look at that girl’s face, and see what Jesus has done for her, because she’s sung Jesus’ songs so long.

They made her look like Him, don’t they? My goodness, I don’t know anybody that looks more like Jesus. Is she around? But she’s blushing like anything. But, probably went out. But, if you were a musician, stick close to the music that’s so rich, and so abundant, and so marvelous, about Jesus. And just sing Jesus’ songs, till you look like Him.

Now, you people here in the CFO camp of Jesus, changed. Maybe you didn’t notice it in yourself, but you did in everybody else. When you came here, there was an awful lot of people who’d never been here before. You could tell right away. But now you all look like saints. And it’s because Ruth and the rest of us have been talking about Jesus, and because you’ve been singing about Him, and you’ve been having a wonderful time with Him, you didn’t know it was changing you, but has love changed? What is that? Lifted me. Christ is the best thing to change you in the world. You all have heard that old story of The Great Stone Face. Wonderful story. About this man who looked at that benign face up there in northern Vermont. Day after day, wondering if anybody would ever come who looked like him. And as he got on in later years, probably 45 or something like that, they had a big celebration one day. A poet came. And the poet turned around and said, “Ernest himself looks like the Great Stone Face.” He looked at him so long and loved him so much that he had become the embodiment of that Great Stone Face. And you and I, if we look at Him long enough and love Him well enough, we become the embodiment of Jesus Christ.

And that’s the way He’s going to save the world. By embodying Himself in people. Now, there are people. Now I’m going to begin this book. This is called You Are My Friends. Up to this time, it’s been just impromptu. But there are people who say, “I don’t know enough about Jesus or I don’t believe enough about Jesus. All these things the preachers say about Him.” And some preachers are that way too. And so the answer to that is this. You don’t have to. I heard Harry Emerson Fosdick say once what I think is true in this case. He said, “You don’t have to know a thing about Jesus in order to follow Him and love Him and study Him, excepting a thing that the whole wide world agrees upon.” Guess what it is? That He’s very, very beautiful. Spiritually there never was anybody as beautiful as Jesus. And if you want to get the best and not the second best, so far as beauty of personality and character is concerned, just follow Him to see where He leads you. I have a poem. I don’t know whether I can find it here, but it’s so packed I’m going to try to while I talk. Oh yes, this is the one. Richard Watson Gilder said this about Jesus.

When he started, he had his doubts. He said, because he admired Jesus’ beauty so much, “If Jesus Christ is a man and only a man, I say that of all mankind I will cleave to Him, and to Him I will cleave always. But if Jesus Christ is a God, and the only God, I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell and the earth and the sea and the air.” You don’t have to know at first. In fact, those early disciples, those fishermen, didn’t know as much as anybody knows today. They didn’t know a thing, excepting along came a person whose face and voice and eyes and actions were just out of this world. So lovely. Everything He said, everything He did, was a pure love. He was so beautiful, that when He said to them, “Man, if you will follow Me and stop being fishermen, come along with Me, I’ll make you fishermen of men.” And He was so beautiful, they followed Him. And that’s all they knew.

And that’s all you need to know to start. And the rest of it, if you stay with Him long enough, He’ll teach you Himself. It was quite a long time before, at last, Peter was able to blurt out, “You, I’ve seen You this long, and now I’m convinced that You are the Christ that we’ve been looking for, the Son of the living God.” He was the only one of the twelve that had caught up that far yet, I think.

And so, that’s how we start. And let’s follow Him then, a little while this evening. In fact, I believe that the only thing you need to do to convert the world, preachers and others, is not to convince them of any theology, but to give them a wonderful exposure of the heart and life and love and soul of Jesus. He sells Himself, you don’t have to argue for Him. He’s His best argument. Just let him see Him in you. And see Him in your Gospels. And let Him… let Him do the converting. You never convert anybody. He does it. You don’t convert their heads. A man convinced against his heart or will is of the same opinion still. You’re not converted until your heart’s converted. Until your love responds to His love. Until you fall in love with Him. Like you fall in love with the person you love the most, only more. In fact, Christianity is not religion. It’s just a matter of falling in love. It’s a love affair with Jesus Christ. Not doctrine, but a person.

