All Direction Is From The Altar

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 1998 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Oneness of God · Prayer · Repentance

Introduced by his pastor.

Anthony Mangun presents his district superintendent, and Tenney takes the pulpit joking that after that introduction he is like the mosquito that lit on a large man — he knows what to do but not where to start. He tells the house that Sister Nyla, in the room, is the woman who preached him to the altar over forty-eight years ago, when he believed in almost nothing — not tongues, not the oneness. Then he does the district's business: a ladies conference in March, a men's conference in the spring, and the Louisiana camp meeting in June. (The host's introduction is seamed out; the span is Tenney's voice from his thanks to Anthony to his closing appeal — packet.md.)

The text: Ahaz and the foreign altar.

He has the house open the second book of Kings and reads the sixteenth chapter aloud himself, from the seventh verse: Ahaz, pressed by Syria and Israel, sends the temple's silver and gold to the king of Assyria; goes to Damascus and sees an altar he likes better; sends its pattern home, and the priest builds it before he returns. The old brazen altar is not destroyed — it is moved to the north side and demoted: the new altar gets the offerings, and the old one will be, in the king's words, for him to inquire by. Then the stripping begins — the borders cut off, the laver removed, the sea taken down off its oxen, the Sabbath covering and the king's own entryway turned away — all of it, the record keeps saying, for the king of Assyria. Tenney stops the reading at the detail the chapter itself lingers on: the old altar was placed north of the new one. Not five cubits from the gate, not west of the holy place — north of the altar. And that, he announces, is his subject: all direction is from the altar.

Scriptures: 2 Kings 16:7-18

The greatest doctrine.

Someone will say the greatest doctrine is the familiar proof text — he names it himself, and passes it by. The greatest doctrine, he says, is the one Jesus gave when they asked him for the greatest commandment: hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one — and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself. Everything starts there; a man who does not start there is off course no matter how far or how big he goes. And he sets the test for every doctrine that follows: any doctrine that does not leave him loving Jesus more and appreciating his brother deeper is not true doctrine. (That wording is voiced entire and repeatedly as Jesus' own answer and is carried as the sermon's foundation; it stands priced with the dominical family in the packet.)

Drift: how an altar is lost.

There are laws of ascendancy and descendancy, and both run through the altar: Jacob saw a ladder ascending; Jonah, running the other way, went down to Joppa, down into the ship, down and down. God sent Isaiah to Ahaz with a warning — the two kings he feared were smoking firebrands, a spent force — and Ahaz would not hear it. Tenney tells the horseshoe-nail chain: for want of a nail the shoe, the horse, the rider, the message, the battle, the war, the nation. Drift is that small at the start. Ahaz graduated to sacrificing in the high places, where he could be seen; this pulpit, Tenney says, should never be a stage. It ought to be an altar of sacrifice.

Scriptures: Isaiah 7

A Paul, a Barnabas, and a Timothy.

Every man needs three men: a Paul who can speak an apostolic word into his life — he has T. W. Barnes stand, and tells the house that less than two weeks ago Barnes told him and his wife not to do something, and it rearranged a month of their lives; a Barnabas, a peer of forty-five years standing like James Kilgore, who can say what nobody else can say; and a Timothy he is mentoring. Submission, he says, is the forgotten word. Solomon's altar was two hundred seventy years old and Ahaz thought it needed changing; David changed things, Solomon enlarged things — but there is one thing you do not fool with, and that is the way in and the place of direction.

Don't touch the altar.

The householder in Jesus' parable brought out treasures old and new — but not everything in the house is a treasure, and some preachers go in and come out with the meat tenderizer, or with the cool whip instead of the cream. The way to know the difference is the altar. The apostles themselves refused to leave the word of God and prayer to wait on tables — that refusal is the pattern for every minister in the room. Pray without ceasing (that short refrain is priced in the packet), and then the promise he does voice entire: they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, mount up with wings as eagles, run and not be weary, walk and not faint. He calls three men forward and fixes the point face to face: if you ever think about compromising the altar and the old treasures, remember my face.

