Horace W. Busby (A Biographical Sketch)
Horace Wooten Busby was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, the son of John S. and Frances Wooten Busby. When he was about seven years of age his father moved to Ellis County in Texas and settled near Waxahachie, where he grew to manhood. Here he taught school, married Miss May Wise, and began his work as a preacher of the gospel.
As he relates in his discourse his wife and he were baptized into Christ by Henry E. Warlick in Mangum, Oklahoma, after which time he spent four years in special preparation and study to preach the gospel.
His first and only local work with a congregation was with the Glenwood (Vickery Boulevard) congregation in Fort Worth. After five years labor with this congregation the invitations were so numerous for meetings that he decided to give up the local work and hold meetings altogether. For the past thirty years he has been an outstanding evangelist in the church of Christ in gospel meeting work. He has never held less than twenty-five meetings annually, and during 1948 he held twenty-eight. He has held meetings in many of our larger cities, and in most of the states. Approximately 17,000 souls have obeyed the gospel under his preaching, with many more reclaimed, and a number of congregations started. He has held over one hundred meetings in his home town, Fort Worth, and his converts are numbered among the hundreds here. Many of our leading preachers and educators are among the number who have been led into Christ in the evangelistic work of Bro. Busby.
It is with the greatest pleasure that we come together tonight, and especially on my part. We see so many people, and the house is filled with honest listeners.
My subject happens to be, “Why I Left the Presbyterian Church.” It is not the big thing in my life just to leave something. Sometimes people come in among us like they go into various churches because they became angry at somebody. They did not think they were treated right; so they wanted to leave. But that is not so in my case; I did not get mad at anybody. I have just as many friends among the Presbyterians as I ever had. I know I have no enemies. They all conceded that I had a right to do as I pleased about religion, and I saw fit to obey my Lord more fully than I could and be a first-rate Presbyterian.
A Short History of Presbyterianism
Presbyterianism is that form of church life where elders, the presbytery, rule. We call them elders, and they call them elders. The elders with their preachers—and the preacher might be one of the elders like it is with us—govern the local bodies. Therefore it is called Presbyterianism. There are many churches in that fellowship, as opposed to what we have in England where we have the Episcopal form of church government in which one man rules. There was a great fight in England a long time ago when Presbyterianism first made its appearance through John Knox and others. It looked like it would conquer the empire, and it almost did. They had a monarchy, and the English government had something to do with the religion of all those countries. When those monarchs began to seek for power, and all those people were members of a state religion, the Presbyterian form of religion was contrary to their wishes, because they taught the rule should be in the hands of several like we have in our government, and like we have in the English government now, but did not then. So the fight began between the Episcopalian idea where a bishop ruled a whole province, and where elders would rule locally.
John Calvin is the author, we might say, of Presbyterianism. The Geneva preacher’s teaching has formed the basis of the creeds of many churches. John Knox was his disciple. He was a very eloquent man and a very great preacher. He went from Geneva over to Scotland, and from there started the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. It became the Scotch church—the Scotch Presbyterian Church. We are quite familiar, perhaps, with the history about these men. I am familiar with it for several reasons: I was raised on it, I read a lot about it. If you were Presbyterians you did, too.
Not Ashamed of the People
Well, we notice the Presbyterian Church planted in Scotland back in the middle of the Sixteenth Century became a very great power. I am not ashamed of the crowd that I ran with when I was a Presbyterian as far as the people are concerned. Some of the greatest men of our country have been Presbyterian. We have had more presidents of the United States from Presbyterian families than any other. In Scotland that has been true, and other nations we might mention. It has been a big thing. They have contributed largely to our great government. Their form of government is not adverse to the New Testament idea, but they raised it to a political power in a measure to where the greatest political leaders we have had had that idea of religion. Woodrow Wilson was a Presbyterian as was also Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryan and others who were prominent in our government. They usually made great men in our political affairs. They were men who dealt with the people more. They did not try to assume too much rule like some others.
