0: A man many of you know, Philip K. Chamberlain, a Yale graduate who has been faithful to this campus since his graduation in 1970, about a quarter of a century of desire to see the work of God increased in this place.

I don’t know how many of you would be here normally in this place tonight, I suspect a good many of you. But for each of you, your presence is much appreciated. I know that you’re crowded with things all the time. There are demands that sometimes are cruel upon you, and I appreciate your time and the attention of your minds on some content tonight.

I’m told that Dr. Michael Brown is coming on the 18^th. He’s a marvelous man. He is well described as a scholar and a gentleman. He knows God’s word deeply and thoroughly. He’s a Jewish believer. A believer I know heard him last night in New York City and said that he spoke as from heaven. And I believe the more that come that night to hear Mike Brown the greater the blessing will be.

3: John the Baptist, the anointed forerunner, said two central things concerning Jesus: one, announced his redemptive mission to lost mankind, “Behold, God’s lamb, who takes away the sin of the world.” And the other was to believers, “He it is who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”—holy fire, purifying, refining fire, fire that works inwardly, purging us of everything that is obstructively secondary in our beings and makes us less than we can be in Christ. And fire that works outwardly to consume dross and unbelief in the atmosphere in which we walk and work or minister. A fire of holy love and zeal that is wonderfully benign in its effects. Just as that storm of raging eruptive fire that is the sun above us reaches us at the level of our need and becomes supply rather than scorching, so this fire is sent forth to do us great good by the One of whom it is said in Hebrews 12:29, “Our God is a consuming fire.”

5: And all of sinful mankind has an appointment with fire that is inescapable on any other terms but the provided redemption. And I have an appointment with fire, and so do you. But not with the fire of God’s wrath, because we have passed from death to life–the life of God given to us, and don’t ever listen to the enemy say, “It’s not quite true.” That fire that are things and you face will not consume us, but it may thoroughly humiliate us. Or it may be the source of amazing joy and indescribable reward.

6: The one foundation for life and work is what? Jesus Christ, as 1 Corinthians 3:10 states: “If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be revealed with fire, and that fire will test each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss, yet he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.”

7: The Christian life of wood and straw will be crisped to cinders with a single glance of holy fire—there it is, just reduced to a film of ash. Do you really want to go in that way? There is no doubt that some believers do. They want to consume this life on their own desires in some fashion, some particular fashion that appeals to them, and then go in.

8: But consider this if you will: the inescapable reckoning may seem tonight fairly far off, but it cannot be postponed at all in terms of its finding or result. That result is revealed then. It is determined with finality here and now at Yale, beyond Yale, by the life that I live in Christ.

We make the pile here. You think, well, Jesus gets that pile and presents it. No, no. We give it to him, and then he puts it there for the fire test. If that is not a motivator to shape up before the Lord and to be on the line for Christ, then the sensibility is dangerously anesthetized, gospel-hardened, as some have said.

10: So, yes, we are heading for a wedding as the Bride of Christ. But we must first pass through the door of fire. And the gold, you see, having met the ultimate test, will have been so of God as to last throughout eternity. It will have been formed here and then finally tested there, because it won’t be perfectly pure; it will survive.

11: It is all too readily assumed that the highest earthly aim of the Creator is the happiness of man, and the conclusion attached to that assumption is that whatever is conducive to man’s happiness is therefore good and in line with the will of the Creator. A danger lurks in that assumption that is greater than it looks to be, because it elevates something which, while it has a part in the purpose of God, is not in truth His highest aim.

12: Clearly we have the capacity for happiness because God has written that into our beings. But when we exalt it over what must have the primary priority, then we pervert it, and it inevitably becomes a danger to our souls and ultimately a nesting place for evil. So ministry that aims at the happiness of man, as too much ministry does, must falsify truth at some point or adapt truth to mortal convenience, thus subverting truth. Since happiness can be enjoyed on a wide spectrum, from virtue to what is called nobleness to sinful indulgence, such a ministry will inevitably to some degree subordinate or even contradict truths in God’s word that are changeless, and do so for the convenience of man or to suit his gratifications.

