WE BEGIN OUR FORTIETH YEAR

Dr.  W.  A.  Criswell

Philippians 3:12-14

10-02-83    10:50 a.m.

 

 

What a great surprise: on cable in places and on stations and at hours that I know nothing about, I run into people all the time who tell me that they heard a message delivered by this pastor upon a cable, and I am so surprised.  All over America—here and yonder and still over there—the message is presented.  And for that I am grateful, if it honors the Lord and calls us to a renewed dedication to Him or to a commitment of our life and faith and trust to our wonderful Savior.

 

The published title of the message is Today We Begin Our Fortieth Year.  A more accurate description, delineation of the message might be “The Advantages and the Disadvantages of a Long Pastorate.” As a background text, in the Book of Philippians, chapter 3, verses 12-14, Paul wrote to the church in Philippi in Philippians 3:12-14:

 

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfected; but I follow after, if I may get hold of that for which Christ got hold of me.

 

Brethren, I count not myself to have attained it; but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forward to those things that are before,

 

I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

 

 The Advantages and the Disadvantages of a Long Pastorate: the title refers not only to the fortieth year we are sharing together here, but also to the fifty and four years that I have been a pastor.

First, the disadvantages: one of the sorrows of a long pastorate is to see the people that you have come to know and to love dissolve before your very eyes.  The seven members of the pulpit committee that called me to this place have been dead for many, many years.  Even Ralph Baker, who represented the young people and for whom Ralph Baker Hall is named, even Ralph Baker has been dead for many years.

All of the deacons who served under Dr.  Truett and who were here when I came to be undershepherd of this congregation, all of those deacons have been gone for many, many years.  And the congregation to which Dr.  Truett preached for forty and seven years, all of that congregation is gone except a very few surviving members.  One of the sadnesses of a long, long pastorate is to see the dissolution of the congregation right before your eyes.  Years and years take them away.

Another one of the disadvantages of a long pastorate: you come to see the outworking of your mistakes.  For example, structurally, when we built the parking building, it was a time when parking attendants were trustworthy and you could pay them commensurate with what we were able to afford.  But all of that has changed in these years and years.  The building was constructed for attendant parking: you drove your car into the building, and an attendant took it to the parking space, then returned it to you.  All of that is past now.  And we have been forced to make it a self-parking building.  And that is very, very inconvenient.  It is, structurally, now a grave mistake.  But you do not see that until the passing of the years.

Take again, looking at the mistakes of a long ministry: a long time ago the Salvation Army offered us their lot for $150,000.  I greatly coveted it, because we were building our Good Shepherd Ministry downtown, and I wanted the property for our Good Shepherd Chapel.  So we appointed a committee to study the buying of the property.  The committee was chaired by one of our ablest men.  And they came back with a report that it was too costly, too expensive; under no conditions could the church afford to buy it.

What I should have done was to raise so much cane that the church would have bought it just to quiet the pastor! But I made a mistake, I let it go.  And now, they say they have been offered $4,000,000 for that corner.  As the years pass, the mistakes you have made in years past become very apparent.

One of the disadvantages of a long pastorate: looking over the development of life, you find truths that in the beginning you do not realize.  A good example is the evolution of evil.  It is universally taught in our schools—in our high schools, in our universities, in our colleges—evolution is the backbone of all modern teaching.  And they have some things that bolster, that confirm, that affirm their hypothesis.

I think it is idiotic to attempt to defend the evolutionary process in life.  The truth of the evolutionary process in life is that it devolutes not evolutes.  If you take a fine strain of horses and you just let them go, they will turn into broomtails.  If you take a fine strain of cattle and you just let them go, then they will devolve into scrubs.  You take a fine strain of roses or orange trees and you let them go, and they will descend into bushes.  That is my impression of life in evolutionary processes.  It is an undefendable and unprovable hypothesis.  I think the reason it is defended is to get rid of God.

But there are areas of life in which the evolutionist has a point to make.  There is advancement and there is progress in discovery, in invention, in technology, in science, in education.  I can remember when the radio was invented.  I can remember when television was invented.

