The Judgement Of God

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the YouTube recording's caption track, read through the transcript panel — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Because of the Times 1994, The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA. The elder Urshan, the sitting general superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International, takes up the question the whole Bible presses on every hearer: who is going to judge you? His answer runs through the two great judgments — the judgment seat of Christ, where the blood is present and the issue is reward, and the white throne, where there is no blood at all — and through the mercy available now, in this life, to anyone who will repent before either one arrives.

The sign of Jonah, read together

Conviction from the service before his is still sitting on the house, and he will not call it an altar call and he will not waste it. He says first that he loves everybody — he does not know a soul he holds hate or prejudice against — and then he has the whole congregation read his text aloud with him, in unison: the scribes and Pharisees asking for a sign, and the Lord's answer that no sign would be given but the sign of Jonah — three days and three nights in the heart of the earth — with the men of Nineveh and the Queen of the South rising in the judgment to condemn a generation that had a greater than Jonah, and a greater than Solomon, standing in front of it. His own frame for it is a Psalm: the Lord tries the righteous, and the wicked He hates — yet He died to save them all.

Scriptures: Psalm 11:5; Matthew 12:38-42

Repentance, every day

Jonah's message was not impressive — forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown, walked up and down the streets — but the city repented wholesale, from the king to the beasts of the field, and God turned from His anger. That is the pattern God's people still need: repentance every day, clean hands and a pure heart to come into the presence of a holy God. Even respect for an office teaches it — if the president walked in, sheer respect would put the room on its feet, and a greater than any president is here.

The mercy business

The church's trade is forgiveness, and there is too little of it: hardness, tearing a man down if he is successful, blemishing his name if God is blessing him. If you cannot forgive, he says, you will never go to heaven — the Father will not hear the prayer of a man who will not forgive as his Father forgave him, seventy times seven, in one day if need be, until forgiveness is the habit of the heart. And God is not limited to our peers when He looks for judges: He raised Charles Lindbergh out of the world — a man who took his life in his hands in a one-propeller plane and landed in Paris — and He can set such a man, who risked everything on a purpose, to judge a generation that risked nothing.

What the blood accomplished

Calvary's accomplishments are the sermon's ground: sanctification by the blood, and remission of sins when we went down in the water in Jesus' name — the life is in the name, he says, so that baptism in His name is receiving His blood. What came before baptism is cast into a deep sea to be remembered no more, and for those who walk in the light there is a constant stream of cleansing as they walk. He stands before them a blood-covered man: there is no condemnation to them who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit, and Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.

Scriptures: 1 John 1:7; Romans 8:1; Galatians 3:13

Blemishes covered

Then he reads the old ordinance out loud, and it disqualifies every preacher in the room: under the law given to Aaron's seed, a man with any blemish — blind, lame, a flat nose, broken-footed or broken-handed, crookbacked, a dwarf, a blemish in his eye — could not approach to offer the bread of his God. His answer is the blood: the blood has covered my blemishes, and I can preach the gospel tonight. On that same cross He killed enmity in His body — the church He would raise up — and so there is no enmity and no prejudice in the church of the living God.

Scriptures: Leviticus 21:16-24

Out of the novice class

The devil comes to church when the sons of God gather, and his work is a dropped thought that costs a man the whole blessing. The way out of the novice class is not age but the mind of Christ: humbling yourself, taking the form of a servant, obedience instead of rebellion — and no man need despise your youth while you are doing it.

Scriptures: Philippians 2:5-8; 1 Timothy 4:12

Building on the foundation

He calls on brother Mangun to read, and the building passage is sounded in the hearing of the house with his own voice answering inside it: we are God's building; the wise masterbuilder laid the foundation, and other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ; a man may build gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble — and the day shall declare it, revealed by fire, some receiving a reward and some saved yet so as by fire. Paul's course is the pattern for the builder: he fought a good fight, he kept the faith, and a crown of righteousness is laid up. Character is the material: a double-dealer cannot put character into a church, and a hypocrite cannot either — put Jesus Christ into their lives, he says, not your personality, and you will have a church that stands every opposition on the face of the earth.

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 3:9-15; 2 Timothy 4:7-8

No blood at the white throne

At the judgment seat the blood is there, and the issue is reward or being saved so as by fire; his aim is the full and abundant entrance — put your hand in the hand of the Nazarene and go sailing through. There is no reason to fear the Lord's coming while a penitent spirit is kept every day. Then the white throne is read aloud in the house: the great white throne and Him who sat on it, the dead small and great standing before God, the books opened and the book of life, the sea and death and hell giving up their dead, death and hell cast into the lake of fire — and his refrain lands twice: no blood at the white throne judgment. Against that throne he reads the reprieve from Hebrews himself: it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment — and Christ, once offered to bear the sins of many, will appear the second time without sin unto salvation to them that look for Him. What happened at Calvary is why the redeemed never face that throne.

