Blow the Trumpet!

05 -- BLOW THE TRUMPET LONG AND LOUD

There are breakers ahead! The church of God is in the midst of increasing dangers! These are perilous times! Infidelity, the rum curse, and the devil and secretism more than ever are bold, active and rampant, while multitudes in the churches are either blind, asleep or dead.

There is a rising tide of unbelief, carelessness, recklessness, licentiousness, fraud, worldliness and ungodliness setting in around the church on all sides. How powerless many professing Christians, to resist these evil influences and exert good ones!

The way many churches are treating the duty and privilege of personal sanctification is manifestly displeasing God, and grieving his Holy Spirit.

The obligation to be pure in heart and entirely devoted to God, who can deny? Mark how God enjoins holiness, and how he enforces it, and how his appeals are rejected, and his provision for it neglected. He reveals his own unsullied holiness, and then commands his people to be holy as he is holy. He gives his own Son as an atoning sacrifice, whose precious blood cleanseth from all sin. He gives the church "exceeding great and precious promises," that she may be filled with the "divine nature." He furnishes us the Holy Spirit and commands us to "be filled with it," as a living, divine energy. He tells his church plainly that "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord."

How are these important and blessed truths treated by the mass of the church? Great multitudes doubt and deny the practicability of becoming holy as God requires, until death. The future life alone they set apart for entire sanctification; the present they regard as destined to mixed holiness and sin. That man can and ought to be saved from all sin in this life is regarded as rank heresy. Many of our fashionable churches will not endure the plain, faithful preaching of entire sanctification.

Unbelief is the great sin of these times, both within and without the church, and it is fruitful of the most alarming results. Nothing can be so fatal to the soul as unbelief. It always has been so. It is now so, and it always will be so, and I may add, it ought to be so. When the church harbors unbelief she forfeits her hold upon the promised strength of God, and like Samson, is shorn of her locks. Unbelief would paralyze the energies of an angel.

Oh! how much tolerating, countenancing and defending sin there is among church members. It gives place to the devil, displeases God and works ruin. This is that which we fear is gradually killing thousands of American churches which are cold and seemingly powerless to evangelize this world and bring lost men to God.

There never was a time, perhaps, when light and truth were poured in upon the church more than now, and the duty and privilege of being saved from sin and made pure in heart; and yet there probably was never half as much effort, learning, talent and philosophy expended to defend sin and hold on to it as now.

Christ came to put away sin; his blood cleanseth from all sin. He cannot and will not sanction any sin. When those who profess to be his people stand back from duty, and excuse, defend and hold on to sin, he will forsake them. This is the reason why the heavens over many of the churches are brass; they are pining and dying out, while infidelity, licentiousness, Sabbath desecration, drunkenness, rowdyism and the like are on the increase almost everywhere.

God has a controversy today with the Christian church for her unbelief, remissness, failure to put on her strength and come up to his help against the mighty. Millions are marching hellward, while the great body of the visible church are doubting, hesitating, or caviling over the duty and privilege of Christian sanctification.

It is as clear as the sun in mid-heavens that the pressing need of the church is holiness and power, evangelical, aggressive power. This is needed a thousand times more than anything else to save the church from her miserable wranglings, her cursing church trials, her paralyzing unbelief, her fairs, her festivals and church frolics, and from all torpidity, worldliness and spiritual death.

Satan is prowling around our churches, and backsliders are dropping out on every side, and this is no time for the ministers of God to sleep at their posts. The lines need to be more sharply drawn and the watchmen more bold, independent, and outspoken. Let Zion's watchman "cry aloud, spare not, lift up their voice like a trumpet and show God's people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins."

"Let Zion's watchmen all arise,

And take the alarm they give,"

and let the trumpet be blown long and loud until millions come who are ready to perish.