“I press.” This is also intense action. Now I want to give you another little hook-up of verses that I would like to help you with. This idea of pressing: “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14). “I press toward that.” That takes energy; that takes a life element; that takes something in us that we have to have in order to press. You have to have what I call “the dynamic.” It is the dynamic which causes the spirit, my inner spirit, to be conscious of it for its press; that’s life! With that, hook up a nice verse that I wish we could see. Luke 21:34. These are the last words of Jesus to His people concerning His second coming: “And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares.” My!That’s pretty heavy isn’t it? “Cares of this life …” “Doesn’t He want us to?” “Well, yes.” How many know He wants us to live? You know everyone of us now live (and I am guilty of it and I know it, and I confess it) with

about a thousand things we are now involved in that are not real necessities? What in the last few years has proved the fact? - The war! And we found that we could live without a lot of things we thought we never could live without. We all lived through it, and many of us are better off. But it took the war to strip us of all these externals which we had allowed to become a part of us, un­ til we thought we couldn’t live without them. Now listen! We can! But we don’t want to! The fashion of the world has tied us down; the standards of the people about us have tied us down; they compel us to crowd our lives with a thousand things we don’t need at all. I know it and I am hoping for some changes in my own life, because I am involved with a lot of things I do not need. I can live without them and I think I can live nearer God and be nearer in the spirit if I didn’t have them. I believe it. Now the Lord says, “The cares of this life, the very things that occupy us, I just ask you to beware about them.” Now don’t go and look like a porker, running around and living in a barrel, somewhere under somebody’s back stoop! He says, “You don’t have to do that.” But He warns us; He warns us; He warns us! He says, “the cares,” (just the cares of this life that we are laden with) “beware!” Oh, this is a funny thing. I was going to California and Ma was going along with me and we had to have a sale in the home. Poor little Mother, she was quite a remarkable little woman. She raised four children and we went through plenty to get there too, worked on a farm, lived on a farm, she wasn’t very big. We had to have an auction to dispose of our property and all the things of the house. And when we sold and sold and sold we ended up with these trunks, with a few books and clothes. Well she sat on the trunk (this was so sweet),

“Oh,” she said, “blessed be nothing!” That was good. She looked so pitiful, she had let forty years of housekeeping go, and when you clear out, see if you don’t have a sensation! There went all the things: accumulation of years; sentiment and feelings, love and emotion, and there went this, and there went that; and it did mean something, and the poor little dear, she sat and she said, “Oh! blessed be nothing!” I said, “Well, come on Ma, you will have some more by and by.” And the Lord did take good care of her. But those were the cares of this life. She lived a long time without any of it. She real­ ly did. We could do the same. Every one of us could live without…. “But it’s so comfortable! It’s so luxurious!” And we accumulate and we don’t know what to do with it, and then we have more, and more then we have more. Now I am not making any reflections on the day and age of our dress, but how many know we have about teen more things in dress than our folks had and they got by. Why, Mother used to have a Sunday dress and everyday dresses. Now we have to have a dress for every day and a pair of shoes that match the dress for that day, until now you will have twenty to thirty dresses and seventeen pairs of shoes and fourteen handbags and twenty-eight hats! Listen! I am not making fun of you, I like to see you dressed nice­ ly, I really do, I like to see you well dressed. But do you know what I mean? They are not necessary. Remember when your

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mothers talked about the days when they had a silk dress and that dress lasted them from four to six years? Well now, don’t think that Follette doesn’t like nice things. l like to see you well dressed and you look artistic and pretty. I think it is very nice, and for you to be obedient now and burn up all your dresses, how many know it won’t get you to God! No, no, it won’t; it will get you into the poorhouse! What I am trying to tell you is, that we have run into such a tempo of doing with speed, and change, and color, that we are just too captivated, and He does give us a little warning. He says, “Don’t let it get going too strongly with you. Don’t, don’t do that, because it will divert; it will hinder you; it occupies you. He says, ‘‘That’s not good.” Now as we continue in Luke 21:35, this is the Lord’s admoni­ tion to them: “For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on

BUT

the face of the whole earth.” this is what you can do, this is what Paul is going to do now

in his pressing. He has to have LIFE to do it. In his energy to get through, he has to have LIFE. So when Jesus gives them the farewell word, He says: “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:36). The two things that He says to do are: to ‘WATCH and This is so very good, I like this, it is a command to everyone who is seeking Him or longing for Him or expecting Him. If there is a group, or if there is one individual, anyone who is looking and longing for and expecting His coming, He asks all

of them alike to do the same thing.

Whether you are the weakest member, or the strongest member; or whether you are a Christian worker, or whether you are a layman; whether you are used in the Spirit, or your vocation is something quite out of the way and hidden, but in God, whatever that may be, He doesn’t say anything about that, He says, “These are two things that all of you can do; the weakest can do it-they must! the strongest, the most noble, the poorest, everyone:

“YOU HAVE TO WATCH AND PRAY.” Everybody can watch. You don’t have to be a great preacher; you don’t have to be a missionary; you don’t have to be anything that we call “outstanding” in the standards which have been made; you don’t have to be that to watch. You can be the most simple follower of the Lord, but you can watch. Everyone can pray, that’s something that all of us can do; everyone of us, we can all pray. “I can’t pray!” “Can you talk?”

