All right, now, Peter, and all the disciples
were gathered together when the day of Pentecost
was fully come, and they were all with
one accord in one place.
And suddenly, as they were thus gathered, there
came a sound from heaven as the sound
of a rushing mighty wind.
There wasn't a rushing mighty wind, but there
was a rushing mighty wind.
And suddenly, as they were thus gathered, there
came a sound from heaven as the sound
of a rushing mighty wind.
And suddenly, as they were thus gathered, there
was a rushing mighty wind.
And suddenly, And there was a sound there,
as of a rushing mighty wind, that filled
all the house where they were sitting.
And little jets of fire sat upon each
forge, and they were all filled with the
Holy Ghost.
And they began to speak in languages, seventeen
nations were there and heard them speak in
their own language.
And they were all amazed, that is, the
ones that could be amazed, and the doubters
doubted.
And the questioners said, What meaneth this?
And then they had present also the others,
who sat in the seat of the scornful,
and they said, These men are full of
new wine.
But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted
up his voice and said unto them, Then
he went on to tell them, Ye men
of Israel, hear these words.
This is a fulfillment of prophecy that you
are experiencing here.
Jesus of Nazareth, verse 22, and from there
on was all about Jesus of Nazareth.
And then he said in verse 32, This
Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are
all witnesses, all we are witnesses.
Therefore being at, or by, the right hand
of God exalted, and having received of the
Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he
hath shed forth this which ye now see
and hear.
Therefore, let all the house of Israel know
assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus
whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ."
The contrary to what most people might just
unintentionally assume, and I might, the important thing
here wasn't that the Spirit had come.
The important thing was that Jesus had been
exalted, for he said himself that last great
day of the feast of Jerusalem sometime before,
that whoever believed in him, out of his
inmost being there should flow rivers of living
water.
But this spake he of the Spirit which
they that believed in him were to receive,
but the Spirit hadn't been given because Jesus
had not yet been glorified.
The glorification of Jesus brought the Holy Ghost.
Now, we ought to be able to get
hold of that instantly, and if any embryonic
preachers are present here, who later will be
preachers in their own right, let me just
hand that little thought to you that wherever
Jesus is glorified, the Holy Spirit comes.
He needn't be begged, he comes when the
Holy Spirit, when the Savior, is glorified.
When Christ is honored, the Spirit comes.
The verse I want to get particularly to
tonight is this one, but Peter stood up
and lifted up his voice.
He stood up and lifted up his voice.
Now, there will not be an exposition of
the passage that I have read, but only
to remind you that Peter here stands for
the whole Church of God.
Peter was the first man to get on
his feet after the Holy Spirit had come
to his church.
And as far and as long as the
church has been the true church, and wherever
it is the true church, the individual believes
the Lord's word.
Peter had.
He had believed the Lord's word, and he
had received confirmation in his own breast.
Now, long ago, it was 1937, I wrote
some articles that later became a little booklet,
and in it I had one chapter in
which I dealt with what since that time
has been named easy-believism.
And I said that the difference between faith
as it was found in the New Testament
and faith as it is found now is
that faith in the New Testament produced something,
that there was a confirmation of it.
Faith now is a beginning and an end.
We have faith in faith, but nothing happens.
They had faith in a risen Christ, and
something did happen.
That's the difference.
Incidentally, that little book has had a very
wide sale.
It was sent to one of the mission
fields, not the Christian and Missionary Alliance, but
a fundamentalist mission field, and 500 copies of
it were sent by a man who thought
that it had a little message in it
that it was called, Pass the Power.
And they hated that little booklet so badly
there that they passed a conference motion to
have it barred from the field.
And I rejoiced when I heard that, for
so persecuted they, the Prophets, were before me.
But some years went by and things began
to happen.
Whatever the little book had to do with
it, I don't know, maybe nothing at all.
But that society received such a pouring out
of God blessing that they wrote me that
they not only were sorry that they had
barred that little booklet that I put in,
they didn't say that, but that they had
chosen another book of mine for conference study
during their conference.
So I was a heretic for saying that
when you have faith, that God will confirm
it.
And later on I was a hero.
So you see, as Babe Ruth says, you're
either a hero or a bum, and there's
no middle ground, you know, there's nowhere in
between.
