Eating Money

“So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”—Luke 12:21

We have here the picture that Jesus draws of the rich fool. Now it is pretty hard to tell the world that there is such a thing as a rich fool, because nearly everybody thinks when a man gets money he is about the wisest thing on the earth, and they think when money comes it is about all you can ask for, and it seems to be the god of this world.

God has said Himself, that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and there is something about the laying up of gold that is very peculiar. There is a fellow called Death Valley Scotty, a man from Death Valley in California. He has discovered gold out in that place, and no telling how many “nicks he has on his gun” (how many men he has killed); but he said not long ago that whenever a man saw gold he went crazy.

He said, “I have gone into a man’s office in this country, and reached my hand into my vest-pocket and pulled out a gold nugget and sat there talking to him, fingering the gold nugget. The man would say, ‘what is that you have in your hand?’ ‘Just a little gold nugget.’ ‘Let me see it.’ He would take it, and say,—his eyes would commence to gleam and he would say, ‘Where did you get that?’ He wanted to get some more like it.” That nugget looked better than if he had pulled out a twenty dollar gold piece and sat there fooling with it. The man would pay no attention to that,—used to seeing money; but when he would see the gold he was crazy over it, thinking of the source of supply, that he might get some more.

Somehow this world has bowed the knee to treasures, and although every man hasn’t the treasure, yet it is the love of it that God is talking about. There is many a man, who, poor as the proverbial church mouse, has a deep hunger for treasure, and really thinks if he gets hold of money he is going to get life and power and satisfaction,—and the multitude thinks that. That is the gospel of the multitude—money. They may not have it, or be striving for it in the right way. It may never come to them, but the desire for it is there.

Thank God that Jesus came into this evil world to tell us that God cares for us, and that it isn’t our business to fret ourselves if we are His about these things that the nations of the earth seek after; but He says there is something else better that we may see after.

Sowing to Self

A Norwegian legend is told of two brothers who sailed out on one of the old-time ships to discover a new country. They were shipwrecked, the rest of the crew were lost, and only these two brothers were saved. The old ship was thrown up on the rocks, and after they finally got to land and got their breath back and themselves straightened out, they made their way out to the ship and found that, although most of the supplies had gone down, there was considerable grain left, enough to keep them six months.

They talked over their plans together, and the older brother was very quarrelsome, and said to the younger, “I am the older, and the boss of the food supply.” The younger brother said, “Let’s not eat it. Let us not be so foolish as to use it up.” The other replied, “A ship will pass within a week and we can get away and will have this grain to sell, and we may as well eat what we want.” The younger pleaded with him to go with him into the woods and get something to eat, and save the precious grain, but the other said, “If you are going to quarrel with me you had better leave.” “I would just as soon leave,” said the younger. “Well, what do you want,” said the older brother, “you can’t have this or that, what do you want?” “I want a bag of wheat and a bag of corn.”

He took his wheat and corn and said goodbye, and the older man said to himself, “Now I am happy, with everything to myself, and when a ship comes and takes me away with this grain I will be in luxury, and the cannibals will get my brother.”

Sowing for Others

The younger man went off into the country and traveled many miles over the hills into the region beyond. As he journeyed, he gathered what food he could find, opening one corner of the sack to take a few grains now and then to eat when it became absolutely necessary. Over in the south land he found a race of black men, to whom his heart went out, and he longed to be of help to them. So he went down and made friends with them, and said, “Now I want your help.” They cleared away some of the forest and underbrush, and he very carefully began to plant his wheat.

They said, “That is white man’s food. You cannot live on our rough food.” He said, “Oh yes, I can live on it.” And he lived on their rough food while waiting for the harvest. That year he had a splendid crop, and saved it all. They clamored for it and said, “We want the white man’s food”; but he told them, “I am boss around here, and any man that touches this grain to eat it shall die.” They told him he was stingy, and he said, “No, I am not stingy, I am only giving you a chance to have plenty to eat.”