Scriptures: Revelation 20:11-15; Hebrews 9:25-28

Union services, and pastor Smith

For fifteen years in Indianapolis he preached union services to every denomination in town, and they knew exactly what he was — a Jesus-name Pentecostal who would speak the sweet refrain. Then the service came to his church, and he let them run it their way: the soloist working the platform and slapping preachers on the back over one lost sheep, until the whole audience became that sheep; a Lutheran preacher who threw his Bible on the desk and said he had never felt such freedom in his life; a Baptist preacher named Smith, shouting and running the steps, and an Assembly of God preacher who had not felt that freedom in his own church for twenty-five years. Years later, in Oregon, two strangers sought him out to tell him Smith had passed away — and that before he died he had been baptized in Jesus' name and filled with the Holy Ghost, and wanted Urshan to know. Smith was the same man who, with Urshan, had once been made probation officer over two young soldiers fresh out of the Army, boys who turned out wonderful and never saw trouble again. We should not be afraid, he says, to walk into any area with this message.

The doctor, his little boy, and Dr. Roy

His own open-heart surgeon wept when Urshan told him a dream in his office. Four months later the doctor's only child, a three-year-old, fell in their pool and drowned, and Urshan went to a house he had never seen more brokenhearted and counselled them to have another child to take the sting away; in time a second son was born who looked just like the first — and the day before this conference, the surgeon called to ask him what he must do to be saved. His own part in it is told as comedy: preaching nine days after the surgery, walking out of the hospital against orders while his doctor collected on the bets that no one could keep him in it, never depressed for a day. In Houston, a doctor named Roy, who had listened to the broadcast for years, dismissed his whole afternoon of patients to ask about this gospel, and three weeks after the 1971 conference — the year Urshan was elected assistant general superintendent, and the year he preached that conference on a cane with a disjointed hip — Dr. Roy was baptized and received the Holy Ghost, and when the convention ended the hip was healed.

Don't get involved

He reads an item from the paper: a seventy-three-year-old woman lay dead fourteen days before she was found — and no grocery clerk, no milkman, no mailman, no neighbour, no relative was interested enough to investigate. Then Kitty Genovese in New York, stabbed three times over by her killer while thirty-eight witnesses watched and made no move, until a man finally called the police, too late; the killer said himself that when no one came to her aid he decided to finish her off. Don't get involved — spoken over a world that is, at the same time, wanting this great message.

What the world itself is saying

He reads a Methodist bishop's published account of Pentecostalism sweeping Brazil — no clergy, no burdensome administration, worship joyous, lively, free and expressive — and a church magazine's editorial answer to why the Spirit seems more active in one body than another: the one body stirs up the Spirit within itself, while the other resists it, embracing the spirit of the age in the hope of serving two masters. And Billy Graham's research says seventy percent of Catholics in South America are turning to Pentecostalism, fifty-six percent of them of the Oneness variety. There is a revival going on in this world, he says, because people are hungry for God.

Wars and fightings

One more reading is called for, and James's word on wars is sounded in the house: they come of lusts — and he names the lusts of the ministry, preeminence, authority, power, a big name. Friendship with the world is enmity with God; God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble; submit yourselves to God, resist the devil, draw nigh to God, cleanse your hands, purify your hearts, humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you up. It is too bad, he says, that we have to have a manual with rules in it — but it comes out of the lust of the heart.

Scriptures: James 4:1-10

Refinement, and the open door

Before Jesus comes there will be a refinement — he corrects himself: not tribulation, refinement — and God will define His people. Philadelphia kept His word and did not deny His name, and to that church the promise stands: kept from the awful hour coming on the face of the earth, and an open door set before it that no man can shut. That door, he says, is the thousands and millions leaving the denominations looking for the true church of the living God — and they will find it among a God-loving, God-fearing people, not among squabblers.

Ben: mercy at the eleventh hour

His first closing is a story he tells on himself and a friend. Ben Delaney — a handball player, a financier who had carried poor people of the church for years — met him in a park, healthy and whole to look at, and asked him to preach his funeral: a disease would take him in three months. Urshan went to the house with his son Andy beside him and pleaded, and Ben refused on a ground he had never heard from any man: it was not fair to give his life to God in a diseased body when he could have done it hale and hearty twenty-five years before. As they prayed, Urshan's Bible fell from his lap and lay open at the parable of the labourers who received the same pay at the eleventh hour; he read it to Ben, and read him the twenty-third psalm, and Ben said: baptize me. They filled a bathtub, lifted him down into the water in the name of the Lord, and he came up saying the Lord's Prayer — all he knew. A month later his wife called: she had a new man in her house, and all she heard was praise God, my sins are gone. At three in the morning she carried the phone into his room, and Ben was speaking in tongues. He died a few days later full of the Holy Ghost; Urshan preached his funeral before hundreds of sports people in Indianapolis, and five of them have since come into the church over Ben's death. His closing word for the story is the Lord's own measure of it: done unto the least of these, done unto Him. Then, with the house standing, he does his conference business — there will be street meetings while they are here, and he will preach first.