13: Man must always be subject to the Word of God, and must never subject that Word to his prevailing preferences or even his perceived acute needs or desires, however clamorous. The preaching of God’s Word, that to some degree accommodates such human preferences and felt needs, fails God and ultimately also fails man, for man’s sense of what his happiness consists in is shot-through with uncertainties and failures. How many have said, “Oh, yes, that will be my happiness,” and it hasn’t been so. Some have thought that would be my happiness, and it’s been their hell.

15: God’s Word will not heel to the human quest for happiness, because that quest is often faulty and sometimes depraved. Yet the process is now on by which God’s Word among Evangelicals and Pentecostals is being reworked, reinterpreted to suit both the present convenience and perceived happiness of man, exalting it above its station in the divine order. Any teaching, however scholarly in tone or kindly in intent or maybe both, having the present happiness of man at its center reworks truth just enough to cancel its effect at some point, opening a way for believers to satisfy their wants without distressing their consciences, and that is, no matter where it comes from, spiritual deception. To fear the Lord is to hate evil (Proverbs 8:13).

17: Why, Jesus asked the finest religious teachers of his day, do you by your tradition make void the Word of God? You see, that Word preached whole as it is is a mighty bulwark against a host of evils that otherwise break out and burst all bounds.

18: To Tocqueville, after his journey in the rising new world, found the strength of its character and the genius of its growth to proceed from one foremost source: her pulpits. He wrote, the pulpits of America are aflame with righteousness. And that fire that he observed consumed fleshly and soulish and spiritual and societal evils before they could hatch their eggs and loose their little circles. And it conducted to a sum of human happiness generally greater than the inhabitants of the world have almost ever known. Righteousness exalts a nation (Proverbs 14:34).

19: Righteousness preserves a nation by means of the proclamation and the reception and the obedience of the Word of the Most High God. “Forever, O Lord, your Word is settled in heaven.” So can I reach up and say, “There are just four lines…. I love that Bible, but there are just four lines that don’t work for me, Lord. Enough, I’m going to pull them down, put them aside.”

The holiness of God is more important than the happiness of man, now and forever, and His holiness cannot be amended to subserve man’s happiness. But man must find his happiness within the holiness of God, and it’s immeasurably there.

21: The glory and the honor of the Creator is also more important than the happiness of man. He who is the fountain of life in whom there is no darkness at all must be exalted, feared and carefully obeyed and His Word fearlessly upheld by all whose privilege it is to teach it or to proclaim it. “Let God be true,” Romans 3:4 warns, “and every man a liar, as it is written, ‘So that you may be proved right in your works and prevail in your judgments.’”

22: “Arise, O Lord,” cries the psalmist, “let not man prevail; let the nations know that they are but men” (Psalm 9:19-20). “God rules forever by His power. His eyes watch the nations—let not the rebellious exalt themselves” (Psalm 66:7). “It is time, O Lord, for you to act” (Psalm 119:126). That’s a declaration: “It’s time, O Lord, for you to act.” But there’s a reason attached to it. “It is time, O Lord, for you to act, for men have made void your law.” When that law is violated, the judge begins to send not final wrath but initial judgments and costs.

24: The Scriptures warn repeatedly and most explicitly against the violations of God’s design by means of the sins of fornication, marital infidelity and adultery as among those which, if not repented of, will consign men’s souls to eternal separation from God. The mainline—and I do mean the mainline—Protestant pulpits of North America once stood, with some exceptions, of course, inevitably—virtually singly arrayed against divorce and remarriage. They got it from the Scriptures. And they proclaimed it from the pulpit, not convenient at all to man. But it was proclaimed and God was feared.

25: But now that divorce has been brought from a marginal state, as it was—can you believe it, it was—to one of appalling frequency, and has found its way among Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Behold, the preachers—some—and the writers have found a new way of looking at Scriptures adapting them interpretively to the necessity of the hour.

Let’s hear Jesus. He told his disciples, “It has been said anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to commit adultery” (Matthew 5:32).