Now here was Peter standing up, and he
lifted up, and that's the business of the
Church.
Stand up and lift up.
And Peter became a witness, as the Church
is a witness, on earth to things in
heaven.
The Church is a witness to powers beyond
the earthly and the human.
It is a source of great grief to
me that the Church is trying to run
on its human powers.
Peter testified to something beyond the human and
beyond the earthly, some power that lay beyond
the earthly scene, but was interested in us
men and women, and not only that, but
was working in men and women, willing to
enter us and make itself known to us.
And I use the word itself for power,
because the itself turns out to be a
himself, none other than the Spirit of God
himself.
And thus, the witnessing to things he had
experienced, and to inform and to influence, and
to urge and exhort those who hadn't yet
experienced to enter in.
So now I want to talk a little
bit to this Church, if the Church is
to be a Church of Christ.
Now, I don't know about you, I don't
know whether this is temperament or the Holy
Ghost.
As I told the Brethren last week when
I preached to their conference, I have an
awful time being sure whether it's closure, temperament,
or whether it's the Spirit.
I might as well be honest with you
and tell you that, no use lying about
it in a nice, saintly way.
I might as well tell you that sometimes
I don't know whether or how much is
temperament.
I had an English father.
My English father was so nervous, so nervous,
it was terrible.
He was tighter than a G-string that
was pulled so tight that one more tiny
infinitesimal turn and it would snap.
Well, then I had a German mother, and
you know what you get out of that.
And therefore I have a temperament, and I
don't know, but I'm grieved over the fact
that the Church is trying to carry on
in its own power.
And I'd like to say this to you,
that if I couldn't have the divine power
of God, I'd quit the whole business.
I'd walk out and stop the whole business.
Well, you know, all this Boy Scouts stuff,
all this knitting society stuff, what's the idea
to have it all?
I might as well go out and say,
God says, be ye either hot or cold.
I would, Lord, hot or cold, but because
you're not hot or cold I'll spill you
out of my mouth.
It makes God sick, the kind of Christianity
that doesn't know where it is and that's
trying to run a heavenly institution after an
earthly manner.
Now, if this Church is to be a
Church of Christ, a living, organic member of
that redeemed body of which Christ is the
head, then its teachers and its members must
strive earnestly and sacrificially and with constant prayer
to do a number of things.
Let me name them for you.
This Church, the Church, our Church, the Alliance,
this Church here on the corner, and all
the Churches of all the denominations that are
gospel churches, for they're all, we're all a
part of the same body, then I say
that if we are to be that kind
of Church, then there are certain things that
we must do, not nibble at, but earnestly
strive to do, sacrificially and with constant, earnest
prayer.
We must strive to make our beliefs and
practices new testament in their content, new testament
in their content, nothing dragged in from the
outside.
But we must teach and believe new testament
truth, and we must go constantly to the
grassroots, the men who founded this country and
the country below the border, this great North
American continent.
They took it over a wilderness and they
made it into a civilized continent.
How did they do it?
They did it by going out and with
their axes cutting down the trees first and
making houses and then planting corn and potatoes
and other vegetables and grain.
And you know when they planted that, they
didn't go to bed then and sleep until
it was time to harvest it.
They fought encroachment from the wilderness from the
day they planted their corn and the rest
of their crops until they harvested them and
had them safely in their log barns.
Because the wilderness encroaches on the fruitful field,
and unless there is constant fighting, I know
as a farmer boy from the state of
Pennsylvania, I know how we used to have
to do, plant your corn and then cross
your fingers and pray and get your shotgun
out.
Because the crows would have your corn if
you didn't do everything that was possible to
do.
Now it's exactly the same with the Church.
I read, where did I hear this the
other day, one of the old Saints said,
"...never think for a minute that there is
a time when you won't be tempted, and
he is tempted the most effectively who thinks
he isn't being tempted at all."
So just when you think you're not being
tempted, that is the time when you're being
tempted the most effectively.
And so it is with the Church.
We lean back on our own laurels and
say that may be true of some churches,
but it's not true of us.
We are increased with goods and have need
of nothing.
But I want to remind you that you've
got to fight for what you have.
