Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Guest (Male): Making God's word plain. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents God's eternal truths with Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse and the Bible.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: If you have a life that has in it anything other than a fullness of joy, you do not have what the Lord wants you to have. The Lord never meant a Christian to be downcast. If you are downcast, you are not availing yourselves of the resources that are there for you. You have not because you ask not. There is every possible resource available for you in Jesus Christ.

Guest (Male): With his friendly manner, vivid analogies, and his faithful exposition of the scripture, Dr. Barnhouse makes the Bible relevant to modern man. His sermons are just as applicable today as when they were first preached decades ago.

The Apostle John stated that he wrote his first epistle so that our joy in Christ may be full. But although we are now redeemed sinners, we're still prone to sin and stumble in our walk with the Lord. And this can steal our joy and hinder our fellowship with Him. Thankfully, we have God's promise that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This week, we turn to First John chapter 1. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with his message, Restoration of Fellowship with Christ.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Now, in First John, this epistle is the expansion by the Holy Spirit of the truths that were given by Jesus in the upper room. The disciples were in a state of utter confusion because Jesus announced to them that he was going to leave them and that he was going away and that where he went, they could not come. Such confusion was there that he stopped the subject he was dealing with and said, "Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me," and went on to tell them of the arrangements that he had made, that he was going away, but that he was going to send the Holy Spirit.

Now, in the course of his dealings with them, he said, "A new commandment have I given unto you," and that's expanded in the epistle of John. Twice he tells the purpose: that your joy might be full. And here on the opening page of John, he said, "These things write we unto you that your joy may be full." Now, we ended yesterday with this question of fullness of joy. Remember this fact: if you have a life that has in it anything other than a fullness of joy, you do not have what the Lord wants you to have.

The Lord never meant a Christian to be downcast. If you are downcast, you are not availing yourselves of the resources that are there for you. You have not because you ask not. There is every possible resource available for you in Jesus Christ. When the United States troops landed on Guadalcanal, our Secretary of War and the Navy defense said this. He said when we were struck in the Philippines by the Japanese at Bataan, there was not enough of anything. We were short of everything.

The Japanese rolled our troops back simply because there wasn't enough ammunition, there weren't enough airplanes, there wasn't enough medicine, nothing. He said but on Guadalcanal, we have twice as much food as the Marines can eat. We have twice as much ammunition as they can shoot. There's twice as many airplanes as they need to cover them. And he said there is no possibility of a failure there because we have twice as many resources as could possibly be used. Well, that's the way God is with you. God has never left his troops with insufficient supplies, never.

Whenever there is any difficulty, you may always be sure of the fact that God has more resources than you are ready to take. In fact, God flatly tells us that the situation is something like this. Suppose there were a rule in your life that it was impossible for you to get a bill in the mail for a greater amount than you had money in the bank. Wouldn't that be marvelous? That you never could have a bill sent to you for an amount greater than that which you have resources to pay.

Well, God flatly says there hath no testing taken you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tested above that you are able, but will with the temptation make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it. So, says the Lord, the resources are there. Everything has been made available for you. And these things write we unto you that your joy might be full. Now, we examine these things that he has given to us and we saw in the previous verse that if we have fellowship, we're in joy.

Now, this fellowship is horizontal between Christians and vertical with the Lord. The vertical fellowship is first, and if we have vertical fellowship, we can have horizontal fellowship. If we do not have fellowship with the Lord, we do not have fellowship with each other. This is a sequence, a logical sequence. Fellowship means togetherness, oneness. The Greek word is koinonia, and they translated it in English as fellowship or communion. Now, communion is Latin for "one with."

I think it's interesting to note that in the modern centuries, they've created a word from this same Latin root: communism. Did you ever stop to think that communism and communion are exactly identical words? One meaning oneness with the Lord and the other meaning a oneness without the Lord. For what the devil is trying to do in communism is to replace what God has promised in communion. And believe me, if the church of Jesus Christ does not accept the truth and reality of what communion is, Satan will take it over with communism.

For they go to the people of the world who are the downtrodden, the miserable, the mean—to the Chinese and the Hindus and the dark-skinned peoples of the whole world. And they come and they say, "Here is equality and brotherhood in communism." They never can make an advance where the church has gone first with true communion. And where the church does not go with true communion, just as sure as God made little apples, the devil is going to come with communism, even if it's Alabama. This will come to pass and it cannot be escaped.