He kept all the crop that year for seed, and kept on working the natives and talking to them and educating them. The days and years went by, and finally, a man of great wealth, he went down one day to the port. A ship was coming in and he went back to the old home. His brother, he learned, had died in poverty, and had passed out to be no more. They asked him, “What have you done?” He answered, “Well, I have fed a multitude.” Astonished, they exclaimed, “Why, your brother told us you didn’t have enough to live on, that all you had was a little grain.” “Yes,” he said, “If I had stayed around eating that grain I would have been dead, but instead of eating it, I sowed it, and now we have abundant harvests in that country, and the people are blessed.”

Give It Out

I tell you my friends, the world is dying today for the Gospel, and dying because we have had so many Christians who are eating it and sitting down alone and forgetting to plant. We have churches all over this country, with anywhere from sixty thousand to a half million dollars over their heads, with the finest kind of music, with splendid oratory, with entertainment that runs riot,—and the Gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t get outside the door and across the street. And away in yonder alley, and down the streets the multitudes go by, and haven’t even heard the Gospel of the Son of God.

We are eating our money! We are eating our own Gospel! We are living on the Bread of Life, and not passing it out to anybody else. I want to say to you, that not only is God going to say to the man who has eaten of the world, and turned Jesus Christ down, that he is foolish, but in that day when the saints are caught up and the crowns begin to pass out, they will look back and say, “Oh, what a fool I was. I took my ease in my church, I took my ease in the world, and the men and women died all around me for the Gospel that I could have given out, and I have no crown.” Others will wear crowns and sit in His throne with Him, and the overcomers shall go on from glory unto glory; but you are saved, “as by fire.”

Oh, the castaways that there are this morning because of this desire to have something for themselves! Oh, how groups have arisen that have called for this kind of a preacher or that kind of a preacher that would put balm on their ears, and “have gotten to themselves teachers having itching ears.” These haven’t pushed the workers forth, but gathered them in and fed them, and there they sit this morning, fat and overfed. They may be saved, but just above them hangs a crown, and Jesus says, “Oh, why don’t you leave every weight, and the sin that so easily besets you, and run, run! Run! With patience, the race that is set before you.” Spend, give out, and then you will live, “He that loveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for my sake, shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Spiritual Inactivity

Some are sitting with a sad heart that could have had a heart bounding with the glory of God, if they had given out the Gospel God has given to them. God will not allow anything in this world to take precedence over the passing out of the Gospel. He will not allow any doctrine that is preached to take precedence over the salvation of souls, and it doesn’t make any difference how precious that doctrine may be. God has given us the Gospel, and told men to give themselves to the getting it out, and if you exalt anything above it, whether a church building, or organization, or preacher, or society, or money, or clothing, or folks, above putting out the Gospel, you will find out that the cold finger of God is upon that people and they will die—spiritually die, in their church.

You remember the experience of that mighty Bible teacher of God, how he said he prayed in his wealthy cold church. It was after his return from a Bible conference, where there was fire, I think, and where he caught fire himself. He said, “Oh, God, I don’t care what my people think, or do. They have got to get out and preach the Gospel. I have preached to them long enough. Now they have to get it out. Lord, any way, but get us out.”

A week from that day the church burned down, and everybody said, “Oh, what a catastrophe. God has left us.” “No,” the pastor said, “God is with us. He has burned up our old comfortable nest. Now beat it out into the highways and hedges and compel men to come in.” They had to hire a hall, and stirred themselves like a flock of dusty sheep, with the wool and dust dropping behind them. Some of you have moss on you an inch thick, and may the Holy Ghost get you out this morning, yielding time and money, and the life that ought to go out to somebody else. 

You are eating the seed crop. They say seventy-five per cent is all they can get of the usual potato crop this year, because people have eaten the potato seed, and haven’t saved enough for seed. They wanted a bumper crop of potatoes, and haven’t even enough to plant, because they have eaten them. The world is dying for this Gospel of Jesus Christ, and some folks are eating the Gospel and not giving it out.

