The Invitation
Martin Cecil March 6, 1983
Greg Archambault:
All people of the earth
Turn your hearts to the dawning day.
The Son of God lives and moves
In glory, in splendor, in His rising flame.
His temple is the holy heart of man.
His garden planted eastward in all the earth.
O, ye nations, come and worship Him;
Come and worship the living God.
Gloria Brooks:
Peace, peace be unto you,
That the peace of God may be known on earth.
Martin Cecil — “Come and worship the living God, that the peace of God may be in all the earth.” All of you who are present here this morning have issued this invitation. It is your invitation to come and worship the living God. I would speak to you this morning particularly as being the truth of you. Usually I have identified myself with you by the use of the words we, our, us. But this morning, seeing that it is you who have issued the invitation, I would speak to you as the one who you are, addressing therefore your yielded minds and hearts, which in turn represent the minds and hearts of people everywhere. If you issue an invitation, such as you have, you have the responsibility of what then occurs. If you say, “Come,” you have indeed extended an invitation to all the people of the world to come. Where? Where you are, presumably, seeing that you are the one who has issued the invitation. Where are you? The invitation is to come and worship the living God.
There have been invitations of the kind extended before, all down through the ages in fact, to come and worship a theoretical God, even a theological God, a God of belief, an imaginary God. But the invitation is not this, if it is genuine. It is the invitation to worship the living God, the God who is known only as He composes the wholeness of one’s living. In this case you could not invite anyone to share this with you if you do not know that wholeness in your own living. The invitation extended would be a sham otherwise, as it has been. Perhaps the invitation has been extended in the Christian world to come to church and worship, but very rarely has the invitation been to come and worship the living God—rather, the theoretical God.
Is the invitation that you have extended this morning genuine? Is it an invitation to come and worship the living God because this is what composes your living? Perhaps speaking as the truth of you I can ask some pertinent and pointed questions in this regard, because human minds and hearts are wont to deceive themselves. This invitation which you have extended by your participation in singing with the choir, and which the choir has extended by the invitation of those who compose it, in their singing, and which the orchestra, the organist, have also extended through the music which they brought forth, is something that all of you have shared in extending this morning. How conscious are you of the gravity of responsibility that consequently rests upon you? Now I am not speaking of you collectively, although it may seem that way, but I am speaking to you individually. How genuine are you? What is the fact? To what are the people of the world being invited to come? That was defined in the words, “to worship the living God.” If anyone comes to you—personal, individual you—does that person come to one who really, genuinely, knows what it means to worship the living God? What might well be called phony invitations have been extended over the centuries to come and worship God, but it was not the living God, because He has scarcely ever been represented by anyone. Have we, because we are genuine, provided the place for the people of the world to come and worship the living God, because that is our experience, our continuous experience?—I would change a word there, your continuous experience.
In a sense I am stepping aside in order to say what needs to be said to you that you might acknowledge your particular responsibility brought to specific focus this morning, given voice in words and music, particularly by Greg in representation of all of you, and then by Gloria in her song. These two were not standing up there merely for themselves, but for all. I am sure that you, while they were speaking and singing, were aligning yourselves with the words as your words; otherwise they would have little meaning. Here were words clothing the Word. The Word is, indeed, “Come unto me. Come and worship the living God, because here where I am is the state and experience of that worship.” Surely you do not invite anyone to come to a hollow space where there is nothing, or even where there is just a little. There is just a little in many, many places. But where is the wholeness? Where is the Word?
The Word is God. The Word creates all things and in the Word is life, the living God. The Word remains meaningless—it has always been present—until it takes form in the words of living. This includes what we call words in the sense of speaking, but it includes far more than that. Come and worship the living God. Come and give total value to the Word. I have spoken the Word in words, and in more than words, lo these many years. Have you received it? Is the Word of supreme value? That is worship. Worship has something to do with worth. To what do you give worth? In what do you see the supreme value? In what do you see the one true value, or are there many values? With most this has been the case. Values have been equated with the form of things.
Some of you may have seen the movie “Gandhi.” Here was a man who undoubtedly gave expression to the Word partially. It had great effect, but evidently there was the inclination to see what needed to happen in the world in terms of form. Perhaps what occurred has been included in the creative process that is working out on earth, but the immediate intent was to extract India from the control of the British. But into what control? Presumably the control of the Indians. That turned out to be divisive, didn’t it? There were, for instance, Hindus on the one hand and Muslims on the other, who immediately set to work to destroy each other. Will the problems of the world be solved by turning over control from one particular aspect of human nature to another? This is about as far as the vision of most people goes. The government is usually the villain, whatever the government happens to be, so if possible kick them out and put in another; turn from one pattern of human nature to another pattern of human nature, as though that was a solution. You know what the solution is by reason of the invitation which you issued this morning: “Come out of her, my people. Stop your games and come home where you belong.”
That may be said to be the invitation in general terms and it is spoken not only to those who think of themselves as Christians or Muslims or Hindus, or anything else—human beings everywhere. All that pattern of religion is game-playing, all of it—dangerous games, obviously so. So you issue an invitation to come where? To come over from one area of game-playing to another? Self-righteously, I am sure you would all shake your heads. But that wouldn’t do any good. What is the fact? What is the nature of the invitation in fact? If it’s merely an imagination then the invitation is to come and worship an imaginary God. And this has been going on for millennia. No, the invitation is the invitation extended by the Word in the words of living. The Word must take form to have any meaning. This is obvious enough, because the Word has never ceased to be spoken in spirit. It only begins to have meaning to you and to others to the extent that it has taken form in you and in others.