The secret is communion with the Lord, fellowship with the Lord. For when one is absolutely right with the Lord, then we'll be able to reach out our hands to those who have been redeemed by Jesus Christ. There'll be a oneness and we will be a witness against the world and the Lord will cause our fellowship to be true in him and then there will be joy. So you see, it all works out in a chain. Oneness with the Lord means oneness with others, and oneness with others means joy.

And these things write we unto you that your joy may be full. If you have the slightest bit of hatred in your heart towards any human being, you're not in fellowship. It'll say in a moment in this passage that you can talk about fellowship till you're blue in the face, but you lie, says God, and do not the truth if there is anything between you and any other human being for whom Christ died. Now, this then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you: that God is light and in him dwelleth no darkness at all.

God shines right through everything. He shines through all pretense. It is impossible to have pretense when we're dealing with the Lord. He comes right through and with him is no shadow, it tells us in James. Then it says in verse six, "If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth." Now, I believe that this refers to a tremendous proportion of the members of the church in the world. I think that there are multitudes of Christians who say they have fellowship and really walk in darkness.

Here the Holy Spirit must come and must go through to your heart. And you must be willing to think. You must be willing to be disturbed. You must be willing to face the things that you do not want to face. So many people get the idea, "Well, if we just turn our back on a problem and look the other way, maybe it'll go away." It won't. It'll rise like yeast and there'll be twice as much of it when you turn back to it. These things are like nettles. If you try to touch a nettle with just a soft touch, it'll burn you. But if you grasp it hard by your hand, it can't hurt you at all.

Now, these are the problems that are ours and that we've got to face, and we must be willing to think. Two years ago, Mrs. Barnhouse and I were out. I was preaching to hundreds of missionaries in the Far East. At one place, they had 400 or 500 missionaries gathered together at Karuizawa in central Japan. I went there to speak and I began to speak and there was wonderful blessing. We had fellowship with a great many of these missionaries. There was a young fellow who happens to be Southern Baptist who's in the mission work out there and doing a wonderful work for the Lord.

He said to me, "Oh, you know, some of these missionaries, it's really terrible. They come over here and they think that they're going to do exactly in Japan like they did in America. They don't understand the nature of the people and they're just not willing to think." He said, "Here is a woman. My wife and I were talking to her about the meetings and we said something that you had said. Wasn't that wonderful that Dr. Barnhouse said? She said, 'I didn't hear it.' What do you mean, why don't you go? 'No,' she said, 'five years ago, I heard Dr. Barnhouse in Los Angeles and he disturbed me so much that it just churned me.'"

It took her almost two years to get back to normal so she wouldn't have to worry and think about these things. In other words, it took her almost two years of morphine of not thinking to get over the shot in the arm that I'd tried to give them. Because you see, this is my method. My method is to leave you just slightly angry enough so that you say, "Now, I don't believe this. I'm going to see, well, maybe he's right. Well, I'm afraid he's right. Yes, he is right." And then you'll be in the book and you'll know for yourself. You'll never go around and believe anything simply because I taught it to you.

The worst thing that you can ever say about a Bible teacher is "Yes, I believe this because Dr. Barnhouse said so." Then you become of Paul, of Apollos, and so on. Is Christ divided? You heard of the young man who had an accident? He was struck by a thought. Now, it doesn't happen to everybody. Don't forget that fact. It does not happen to everybody. And what you're going to see now may make some of you think. There are problems that I won't even mention, that I will never talk about.

I hope I'll say enough so that the Holy Spirit will cause your mind to jump over from one track to another and say, "Hey, maybe I should go down this track a little bit where I've been unwilling to go." Because a lot of people go and get a piece of cheesecloth and put it across a track of thought and they paint a nice little haystack there. Every time their train comes down, they say, "Oh, there's no track down there. I don't have to think in that direction. That's where the haystack is." Believe me, you're never going to get anywhere in your Christian life until you just go down the direction that God wants you to go.

And that you begin to think and that you begin to act on the results of your thinking. Because it says here, God is light and in him dwelleth no darkness at all. That is to say that if we go with God, those things which are tremendous problems out in civic life and in the life of the world, these things have got to be faced. We have to face them and understand the terrible rottenness there is in politics, the terrible horror there is in life round about us. Last year when we were down in Texas, the newspapers were just filled with the stories of the corruption in the state legislature, the bribery and so on, the meanness, the rottenness that was there.