26: I’m the man; I’ve gotten a little tired of you. I see someone over there, [tasty] to me. So I put you away; you’re the old timer. And I cause you to commit adultery. And I will pay for that. But you will pay for that. But you were unjustly put away.

So how does a man who puts away his wife, perhaps wholly unjustly, cause her to commit adultery? It’s clear enough. He leaves her exposed; he was a covering in a sense—I don’t want to make that too literal. He was God’s man for her, and he’s left her exposed to the temptation of remarriage while he remains alive. And Jesus here identifies that as her committing adultery. And His statement concludes with these words: “And anyone who marries a woman so divorced commits adultery.” He said also that divorce was given by Moses for the hardness of the people’s hearts, but, He said, “In the beginning, it was not so.” So you see, He loved it that way, the “not so in the beginning” way.

29: “The time will come,” we are plainly told in 2 Timothy 4:3, “when men will not put up with sound doctrine, instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” And that’s a warning to believers: you’ve got to discern, not the kindliness of the intent, not the scholarliness of the pretension, when it’s that, but how it accords with truth that cannot be changed.

30: A great and humble national leader once desired what he called a “new birth of liberty (or freedom)” across this land. And that desire was abundantly realized—freedom almost limitless. But this land now needs something different. It desperately needs a new birth of righteousness so that as Psalm 85:9 puts it, “So that glory may dwell in our land”—glory, free to come down from heaven and dwell in our land.

31: And that can come about by chiefly two means: one of them is by young believers receiving and exercising the God-given ministries that scatter darkness and that build Christ’s church in God’s way. You know what they are: apostles, those who break into new territory, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. Those ministries working together not divided—because each is essential—working in godly balance, will bring the church to full maturity or stature.

33:And there is no higher station attainable to young believers than one of those ministries on this earth, that is. They are given to man, but they are not of man. They are heavenly, originated. Won by sacrifice on the cross and bestowed, the Scripture says, as Jesus’ gifts to man.

Should not some such ministries arise out of Yale? Should not Yale be the birthing point, as it were, of an evangelist of passionate intelligence and holy zeal? That would be in express accord with the very intentions of its founders, for they designed and desired to train and fit young men for service to God—that’s how they put it—in church and in commonwealth or civil state.

34: And a second way is for young believers, individually and not as some kind of organized campaign, to enter in and occupy places where public influence is enlarged or even amazingly magnified, so that one individual in fact wields an influence greater than a thousand other individuals. And these places include the mass media of information, issues, ideas and persuasions. It includes offices whose occupants deal with the raw matter of public policy almost every day. They mold with their minds and souls and hands that which we all live under. And it certainly includes universities, education.

36: The record of believers in this country in just these three sensitive areas, these culture-shaping sectors, is one of cowardly abandonment. Why are there not twenty scholars of repute and godly character here at Yale? Does anyone dare to reverse this costly [finding]? Will any young believer go from Yale to the employment office of that great organ The New York Times and get into its news or editorial operations?

37: I won’t tell you that there are 1,584 daily newspapers published in this country. Nor will I tell you what the number is published and operated by Christian believers who are just as free in this free land as any unbeliever. But it’s fewer than one of my hands can express by a signal.

38: Now let me ask you: why should unbelievers hold so nearly a monopoly position of hold on places of lawful authority and of extended often daily and sometimes incredibly widespread influence? It is an inculcated mindset and a bind. It shrinks from honest conflict rather than join it. And the whole nation pays the price. You know there’s a protest song that confidently asserts, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” What if it’s blown in the wind? It’s probably the product of the prince of the air, and it must, however good it looks, finally fall short or fail.

39: So the answer isn’t in the wind. The answer is the wind. The wind of the Holy Spirit, loosed from heaven and moving freely among men. Come to convict, convert, cleanse and instill spiritual life into the very dead.

When that wind comes, often very suddenly and with surprising power, men call it revival or awakening. And Scripture speaks of “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.” And such awakenings are rather rare. There have been four historic general awakenings in North America since it was settled by founders in Europe. And the latest was in 1858, the latest general national awakening. And there have been a series of local awakenings, because the wind blows where it will.

