Hungry For God!

My folks, it is good to be home! I tell you, I have been a long way from home, and it is good to get back. I feel so good in getting back that I hardly want to say anything tonight, and yet I have so much to say that I do not know where to begin.

I arrived in town this morning, and the first thing [I] had to [do was to] go to a reception for Mr. [Billy] Sunday at the depot, and then up to his house. It is great that he is in town, and we must all get behind him in prayer and do everything we can in this great chance that we have to stir this old city as she never has been stirred before. If God shoots the bomb, it is our business to go in. It does not make any difference how he cracks it, or what method He may use in calling people’s attention to God, it is our business to go in and tell men the way.

It will be the easiest chance you ever had to talk to men about Jesus Christ in the city of Chicago. Everybody will be talking about Billy, and it is not very hard for you to switch the conversation to Jesus Christ.

War An Opportunity

You know what I think about war, and what I think about the things that have gone on in the earth. You positively know what I believe about the second coming of Jesus Christ; and yet I have used this war as an opportunity to telling men and women about Jesus, and I have to had the most marvelous opportunity of my life.

I have learned a great many things. First of all, I have learned to enter any open door (it does not make any difference what kind of a door it is), and always to tell the Gospel message. There is a way in, and God will show you the way out if you are true to Him. He says, “Acknowledge Him in all thy ways and He shall direct thy path.”

So I am taking this mighty opening that the war has made to deliver a double message I have certainly worked with all my power, and knowledge, and ability, by the Holy Ghost, to raise this money and organize the cities into which I have gone. Some have had to be pried open, and jimmied open, and shocked open to get them open to the Salvation Army work.

Rivers Of Tears

I have seen rivers—literally rivers—of tears. I have seen the biggest men in those cities bawl like babies, and thank God that they could cry. Oh, if men were ever hungry to hear about immortality and about God, that day is today, and they are so glad when you put it up to them straight, right out, and let them have it straight from your heart, and straight from the shoulder.

This war is teaching men a great many lessons. We have become materialists in character in America. We have been thinking of all of our luxuries and refinement, our education and the nice things that go with civilization, wearing better clothes than our folks did, going to better schools, riding on better cars, and not only riding, but literally flying, and having better opportunities, with all sorts of things to make men think about themselves.

I do thank God that He took this wicked, selfish old world by the nape of the neck and is shaking it like a dog shakes a rat, that it may wake up and know about God. He is going to keep it up until men and women know that God is God, and that Jesus Christ is Lord, in this world—don’t forget it.

Men know He is in the midst, and are glad to have someone come around and talk to them about Jesus Christ. So I consider that I went out on a double errand—I went out to bring a positive message that I believe I got from God Himself, to this nation, at this time, and before the war is over, I believe God is going to let me deliver that message all over America. I believe the day is coming, before the war is over, that America is going to be on her face before God.

As I told you months ago, when I went to Washington, whether we go down, or whether we go up, is going to depend on whether we get on our knees and talk to God about this business, or stand up only and talk to men about it. It is time some nation talked to God, and I believe the time has come from someone to go out and tell men about it. God is speaking, and will not be put aside. For nineteen long centuries, He has put up with the blasphemy and infidelity of men. “God’s Spirit will not always strive with me,” but God is tenderly striving now, although His judgments are in the world, and He is speaking to men, and it is a splendid thing to go out and talk to men about it and let them get a vision.

One of the fellows in the southern states told how God had been talking to him. I was talking to him about the selfish side of this business, and what a splendid thing it was that somehow the government could not pay all the bills, but everybody was getting a chance to knit, or save a biscuit or a bun, or a piece of beefsteak. No comedian expects to make anybody laugh these days. Everybody is knitting while they are talking. I had to talk while people were knitting, and the only ruffle you can make on them is to make them miss a stitch, and you have done wonders if you can do that! They are all at it, and it is a splendid thing they have something to do; some of those old lazy pussycats in their mansions need something to get them busy. Maybe it is the first service they have ever done in their lives for someone else, when they knit a bum sock and send it off to the soldiers.

“Somebody Else”

It is a good thing some people have learned how to think about somebody else. It is an awful thing if something comes to you and you have not paid anything for it. It is an awful thing to have such luxury come to our children, and for them not to know what it cost somebody. The greatest thing that ever came to a man was his hour of sacrifice.

