Spiritual Food For A Hungry World # 2

Spiritual Food For A Hungry World # 2

There has never been a time in my memory when religion has been so reduced to forms and ritual as today. In the mind of Jesus, religion was not to build up the church, but the church was to build up religion. Religion was not the end but the means to the end. Jesus was so far removed from the formalism and traditions, taught by the priests instead of teaching the commands of God, that He was constantly at cross-purposes with them. A church of make-believers will soon beget a generation of non-believers!

The church in endeavoring to serve God and mammon is growing cross-eyed, losing her power to know good from evil. Jesus dealt with fundamentals; His quietest talk had a torpedo effect on His hearers. Some sermons, instead of being a bugle call to service, are showers of spiritual cocaine.

I am satisfied that there has never been a time when it is harder to live a consistent Christian life than now. I believe the conflict between God and the devil, right and wrong, was never hotter. The allurements of sin have never been more fascinating. I do not believe there ever was a time, since Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden, when traps and pitfalls were more numerous and dangerous than today.

The world is not hungry for a religion of social service without Christ. I will go with you in any and all movements for the good of humanity providing you give Jesus Christ His rightful place. You cannot bathe anybody into the kingdom of God. You cannot change their hearts by changing their sanitation. It is an entirely good and Christian act to give a down-and-outer a bath, bed and a job. It is a Christian act to maintain schools and universities, but the road into the kingdom of God is not by the bath tub, the university, social service, or gymnasium, but by the blood-red road of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The Bible declares that human nature is radically bad and the power to uplift and change is external; that power is not in any man, woman or system, but by repentance and faith in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. The church is the one institution authorized to feed the spiritual hunger of this old sin-cursed world.

You will notice that Jesus did not feed the multitude. He created the food and asked his disciples to distribute it. Jesus was the chef, not the waiter at this banquet. Jesus created salvation, the only food that will feed the spiritual hunger of the world; the task of distributing the food is in the hands of his human followers.

For every two nominal Christians, there are three who are not even nominal. Out of every two church members, one is a spiritual liability; four out of five with their names on our church records are doing nothing to bring the world to Jesus. There are twenty million young men in this country between the ages of sixteen and thirty [1925]. Nineteen million are not members of any church; nine million attend church occasionally; ten million never darken a church door.

Seventy-four per cent of our criminals are young men under twenty-one years of age. In the past twenty-five years the age of prostitutes has fallen from twenty-six years of age to seventeen years of age. Five hundred girls fifteen years old and under were divorced or widowed last year. Juvenile crime increased in one year from thirty-two per cent to a hundred and thirty-eight per cent.

There are many institutions that enter into competition with the church in preaching certain phases of religion, but not in preaching religion itself. Associate charities preach charity sometimes with stronger emphasis than the church. Some organizations talk about justice and square-dealing with more vehemence that the church. Some individuals thunder against vice and crime more than the pulpit. Many institutions and organizations preach one or more phases of religion, but it is to the church humanity must ever turn for the last word on salvation and eternal destiny.

People are dissatisfied with philosophy, science, new thought - all these amount to nothing when you have a dead child in the house. These do not solace the troubles and woes of the world. They will tell you that, when they were sick and the door of the future was opening in their face, the only comfort they could find was in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christianity is the only sympathetic religion that ever came into the world, for it is the only religion that ever came from God.

Take your scientific consolations into a room where a mother has lost her child. After you have gotten through with your science, protoplasms, and fortuitous concurrence of atoms, if she isn't bug-house, I will take the Bible and read God's promise, and pray - and her tears will be dried and her soul flooded with calmness like a California sunset.

~Billy Sunday~

(continued with # 3)