But Cannot Follow Christ and Creeds
So I did not leave the Presbyterian Church because I was mad at them or ashamed of the people, or anything like that, but it was purely in principle. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ was something that Jesus founded on earth; and where Christ’s teaching goes contrary to any human theory, if we want to love the Lord and be blessed by Him we have got to say good-bye to every earthly tie, and follow where we believe Jesus is leading. Jesus says, “Unless you take up your cross daily and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” (Matt. 16:24). Well, then, we cannot follow men and do that. Where men make a creed we cannot follow that creed without more or less following men. Nearly all the creeds of the great reformers carried that very strongly in them this principle: that we take the Bible as our rule of faith and practice. That is, among Protestant people. John Calvin did that; John Knox did that, as did John Wesley and Martin Luther. They all took the position that the Bible is a sufficient rule, and the people all started for the same position where we stand tonight. But as time went on and they had a great group of people, they had to form a creed to hold what they had together, they thought. That is how creeds were formed: each man wanting to hold his group together. There has got to be some leading principle before anybody knows what his faction is. There is some idea that he has, and he wants to hold his group to it. He builds him a church and magnifies that one idea that separates him from all other disciples of the Lord. That was the way creed-making started. They all started away from Rome and its corruptions back in the days of Martin Luther. He is called the “Morning-star of the Reformation.” John Calvin gave it life and power. For good life and dignified living, John Calvin headed all the rest. He was very strict in moral teaching; so much so that he became a burden to some people that wanted to mix up worldliness and their religion. We call them Puritans in our country. We know what the Puritan laws were. Well, they were people from Scotland and England that had been touched with Presbyterianism, and therefore with the creed that came from Westminister by John Knox—the disciple of John Calvin. Of course that modified some of the Calvinist views quite a bit. The Presbyterian Church in the United States has divided a time or two, but still it is Presbyterianism.
Divisions Among the Presbyterians
In 1810 in Tennessee there was a division among the Presbyterians, and a part of them were then called Cumberland Presbyterians—but they were still Presbyterians. They were governed by elders in the local group. My father happened to be a member of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. I remember seeing him appointed an elder in one of the local Cumberland Presbyterian churches. My great-grandfather, Samuel McClean, was at the organization of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and was an elder in it the day it was organized. I have a walking-cane over at home that he cut there that day between sessions of that presbytery. It has been in the family since 1810. He walked with it until he died, and willed it to my father, and he willed it to Horace Jr., and it is in our home. My wife’s mother was crippled a good while you know, and she used that stick to walk with around home until she passed on; but the stick is still there—a memorial of the organization of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
The Cumberland Presbyterian Church
The Cumberland Presbyterian Church modified the views of the old Calvinistic teaching much more than the regular branch of the Presbyterian Church in this country, especially concerning foreordination and predestination, and infants dying in infancy going to hell. They eliminated those things, but otherwise held to the Westminister Confession of Faith or to Calvinistic views. The Primitive Baptists took off from the Calvinistic views too, and through them the Philadelphia Confession of Faith was formed. So the Cumberland Presbyterian Church finally reached the point where they thought some of their claims were unnecessary. It started because of a great religious revival in Kentucky and Tennessee, and people were converted so fast that they did not have enough preachers to take care of the great number of converts. The old Presbyterians thought that a man had to pass a certain degree in their seminaries before he could be ordained to preach, hold communion, or baptize and marry people. The Presbytery of the Cumberland raised the question:
“We need to ordain any faithful man that is capable of preaching. He can go out and convert people and administer to them, and where he knows enough to do that, and can do it in a dignified way, we ought to authorize him to do it.”
The fight became rather bitter. So the Cumberland presbytery—a presbytery in the Presbyterian Church—in February, 1810 withdrew from the general Presbyterian Church and started the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Well, that continued until about 1903 when they decided they could take care of the situation by following the old school idea. They had a general election, and I voted in that election for the two bodies to go back together. The vote carried almost unanimously. After the election was over, a lot of the “lay members” began to raise a question over some points which they differed with the regular Presbyterians. They said, “We didn’t vote for this; we believe we had rather be Cumberland Presbyterians.” So the Cumberland Presbyterian Church really continued, but according to the election they lost their property. It was just a church without any property or deed to it. They finally took it to the Supreme Court to settle whether the property should continue Cumberland Presbyterian property, or whether it was now the property of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America. But I voted for that union when I was yet a Presbyterian. I was in it, and that is my lesson tonight, “Why I Left It.” I am not ashamed of why I left, nor why I am what I am, or anything else. I want to tell it. It might be helpful to somebody, and hurtful to nobody.
