Lets be good and mad

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And we must ask ourselves if he, the sinless saviour, was ever angry in his life on earth, and the answer is, oh yes, indeed, several times and on several famous occasions. But let me hasten to add that where anger in man is mostly born of human passion, anger in Christ is always born of a spiritual principle. Remember this, please.

For example, in Mark 3, Jesus faces a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath day. He also faces the Pharisees who had withered religious hearts, whose only gripe in order to trap him was the piffling preservation of a calendar day. Read it sometime.

The Lord Jesus looked round about them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts, and said, Is it a day to save lives or to destroy them? Then he healed the poor wretch, but marked the principle behind his anger, the constructiveness. Again in Matthew 23 and John 2, respectively, we find him blasting these same Pharisees as hypocrites, tombs covered with whitewash. What a description! For their high religious profession and their low irreligious practices, Jesus burst forth with anger.

And the usual money changes in the temple, when in anger he took a scourge and drove them out of the temple, crying in John 2, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a house of merchandise and a den of thieves. Surely as we witness what is going on within the established church in our day, God's challenge of righteous anger should become a major issue in national life. For the church political is loud in telling the world where it is going and how to go.

A bombshell for my Lord. Does the organized church with all its millions of hungry, few worshippers any longer know where it is going? Malcolm Muggeridge, that inimitable British satirist, recently wrote the most extraordinary thing about human beings is the fact that they pursue ends which they know to be disastrous and turn their backs on ways which they know to be joyous. How true, how true! Then why in God's name does the church armed in the pulpit with the Holy Gospel concentrate on humanity's salvation through Christ? Why does it not? And cease dabbling as amateur psychiatrists on humanity's problems in a knowledge that when Christ came to earth, he did not bother with externals, but he went straight to the heart, the evil sinful heart of man to make it pure in the new birth.

Beloved, we must have good people before we can have a good nation. And let me drop another thought right here. It is not buildings that make slums and sorrow.

It is people who make slums and sorrow. People in need of our Savior. Does all this mean there is then no hope or way out? Oh, not in my Bible.

What I'm trying to imply is that we as believing Christians should actively hate wrong deeply because we love the right so deeply. But we're not going to be worth our salt if we merely warm a pew for one hour on Sunday morning, very often listening to religious drivel. Be angry and sin not.

Let's be good and mad. Let the world see a militant church singing and acting the hymn onward, Christian soldiers marching unto war, war for righteousness sake in these desperate days. Tell that man in the pulpit of yours if he fails to glorify Christ that he would be better sweep in gutters honestly.

Listen, beloved, if the Bible holds out no hope for our nation, now dabbling in witchcraft and astrology to the tune of 40 million citizens a day, then America has no future and our country will soon need a new Gibbons to write the decline and fall of the United States of America, God forbid. Something quite a number in our land would find acceptable to their distorted taste. But thanks be unto God, there is hope.

And my time being up on this tape, you will find that hope in Psalm 77. Read it tonight before you go to bed and let us as Christians rise up as we feel the tang of it in our very souls and lift the cross high when we come to verses 10 to 14. The Lord be with you and bless your spirit and make you in these days gospel fearless for the Lord.

Let me read the 77th Psalm referred to, and I trust it will bring to your heart the thrill it brought to mind. Psalm 77, the chief musician. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, even unto God with my voice, and he gave ear unto me.

In the day of my trouble, I sought the Lord. My sore ran in the night, and ceased not. My soul refreshed to be comforted.

I remembered God and was troubled. I complained and my spirit was overwhelmed. Thou holdest mine eyes waking.

I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. I called to remembrance my song in the night.

I commune with mine own heart, and my spirit made diligent search. Will the Lord cast off forever, and will he be favorable no more? Is his mercy clean gone forever? Doth his promise fail forevermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? And I said, This is my infirmity. But I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High.

I will remember the works of the Lord. Surely I will remember thy wonders of old. I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy doings.

Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary. Who is so great a God as our God? Thou art the God that doest wonders. Thou hast declared thy strength among the people.

You will remember that Wesley and Whitfield and his brother Wesley, who wrote the hymns, led England into such a spiritual awakening to prove this psalm, that it saved the mother country from the ravages of the French Revolution. God give to us in America that glorious experience.