While you are the ones who have specifically brought to focus this invitation this morning, there are others who will associate themselves with you in that invitation, particularly in the days to come when they receive the service in transcript form or video form. But let all be honest and let all be genuine, that there may be a genuine invitation on earth to come to the place where God, the living God, is worshipped. And each one therefore says, “Come unto me.” Unless this is true there is no genuine invitation and there is no real meaning in the fact of one’s presence on earth.
“Come and worship the living God.” These are words which may be used to draw attention to the one requirement if the people of the world are to survive. This is a truth that few are willing even to look at. If they do look at it they look at it in religious terms. But it is not really a matter of religion at all. It is a matter of life, or on the other hand, death. It is a matter of being. It goes beyond the business of merely surviving, of course. I doubt if that is likely to be possible anyway unless there is the invitation genuinely offered, “Come and worship the living God,” the invitation genuinely offered, and response to it genuinely offered. There is no other way. There is a blank wall otherwise; no place to go, no possibility of survival on earth. The earth will likely survive. But we are thinking of the population of the earth, not merely because we are a part of it but because of the living God, that the Word may be spoken in the words of living continuously, wholly, occupying every nook and cranny of what you are in the external sense. In that sense you have no life whatsoever of your own. The fact of the matter is you never did, and of course that is proven out in due course in the ordinary course of events.
I have sought, over the years, to speak the Word in the words of my living so that there might be an invitation to you: “Come and worship God, the living God.” Now possibly somewhat unwittingly, but also consciously, you yourselves have placed yourselves in that position by speaking the words, singing the words, or whatever, sharing in the expression of the words, “Come and worship the living God.” You said it. How genuine are you? Is it safe for others to come to you, because they will find one who worships the living God, one whose total expression of life is the Word—the Word expressed in the words of living? That is the invitation.
Spirit. Spirit has little meaning until it takes form. The spirit of the living God may take form through human flesh. It does through everybody to some extent; there is the evidence of life still lingering. But it takes form through thought, through words, through emotion. What is the spirit revealed through your thoughts, your words and your emotions? What exactly is it? Is it the living God? Is it the Word made flesh and dwelling among the people of the world, to extend the invitation: “Come and worship the living God with me”?—not come into some sort of form or religion or belief.
One may on occasion be asked whether one believes in God. Well possibly we have to answer that according to the understanding of the questioner. One could well say, “No.” But that might be taken wrongly. It needs to be true that we do not believe in God, because we know God. Why do you have to believe in something that you know? In our own living we know the Word. There is no need then for belief. But most people wouldn’t understand that, so probably we would say, “Yes, I believe in God.” One can’t go into a sermon as to what all the meaning of this is; it wouldn’t be understood anyway; but we ourselves need to know. Are you trying to believe in God? Welcome to the religious club, but not to the truth.
It is the spirit of our living which tells the tale, the quality of spirit that finds expression through the words of our living. Without that spirit everything is, to me, deadly dull. I have heard my own words rendered deadly dull, because the one who read them was deadly dull. The spirit wasn’t there, just the form, and the form in such case is a carcass. It is the spirit that giveth life, the flesh profiteth nothing. That is, you can’t get life out of the flesh. You can’t get it into it either. It either is allowed to be present and in expression or it fades away and the flesh is left desolate. The form becomes desolate, and it doesn’t matter how beautiful the form may have been in its original expression, because of the Word, because of the spirit; it becomes unprofitable when the spirit is absent. The spirit has been absent, for the most part, in the words of this book—the Bible—because it was not in those who were reading it. We have found these words coming to life, because there has been the living God present. The same is true of your living in each moment. It is either deadly or it is alive forevermore. Life is eternal. The creative expression of life never ceases. Your invitation to others is to the experience of that creative expression of life. Do you know what it is? Is your invitation genuine? I would say that you had better let it be so. It is an awful thing to be found merely to be a liar, full of wind.
So these words I have spoken to you, not as someone separate from you but as one who is you, the truth of you, that your words of living may be just that: the Word in expression. And when you experience this continuously the Word is more precious to you than anything. This has been stated by many: “I know the importance of the Word.” Do you really? Praise the Lord, if you do, if you are not a liar. But what is the spirit of one’s own living, of your individual living? How consistent is it? How continuous is it? Or do you take a snack break every now and again?—off duty: “It doesn’t matter now; the Word is unimportant.” Are you inviting anyone to come to you on that basis? What a horror, what a betrayal. Your Word, my Word, is, “Come and worship the living God.”
You are a whole and holy people. But that only has meaning because each individual is whole and holy continuously. That is what is meant by whole, and what is meant by holy. “Come and worship the living God, that the peace of God may be known in all the earth”—the peace which passes all human understanding. It is not based in human understanding. It doesn’t come because of human manipulation. It comes because the Word is spoken in the words of living by those who extend the invitation to come and worship the living God.
© emissaries of divine light