Studies the Bible
Well, then, we have in this lesson tonight, “Why I Left The Presbyterian Church”. Now, here is the reason:
I began to read my Bible early in life. My mother taught me the scriptures before I could read. I could quote many passages from memory. In fact, many of the passages of scripture that I can quote easily today I learned before I could read. My mother taught me. She knew a great deal about the Bible. That was not foreign to Presbyterianism either. They were great Bible students. Most of the works in your library as Christian men and gospel preachers—their authors were Presbyterian scholars. They were scholarly men, and are yet. When it comes to the life of Christ and the Old Testament, you cannot find any better commentaries on that part of the Bible than by Presbyterian authors. The only question that I could bring up is, that they do not know how to rightly divide the scriptures—that they do not give the proper division of the Old Testament from the New. That is where I became dissatisfied with my part of it.
Become Dissatisfied With the Name
I began to read and study my Bible. After I was grown I continued to study it, and to study it hard. I studied to midnight. My father who was then an elder in the Presbyterian Church would often come to my room and want me to go to bed. He said, “You will go crazy reading the Bible so much. You don’t need to read it so much.” When he would go back to sleep, I would still want to finish a thought. In that way I became dissatisfied with a good many things. One was the name. “Why do I have to tell people that I am a Presbyterian, when I read my Bible, and became a follower of Christ? Why do that?” Well, that was the question, and I could not answer it by the Bible.
Could Not Find Infant Baptism
Another question that bothered me was: We believed and taught infant baptism. I began to read and search the Bible for it, but could not find anything about it. I wanted to be able to answer everybody that asked me why we did so and so. But I could not find it in the Bible, and I tried hard. I went to Dallas and called on the pastor of the largest Presbyterian Church in the state. When I asked him, he just referred me to the library to read some books. He did not answer my question. That threw me into greater dissatisfaction. One of the greatest men among them referred me to some books of men instead of to the Bible—the book that I was anxious about. So I went back home and studied some more.
Sprinkle or Immerse for Baptism?
I began to wonder about the mode of baptism—that was a great question then. I had been sprinkled when I was a child. I was old enough to remember what they did. The preacher said, “Horace, arise and be baptized.” And so I stood up, and he dipped his finger in a glass of water, and placed it on my face. He said the same ceremony that I have said hundreds of times in baptizing people now. That was the way it was done. I could not find any proof for that, and it made me very greatly dissatisfied that I had to tell people that I had been sprinkled or water poured on my face for baptism.
However, they did not force sprinkling or pouring on us. The first immersion I ever saw was performed by a Presbyterian preacher. Over at Ovella when I was about like little John, my grandson, over here on my left, I went down to Red Oak Creek one Sunday afternoon, and the preacher named Bunch, the pastor of the church where my father was an elder, had a group of people who wanted to join his church, but they had heard a part of the gospel, or read it like I had, and they said, “We will not come into the Presbyterian Church unless we can be immersed.”
They only made a confession of faith in Christ, too; they did not say, “We believe that God for Christ’s sake has pardoned our sins,” like some denominational people do. They just made a simple confession, and Bunch baptized all that bunch sure enough, in Red Oak Creek. That was the first immersion I ever saw. Everybody commented on how well he did it—how nice and dignified the baptizing was conducted—they did not think it could be done by immersion. Some had made fun of it, and said that it was indecent to immerse people. But when the man I have just referred to did that baptizing they could see that it was done in a very fine way.
They were not dogmatic about sprinkling and pouring, but that was their doctrine. They believed that baptism could be done by pouring water on the individual instead of immersing the whole body. And so, I began to study the question, and perhaps it bothered me more than any other one thing.
Worries About the Purpose of Baptism
Another question came into that particular study and that was, “What was I baptized for?” The answer that they wanted me to give was: to get into the visible church on earth. When you believed on the Lord you entered the spiritual or invisible church, but now baptism is to put you into the visible church. And so when I read in my New Testament that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6:3; Gal. 3:27), I could not fix that thing, and my conscience was not at ease. I would talk to my Presbyterian friends and my own family about it often. There was no quarreling over it, but just discussing it so that we might understand it. That question could not be answered by staying where I was, and letting the Presbyterians answer for me.
