Authority in a big old black Book

Came home from work this evening looking forward to replaying the CD I finally found in a large pile but--get this--it doesn’t play on my boom box’s CD player. The title of the sermon from August 22, 2004 is “A Change to Keep.”

I looked through the Shorewood archives and couldn’t find it. I did find a good one, though, entitled “It Became a Proverb” and here’s a first installment from it.

I came down with a cold sometime today and it is worsening each hour now with building pain in my head, eyes and ears to go along with the congestion that’s causing me to cough and have my throat feel sore. Wish I had a reserve bottle of Robitussin in my medicine cabinet, but I’ll just have to take some Tylenol and get to bed early since there’s no calling in sick tomorrow—Saturday is my biggest day of the week at work.

John 14:23: [23] Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

You’ve got in your lap the greatest book the world’s ever seen and the wonderful thing about it is you can understand it. You can get it and you can get into it and KNOW what’s involved in what God Almighty’s doing in the world, said Richard Jordan, who mentioned he was 36 years old during the message.

If you don’t have that Book, you don’t have any way to demonstrate whether or not you love the Lord. He said, “If you love me, you’ll keep my words,” and if those words aren’t available to you to keep, and you don’t have them and you’re not keeping them, you don’t have any proof that you love Him.

I mean, folks, you think God Almighty would have inspired His Word, and then He was just so tired and pooped out, impotent and worn out from inspiring it, that He couldn’t preserve it and keep it so you can have it today?!

You ever thought about that for any length of time? Not just that He wrote it in original manuscripts, but that He’s preserved it for you and there’s somewhere for you to get your hands of them?

When Jesus said, “If you love me you’ll keep my words,” He expected His people to be able to know where that Book was and be able to hold it in their hands and be able to believe it and obey it. And it’s demonstration and proof of their love for Him.

If you took the Bibles of the average Believer . . . Billy Sunday said one time that if you took all the Bibles on Christians’ shelves and blew the dust off of them, you’d have a dust storm.

I’m sorry to say but I’d be willing to guess that there’s a lot of you folks that between Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night, you take that Bible and put it on the shelf and it gathers dust.

And you just think, as far as Bible-Believing people go you’re some of the cream of the crop. You think of the treatment it gets out there.

Take a look at that Book of yours and hold it up. How many of you have black ones? How man of you have red ones? Red is the blood; that’s a bloody Book.

The most prominent color is black. You ever heard anybody say, “Put that down in your little black book.” You know what they’re talking about? That Book’s the authority.

I used to go around Down South in the late ’60s and preach on the street. They had a lot of racial tension across the South then and we’d go all through Mobile and other cities all around  and I didn’t have any problem at all.

You know what I learned? Any neighborhood I went into, it didn’t matter what the racial makeup, or the economic makeup, I take a big old black Book and stick it under my arm and I could walk down through any crowd and people got out of my way.

I used to get on the bus, lay that Book on the seat—you don’t wany anybody to sit next to you on a crowded bus, you know what you do? Lay that big old black Book on the seat next to you.

Now, it won’t work on an airplane because there are assigned seats, but they’ll be eyeballing that thing. If you had a Playboy magazine, they wouldn’t look at you twice, but you open your brief case and get out that big old Book and lay it out and you’ll hear, “Uhh, uhh,” and get people moving around, all upset. That’s the authority.

New bibles, they don’t put them out in black; they lost the authority.