I was a grown young man when television was invented.  I remember the first televised presentation made in America.  I went to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, and the televised station was in that room and the other station was in this room.  They were able to transfer, to broadcast the image, say, thirty feet.  And I said to myself, “If they can broadcast that thirty feet, they will sometime be able to do it thirty miles, then 300 miles, then 3,000 miles, then around the world.”

Well, all of that has come to pass.  And the development of modern technology is astounding—all of the things up above us and all of the things having to do with this modern computerized life.  I can understand that; I can see that in education and in all the gadgets in life.  But I also avow that there is progress in war and in the instruments of war, in hatred and in the bitter confrontations between nations.

There is advancement and progress also in the evil of sodomy.  When I began my ministry here, I had never heard of a Sodomonic community.  In San Francisco they will have 250,000 members of that community.  They have a “Sodom” community in Dallas.  They clamor for recognition on the campus of the great Christian Southern Methodist University here in Dallas.  I never heard of herpes.  I never heard of AIDS.  There is advancement and progress in evil.

I see it also in the drug culture that has developed in my ministry.  Drugs now are almost universally imbibed in our society.  We drink it in alcohol, we smoke it in marijuana, we swallow it in amphetamine pills, we inhale it with cocaine, and we inject it in our veins in heroine.  All of the drugs of all the pharmaceutical houses do not begin to compare with the destruction and the waste of alcohol.  Thousands and thousands and thousands of lives are destroyed every year in alcohol.  And yet, it is advertised and almost universally imbibed.

But I was a youth in Prohibition.  The Eighteenth Amendment was the result of the spiritual dedication of America.  All of that is lost, and the fabric of our nation is beginning to ebb at an alarming pace and rate.  There is also evolution in evil.  When you look at it over time, it becomes tragically, traumatically apparent.  The same thing in regard to humanism and its impact in education outside the Christian academies and colleges in our country: the background of all education is humanistic, it is humanism.  God is left out of it, and only what is material is left.

Look at this.  Would you believe that when I came here to Dallas, if we had an able and gifted evangelist, he would hold chapel services in the schools of our city.  All over the city, the evangelist who was preaching here at our church would be holding services in the schools, in the chapels of our great city.  Could you imagine a thing like that now? It would be unthinkable.  I suppose that the law and the courts would close down the institution, if you just had a service with the students.  It is another world, it is a new day.

One of the disadvantages of a long pastorate is to observe the development and growth and the advancement of evil.  What could I say about pornography? The day is soon coming when every living room in this country can have in front of that group an X-rated movie; cable will bring it to you.  You watch it: think of the effect that it will have on children and upon family groups.  When I came here to this church, that was unheard of.

The discouragements of a long pastorate, may I name one other: the dissolution of the association and the denomination to which you belong.  When I was a youth and began my work, I was seventeen years old, and even when I came to Dallas at thirty-four years of age—forty-three years younger than Dr.  Truett—I looked upon our Baptist communion as monolithic.  It seemed to me that everybody believed the Bible, every preacher preached the Word of God.

I knew there were others—I had no contact with them—I knew there others who did not believe the Bible: liberals.  They looked upon it as a piece of antique literature written by a small clan or tribe in a hidden corner of the world.  But for us Baptists, and particularly Southern Baptists, we were people of the Book: preached the Bible, believed the Bible, the infallible Word of God.  That is the way I looked on the denomination when I began as a pastor.

Now I am going to read from a recent publication, a religious publication, “Spurgeon said this volume is the writing of the living God.  Each letter was penned with an almighty finger.  Each word in it dropped from the everlasting lips.  Each sentence was dictated by the Holy Spirit.”

Those were the words of the revered Baptist preacher of all time.  Now as I read the article, forgive me for reading this part, “Dr.  W.  A.  Criswell, called by many ‘the Spurgeon of the Twentieth Century,’ has written with complete and perfect assurance that, ‘When I pick up my Bible, I read the revealed Word of God.  The God who inspired also took care to make sure that it was preserved through the fire and flood of centuries.’