Baptism Is for the Remission of Sins
In studying the question of what baptism is for, I noticed it was the remission of sins (Acts 2:38). The Bible said that. Ananias said, “Arise, and be baptized and wash away thy sins…” (Acts 22:16). Well, the preacher told me to arise and be baptized, but he did not say to me what Ananias said to Paul. When I began to compare mine with Saul’s, it disturbed me. Then I read Paul’s explanation of his baptism when he said, “As many of us (including himself) as were baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). His baptism was into Christ—mine was not. Paul also said, “We are buried with him by baptism into death, and raised to walk a new life” (Rom. 6:4). I thought I had the new life before I went into it, and as a child of God I was obeying a simple command that placed me into the visible church here on earth. Of course I was dissatisfied. Reading my Bible made me so. I was not dissatisfied with the group I was running with. They were my kin people. They were the ones I went to school with, had dates with, and loved very dearly. It was really a hard fight to have to leave that group religiously over nothing but doctrinal differences, but I did.
Events in Oklahoma
Well, we kept on reading, and finally I married. My wife is present to check on the rest of it. She was not a member of the church of Christ either. We went to Oklahoma, and while I was there I heard Henry Warlick preach a sermon. It was very much along the line that I had been studying. I was disturbed. It was out in a community where there was no church. They did not have the Lord’s Supper there that day. Somebody had invited him there to make a talk about like I am. Well, I listened to it, and I saw that he had something that I had been craving. And so I went home and gave up a job I had as a bookkeeper in a wholesale grocery store in Mangum. I went out to an uncle’s home whose wife was a very fine Bible student.
I said, “Aunt Lizzie, I want to study the Bible—just study it. My mind craves to know more of the Book, and you are an able teacher.”
She said, “Horace, I’ll let the girls take care of the house, and we will just study.”
And so sure enough the girls did it, and from breakfast at six o’clock, until midnight every night for ten days we just sat there and studied the Bible on these questions that were hard for me to grasp. She did not say a word about my religion, nor the people with whom I associated, nor the church I was a member of, but showed me in the Book what the New Testament Church was. That was all I cared about. I knew about the other. There was no need for her to waste time, and to say those other things were wrong.
Is Baptized Into Christ
My uncle was not much of a Bible scholar, but a Christian who was doing the best that he could. It was something like Priscilla and Aquila; they taught Apollos the way of the Lord more perfectly. Priscilla is mentioned first which shows that she did the teaching while Aquila sat there like uncle did and listened. That straightened Apollos out (Acts 18:26), and that straightened me out.
My uncle said, “Horace, if you ever decide that you would like to be baptized and become a New Testament Christian, I’ll go get a preacher to do the baptizing.”
I said, “I am ready now, Uncle Tom.”
So he got up early the next morning and hitched two great big grey horses to an old-fashioned Spaulding hack, and drove twenty-two miles to Marie, and called for Brother Henry E. Warlick.
He said, “I have a nephew over home that is not satisfied with his religious work, and he has decided to be baptized into Christ for the remission of sins. We could do it, but I just thought you were accessible, and I’d come and tell you about it.”
“All right, Tom, I’ll be over in the morning. Just announce that on tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll preach in Mangum.”
Well, my uncle came back and stopped at every farm house and had them telephone to everybody that the telephone would reach, that he had a nephew that was a Presbyterian, and was going to be baptized in Mangum Sunday morning. The house was as full as this, and Henry preached. But my mind was made up before I heard his sermon, and so before the invitation song started, I started down the aisle to make my confession. I told them that I wanted to be baptized into Christ for the remission of sins. I did not want to be anything but just a Christian. I did not want any church affiliation except the New Testament church, which is called the church of Christ, the church of God, or the church of the Lord (Rom. 16:16; I Tim. 3:15; Acts 20:28). Brother Warlick said that he would do that. My wife went with me, and my uncle’s daughter-in-law went with us—three of us. We were baptized that afternoon in Brother Wetston’s tank. A good many of the good old sisters came around—God bless them—and slapped me on the back and said, “Horace, the next time we hear from you, we want to hear of your being a gospel preacher.”
Begins Preaching the Gospel
We left there in about a week and came to Ellis County, Texas. There I began to study hard the scriptures, and finally hired a man to work in my place that my father-in-law had arranged for me. For four years I studied the Bible—not doctrine. I had studied doctrine nearly all of my life. But I studied the Bible that I might know how to preach it acceptably. At the end of that four years I was preaching. I had been teaching the Bible every Sunday, for the elders had put me right to work at that. I was teaching the church house packed full of people every Sunday, chapter by chapter. They had a preacher out of me before I knew it. At the end of those four years I was called to come to a church near Midlothian and hold a meeting. We baptized more than twenty, and it went out broadcast that I had become a preacher. Then I went to Lockney Bible College for a meeting. There I baptized my father. My mother came into the church there, and my brothers and sisters heard me, and my sisters were baptized, and one of them is here tonight.