Well… When we walk along with Him, and watch Him day by day with these disciples, here’s some of the things that we see about Him. He loved people. We see Him loving everybody. Not because they’re good looking, but because they were in need. He had a particular kind of love that was wistful, that longed to help people. He liked to be with them, and He liked to help them. We love Him for that. We see He was hungry for friendship. I don’t think there’s anything so beautiful in all the volumes in the English or German or French or any other language as the five chapters of John that began at 13 and ended 17. The night, the last night, He was with them. He knew it was. And that night He just didn’t seem to be able to stop. Oh, the beautiful words that pour out of His mouth. I almost wish that I hadn’t done anything but read those five chapters to you tonight. Because that’s better than anything anybody else can say. Love like that is… Well, there’s nothing like it. It’s out of this world. Of course it was. And even Judas, whom He knew was going to betray Him, He didn’t say anything harsh to him. He tried to woo him.

He loved even him to the very end. And then He was taken out, crucified. They had walked with the dearest, lovingest, most beautiful person the world has ever known. For three years. They got so after a while, if they had to be away from that dear person even for half an hour to go and buy food, they hurried back. And there they would find Him talking to somebody, perhaps a woman at the well. And the longer He was with them, the more they loved Him until it got so that to be with Him was heaven.

And to be without Him was… to be in despair. And then they were without Him, for He was crucified. And they ran off numb with agony. That’s the trouble with being in love too much. When that love is broken, if you don’t feel it is eternal, it becomes hell. Maybe some of you know what I’m talking about in this room. Love lost, if it was enough. The very opposite of it is terrible, and that’s the way they were. They’d gone off to… They wanted to die. Peter especially. He hated himself. Down there in that hole, because he had denied Jesus three times. Judas… I don’t know why he betrayed Jesus. Some people think that he was trying to force Him to show His hand, to bring the soldiers down. And he would compel Him that way. I don’t know what his motive was, but whatever it was, he hated himself so much he went off and hanged himself. Because he knew that he had killed not only the innocent person, but the most beautiful person the world ever met.

And then they began to see Him. I think it’s just like Jesus, that He should show Himself to the worst one in the whole crowd. I mean, the one He had saved from being the worst. The nearest one to Starr Daily. This was a woman. Her name was Mary Magdalene. I don’t know what the names of all these seven devils were, but she had seven of them. And I wouldn’t wonder at all if she was the one that caught an adultery, but probably some of the things were worse than that. She was an awful woman. And now she was a saint. She’s the one I know that wept over His feet and took her long hair and wiped the tears off His feet and poured the perfume on Him. Because He’d done so much for her. She couldn’t give Him up. The rest had gone off to hide, numb, hide and pine away and die, but she couldn’t. She loved Him too much and she went to that tomb. And there she met Him.

And then she rushed back and she told the rest and they came. And the next one He showed Him to, according to our Gospels, was the one who had denied Him three times. I think He had a motive in that. It was so like Jesus. Peter saw Him. And then He came and showed Himself to the twelve. One night, and one of them was a doubter. He wasn’t there. I mean, there weren’t twelve anymore. There weren’t ten that night. Thomas hadn’t been there and he was a doubter. And so he said, “I won’t believe it. I just won’t believe it until I see Him.” So next week He came back again. In fact, for forty days He kept showing Himself time after time to as many as five hundred people.

But there was something different about Him. Mary, when she saw Him, thought at first it was the gardener. Oh, I suppose her eyes were full of tears, yes. But at least He was different. Two of them were on the way to Emmaus and the stranger came along. Wasn’t the same. Didn’t look like Him. Not until they went into the house and broke the bread. He was different. And it even says up there in Galilee, some of them saw Him but said, they doubted. In other words, Jesus used to come incognito. And maybe He does now. Does He ever come anymore? Does He appear to people? Well, I happen to be one who knows He does because I saw Him once. And I have friends. That isn’t only my own strange psychology. Because I’ve met lots of people who have seen Him. And I think that He would come to any of us when we needed Him. If you needed Him tonight, He would appear to you. And, for example, I used to have a lovely friend in the Philippine Islands named Julia Yapsitko. She had tuberculosis, but she was a minister. She needed Him. And so He came to her and He saw her in visions. And Sadhu Sundar Singh, the greatest saint, Christian in all of India, saw Him time after time.