41: But where have there been repeated phenomenal thorough-going revivals? Right here at Yale, where you now walk, work and pray. If you think Yale is now dry, if you do, it’s nothing like as dry as it once was. Clearly founded by men of Christian, biblical faith, held pretty much with some obvious swing for most its first full century, except toward the end of that century.

42: The susceptibility of youth to the current fashion of the day allowed the French Infidelity to, as it were, leap from France and drop with some precision upon this campus to a point that there were countably two Christian students left on the Yale campus and scores of unbelievers who organized themselves into what were called—this was the name—Infidel Societies or Infidel Clubs to reinforce their contempt of the Scriptures. But you know, sin won’t be polite. When people are mocking God, and it sort of breaks free, and the atmosphere here became full of profanity and drunkenness and vandalism. And it began to be a kind of anti-educational atmosphere, and students realized this isn’t going to work. And they couldn’t quite figure what was wrong. But they formed what they called the Moral Society—we’re going to make it clean enough so that we can study and get our degrees. And it was an honest effort in a way, and they had some real principles and they did succeed in making the environment more tolerable for gentlemanly pursuit of education by this means.

44: But in mercy and wisdom, in answer to prayers and the courageous faith of President Timothy Dwight, God sent awakenings to this campus in 1802, 1807, 1812, 1815, 1820, 1831 and thereafter, and you notice between 1820 and 1831, there’s a gap of about 11 years, and things went down. They were measurably different. But 1831 came.

45: Now if the happiness of man were the preeminent aim of heaven, then that great and good and godly man named Job would never have been stripped of everything he had except his wife and plunged into sorrow and sufferings and bodily pain and utterly baffling perplexities with virtually everyone shunning him as an outcast. Except alas for those who came to persecute his troubled soul with their righteous but in the case misplaced counsels. The issue was greater than the happiness of man; it was the honor and glory of God. And it was also the faithfulness of Job in the entire absence of comforts or helps of any evident kind. “I know that my Redeemer lives,” he said, “…and when God has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”

48: Job reached the absolute height of spiritual warfare on the earth. And while it was empty of all triumphalism, it was utterly triumphant. Beware of spiritual warfare that centers on human triumphalism or allows man to strut or boast in any way or to cast boastful contempts on powers of darkness, contrary to strong biblical warnings never to do that. “Even the archangel Michael did not bring a railing accusation against Satan, but just said, The Lord rebuke you” (Jude 1:9).

49: Spiritual warfare is incomparably important and in major ways it is very much like natural warfare. There is always an enemy aggressor to be defeated, really defeated, or an enemy occupier to be dispossessed. And there is always a field to be taken and an issue to be joined and resolved in favor of righteousness at cost to wickedness. And while that warfare is nearly always actually invisible, it is both real and very powerful.

50: So manifest conquest is not so much the process of spiritual warfare as its ultimate outcome. We think of warfare in terms of strength, but this warfare must often be waged in human weakness even acutely felt weakness and insufficiency, so that if the battle to be won, it is certain to be won only by the strength of God brought to bear upon that field. “His strength is made perfect in my weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7). And like natural warfare, spiritual warfare will be at times dangerous, disorienting, subject to advances with sometimes sharp reversals so intense that the warrior may at certain points not have full assurance of survival in the condition; the Lord will hold him up.

Warfare is characterized at junctures by obviously lack of peace, simply because it is real warfare against real powers, and it can be experientially hellish because the crux of such warfare lies at the precise point of confrontation between the believer and the powers of evil against which he or she has been set in the wisdom of God.

53: Jeremiah was a young man, chosen by God to occupy a high place in real spiritual warfare across decades of life, and his commission was to proclaim the truth of God to his own grossly disobedient and densely darkened people and to the nations, speaking it nearly always to hardened hearts and unwilling ears. If you think it was easy, read his own agonized testimony of the hell that he went through to uphold the word of God in his generation and to do all that he could to see to the honor and the glory of God in the face of hatred and rejection.