The next time, I got a call to go back to Mangum, and those good old sisters were still living. They came around and beat me on the back, and one of them even hugged and kissed me! The old lady said, “Horace, I knew it was in you—God bless you!”
I cannot forget it. It was the same place where I was baptized just a few years before.
Heart’s Desire to Save Those in Error
So that is the story of a man who changed by just following his conscience. I am not mad at anybody. I love all those people. Paul was that way. He came up among the Jews, was a Jew, a Pharisee, and he preached to the Jews. He tried his best to convert them. Some of them mistreated him, and some did not. Yet I hear Paul speaking just like I would like to speak. He said, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.” (Rom. 10:1-3).
Now, friends, you can see the likeness, and you can see what I have in my heart when I pray that same prayer tonight. Presbyterians are good, honest people, and they have a great zeal. Sometimes they make me ashamed of our zeal even yet, and certainly as we read their history. Many people were put to death because they preached so earnestly what they believed was right. But when I began to read my Bible, and I could not read of infant baptism, I said, “There is where man has changed God’s message.” They are preaching that, and are ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own. They would get up and talk about foreordination and predestination, and some people being ordained to eternal life. Of course I had a little modified view of that teaching, but yet that was in our background. They were good people, and they loved me and still do. They want me to preach when I come around where they are. They nearly always endorse it some way or other if I am just preaching the plain Bible. They say, “That is it, and we cannot deny it.”
The Great Larimore Meeting in Lawrenceburg
Well, I will tell you another little thing which may be of interest. Over in Tennessee the descendants of that great-grand-father that was made an elder in the first Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Dickson County, Tennessee, in February 1810, were McCleans. There was a large family of them. I have almost a hundred McClean cousins in Lawrenceburg or vicinity. Brother T. B. Larimore of former days came there to hold the first gospel meeting in that town which now has one of the largest churches of Tennessee. Well, the doctrine was strange, and they would talk on the streets about that new religion that was coming to town. They talked about it in such terms the boys and girls thought it was some dangerous thing. Brother Larimore held the meeting in an old academy that had stood during a battle skirmish during the Civil War. A cannon had been placed out yonder somewhere, and a ball was shot across, cracking down through the roof. The ceiling was still standing.
Well, one of those McClean boys was called Doc, a great, big, old awkward boy—my cousin—decided he would beat them to it. He would go down there and hide, and hear that fellow and just see what went on. So he went down before night, climbed up in the loft, and he got to where that cannon-ball hole just served his purpose to see where the preacher would stand. He hid himself. He was afraid they would hear him breathe, so he was very quiet.
Directly the crowd began to gather, and they began to sing, “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks We Stand,” “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” and “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.”
“Well,” he thought, “there’s nothing bad about that. That is the best singing I ever heard.”
After awhile somebody led a prayer, and he thought, “Well, there’s nothing wrong about that. It seems like they were talking to God.”
Then Brother Larimore came up; he was a young man then, but with as big feet as he ever had. He walked to the edge of the pulpit, and two-thirds of his feet stuck over. I heard him preach when he was eighty-five, and he still had that same habit. Well, Doc saw him come out and stand just that way, and he never did move. He preached a wonderful sermon, as he was capable of doing. He had a great flow of intelligent words and oratory; in fact it was so great in those days that the railroads out of Nashville would give Dollar Excursions to the Larimore meetings even as far down as Alabama. When they would start, the train would be loaded between the cars, on top of the cars, and out of the windows, and everywhere, going to the Larimore revival—a dollar a round trip. So the railroads made lots of money selling tickets to the Larimore Meetings.
Well, anyway, this was one of them, and Doc was up there looking through that cannon-ball hole at the preacher. When he saw there was nothing dangerous about it, the next night he went down and took a seat at the back. It was so great that the following night he went up closer to the front, and on the fourth night he obeyed the gospel. That was Doc. He was the first of the McCleans to obey the gospel. The last time I was in Lawrenceburg, all those cousins of the McCleans and their descendants were members of the church of Christ. Two or three of them are elders and deacons in that congregation. It all started with Doc listening through a cannon-ball hole to Brother Larimore away back in about 1876!