God intended when you ate it that you should spring up a thousandfold and bear sixty or a hundred-fold of fruit. He saved us, not only for the joy of salvation, but for service,—that we might be His friends, and know His acts, and go out and spread the Gospel as His last commission told us to, everywhere in the world.

The Gospel First

Whatever you put ahead of the Gospel God will put down if He has to burn your church or your good works, or your society. Anything you put ahead of the Gospel or simple evangelistic message you will find out will not prosper, and the first thing you know the very center of the church that exalts anything else but the Gospel pure and simple, before long will be rotten at the heart. Either the preacher or board or someone that has something to do with the organization, will become putrefying before God and before the people, and the whole thing will be in a mess.

Some time ago there was spreading through this country what was called the “Holiness Movement,” and men absolutely went into a town and took a meeting, and refused to preach salvation, and talked about nothing but sanctification and the filling of the Holy Ghost. Precious as the doctrine of the life of victory is, and to tell men that there is a crisis in the Christian life where a man may be all the Lord’s,—as precious as that is, God will not allow any people to exalt it above the simple Gospel message. Any group of people that get themselves together and say, “We will just exalt this truth,” has gone to the bow-wows right before you, although it started with a flame of fire. God intended that men should get together and be blessed, but then, that they should use this blessing and fullness of the Holy Ghost to scatter abroad everywhere and go everywhere preaching the Gospel.

If God ever let the fire and the Holy Ghost into your heart, He put it there that you might preach and teach Jesus, born from above, of the Virgin Mary, dying, risen again for our justification and redemption. That is what He told us to preach. Somebody says, “Well, but Mr. Rader, I love the second coming.” Yes,—so do I, but I want to tell you, if there is a class of people going to seed, it is the bunch of people who are teaching the second coming of Jesus Christ, and counting evangelism and Gospel preaching as secondary. One crowd went rotten preaching about holiness and forgetting everything else, and we have a class of people these days that haven’t done anything but search the Scriptures to get the program all arranged and split hairs on the coming of Jesus Christ, and , as beautiful and glorious as the hope is (and I love it with all my heart), any people that set the Gospel message aside to preach the second coming of Jesus Christ, will lose their power and become as a stick.

Ever since I struck this pulpit, and before I started to preach to you, I have stood for divine healing, for the truth that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever,” but if this church were to try to exalt that thing, or put it out of its place, God would make us an off-scouring to the world; and I testify before High Heaven today, that I have never done such a thing and exalted it above the Gospel; but the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been the message of this pulpit from the time we started. We have preached the second coming, and entire sanctification, and the filling of the Holy Ghost; but God has been saving souls here. Somebody asked a friend why the people came to our Tabernacle, and why we didn’t have split-ups, and he said, “I don’t see how people stand for the message.” He said, “Men and women want everything God wants them to have, but first and foremost and all the time, the Gospel message of Jesus Christ must have the preeminence, for the lost multitudes that know nothing about salvation.” 

The lost people on the outside must have the simple Gospel passed out to them, and once in a while we can take a night and have a service and get at the Christian, and cut to the bone and show him how much he lacks in the victory Jesus Christ has provided and have him make a full surrender and go through; but if you do that and then sit around and say, “We have it now,” there will be trouble. What did you get it for? It was dynamite to carry the Gospel and power to bear fruit.

Equipped for Service

Why does a soldier take off his fine clothes and lay his tie and collar aside, and put on the khaki uniform? So he can parade up and down the streets of Chicago, and have his picture taken and send it home? No,—so he can go to the trenches. He stripped for service. That is what his uniform shows. The marks of death are on his shoulder and hat and uniform. There he stands, a living testimony to the fact that he says, “I am going out to be shot if need be.” God pity the people that receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost that don’t have every mark on their life saying, “Here I am, out on the firing-line for service, ready to be shot if need be.”