They had tape recordings, and the tape recordings showed that a man who was teaching a big Bible class in a church down in South Texas and that was big man down there with great piety, that when he went up to Austin to the state legislature, he had a prostitute he lived with and that his room was the center of the passing of bribes. Men met there in order to have money given to them, legislators, in order to vote for false things. And yet on Sunday, the man was flying back to his church. It doesn't make any difference what denomination it was, it could have been anything.

If you go look on the roster at Sing Sing, you'll find the convicts in Sing Sing are Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and whatnot. They're all there. Nobody is free from this. Now, there are these problems round about. A lot of people say, "Well, does it affect us?" Of course it affects you. There is no problem that does not affect you and that must be dealt with from the point of view of a definite spiritual thing. Up in Philadelphia, for instance, there are problems. They used to say Philadelphia is corrupt and contented. What does it mean?

It means that up in Philadelphia, I've got to think enough so that I might even be willing to vote for a Democrat in Philadelphia. You see the problem? I must be willing to think and face all the problems that come in life in every phase of life and living. Someone says, "Oh, Dr. Barnhouse, don't talk to us about anything but being nice religiously. We want to be cozy and warm and think nice thoughts and not know about all the bad things that there are. We just want to have our feathers smoothed out." But God will not allow it that way.

He says in me there is light and in me there is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness—now, do you walk in darkness? You have to have the Holy Spirit tell you now. If I make mention of one thing, you say, "Well, that doesn't fit me, that doesn't hit me." You've got to go all the way down to find out if you're walking in darkness in some envy or jealousy. I've known of competition in the training union or the ladies' organization. I've known of women that practically ran political campaigns to be elected president of this or that.

You have to have God search your hearts about religious things. There are men, even I've seen it in the ministry, men who finagle and almost lie to big men in order to be mentioned for a bigger church, to get a call to a bigger church. There can be sins in the ministry and in the training union and the Sunday school. We have to have God to search our hearts because, you see, what we're talking about is we want to have lives of joy. In order to have lives of joy, we must have lives of fellowship and oneness. It must be oneness with the Lord, and then it will be oneness with others.

So that if you are not absolutely one with any other Christian, then you can be sure that you're not right with God. If there is the slightest envy or jealousy or strife between you and any other person, you may be sure of the fact that there's a cloud on your life and that you are not right with God. Now, what is it that makes it possible for us to remain in fellowship? We've got to see what it is that will break fellowship and then we can get back into fellowship. Let me read the whole paragraph.

"This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare to you: that God is light and in him dwelleth no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another." That means that every born-again Christian has fellowship with every other Christian. If there is any possible break in fellowship, God says we are lying. But the break in fellowship can be any one of 10,000 things.

Let me illustrate this to you by story. Did you ever see a woman powder her face in public? Now, what does she do? Number one, she opens her pocketbook. Number two, she fishes around in the pocketbook. Number three, she finds her compact. Number four, she takes out the compact. Number five, she closes the pocketbook. Number six, she opens the compact. Number seven—men, you tell me, what's the seventh thing she does? Ladies, what does she do? No, you're wrong. You said she looks in the mirror, but she doesn't. She wipes the mirror off.

Now, that's the key to my story. Now, why does she wipe the mirror off? Why does she wipe the mirror off? And the answer is there's a little talcum powder on it and she can't see herself. Now, let me stop. I'll be back to that compact in a few minutes, but let me tell you another story and you'll see the importance. A few years ago, we were over in France and we were at Bordeaux. And there is a French Protestant, an elder in the Reformed Church, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, one of the greatest scientists in the history of science.

In fact, the effect of his life is in Birmingham, Alabama today because he's the man that invented the methods of measuring down to a ten-thousandth of an inch. Our whole American civilization is built upon exchange of parts, so that one cylinder made by Ford will fit into every Ford in the world and one screw that goes in this spot is the screw that'll go in that same spot in any car. Now, the reason that we've been able to do this is because this man made it possible to measure down to a millionth of an inch.

Johansson of Denmark made the Johansson blocks, and Henry Ford paid a million dollars for them originally in order that he might make machine tools that could manufacture by the tens of thousands things that would be so exactly alike that they were interchangeable. You see, up until 40 years ago, everything was beaten out by hand and you never could have interchangeable parts. Now, this man in France, this very fine Christian who invented the method of measuring the thinnest things in the world, said to me one day, "Do you know what the thinnest thing in the world is?" I said, "What?" He said, "Talcum powder." I said, "Tell me more." "Well," he said, "you can do this in your own kitchen and show your children."