My grandfather and grandmother were baptized in that meeting, and all my uncles except one. All except that uncle and my father obeyed the gospel; they did not. That shows how the work can radiate out through the influence of one or two members of a family—and that is still going on. We have preachers of the gospel among those descendants that nobody in the world would be ashamed of, as they used to say about Jesse Sewell—the grandfather of our Jesse—that he was a man of one Book. He had only read the Bible, but he knew it. His speeches would grace the halls of Congress. We have some of them over there whose speeches would “grace the halls of Congress” as they defend the old-fashioned way—the gospel of Jesus Christ, the blood-stained message that began in Jerusalem about 1915 years ago this past June, and has been rolling over hills and through the valleys, and touching the hearts of honest men and women, boys and girls through all the centuries and all nations, and today it is spreading anew.
The Kingdom Is Spreading
This is something that is almost marvelous. Since the War started we have had boys in the army who were Christians, and they dropped the seed of the kingdom in Manila. We now have a preacher preaching in Manila, and baptizing people as fast as we are in Fort Worth. This has occurred in just the past two or three years. We have people in Germany preaching to as many people on Sunday night as we have here tonight. Brother Gatewood told me that he thought there would be a hundred or two baptized in a very short time, because they were studying hard, and he was taking time that they might not do something too early before they understood it. That is the work that happened as a result of that terrible calamity on human society—the World War II. Over in England we have had boys to go over there and have had very successful meetings. Brother McGaughey has just closed a series of meetings in Scotland where he baptized as many people as he would have if he had stayed in Texas. He was right back where John Knox taught in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, teaching Presbyterianism and turning the whole world upside down. Ellis McGaughey was back over that same ground, preaching the same gospel that I have found so precious to my soul.
John Allen Hudson was sent over to England to hold some meetings and was successful. He has written some interesting material about how those English people are a little more pious than we are as a rule. They have their religion at heart perhaps a little more, because they might be persecuted, looked down on a little more from the crown. The king is the head of the English church; the Episcopal church is the English church.
Campbell Left the Presbyterian Church
Now we come back to 1948 and back to Glenwood (Vickery Boulevard) where most of you heard me start preaching at Fort Worth. Some of the gray-headed people here obeyed the gospel back in those days. I am enjoying my visit here tonight. You know that in our Restoration Movement Alexander Campbell was a leading light. He was not the one who started this movement, but he was a scholarly man. He wrote lots, and edited the Christian Baptist. People read his works when they would not read anything else. He was a Scotch Presbyterian when he came to this country. He later affiliated himself with the Baptist people because they would immerse him. He was a Bible student, and he came to the point where he wanted to be simply a New Testament saint or Christian, or a member of the church of Christ, and to drop any other name or doctrine that he could not read about in the New Testament. There were a great number of men with him such as Barton W. Stone, his father, Thomas Campbell, and Walter Scott—all who came from the Presbyterians. They came to this country and learned the truth. They were implicated in leading many souls to Christ when the great cry went up, “We must go back to the Bible, and speak where the Bible speaks, and be silent where it is silent.” On this slogan we take our stand tonight.
Cannot Afford to Compromise
No, we are not mad at anybody. We want everybody to go to heaven. We are not trying to send anybody to hell. We are not tickled when somebody is wrong, but we want everybody to be right. We want to treat them like our brothers if we can, and pray for them like Paul did for the Jews (Rom. 10:1-3). But we cannot afford to compromise the truth even with father or mother or ourselves, because it will not do us any good.
I cannot afford to compromise one thing. If I wanted to compromise any truth at all, I would have remained with the Presbyterians, because that is as fine a body of Protestant people as can be found. But I cannot do that. I want to go to heaven, and I cannot go to heaven weakening on the truth of God Almighty, and preaching it some other way than is found in the New Testament.
I have sat down with preachers of that group, and we have talked about those things. I said, “Now, here, I’m not mad at you. I am not a denominationalist. I am nothing of the kind. I believe this Book, do you?”
“Well,” he said, “Yes, I do believe this book.”
I said, “Well, now, this is what this Book says.”
