Pure Heart, Pure Church - Part 5

The Lord's my shepherd, I shall not want, so forth. You can turn that round, work on it, it's, they're all in metres the psalms. Or get a Presbyterian psalm book, or get a Presbyterian psalm book.

And all the psalms at the back are in metres. The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want, he makes me down to lie. In pastures green he leadeth me, the quiet waters by.

Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me, and in God's house for evermore my dwelling place shall be. It's beautiful. He writes the 23rd psalm, he sings it.

But he's in a different situation from when he said, when he wrote this psalm. He says, Thou desirest not sacrifice, thought I would give it. The sacrifice of God out of broken spirit.

What else does he say? In verse 8, Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken. He hadn't got a broken bone in his body. He's using a figure of speech.

In 1951 I jumped out of a burning hotel. We had had two weeks of revival in Dr. Tozer's church, which he said were the best revival in 25 years. I had a prayer partner.

He hadn't been to bed for five nights, dear old Tom Hare. Tremendous man of intercession. We went to bed on the Friday night, pardon me, Saturday night.

About half past two I heard fire, fire, fire. I thought, well, oh dear, this is terrible. Somebody's in a building on fire and it's snow outside.

Wouldn't be where I was, of course. I mean, how would the church go on if I died? Incredible, surely that couldn't happen. When I die, the world will stop, or the church will, surely.

I mean, you know, I've put so much into it. Well, it happened to be that I was in the frying pan. The hotel we were in was burning.

A few weeks ago a boy died from a 30-foot tower in the Olympics. Somebody said to him, how high is the tower? He said, from the ground up, 30 feet. Went at the top looking down 300 feet.

I was 30 feet up in that hotel and I looked down in the middle of the night. There's the floor down there. People shouting jump, I thought, yeah, that's fine.

No problem jumping, you're putting the brakes on when you get nearly to the bottom. But I landed on my heels, crushed my feet, what do you call the oscalsis, the heels. Crushed like fine sugar, the doctor said.

My leg was in three pieces, three brakes in my back. Both my feet broken. I'm lying in the gutter outside the hotel and a guy comes around the corner.

He says, what are you doing here? Well, obviously playing tennis I'm down here. He says, you can't stay here. I said, I don't want to.

Get up and go away. I said, I can't, my back's broken, my legs are broken, my feet are broken. Oh, I don't think it's so bad.

I said, well, I do. Well, he said, listen, you can't stay here, listen to his humour. Something will come around the corner and run over you and get hurt.

That's all I need. Let me put you over there. No, no, please don't lift me.

He put his hand under my legs here and my back. And you know when he did all those bones just screamed up. And gracious man, he laid me in about 18 inches of snow.

I wasn't ready for refrigeration. I didn't want to stay there. I soon began to shake and quiver.

But you know, I'll tell you what I realised, what this psalm has meant has meant a lot of difference since then. When I got all those bones broken and there was no healing for a long while. It wasn't possible to turn.

And David says, when I'm out of relationship with God, I'm full of broken bones. And there's no way that they can be healed. He says, a broken and a contrite heart thou wilt not despise.

A broken heart, a contrite heart, a grieving heart, a heart that's restless. You're not finding some temporary antidote. He wants that relationship that he had with God to be restored.

Now look at the difference in the psalms. 23rd Psalm, calm and beautiful. In this psalm, he's like a boy that's, to use a very simple, weak argument, like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Here he is loathsome in the sight of God. But the Himalayans say, quicken my conscience till it feels the loathsomeness of sin. There are no mild cases of sin, any more than any mild cases of cancer.

They're all deadly. What does he do in this psalm? He says, hide thy face, ease of holier eyes, and to behold iniquity. How do you feel God thinks about the average congregation in our churches today, where sin doesn't matter anymore? Full of adulterers and liars, and divorced people, and all kinds of crimes that have been done.

And there's no preaching against sin. Oh, once God exposes his light on human corruption, and only then do men cringe and howl for deliverance. Realize they've got leprosy, worse than leprosy, worse than cancer in their breasts.

David here says, hide thy face from my sins. Do you remember the 139th psalm, when he says one of the bravest things I think ever written by man? He says to God, search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way.

That was when he was living as close to God as he ever lived, or maybe anybody else ever lived. He did not fear the searching eyes of God. He hadn't broken the commandments of God.

He was walking in total obedience. But here he says, hide thy face from my sin. Don't come with the searching eyes.

And all him says, search me, oh God. Like he is talking about himself. Search me, oh God, my actions try.

And let my life appear as seen by thine all-searching eye. To my eyes thy ways make clear. Search all my thoughts, the secret springs, the motives that control.

The chambers where polluted things hold empire o'er the soul. Search till thy fiery glance hath cast its holy light through all. And I by grace am brought at last before thy face to fall.

Search me, oh God. I believe the normal Christian life is a life of holiness. It's easy to sing that hymn holy, and by the way, melody there.

I've heard that hymn sung round the world. You can't sing it without moving me to tears. I didn't go to the concert last night, I did something better, I prayed for them.

We never sang that hymn with more delight and rapture than when Keith Green thumped it out on that piano in Brown's house. We didn't have to sing. He had his own interpretation.

He put additional words, I was going to say, additional notes into it. I've heard people comment about that. Oh, I remember, a lady came from Arkansas one night.

The meetings we've been having down there in the last days, which were going to start the last week of this month, all being well. Do you know people have come from Mobile, 700 miles to come to a prayer meeting? Do you know two lords of them come every Friday night from Oral Roberts University and say, why don't we have a prayer meeting like that? I said, ask Oral. Do you know they come from seminaries? Isn't it a shame that people have to drive 4, 5, 600 miles to a meeting that's solely given to prayer?