I have been talking to businessmen, telling them, “Every one of you have been putting skids under your children and slipping them to hell. The thing that made you the big businessman that you are was the fact that you sacrificed, you did the hard thing that came up, and stood the punishment and the misunderstanding and went through, and that is what made you; and now you are slipping luxury to your children and have started them to hell. It is a good thing to look them in the face and tell them so.”

It is a good thing their boys have to go where they will get up in the morning. Instead of getting up at ten o’clock, to hear the bugle call at dawn and roll out of bed and come up standing in line, and obey orders: “Stick in your chest, pull out your chin.”

I went to Pittsburg about six years ago. My father had told me about a beneficent banker there, and I wanted very much to meet him. A gentleman took me to see him, and when I got hold of his hand and looked into his face, I felt like a bigger man, as if I had been out in the timber, under the starry skies at night, and breathed a new life.

He never thought about himself, had just given his life to others. Any widow could come any hour of the day, and without being detained by any secretary, she could get in to see that banker, and he never charged a cent for taking care of her affairs. Anyone that wanted to come and see him could come and he shared their burdens.

I said to him, “I don’t want to bother you. You are a busy man.”

“Sit down,” he said; “this is the thing I like to do. This is not business, and I have to attend to business most of the time, and like to talk to young men.”

He made me sit down and talk to him, and when I would start to go, he would start the conversation again, and kept me there. One day I walked in there with a little oil man, and we went into the big place, and into this man’s office, and there he was, with his head in his hands. I stepped out onto the market corner a little while later, and while I was standing there, a fellow came along with a “red devil” machine, and passed me on the fly, and all I could smell was cigarettes and gasoline. He had his cap on one side, and his goggles on, and looked like a demon as he whirled around that corner. I said to the cop, “Don’t you pinch that kind?”

“We don’t pinch him!” he said.

“Who is he?”

“The banker’s son.”

“What, that kind of a fellow?”

“Yes, anything that is fast goes with him. He is slipping to the devil as fast as he knows.”

Broken

When I walked into the office with that oil man, here was this banker all broken to pieces. His boy had hit the bumps hard, and, when I began to talk, he said, “Listen, don’t let people blame the boy. I am to blame. You know I came to Pennsylvania as an early immigrant, and I had such a hard time, and life was so hard. My wife and myself worked and saved, and I got hold of a coal claim, and it turned out to be pretty good, and I got some more coal land, and got to having bank stock and oil stock. I had coal and oil on my lands, and I became a banker, and wealthy, and when the boy came along, I said, ‘Mother, we have had such a hard time. Let’s don’t make him have it hard. Let us make him have it easy.’”

He put the skids under that boy and slipped him to hell.

Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said about this nation in its darkest hours? “We have forgotten God.” We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

“It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

It is a mighty good thing that an order is issued from Washington to save on anything, and let people know what it means to sacrifice and to labor for some of the things that are coming their way. It is easy enough for men to object. You take the people of luxury, and they never appreciate Jesus Christ. Why? They have never appreciated sacrifice in their lives.

It is the man that has suffered, that has been misunderstood, that looks up into the face of Jesus on Calvary and says, “Thank God, He could leave the luxuries of heaven, and come down and suffer and take my place. I will love Him as long as I live!” And when a man has been forgiven, and has come out of sin and darkness and rancor, he will throw himself at Jesus’ feet and say, “Lord, I do not want to be any higher. I am so glad you came from glory. Oh, luxuries, and ease, and refinement are not what I want. Lord, make me big enough to take other people’s burdens and carry them for them. Put something into my heart so I will have a compassion and live for other men.”

Read Mr. Moody’s books and see how he used to plead with God to send a panic, or hard time, so men and women would wake up. Men and women have gotten to the place of luxury, of reading iconoclastic books, and looking at the triangle plays of the movies, until they have forgotten the things out of which life is made. Thank God for the awful sword of judgment that is going through the land to wake men and women up and show them what God has done in Christ Jesus.

They are not laughing at the resurrected Christ like they did, but they are anxious to hear something about these things, glad for men and women that are able to tell them about the things Jesus Christ can do in their lives.

What Harry Lauder Thinks

I walked into a room in Seattle to talk to Harry Lauder while he was putting on his grease paint. He was standing before his full-length mirror, sticking the grease paint on, and we began to talk about different things. Finally, I came to the war and said, “Harry, this thing makes me mad to hear some of these bloaters go around and say, ‘I don’t believe in God.’”

I was sitting on a little chair. He whirled around and stuck his face almost into mine and said, “Rader, any man that has ever looked into war and the awful furnace of hell, and says he does not believe in God, tell him he is a liar—he is aliar!”