He said, “I admit that. I think you are all right, and I think you will go to heaven, but I believe I can go to heaven too.”
That is about as far as some of them would ever go. Just close the Book, their mouth, and their head, and everything else to the truth, when I was doing the greatest thing I could possibly do for their soul. They have always treated me very fine, but they would not pay any attention when I tried to teach them God’s ways. I did not get offended, of course; it is their business.
The Testimony From Heaven
You can be what you want to be. You are. If you do not want to be a good, faithful Christian, you are a backslider, and it is of your own making. Nobody wants you to be. God does not want you to be. The church does not want you to be. I am sure you have a perfect right to be what you want to be, but we have a convincing argument from heaven—and that is what the Bible is. When Peter spoke on Pentecost’s glorious morning—the day the Holy Spirit came to bring the mind of Christ to the mind of men, the record says he spake “as the Spirit gave them utterance,” and therefore, the apostolic utterances are the Holy Ghost’s utterances. It was brought right from heaven that day, and Peter speaking about it thirty years later in I Peter 1:2 said, “the gospel was preached by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.” That is the way the gospel came—not through a conference of men—not through a presbytery made up of elders and preachers, and a few presbyteries making a synod that could vote and make a law equal to the pope and his cardinals. I saw this thing standing out clearly in my Bible which you can read easily. The little boys can read it. It is not hard to read God’s word.
The Law of the Lord Is Perfect
David says in Psalm 19, “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul.” What men makes is not the Lord’s law. Jesus said in Matthew 15:9, “In vain you worship me teaching for doctrine, the commandments of men.” Then the worship based on what men say about it, Jesus says is vain. You see that. Then we read again in that New Testament that we are following, that the apostles preached the law of the Lord, and it convicted the people on that Pentecost morning. In their conviction they cried out and said, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter did not preach a lot of theology, but simply spake from heaven as the Spirit spake, “Repent and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.” “They that gladly received the word” did obey that day for it was a message from heaven. That is genuine Holy Ghost religion. That is the old-time religion that makes men happy, because it associates with the angels and the redeemed of the ages around our Father’s throne through Jesus Christ our Lord.
We come a little further and quote James on this, too. James says, “Lay aside all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21). You can see that the word of God is sufficient, friends. Again Peter speaks in I Peter 1:22, “Seeing you have purified your souls in obeying the truth…” Jesus says, “Thy word is truth” (John 17:17). When the truth of God Almighty is preached, the Holy Spirit’s message is preached, and when that convicts men of error, it is the Holy Spirit that does the convicting through these words. When men open their hearts and believe and obey the word, they become followers of the Holy Spirit. Paul says, “As many of you as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:14). “If we are sons, then heirs, and joint-heirs with Jesus.” We know we are children of God tonight, if we are following the Spirit’s message. Not the Holy Spirit in some mystical way that we cannot explain, but his plain message of divine truth which will sink deep into your heart and show them exactly how to walk and please God.
The Church Built on Christ
The apostle speaks of men who had heard, believed, and had been baptized into Christ, and thus become members of the church at Ephesus, “You are builded upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.” (Eph. 2:20). The chief cornerstone is Jesus Christ. In I Cor. 3:11, Paul said, “There is no other foundation that any man can lay but that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus.” Brother John Cash over here is one of our fine builders. We know we must first lay a foundation, and then build a house on that foundation. When we build a house on that foundation we have got to lay another foundation to build another house. The church of the apostolic age built theirs on Jesus Christ as the chief foundation, and Paul says, “There is none other.” Then if there is any church built by men alongside the church of the New Testament, it would have to have another foundation, for Christ is the foundation of the church that he built. He says, “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:18). He says that it is his. Paul called it, “the church of the Lord, which he purchased with his own blood.” (Acts 20:28). Then that church that was built by Christ was built by the power of God, and if we build another, we would have to build another foundation. That would be another Christ, and Paul says, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism” and one body (Eph. 4:4-6). He also says, “We were all baptized into one body…whether Jew or Greek, bond or free” (I Cor. 12:13).
