Excerpts from sermon:
“A school will dry up, they will die if there is not fresh faith coming from these things of the Word of God. Please love me for what I’m saying. Hasn’t the music been wonderful this week? It’s been the past year and a half it has literally exploded. It’s exploded. It’s picked us up like a wave. Everybody is coming into the prime, in the prime, been in the prime like us in the Bible and theology. But God forbid that there ever come a day that the music consumes us and we expect more and more in every service. After a while the pressure is going to be on the Fine Arts Department that the arrangements have got to outdo what they were last year. It’s got to be bigger. It’s got to be better. It’s got to be larger. It’s got to be longer. And after a while, we’re going to potentially lose the simplicity of the hymn. This is what’s grieved me about Bob Jones University. They feel like they have got to take every good hymn, and put a new melody to it. Why do we have to do that? After a while the talent will become the master rather than the Holy Spirit in His simplicity. And we are going to have to guard and biblically judge each step that we take, for it has destroyed many churches. Can a church have precious, glorious music that is not wrapped up in flesh and the pride of the talent? And we start hearing more about the music than the preaching. I tell you it will become a commentary of this ministry that the natural man is taking over the spiritual. Anything I have said today, and this is a warning to me about the theology. I’ve got to go beyond what I taught two or three years ago on sanctification, and there are basics. You’ve got to give principles, but I tell you we have got to be on the quest, and there is a point, even in the music, sometimes we’ve got to hear from the ram’s horn—these preachers that don’t have that good of a voice, but at least they can carry a tune. My father was bold enough, and my mother wanted this—“Honey, I’m going to sing this morning.” You know, Pastors can do that—“I’m going to sing this morning.” Truth caught him in his unique writing, and the ram’s horn bellows it out. Can anything good come out of a ram’s horn and a nightingale’s voice of a Dr. Joye. Well, I wish we had two or three CDs of their singing. We can’t lose that, but I don’t want to labor that point.”
“We’ve got to hate legalism, but we’ve got to hate compromise with equal passion. It’s being pressed on us everyday—you don’t know the pressure that I sense from outside—change, change, change, change, change. Why, you could sell more books, you could sell more music if your music was a little more like Bob Jones. Jesus is the Judge of His house now, and there is only a few angels of the church that even see the problems.”
“There’s one thing I don’t like in preparing for my contemporary music classes, and I don’t do this. I get maybe a staff member. Get this on. I don’t want to listen to that stuff, because I know unconsciously it could affect me. We want the best for God in preaching, in the classes, in the music, but we don’t want to be taken by the beauty of the presentation, and we don’t have a hunger for the message.”