God wants men and women to give up to Him with no reservation, so they can go out and carry the Gospel to the end of the earth. It is our business to turn down any method that becomes rutty or gets into a groove, and hinders us in carrying the Gospel to others. Let us renew our allegiance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a new resolve to spread it.

I know that the men out on the firing-line for Jesus won’t stand when the storm comes unless they are sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. They will run and play to the flesh every time; but the men who are absolutely given up, and the women that have gone through with Jesus Christ, are the ones you can send into the city or to the uttermost part of the earth, and they will stick there in glory, and have joy in their hearts, and won’t be writing home and telling how lonely they are. They will say, “It is such a privilege to suffer for Jesus.”

But, my friends, you cannot even exalt the blessed experience of fullness that makes men stick, above the simple story of Jesus Christ for the lost; and what I am trying to do is to get your vision on our city that we love so much, with two million and a half people, and, oh, so few who have heard the Gospel. That is what this church should have on its heart. God has taken us away from the old corner and the old church, that if ever a people could love a church, you could love every brick of it. If ever a people could love bricks there are bricks there that are sacred on that old corner, but I praise God for a people that will leave a historic spot to go anywhere they can catch people for Jesus Christ. It is a joy, and God has made it a great blessing to us.

As long as God furnishes the vision, throw the net around the fish and go out as far as you can, as far as you have the spiritual muscle and faith, and then all pull together for the convert. I praise God that our vision and work is not bounded by these Tabernacle walls, but from time to time we come before you and call your attention to things that are out yonder. The last time I preached to you, I praise God, we raise $20,000, and got over 100 missionary volunteers,—not for ourselves, but for the uttermost part of the earth. We will never go rotten in the middle as long as we keep that kind of work going on the outside. As long as we have a vision of the perishing world, and know that we only have a recruiting station, an officer training camp in our church, where men get hold of the Lord and are trained and fitted for service, and thrust forth by intercession into the harvest, one will be blessed.

Lazy Christians

You say, “But Mr. Rader, it is a sacrifice.” It certainly is. Here sits this “rich fool” on his porch, in luxury, with servants at his beck and call and everything he wants to eat. He is looking over his plantation, and can see the servants working in the fields, and says, “We are going to have a bumper crop this year, what shall I do? I guess I will tear down my old barns and build bigger. Then I will fill them up and lie back and say to my soul, “Soul, you have much treasure for many years.”

But, oh, my friends, there is another voice that comes on the scene, like the ghost in Hamlet; it always creeps in, and that is the voice of the Lord, and God says to him, “Hey, Soul!!” and the poor fellow wakes up and yells, “Come to my rescue Barns!” “Soul!” comes the call again,—“Houses and lands,” he replies; “Soul!!” the Lord says, “Money,” the man cries, but the Lord still says, “Soul!!!” “Oh, I forgot about my soul.” “This night thy soul is required of thee.” Let me ask you this morning, if God were to say, “Hurry and add it up,” how do you stand before Jesus this morning, as a Christian for whom He gave all?

Don’t get mixed up, you cannot buy salvation, and I am not asking you whether you have salvation. I am asking you about your sacrifice for Jesus’ sake, since you are saved. Let us take time. How do you spend your time? You have to give an account for it. How do you spend your time? I want to say to you that Christians will have to answer to God for laziness in a terrific way. Oh, the lazy Christians that I know, and that you know! Oh, the hours that are wasted! Do you know, the more God shows you the value of time, and the more He lets you do, and the more God puts into your day, the more you weep before Him, because of empty days in the past you will look back over the years into which you could have put so much more! Somebody says, “Be careful, you will wear out.” Don’t be so careful about wearing out. We have enough folks that are careful about that. If he supplies oil you can run a long time without friction.

I had an old relative down South that saved every piece of goods she ever got her hands on. How she loved sheets and tablecloths. And when that woman died and they opened up the drawers, everyone of those cloths were rotten in the creases. Maybe you are rotten in the creases. It is a whole lot better to show the effects of ironing and washing, than the creases from lying in the drawer.