“Well, then you can pray, anybody who can talk can pray. Can you think?” “I hope so.” ‘‘You can pray.” There is no excuse for it at all. You are thinking of praying like somebody. He isn’t asking you to do that. That urge in you,

whether it takes the form of beautiful words or a cry, He is asking you to vent it, give it out. Everyone can pray. Everybody can pray. Every Christian can pray. So He says, “These are the only two requirements; I am not ask­ ing you, when you look for Me, to go out and turn the world over and build six churches before I get here.” He didn’t say that at all. He said, “Listen! the whole thing rests on these two things with its consequence, two things with a consequence.” What are they? “WATCH and PRAY.” What are you going to watch and pray for? “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things …” “Why, none of us will ever be worthy!” you say. “How can I pray to be worthy? Christ is the only worthy One.” Let us look at that again. Do you know what it says in your original when it was really written? ‘‘Watch and pray that ye may have ‘spiritual vigor’ enough to escape the things that are coming upon you." Because you cannot escape them without the spiritual vigor, which is a requisite; it is required; it is necessary. That will be the dynamic. “Watch and pray that ye may have spiritual vigor to escape " Now He says, ‘‘worthy.” That is a misleading word. We think when a person is worthy, there is something about him that is different from other people; that he is worthy of it. That is not the word. This is an old English word that was stuck in here when they made the translation and this goes way back to your King James time when they used old English phrases. What is the word “worthy?” We get exactly the same word when we say, “this ship is seaworthy.”

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What does it mean? It means it is so constituted, and is so strengthened that it can buffet the sea, and let the sea roll, and roar, and beat, and thump, and have a tornado, the ship is seaworthy; it has power to “prevail,” is another word; it has power to prevail in the cyclone, in the storm, and all that may beset it; the ship is seaworthy; it is strengthened against the sea. That is what He says: “Pray, watch and pray that ye may be wor­ thy.” Worthy against what? “All these things that shall come to pass.” We become worthy in the sense of “spiritual vigor,“which is given in some of the older translations. “Pray that ye may have spiritual vigor.” Why? To make you seaworthy, worthy to meet, to combat, to buffet, to have strength to be thrown against all that which is coming. We are beginning to feel it! Aren’t you conscious already of things very much confused in the powers above us? Certainly! Anybody who is at all alert to spiritual reality, I am sure, must be con­ scious of disturbances in the realm of spirit over us that we didn’t have five, ten and fifteen years ago. I know that; I know that. This is in the realm of the spirit above us and that is the place of warfare, warring against the powers of darkness. Look at the times when people used to have their prayers so quickly answered! How many know the awful battling that some have to have now? You can’t get the prayer through. Your faith too, you

can’t get into God for some people and some conditions; certain things that are to be prayed through. We have all found that. How many have noticed there are some things you can pray through gracefully and you get the will of God, the mind of God, and there are other things you can pray and pray and pray and you can’t seem to get through to the thing? Well, there is a reason for that. It is this: “Pray that ye may have spiritual vigor, faith, power, strength, the dynamic of the Spirit to carry you through that.” So Paul says, “In order to win this wonderful, beautiful thing that I see, I had to count everything loss to bring me in touch with it. I suffered the loss. I let it be swept away, but it brought me more perfectly into consciousness of it. Then I began to follow on to the thing that He says; then I realized that I had not grasped it, but I must be conscious all the time: God has got a hold of me for this, and I will yet apprehend the thing for which God has apprehended me; He has laid hold of me for it…” And so on all the way down through … (forgetting those things, and reaching forth) and at the last he says:

“I press."

That is LIFE, I press. It is exactly what he says here: “Pray, watch and pray that ye may have spiritual vigor to escape.” See to it that the ship is seaworthy, that it can battle through. Worthy is an old English word but I think it is a very good word.

They have used it in relation to a chum, the churn was “worthy.” What did they mean? The chum was sound. All the little staves that go together to make the chum what it was, the hoops and the whole thing; they said it was a very worthy churn. It had all the qualities necessary to make it a good churn. Now He says, “Watch and pray that you be worthy against the things which are coming, to escape them.

They are coming! But pray that ye may escape them, not get too much of the terror on you.”

Prayer

Our Precious Lord, we have been talking about these things in the life and ministry of thy servant, Paul, for whom we are grateful. We thank Thee tonight for his wonderful life. We thank Thee for his noble obedience to Thee; for his thorough consecration; for his love and devotion. We wish that some of that love might be in our hearts too; that we could love Thee with a love such as he had. Put that love in our hearts that makes us bond servants, as he was willing to call himself, a bond servant of the Lord Jesus. Oh, make Thyself more and more desirable; make Thyself so desirable, Lord, that we will be glad to let everything drop, everything that becomes a snare or hindrance, anything which would frustrate or hinder. Help us to evaluate the thing and say, Thou art worth more than this, and we let it go. Help us to forget and put them back of us, forget them. By Thy grace may we take Thy life and power in our innermost beings, that in the days to come, there shall be a worthiness wrought in us by the power of Thy Spirit, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.p