“On the twenty-third day of April, 1888, the Baptist Union of Great Britain censured Spurgeon—it was 2,000 for the censure and only seven against it—and withdrew fellowship from Spurgeon and the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London.”

In 1969, I wrote a book entitled Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True.  I was President of the Southern Baptist Convention at that time.  When that book came out—Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True—the Southeastern Association of Professors of Religion in our Baptist schools censured me.  And one of our Baptist publications wrote, published, what they said.  And I have copied it, “Biblical literalism is blasphemy against God.  Biblical literalism accuses God of using men as tape recorders, a notion that dishonors God and destroys men.  Literalism barters inspiration for mechanics.  It tramples elementary honesty.” These are our people!

“See that fellow there, Criswell.  He believes the Bible.  Ha, ha, ha.  He believes the Bible.  Ha, ha.  See that fellow there at the First Baptist Church in Dallas.  He is naïve, he believes the Bible.  See that fellow that pastors the downtown church in Dallas.  He is an anachronism.  He belongs in the days when people did not know anything.  See that fellow that pastors the First Baptist Church in Dallas.  He is archaic.  He is a throwback to the last century.”  Why? Because I believe, literally, the Word of God.

When I look back over the years and the years and the years, I wish I were back where I was when I was a boy, when the whole Baptist world seemed to me to be monolithic, when everybody believed the Bible and preached it.  I think of the poem of Thomas Hood:

 

I remember, I remember

The fir-trees, tall and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were pressed against the sky;

’Twas but a childish fantasy,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from Heaven

Than when I was a boy.

 

I regret the intervening years.  I wish I were back where I was when I was a boy.  I wish I did not know what I know; I wish it were blotted out of my mind and memory.  I wish we were as we used to be—the disadvantages of a long pastorate.  Now I wish I had hours to speak of the advantages of a long pastorate.  One: I am now marrying children of the parents that I have married.  Through two generations now, I am seeing them grow up.  You have to be about four years or some-odd to remember the days of childhood, which means that there are people who have been in the congregation all their lives who are forty-four years old who can only remember me as their pastor.

The advantages of a long pastorate: living so closely and intimately with the people and seeing them grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and the wisdom of God—sweet, dear, gracious, in honor preferring one another, growing heavenward and Christ-ward and God-ward.  It is a beautiful thing to see a congregation grow in the grace and love of our Lord.  It is no less a beautiful thing to see our people grow in love and kindness and sweetness.  The older we become, the dearer, the more precious: it is beautiful to see a congregation grow in the sweet likeness of our humble and loving Lord:

 

Growing graceful, growing old,

So many fine things to do;

Laces, and ivory and gold;

And silks need not be new.

There is healing in old trees;

Old streets a glamour hold;

And may not we, as well as these,

Grow lovely, growing old?

 

And to see our people grow in grace and love, in humility, in kindness, in charity, Christ-likeness is one of the sweet rewards of a long pastorate.  What are the advantages of a long pastorate? In our dear church, the growth of an idea: the idea of the church as the body of Christ, a community, a Christian community in a world of compromise and sin, a lovely people of God in a world of worldliness.

By contrast—not a sarcastic or critical contrast, but just contrast in history—I am speaking of now the advantages of a long pastorate as it used to be.  I think universally as it used to be, the church was looked upon as a square meeting-house in which was a pulpit, behind which the minister preached the gospel.  It was so here, this church and the assembly of people, and the great pastors stand here to preach.  That was the church.

The new idea that the church is not just a meeting-house with a pulpit and a preacher standing behind it, but the new idea that the church is a community, a family of God’s people, separate and apart from the world, in it but not of it, witnessing to it but the people pulled out from its ways of compromise and evil.  All of that would mean that there had to be a program in the church that involved every member of the family, and the heart and the center of the home was not out there somewhere, but it was here in the house of God.  Our friends are made here.  Our young people meet each other here.  They fall in love here, they marry here, they bring up their children here, and their children are brought up in the love and nurture of the Lord.