But it’s unusual. And perhaps none of you have, but perhaps some of you have, seen visions of Christ by night or by day. But, after all, they didn’t see Christ. Because He’s a spirit. You don’t see me. No, sir. I looked in that looking glass a little while ago, just before I came over here. And I said, “Whoever you are, you don’t look like I feel at all.”

And I don’t see you. I just see that house, that house that you live in. But you live in it, our spirit. And with our physical eyes, we don’t see each other at all. Now, it may be that He embodies Himself and comes around incognito. In fact, He says He lives in us if we welcome Him in. I’ll tell you where to look for Him. In the CFO camp, you’ll find Him all around. Look in the eyes of those who look like Him. Have the radiance in their faces. And He’s there. The Spirit is there. Or He said also that He’s in people in trouble, in beggars. I am hungry and thirsty and sick and in prison and a stranger in everybody who is in trouble. And when you help them, it’s Me that you’re helping.

Does He ever talk to us anymore like He did after He rose from the dead? Well, I wonder how many have ever had Him talk to you. I never did until 32 years ago, last January. I was out in the Philippine Islands. I had been a failure as a missionary. I had contemplated everything from going home to jumping in the lake and ending it all. I had enough religion to go out there, but I didn’t have enough religion to do a bit of good. I didn’t convert anybody. I couldn’t even get to first base with these Moros. One night I was up in a hill. Signal Hill. I wish I hadn’t started that. Wait a minute, like I get a drink of water and get hold of myself here a little bit.

I’ll see whether we can finish it. I was telling God what a failure I was. I was telling Him, “Why did You ever bring me out to these hateful, murderous, thieving, dirty, betel nut-chewing, ignorant Moros?” I had them all laid out properly. And Him too. And suddenly, my lips began to talk. We weren’t talking to Him. They were talking to Frank Laubach. My lips said, “Frank,” that’s my first name.

“Those Moros… Those Moros don’t love you because you look down on them with your white man’s sense of superiority. You got a PhD and it’s gone to your head. You think you’re a Christian and they’re Mohammedans.” Oh, He laid me out properly with my own lips talking to me. And as my lips talked to me, I said, when I got through, “God, if You’re talking to me, You’re telling the truth. You’re right about it, I know that. I hate myself. I wish I were dead.” I waited a little bit. He didn’t do anything about that. And so I said, “Well then, come and change me. Come in here and drive me out of myself. Come and make me love them.” And then it happened. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it excepting that I was as happy as I am in the best moment in a CFO camp. Happy as some of you are getting in this week. Happier maybe. I felt like a young boy who just fell in love for the first time, head over heels, walking four feet above the ground. Seemed like that. As I went down the hill, I loved everybody and everything. I loved the world. I loved the Moros. I loved everybody. I could have loved a murderous old murderer while he had his arm around me, driving a spear to my side.

I was in love. And I… I don’t know whether to tell the rest of this story. That’s off my story. All I wanted to say was this. Oh yes, that’s when… when I opened up. And if… oh nay, I can keep that way. That’s the way the world opens up. I have to rush back to the CFO camps. Now I’m letting the secret out. I don’t know whether you need me, but I just got to come back to… your camps every… four or five times a year to get that way again. And I hope staying that way. Because when you’re that way, the world opens up.

And… from that night onward, I’m sure that… He talks… back. I don’t pray anymore when I’m alone like the rest of… I don’t know how you pray when you’re alone, but I don’t pray that way anyhow. Like we do when we’re together. I just start off a little… alone over there in that room. I’m so glad you give me a room by myself… where I can say, “Now Lord, what shall we talk about?” And I let my lips idle and… sometimes they talk loud. If the woman next door here… me hears anything, don’t suspect me of having anybody in the room with me. It’s just God. And… we talk together and… He talks to me and He walks with me… and He tells me I’m His own. Now… maybe you think that’s peculiar. If it is, then there’s an awful lot of songs in the songbook that are peculiar. This is the experience I’ve found out of millions of people. Yes, He talks to us yet. He whispers to us down in here if anybody’s around and He doesn’t want to be overheard. Or if nobody’s around, He may whisper to us through our lips. I’ve told you the deepest secret I have now. If you can use it. But you say, “How can I know that it’s Him?”