Oh, some bully swagger who thinks he is a smart aleck, strutting around, who has never seen the war, and never gone to a cantonment, and seen those lonesome boys, may make such a statement, but you cannot be down there and see some of those boys, detached, don’t know where to go or what to do, and not begin to think. Forty millions of men under color tonight, waiting for orders to die! It is like walking into a prison cell just before sunup when they hang men.

These are days of hell. This is no time to fool, and men are thinking of God like they never thought of Him before. They want somebody to dare to pull the curtain off and stop this everlasting foolishness of mock patriotism and dare to tell men and women to get back to God.

I talked to Mr. Lauder for a while, and he said, “Tell them for me that they are liars. They cannot look into that awful furnace and not pray. Did I pray? I should say I prayed.”

You know what he said in the magazine, that in a time like that which came to him with the news of his boy’s death, that there was only one of three things to do—turn to booze, commit suicide, or turn to God. He turned to God. God gets the hooks in them young.

Mr. McKee and myself went to a Rotary Club meeting in the city of Portland, and I had the opportunity of talking to those men, after I had addressed an audience in the great auditorium the night before. I gave my heart out the best I could, and when I got through talking, my eyes were wet with tears, and so were theirs, and they stood up to cheer and cry, and you never saw such an altar service in your life. The biggest businessmen of the country, lumber men, iron men, were sitting in front of me, with their eyes bathed with tears, and we were crying like babies.

Have you been awakened to the fact that all over this land are broken hearts and men do not know which way to turn? The boy is gone and the home is broken up, and they have relatives over there. We have people out of every realm of life, and when you talk to Americans you talk to people who have relatives in every part of the world, and many of their boys have died under the allies’ flag and not with the U.S. troops.

When you can go into a chamber of commerce and talk to men and put things before them and have them stand and cry, you realize their need. As we went to go out they said, “There is a man over here. Will you come—”

“Only have nine minutes; I cannot.”

“Yes, but there is another fellow over here crying at the table.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Then step back to this one close at hand.”

“I might stop a second.”

I looked at him and exclaimed, “Nesbit, in God’s name, are you coming through?”

“Rader, I will never be the same again. God has been talking to me twenty-nine years.”

The old iron man was standing with his hand over him, and when I went through the town again, he was at the depot and said, “Rader, that was the first man I ever led to Jesus Christ. I have led four since, and I am going to keep it right up.”

Men and women are hungry for God, when you can talk to businessmen—and then say they do not want to hear it! They do want to hear it. Everybody wants to hear, with this war on [World War I], and hearts broken. Why don’t you tell them? Let us tell them as we never did before.

Folks are ready. “The fields are white,” Jesus says, “to harvest.” If He said that long ago, let us believe it tonight, and let us go out and tell men and women about the great opportunity of just taking salvation. “It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call shall be saved.”

Sometimes God starts a revival in a strange way. He takes a city and shakes it. If there ever was a call for evangelists to go through the land and tell men of Jesus it is today. I have come back sick at heart. I never felt so in all my life. In such an hour, in God’s name, if men ever wanted to do evangelistic work, why don’t they go to the cities now?

There is a call everywhere, everywhere, EVERYWHERE. The YMCA is pleading and begging for men that can deliver the message, men that can deliver the message.

I was asked to go to one cantonment in the East, and a pussyfoot fellow that took me in said, “Now, Mr. Rader, you will have to be careful, because we have some Catholics here, and Jews, and different sects.”

“The Lord help me,” I said to myself, and then aloud, “I will tell you what you do. I know you feel funny about me, and have heard funny things about me, and do not know what I am going to spring on these fellows. Now, you get your excuse from the Major, and tell him you are not responsible for a thing I do, and turn me loose on him. Will you do that?”

“Certainly,” he said, “if you wish it done. I am responsible for this thing.”

“You get rid of your responsibility,” I said, “and let me loose for fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, but the Major is a gruff old boy.”

“Never mind, you go tell him.”

The Major got so curious about a fellow that wanted to get loose that he came to the meeting himself. He sat on my right, and once in a while, he would shed a tear, and when I go through he straightened up and said, “That’s the kind of stuff we want! That’s the kind of stuff we want!”

They know the difference, I’ll tell you. Men that are going out to face bullets are glad enough to face the truth. They are through with all this folderol, and men ought to see it. There is no argument to it; it is a question of whether you are willing to go out and take it. Let us take it out! Let us take it out!