Go out and get tired out, and then let God put you through His washing machine, and put the nice warm iron on you and straighten out all the wrinkles in your brain and nerves, and it is a mighty glorious feeling.

Consecrated Energy

Did you ever get tired working for Jesus? I wonder how many of you could really say, “Lord, I have gotten tired working for you.” Oh, you get tired working for somebody else, and running your head off after something you want. My, there will be folks this year going to picnics [then] go home and have to stay in bed a day because of the things they have done, who never were tired for Jesus. It is a strange thing, that whenever a young person becomes enthusiastic for Jesus, then someone goes around to them to say, “You’d better be careful.”

A young boy came to me not long ago and said, “Mr. Rader, I have been converted and am going to college, and three college professors have said, ‘Boy, you will have to be careful or you will wear yourself out.’ There is a little mission in the city, and I give them Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, and don’t go out any other nights; but they heard I was there. Finally I got on my dignity, and said, ‘Why don’t you go to those fellows that are boozing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, and dancing and going like mad, and going out every other night they can sneak out? I am in my room every other night, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday night up to ten o’clock I am giving to God, and I believe the devil has sent you fellows around.’” I think so, too.

My but people are afraid of work. Young girls, with no kind of footwear, and low-necked dresses and short sleeves, taking all kinds of cold, and night after night running to sinful places and not a word said; but let that girl go through for God, and night after night begin to work for Jesus, and have the refreshment of Jesus in her heart, and somebody begins to say, “Be careful, you are going to break down.” No, you are going to break through and get into the race and run it with patience as He sets it before you. He goes before, remember. He is the pace-maker. Don’t run ahead of Him, but oh, don’t draw back. He has no pleasure in the soul that draws back.

Many a man has been an absolute sport for the devil. Anybody could call him up, any hour, and get a game out of him. He went the limit all the while for the world; but when he is converted he sits down. I am not going to let it be said in Heaven that I didn’t put in as much time for Jesus Christ as for the devil; and if you ever were enthusiastic about the things of the world, for His glory, get rich toward God.

Do I dare use this phrase? Did you ever try to be a “sport” for Jesus’ sake, and just say, “I am going the limit for Him, put in everything I am, and going right at it?” This is what He is looking for, folks that are really willing to go in for God. Many a man has gone broke for the devil, and gone around and tapped somebody else and gotten a new start, spent his money for that which was not meat, and yet if you give until it hurts, folks will say, “My, you are going to get poverty-stricken,” but you cannot show me a man that ever got poor giving to God.”

I would feel badly about taking money from people and asking God’s children for money, if I thought they got poor, but I am as conscious as that I stand in this pulpit that every time I get a dollar away from a Christian for Jesus, God puts it back into his pocket, and God puts in blessing and joy with it. The men and women who have learned to do business with God have found that God takes time to do business with, and for them.

God’s Pruning

Some folks say, “Mr. Rader, if you ask anything more we will be poverty-stricken.” You never hear any complaint from those who have made sacrifices. They come back from China, and we say, “How long have you been out on the field?” “Twenty years.” “Do you regret it?” “Oh, no.” “But you left father and mother, and home and loved ones, and position and wealth.” “No, I never got it until I went out there. I am rich. Why, when I get to Glory there will be…faces all around me. For eternity I am going to look at the blossoms that have come, because I let God cut me loose and send me away. Oh, gather not treasures for yourself.”