You can’t. We had a little argument at our table, wasn’t it, this morning? One lady across the table said, “The Bible says you know first before you believe.” And I said, “Point to that.” I don’t know where it is. The Bible says you believe first. And you’ll know afterwards. And so in this thing I’m talking about now, it’s one of these things, just like the whole spirit world, you believe first. You try it. Go home and try it. But tonight, if you want to, many people in the United States have come to me and said, they’re infinitely grateful. Because I wasn’t afraid of the psychiatrist or the psychologist who was willing to say that I’m queer, and I let God talk to me through my lips. And they’re grateful because they do it too.

Here are some songs that show that these fellows had the same experience. I hear Thy welcome voice that calls me, Lord, to Thee. I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto Me and rest.” Jesus calls us o’er the tumult. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling.

Lord, speak to me that I may speak in living echoes of Thy tone. Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, O still, small voice of calm. Tell me Thy secret. Help me bear the strain of toil, the fret of care. He speaks and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds stop their singing. And the words I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God is bringing. For He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. If I am queer, there are a lot of queer music writers.

I am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice and have told Thy love to me. This is my Father’s world. He shines in all that’s fair, in the rustling grass. I hear Him pass. He speaks to me everywhere.

He speaks. And now, before the time is up, I got to skip a whole lot that’s in this book. You can get it now if you want to. They’ve just got a new lot of them, if it interests you. Called the French, You Are My Friends.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the other things that… the price that you have to pay, first of all, for the friendship of Jesus. You don’t have to be smart, but you have to be sincere. You don’t have to be important, but you have to be humble.

You don’t have to give Him any money, but you have to give Him everything you are. You got to be completely surrendered. And then, what does He do to you? If you let Him into your life, let Him take your will.

And then His will rules your will, and your will rules your body, and then you and He begin to do things. What does He do for you, if you let Him into your life? Well, for one thing, He makes you… your cleanser, the cesspool known as your mind. You may not be that way, but many people are. They need the cesspool cleaned out, evil. I don’t mean only sex. I mean selfishness, pettiness, cattiness, gossip. I mean dislike. I don’t like him, don’t like her. I’ll help her myself.

Cleans that out. You can’t talk with Him and walk with Him without getting cleaned. His love does that for us. And then it enlarges us. The trouble with us all, everybody that I meet, including myself, is we’re too little in this big world for this new one world that we’re getting into. We aren’t one. That’s the trouble. The world’s full of little people. He enlarges us. Enlarges our love. We’re like Edwin Markham’s poem that talks about another man. It says like this, “That fellow drew a circle that left me out. He called me a heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.” But says Edwin Markham, “Love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle. It took him in.” The trouble with the world is our circles are too little. To the people inside of that circle, we’re heaven. We’re angels. But to the people outside, they’re as heathen. And not to Jesus. He drew a circle. And took the world in. Because God sent Him. Because He loved this wicked, needy, old world. And as we walk with Him day by day, we’re going to be enlarged and we can’t help it. And then there’s a higher heroism. Now this is the toughest thing to say. You can’t say it. You don’t know how to say it.

The soldier that goes out and risks his life while he’s killing other people is a hero. There’s no doubt about that. That is to say, unless he’s frightened from somebody behind and has to run ahead to keep away from the man behind him, there isn’t a hero. But many are heroes. And when you put up these monuments all over the United States, those names there is heroism. But there’s a higher heroism that Jesus knew.

But He’s had an awful time helping us see it. For He went straight to Jerusalem, not to kill anybody, but to tell them the truth and let them kill Him without hating. The highest heroism in the world is to let them do you dirt and spit on you and flog you and rob you and take everything you’ve got and finally kill you and keep on loving them. That’s tough. And I don’t believe it was ever done until Jesus died on the cross. I believe it’s the first time in history. I can’t find anybody who ever did it anywhere else. And those who have done it since, and there have been lots of them, and as I said the other night, I hope one of you will get inspired to write the next book that needs to be written, The Martyrs. There were thousands of martyrs who went to the cross, like Stephen, when he was stoned to death, said, “Father, do not lay this into their charge. I see the heavens open and Jesus there sitting beside the throne.” And when Paul saw that, Saul I mean, the man that they were, who had engineered this thing, they threw their cloaks down at his feet, while they stoned Stephen to death. When he saw that he couldn’t take it.