When I found out what the Salvation Army was doing, I made up my mind I was going out to get the gasoline for this machine. It is a great machine. The longer I know it, and read the letters that are coming in, the better I feel about it. They not only write home and say, “I have some letterheads to write on, and they bake good doughnuts here,” but what do they write? “Mother, I went into the meeting and was saved tonight.”

That is the thing that satisfies me, and we are getting them by the dozens. I think every army officer that has gone over there has fallen into a revival. How can he help it, when men are brought in wounded or dying? One man came in after burying twenty-four in one day.

The Salvation Army folks haven’t any more sense than to hold a meeting anywhere and all the time. They do not wait for the sun to shine. They go out anywhere, and it doesn’t make any difference to them, and they do not have a patriotic meeting, and pink tea, and an educational seance. Every evening they have old-fashioned, genuine SALVATION, every evening, all the time. They sell doughnuts on the side, and draw the flies in so they can snap them; they are very slick about that. Here at home they go out on the street and start a meeting, whether there is anybody there or not.

I walked down the street one day, and there was a drum there, and two or three Army women, and there was a man walking up and down, preaching his head off. Not a person on the sidewalk at all! You say, “That is foolishness.” Don’t you put out fly-paper, and the first thing you know it is full? If we do our part, it is up to God to do the rest. You go out preaching on the street, and God will send the flies.

Along came an old bum with just one ear sticking out of the bandages that were wound about his head. The man went on preaching to this one man, and pretty soon, two fellows came out of the saloon and called out, “Come on...you can’t hear him. You only have one ear.”

“Stop,” called the preacher. “The Bible says, ‘He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear.’”

They know how to hold meetings anytime, anywhere. A young fellow, a comrade from Detroit, was sent over there, and they put him to selling doughnuts the first day. He sold them up to four o’clock, and dished out coffee, and he said, “I just kept praying, ‘O Jesus, give me a chance to tell the fellows.’” (I like to see a fellow chawing the bit like that. You are going to get something, as sure as you live.) “Lord, I am willing to pass out doughnuts,” he went on, “but I want the real thing.”

Pretty soon at four o’clock the trade stopped, and the fellows were sitting outside eating their doughnuts and drinking their coffee. “Now is my chance for a meeting,” he said. The fellow who had charge of the hut, and his wife, were taking a rest. He dashed around the corner and looked at the fellows and said, “Say, I just came on out, and you haven’t heard my testimony.”

He squatted down and began to talk to them, and then he was walking up and down preaching. The captain in the hut said, “He has them going out there. We’d better go and help.”

Pretty soon he said, “Listen, there was a fellow in the hut just now; who was he?”

“That man?” “Did he go over the hill?” “What did he tell you?” they called.

“He said it wouldn’t be very long until you fellows would hear the whistle, and it is your time next in the trenches. Now, listen fellows, you are going over before long. How many will let me pray for you now?”

Their faces blanched, and seven of them came. Pretty soon, the Captain and his wife came from the hut and knelt beside them, and one or two of the Christian boys in the group knelt and led them to Jesus, the seven of them. Just as he grabbed the last fellow’s hand the whistle blew, and they ran over the bill as fast as they could go.

Another troop came along, and another. Three weeks went by, and after a while a Swedish boy that had enlisted in the British army, who was one of the seven, came back with his arm tied up and his head tied up, and went over and grabbed this fellow’s hand and said, “Do you know me?”

“How could I, with all that bandage on?”

“I am one of the seven.”

“The seven?”

“Don’t you remember the seven on the outside that you told the story to, and I was saved there?”

“Are you one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the rest of them?”

“Oh—I came back. They will—never come back. They are all gone, and they let me out of the hospital to come back and tell you. I am so glad you told me about Jesus. And, listen, one little fellow sent you a message. When I was on the stretcher and they were bringing me back, and he was in a shell hole, I said. ‘Won’t you carry me close to him?’ They laid me beside him and I said, ‘Bud, don’t you want to get on the stretcher?’

“‘No,’ he said: ‘only have an hour. The surgeon was here. It is useless to carry me. Come back and get my body.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘But, listen! When you get to the hut, tell them that Jesus saves all r-i-g-h-t.’”

“And so I came to tell you.”

What if it had been your boy? You would have been glad somebody was out there. Oh, friends, if we are a Christian nation, we have no right to ask any of these boys to go out and give their lives unless we give them one good, square chance to get another life before they give this life up. That is our business, and God will not hold us guiltless if we fail to give the Gospel to the boys in this hour.”