Out in Chicago there are millions that are dying, and if God could cut you loose from your pride and selfishness, and cut your purse-strings a little bit more, you could have through eternity a crown of blessed faces that are there because God made you rich toward Him. But you have said, “I am living to store up.” Oh, no, that is not living, that is dying. You have said, “I am working a little trellis to lay these growths upon.” Oh, no, the trellis will have to come down. He said, “After all these things do the nations of the world seek,” but there is something better for you, something more marvelous, and that is a life filled with sacrifice, and filled with joy. Are you willing to make the sacrifice? Did you ever try to be rich toward God? How have you spent your time, your money? What have you done with the Gospel He gave you? “Yes, but I have nothing left to live on.” That is because you are like the shipwrecked man who stayed on this side of the hill

Rich Toward God

God says that the man who knows how to plant and give to God, will have his needs supplied, for God pours into that man’s lap, and says the world will pour unto him “pressed down, shaken together and running over.” That is God’s law, and He says, “there is that withholds that tends to poverty.” 

I was talking with a man who has made money, and his boy is going to the devil. I said, “You expected your boy to do anything else?” “Yes, I expected him to be a man.” “Listen, before I know anything about you, I will warrant you said this, ‘My boy will never suffer like I did, or go through what I went through.’” “Certainly, a man wouldn’t be a father unless he did that. I made up my mind my boy should have the best.” “That is the reason he is slipping to the devil. You are what you are because of what you suffered and went through, and if you hadn’t had privation you would never have had the accumulation.” Don’t pull back from the pruning knife and sacrifice or you pull back from fruit bearing.

Many Christians in this world are taking their ease. Others have fought to win the prize and literally sailed through bloody seas; others have given their necks to the block for Jesus’ sake, while with thousands in our day it is a perfumed life of faith. They have gone along, with no sacrifice, none of this joy of being stripped for Jesus’ sake, and no crown awaits them. They have been rich toward themselves. Oh, start today to lay up treasure toward God. “If we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him.” Crownless! Crownless! Crownless!

“So is everyone that heaps up treasure to himself and is not rich toward God.” Oh, what a joy to be rich toward Him! What a joy to bring a present to Jesus because you love Him, and say, “Master I lay it at your feet.”

Today’s Apostasy

This old city of ours needs evangelization. Oh, how we need to speak of it! How the cities of the world today are famishing for the Bread of Life! I have just come from another large city, where I have been laboring, and my heart is broken. I didn’t dream that apostasy had gone as far as it has; but, oh, the few places that are open today where men can really be saved and get the water of life! I don’t believe the half of us who have been at the fountain which has been flowing for years through this old church really realize what the world is feeding on today, and if there ever was a time when God asks us to stand by the things in this country that will hold the Gospel banner high, the blood of Jesus high, the resurrection of Jesus high, and the old Gospel up above where men can see it—if there ever was a day to get the message out, this is the day! If there ever was a day to ask for down-right sacrifice, that there might be established strongholds from which the Gospel can go out, it is in our day.

One man said to me last summer, “Mr. Rader, I went to a Bible Conference, and took my son, nineteen years of age, and my daughter, twenty-three years old. I went two days before the conference opened. I don’t allow them to go to theaters. We had our tickets for the conference, and I thought it was a godly place. The first night they came home and said, ‘Oh, Daddy, but there was something going on so fine!’ ‘What?’ ‘The vaudeville stunts were great!’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘They had the bell-ringers there, and some great jokers, and folk dances, and the women sang and recited, and I have always longed to go to that sort of thing, and am so glad they have it in connection with the Bible Conference.’”

Some of you are looking surprised, but there are many such places all mixed up. The conference holds a little place in between when they say to the opera singers, “You stop squawking for a while. We are going to have a Bible Conference, and then we will hoop it up again for the rest of the summer.”

He said, “Rader, I left the tickets there and picked up my son and daughter, and went back. One of the men came and asked me for a thousand dollars for that work, and I said, ‘I am going to spend a thousand dollars to put you fellows out of business, and I am telling everybody I know to keep away from there.’”

That is the way the devil is trying to do these days, trying to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and smear it on both sides close up to the world. Oh, God, in these awful days, deliver us and give us a vision of the pure Gospel and the place where it can be preached without all the furbelows that the world thinks so absolutely necessary.