54: The Lamentations of Jeremiah, the anointed prophet, are highly personal and affecting. I read from the book called the Lamentations of Jeremiah. And the chapter begins, “I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath.” Now these ruminations, these revelations of experience may not be entirely accurate in all their expressions. He’s trying to express the truth of what he went through in service to his Lord.

55: And he says, “He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; against me alone he turns his hand again and again all day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away and broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me sit in darkness. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has put heavy chains upon me; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with hewn stones; he has made my paths crooked.”

56: Down a few verses: “He has shot into my vitals the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all my people, the object of their taunts songs all day long. He has filled me with bitterness and sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace.”

57: Now was he godly? Who dare say it? You dare say it. He was godly. Was he faithful? He was bereft of peace—that is not Evangelical, it’s not Pentecostal, it surely is not Charismatic. Why, brother, you can’t be bereft of peace. He says that, then, he was.

58: “I have forgotten what happiness is.” That’s Jeremiah, the young prophet. “So I say, ‘Gone is my glory and all that I hope for from the Lord.’ The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall.” Who was he identifying with?

59: “My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’ The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth.”

1:00: That’s what he did. And he said that it is good to bear it in your youth.

1:01: Youth is a time of abounding energy, drive, surging ambition. Kindly parental nurture and directions congenial to their concept of what life should be. It’s a time for freedom and it’s averse by nature to any yoke.

1:02: What is the nature of a yoke? It is willing submission to the will of another so that His field may be plowed, however hard the field is, in His time, in His way, for His yield or crop. The yoke in this case is the yoke of God, and you are the young believer, asked to be willing to submit your own will, whatever it is, to the far wiser, all-knowing will of the God who made you for His glory.

1:03: Most young believers, finally preferring their own will, do not go into that yoke. Others have a rough time with it; they wrestle and kick and seek and strive, but they go in. And some others, profoundly in love with Christ, go in quietly and become mighty in meekness.

1:04: The tragedy, and it’s not less than that, of declining, decayed, degenerated America tonight is, more than is remotely suspected, the failure of Christians to be summoned to and to enter into that yoke while they are young.

1:05: Young friend, I have not falsified that warfare to you this night, because you need to know its terms. The honor and glory of God is at stake in this broad land. There is occupied territory to be contested and possessed at cost, and an enemy to be dispossessed in the strength of God.

1:06: Allow me to call you tonight to tell the God who knows the number of the stars and the hairs of your head and the death of a sparrow that you will enter the yoke of His service on His terms in His place of choice for you.

1:07: And let me in closing give you a glimpse of your public potential as a believer from Hebrews 11. And let me say, it’s past time for born-again believers to stand behind the lines of warfare, enjoying the fruits of the land and its potential richnesses, while the line of battle remains so often unmanned. Well, there’s a listing in that chapter Hebrews 11 of believers of whom it is said that they “through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gained what was promised, escaped the edge of the sword, whose weakness was turned into strength.”

1:08: If there are any tonight present who do desire either the understanding of the baptism in the Holy Spirit or that blessed gift, I believe that Peter perhaps Phil, I’m not sure who else, would be willing to go aside if that room is available or some place nearby and talk with you a bit and pray with you.

1:09: I would ask that as we close now that we…let me qualify this a bit. Some of you must leave, and I do not want anyone to stay for any reason who needs to get to books or something tonight. But those who truly have some time, I would ask to remain here in the chapel for a time of prayer.

1:10: And I’ll preface it also with this remark: a time of prayer is an uncertain quantity as you enter it—it depends upon many things. And, you know, sometimes there’s that young zealous one who believes that unless his voice is lifted up with great [decibelate] power, it’s not really a prayer. And over there there’s this quieter type who really is afflicted by that because she believes that you’re quiet before the Lord. You know, they’re both right, and they both have to occupy the same prayer room, and I can’t say to Mr. Boisterous Full Voice, “O brother, sister, come on, calm down.” Nor can I say by any means to Mr. Quiet, “Come, man, lift your voice.” But let those of us who have a burden for this campus, a desire to see God work here, remain, who have the time, and let us see what God will do with us then. Amen.