And a few months later, Saul had a blinding light because Stephen’s death got down in his subconscious and he couldn’t take it. And the Christian church, I mean the early Christians, conquered the Roman Empire the same way Stephen conquered Saul, by going out and dying the higher heroism.

If I have been talking with feeling, I won’t tell you what it is, but I am having a fight myself this week, and I am rather enjoying it the last couple of days, I didn’t at first, saying, “Lord Jesus, You’re giving me one of these tough things, to see whether I’ve learned the lesson from You, and can take it.” And just as that encourages you, it isn’t as bad as it could be, I mean, we have lots of bad things, but if it encourages you, maybe your trouble, your problem is God’s compliment. Jesus Christ Himself went out and took that higher kind of heroism, the heroism that can take it and never hate.

And you and I are being tested. If we aren’t during this week, maybe He sent you here, as I suppose He sent me here, to take it without hate. And if you aren’t tonight, it will happen. And then remember that it’s God’s compliment. I told you night before last, that when a cannibal eats you, it’s because he admires you and sees something in you. It’s a compliment to be eaten by a cannibal. But I will tell you now, that it’s a compliment to have trouble, so big that it makes you want to hate. And then to have Jesus Christ take it all away, until love flows over you. And I can testify that… He’s doing that to me. And that reminds me, before that little watch here of mine says, stop, that’s the meaning of suffering. A meaning. Many people wonder why we’re allowed to suffer. He was made perfect through suffering. And suffering does something to you and me that we don’t like while it’s happening. But I verily believe that anybody who ever suffered in the world was made a nobler child of God, was brought nearer to the condition that Heaven wants, than the people who never had any suffering at all. So if it comes to you, my dear friends, it’s coming to some of you in this room here tonight.

Thank God. I will testify at the age of 78. I’ll be 78 in about a week from now. And I want to testify that whenever I look back 10 years and see troubles, lots of them, my own fault, maybe all of them, but troubles and difficulties back there, they were always better for me than my smooth, happy times when I had automobiles and apple pie and everything sweet and lovely. You coast along and you aren’t going a bit. But when you go through the valley of the shadow, then you grow. I know that’s one of the meanings of suffering. Must be.

Now I haven’t… I guess I’ll have to finish this tomorrow. I want to talk to you about the wonderful rewards you get from the friendship of Jesus. And although I had another speech in mind that wasn’t about Jesus tomorrow morning, I’m going to begin it this way. If you’re around, you’ll hear it. What are the greatest rewards that come from letting Him inside to be your partner, your dearest friend? Oh, they’re wonderful. They hardly need to be told to you when you’re in the CFO camp. For one thing, I’ll just name one.

Birds of a feather tend to flock together. And when you’re this way, you meet other people who are this way, and then you and they get to loving each other like we do here at the CFO camp. And we say, isn’t this heaven? It’s heaven because heaven’s in you and in that person sitting beside you. And heaven’s there because Christ is there. If it weren’t for Him, what would a CFO camp be? I bet we’d be quarreling in half an hour.

Because, well, we wouldn’t be CFO. We wouldn’t be here in the first place. That’s the difference between the camp and out in the world where those around us have not let Him in their hearts. Let’s pray. Oh, it is wonderful. Oh, it is wonderful. Very, very wonderful.

All Your love for us. We don’t know much about it yet, Lord, but once in a while it sweeps over us. Oh, how we love You. And then we say, “If ever I loved You, my Jesus, ’tis now.” Thank You that, while we can’t understand You, You’re too, just too marvelous. We can understand a little about You. And everything we do understand makes us love You more.

I pray You that all of us may be like that soil that was rich and when the seed fell on it grew. It didn’t get choked out by other things. May this determination of ours to spend the rest of our lives day after day cultivating Your friendship and walking with You until, like those disciples, they said they took notice of them that they had been with Jesus. And that’s why they were so courageous and so zealous to tell the good news. Help us to keep on walking with You until we grow more and more like You. Until after a while we can look in the mirror and say, “Well, that does look a little like Jesus.”

In His dear name, in Your dear name, we rededicate ourselves to You. You’re the hope of the world and we can’t do a thing for the world unless You do it. We can’t be… do what we aren’t and we can’t be anything unless You make us over. So, for the world’s sake, and for the sake of the joy of knowing You, we reconsecrate our lives. Help us not to be fickle, but to see it through.

The promise we just made. Amen.