Consecrated Ground

That is why God gave us Cedar Lake. Thank God! He never put all these young people into our hands without giving us a place where they could go among the woods and hills and near that splendid lake—a place of praise and of prayer and of power in Jesus Christ—and He wants everything else kept away from it. God helping us, let us dedicate ourselves to keeping that ground a place where through the days (if Jesus tarries) apostasy shall not come, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Bible, and the truths that men ought to know shall sound out through the summer days.

God never let Woolley get up early in the morning and see that spot, and prompted the Monon Railroad to give it to us, without knowing that there He had a spot where He wanted us to pass out this Gospel to the people of the crowded city, and where little faces pinched and wan could go for a little sunshine on the outside, and while there get the sunshine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the inside. God has put that place there that men and women might come there from other cities, also. This year more than any previous year, we have had inquiries from different states asking about this place and its victorious life conferences.

As we begin to see the apostasy coming on, we will begin to see what a blessing this place may be. A man came down to St. Louis from a place not far away and said, “Mr. Rader, if you will come to our old camp-grounds—,” and began to tell me how much he would pay me. I said, “Brother, it is useless for me to come.” He said, “Years ago God used to walk up and down those aisles and people were saved by hundreds. Now we have a stunt-show, bought by Christian money and turned over to a little summer-resort with all that frivolity going on. Then they piece in a three days’ camp meeting. Can’t we start something?”

Oh how the apostasy of the world is creeping around about and sucking the sugar out of the whole thing! Oh, let us say to God, “With you helping, we will keep true, and spread the Gospel.” If we give ourselves poor and preach ourselves weak with this old Gospel, God help us to die holding up the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.

Friends, I call you to the banner of Jesus, to hold it up in this old city and spread it more than we ever have before. God will help us, don’t get scared. If we will do what God tells us to, and go out to catch the fish, the fish will have the money in their mouths to carry on the work. It is our business to preach the Gospel, and God says, “I will back you up when you fit into my program.” We never will fail when we get into God’s program, and our business is to go out into the highways and hedges and compel men to come in; and it is our business to have a place where men and women can find their way through the summer days from other cities to a spot where they may rest and find real rest of soul as well as body.

Think of our opportunity at Cedar Lake! Forty miles from the city of Chicago, with its teeming hundreds of thousands and millions! And when the thing is known and God gets us ready, and we are in shape and have all the equipment He wants us to have, and everything is ready, He will give us the crowd to come to us down there to hear the Gospel through the summer days. The vision is just ahead. I hope you have caught it. 

Misspent Money

Thank God He talked to me last night and showed me that place, a place held aside for God. What are you going to do for it? I ask you for money, but don’t ask you to give if you don’t want to. I want you to get the vision first. What do you put your money into? Something that is going to preach the Gospel, or in just a good cause? Like the man I asked for a missionary offering, and he said, “I have given the limit.” I said, “How much have you given this year?” “Eight thousand dollars.” I asked him where he gave it, and then told him that not one hundred dollars of all that money had gone in Jesus’ program. He said, “I know, but men come and ask for it and it seems to be a good work.” Oh, when will men that are born of the Spirit and of the precious blood get to the place where they stop giving their money to just good things for this world and begin to give it to the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Beloved, be rich toward God.

All For Jesus

Oh how men can go out on a little philanthropy and get fifty thousand, two hundred thousand and up into millions; but the Gospel of Jesus Christ receives so little. Those of us who love it, let us get behind it ang get it out. It is getting out at Cedar Lake. And workers get a vision there and workers wait on Him there and find His fullness and power with which to go home and spread it.

When you envelope comes in, when your crops increase, when your salary is raised, don’t say the “rich fool’s” say, but say I will give of the increase to His work. I will first give myself wholly to Him and then my whole treasure will be in Him, and my heart will be there also. Oh the joy life is the life of piling up riches for Him; rich in life, sacrifice time, houses, money, lands, toward God.