Scriptures: Acts 6; Isaiah 40:31

Unity at the altar.

Real truth does not need defending by distortion, and brotherhood is a real truth. In Ethiopia they do not pray for revival, they pray for unity, and revival comes out of it; in Zaire the churches have unity because they are too poor to afford the luxury of disunity. He voices the psalm entire: how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity — and that, he says, is where the church can unify: around the altar.

Scriptures: Psalm 133:1

Little leaks: the threshold and the refused gift.

Drift enters by imitation. Zephaniah located a strange judgement — God punishing men for leaping over the threshold — and Tenney traces it back: Dagon fell on his face on a threshold in Philistia, his priests took up leaping over it, Israel saw it and thought it was cute, and little by little a foreign practice filtered into the worship of God's house (that back-story is narration and is priced in the packet; the Zephaniah verse itself is located and voiced). Against Uriah's compliance he sets Naaman's prophet: the verse he cites says the prophet refused the Syrian's gifts — this generation, he says, has lost the spirit of refusal. And the same prophet who refused the gifts could tell a new convert with a dirt altar, who still had to bow in his master's temple, to go in peace. Uriah knew better. Naaman was just getting started.

Scriptures: Zephaniah 1:9; 2 Kings 5:16

The altar is for dying.

Ahaz kept the old altar — as a place to inquire, to talk. But the altar is not a place of inquiry; it is a place of death and repentance and sacrifice. He works the gift Jesus described: a man brings his gift to the altar, remembers a brother he has wronged, and the gift stays on the altar until he goes and makes it right (that complex is Jesus' teaching narrated, and is priced in the packet). Then the first words: John the Baptist's first ministry word was repent; Jesus' first word was repent; and Peter's first word on the day of Pentecost, when they asked what to do, was repent — the door was unlocked, the kingdom had come, and it still began with repentance (the Pentecost narration is priced in the packet; the direct quotation of Peter that ships is in the name movement below). Stubbornness, the Bible says, is idolatry — a stubborn man worships his own opinion. Have we forgotten how to repent?

First the altar, then the water.

The next thing Ahaz touched was the sea — eleven thousand gallons of water on ten wheeled carts, and first he only removed the little borders, with their lions, oxen and cherubim: royalty, strength and worship taken out of the water. (One saying in this movement attributes to Peter a denial that baptism saves; the wording inverts the verse it reaches for, no index entry rests on it, and the packet records the divergence.) Then the oxen came off and the water was lowered to the ground — and that is where Tenney plants himself: he believes water baptism in Jesus' name is for the remission of sin, and the name is a package deal — prayer, healing, devils cast out, baptism, all in the same name. He quotes Peter's own words as far as the house lets him get: "Then Peter said unto them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you" — and then the other word that carries the argument: neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.

Scriptures: 1 Kings 7:27-29; Acts 2:38; Acts 4:12

Naked, and the doors shut.

The chronicle's verdict is located and read: Ahaz made Judah naked — the same word used when Israel danced naked before the golden calf; they became ungovernable, all restraints gone — and it started when somebody moved an altar. The last verse he locates is the end of the story: Ahaz gathered the vessels of the house of God, cut them in pieces, shut the doors, and made himself altars in every corner of Jerusalem. Over it he sets the warning he borrows from a fifty-year-old book about communism: a first generation's sacrifices transfer to the second, fail to transfer to the third, and by the fourth the whole thing collapses — he can pass on doctrines with a little trouble, but he cannot transfer principles or spirit. Somebody in the house has to have a personal experience at an altar. The appeal is the sermon coming home: don't stop till you find your altar. If we lose our direction, we lose it at the altar.

Summary scripture index: 2 Kings 16:7-18 · Isaiah 7 · Acts 6 · Isaiah 40:31 · Psalm 133:1 · Zephaniah 1:9 · 2 Kings 5:16 · 1 Kings 7:27-29 · Acts 2:38 · Acts 4:12 · 2 Chronicles 28:19 · 2 Chronicles 28:24 (12 entries).

Scriptures: 2 Chronicles 28:19; 2 Chronicles 28:24