Such an idea as that carried with it two tremendous programs.  Number one: the expansion of the facilities of the church.  If you are going to involve all of the children and all of the young people and all of the teenagers, if you are going to involve them in the church, there has to be recreational areas, there has to be vast facilities.  Had I had my way, we would have owned this whole part of the city of Dallas, because I had in my mind playgrounds for children and football fields and baseball diamonds.  We could have bought it when property was cheap.  It takes a long time for an idea to grow, but God has blessed us somewhat.  We have five blocks down here, trying to involve people in the church in the household of God.

Do not go out there trying to find your wife at some bar or some nightclub or some disco.  Find your wife here in the household of faith, a Christian girl.  Build your home around the Lord and raise your family around the love of Jesus—the idea of a church being a family, a community.  And of course, that carried us into one final area where God blessed us: I wanted and prayed for a school for our children and, finally, a school for the training of the ministers of our dear Lord.  Our executive leader belonged to the church in these years gone by and he said to me, “I would hate to see you devolve from a preacher of the gospel into the manager of a school.”

It has been against the history of our Baptist communion that we have a school.  Well, why is it that I put so much emphasis on it?  Because I believe in the entire life being built up and built around the mind of Christ Jesus our Lord.  I think history ought to be taught in the mind of Christ.  I think chemistry, I think physics, I think the humanities, I think sociology, I think all of life should be interpreted in the mind of God, in Christ Jesus.  And when we give ourselves to that, it means an inclusive, an all-inclusive program.  It is like this:

 

An old man, going on a lone highway,

Came in the evening, cold and gray,

To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,

[Through which was flowing a sullen tide.]

The old man crossed in the twilight dim;

The sullen stream had no fears for him;

He stopped when safe on the other side;

And built a bridge to span the tide.

 

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,

“You are wasting your strength with building here;

Your journey will end with the ending day;

You never again will pass this way;

You crossed the chasm, deep and wide—

Why build you this bridge at eventide?”

 

The builder lifted his old gray head,

“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,

“There followeth after me this day

A youth whose steps must pass this way.

This chasm which has been naught to me

For that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.

He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;

Good friend, I build this bridge for him.”

[W.A.  Dromgoole, “The Bridgebuilder”]

 

And that is the dedication of our church as a family of God to include in it the child that is born, the youth and the teenager growing up, the young marrieds that are building their home, the men and woman in the strength of their lives and the old and feeble, who come to the twilight years, looking for the great promise and hope we have in Christ Jesus above.  As the seventy-third Psalm, the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth verses say,

 

Whom have I in heaven but Thee?

And there is none upon earth that I desire but Thee…

God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.

 

Our vision, our energies, our toil, our labor, our dedication, the strength of our lives are upward and heavenward and God-ward and Christ-ward.  And when we turn to the world, we invite them to share that same full, beautiful life with us, the one we have found in our living Lord.  Young man, come and walk with us.  Beautiful girl, come and find the true meaning and joy of life with us.  Little family, come with us.  Men and women in the strength and the meridian days of life, come with us, and down to old age and unto death share with us the faith and the promise and the joy that we have in Christ Jesus.

It is a beautiful way to be.  It is a glorious way to go.  It is the purpose of Christ, I think, for His children, His family, His church in the earth.  God bless you as we pilgrimage from this world to the world to come with a wonderful Friend and Savior by our sides.

We are going to stand now and sing our hymn of appeal.  You want to stand now?  And while we sing the hymn of invitation to you, a family, a couple, a one somebody you, “This is God’s day for me and pastor we are coming.  I want to accept Jesus as my Savior and open my heart to Him.”  You come.  “This is my whole family.  We want to put our lives in this church.”  Or, “Pastor, I want to be baptized just as God says in the Book and I am coming.”  As the Spirit shall guide and lead in the way, answer with your life.  In the balcony round, down these stairways, on the lower floor, down one of these aisles and a thousand times welcome.  God speed you as you come while we sing our hymn of appeal.