Heaven’s Condemnation of Division
Jesus prayed that his disciples be not divided, that the unbelieving world might believe (John 17:20-23). Paul condemns the Corinthian church because they allowed divisions to creep in among them (I Cor. 1:10-13). Here some were saying, I am of this preacher, and another that I am of that one, and others I am of Christ. He asked, “Were you baptized in Paul’s name? Was Paul crucified for you?” We see the point there, friends. We are standing before God and the angels tonight. The Holy Spirit is witness through His word, and as we carry on this work, the Spirit makes intercessions for us with groanings that cannot be uttered. The church has no other institutions—it has no church institutions. The church is the only institution under high heaven that Christ is in, or that Christ has sanctioned. We as individuals can go out like Brother Dickey and build a book store, or like Claude McClung raise potatoes, or some others of you can run a store or an engine—that is our work of making a living while we tabernacle here below. But when it comes to a spiritual institution, Jesus built that, and it is the church. He did not build anything else that we can place a man at the head of, and say it is a church affair.
No Church Institutions
We have no church institutions. Brethren can build any honest thing, and do any honest work, but we cannot say that it is a church affair. Sometimes our young people talk about a “church party.” We do not have anything like that, because if it is a “church party” you can read about it in the New Testament. You can have a party, just so you do not do wrong, if you let the gospel principles guide you in the party, but call it “yours.” Do not say that Glenwood church has a party for young people. The devil would not want a better thing than to hear God’s people divide up and call every little thing a church affair, to where you do not know the difference between the church and human institutions.
Paul said, “Christ is the head of all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” (Eph. 1:22, 23). Our Bible school on Lord’s day morning is the church at work. It is not a Sunday School with different organizations that we can go and join, and give our money to, and then go home before the church meets for worship. That would make an institution alongside the church just as literally as institutions we have fought through the years that seek to be connected with the church of the New Testament. We cannot have these as church institutions for it is the church that is to preach the gospel, care for the orphan and the widow, to help the poor and needy, and to keep itself unspotted from the world.
Faithfulness, the Key to Heaven
The church is to meet in worship, and to keep that holy array, and body clean, and so clean until after awhile we can pass inside the pearly gates, and lie around the eternal throne of God, in eternal happiness and joy, where there will be no old age or tears falling from any eye; where we will be the children of God eternal, in that home everlasting, where we can drink the waters of the river of life that flows from beneath the throne of God, and where we can pluck the fruit that grows on either side of the river on the Tree of Life, and where we can associate with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of Old Testament note, and with characters of the New Testament like Paul, Peter, James and John, Mary and Martha.
The people from Glenwood are passing on and in multiplied numbers as the years go drifting by. I am not alarmed, friends; I do not want to go back. I would not go back, if God were to give me a chance, to boyhood again and childhood’s morning. I have lived a good life. It has been happy every inch of the way. There has been no time in my life that I have been in despair about anything for very long. I do not want to go back. There are too many hills yet beyond me. I want to go on. Over the hills, Brother Leslie (Freiley), until after while the towers of that fair city I see, and catch a glimpse of that glory-land, and hear the singing of the 144,000 that Brother Thomas (Campbell) mentioned tonight. Yea, that is far better than to go back and come again through forty years of earthly service. Give me strength, dear Lord, to press on over the hills, and to help as many people along with me as I can, and to touch as many hearts of boys and girls as possible, and to make people happy by the touch of divine power as I teach the word, the gospel, the truth of God Almighty.
Now, our time is up. I wish I could preach on to midnight. The way you are listening thrills my soul. Even Brother White is smiling back there. No better preacher has ever been among us, perhaps, than Brother L. S. White, and he is here tonight. God bless him, and help him through the years yet to come. I pray that every one of you people get to heaven. If you do what the Lord tells you to do in His book, you cannot miss it. All hell cannot rob you of your reward if you follow the teaching of God’s word. John says that we cannot sin if the seed abides in us (I John 3:9), and Jesus said that the seed is the word (Luke 8:11). As long as you strictly obey the word of the Lord, you are not going to go wrong. If you go wrong, it is because you did not let the word of the Lord guide you. You let your old animal nature guide you, or your passion, or your pride, or something other than the Word of God. As long as you submit yourself to the leadership of God’s word, you are submitting yourself to the leadership of the Holy Spirit. As long as you are under the leadership of God’s Spirit, you are God’s child and an heir, and a joint-heir with Jesus.
We are going to stand and sing an invitation song, if anyone wants to be nothing but a Christian, a member of the body of Christ, taking the Bible and the Bible only as your guide, we want you to come tonight. It would be a good time for somebody to make the confession and be baptized. Let us stand together and sing.