This little field of God's planting has to
have plenty of shotguns and plenty of watchmen
out driving off crows, not only crows, but
bears and foxes and groundhogs and all sorts
of other creatures, to say nothing of the
little insects that destroy crops.
You've got to keep after them.
You've got to keep your field healthy.
And there's only one way to do it,
and that is to keep it true to
the word, keep the word in it, keep
the word in it.
To be constantly going back to the grassroots
and getting the word, getting the word into
the Church.
And we must not only do this, but
we must also earnestly and sacrificially and prayerfully
strive to be empowered with that same power
that came upon them and that Peter said,
God has shed forth this which you now
see and hear.
And to live, to gear ourselves into things
eternal and to live the life of heaven
here upon the earth, and to put loyalty
to Christ first at any cost, now that's
a Church.
Anything else than that isn't a Church.
And I personally want to be a member
of a Church.
I'd rather be in a little room over
a barber shop on a side street somewhere
with twenty people meeting and singing off-key
some old hymn of Zion than to be
part of a great going concern that is
not New Testament in its doctrine, in its
spirit, in its living, in its holiness, in
all of its whole texture and tenor.
We must be New Testament, and of course
such a Church as that need not expect
to be relatively popular, but certain fruits will
follow it if we make a Church that
kind of Church.
Certain fruits will follow it.
It's people will be a joyful people.
When the Holy Ghost came upon the Moravians
in 1727, that October morning when they were
having communion, they said they went out from
that place scarcely knowing whether they were on
earth or had died already and gone to
heaven.
And that was a characteristic of the Moravians
for a hundred years.
The characteristic was joy, they were a joyful
people.
They weren't a happy people in the sense
that they worked up their happiness.
They were a joyful people, the joy came
from within.
One of these college groups, Stratton Shufelt was
in one, I suppose it would be, excuse
the word, Wheaton, but I'll use it tonight,
he was a Wheaton man, I suppose it
was a Wheaton college group.
He was out with him when he was
a young chap and he told me that
he went into a certain church, and I
will leave you to discover which it was,
it could have been Lance, but it wasn't.
And he said that he was in that
church, and they got there early and all,
and how they do, you know, brush their
teeth and change their clothes and straighten their
tie, and that's what they were doing, waiting
to get time to go on the platform.
And he said he noticed a little prayer
meeting down in front, and there were some
ladies down there, and they were down there
beating the bench, saying, All right, Jesus, now
let's get going, let's get going, Jesus, all
right, let's get going.
Well, you know what she was trying to
do, God bless her or them, they were
trying to work up their joy.
They weren't joyful, and they were trying to
work it up.
You know Elvis Presley can teach you a
lesson on that if you want to learn
from him, because he knows how to work
it up, brother.
I've been and preached one time in a
huge building, it was an auditorium, and I
was in one end preaching to a packed
house and he was in the other end
preaching to his council, that's when he was
packed.
But I was preaching in one end and
he was singing in the other.
Well, the police didn't bother us, so we
were full that night.
But they did have to keep his customers
under control, because he knows how to get
in there and work it up.
He didn't even have to pray, he just
stood up and wiggled and sang, and everybody
got blessed.
Well, you can do that now, but listen
to me, I say that when we give
God his place in the Church, when we
recognize Christ as Lord, high and lifted up,
when we give the Holy Spirit his place,
there will be a joy that isn't worked
up.
It will be a joy that springs like
a fountain.
The Lord said that it should be a
fountain, an artesian well that springs up from
within.
So that will be one characteristic of a
Spirit-filled Church, there will be a joyful
people, and it will be easy to distinguish
them from the children of the world.
So I wonder what Paul would say if
he came down and looked us over, went
up and down the aisles and looked us
over, then went down to a theater and
looked them over, then went to a hockey
game and looked them over, then went down
to Eaton's and looked at the people shopping,
then went out on the street and looked
at them, went wherever crowds were, and then
came back and looked us over.
And I don't think he'd see very much
difference, really.
But where the Church is a Spirit-filled
Church, you can always distinguish a child of
God from a child of the world.
And then a Church that is Spirit-filled
will be useful to the race of men.
We ought to be useful to the race
of men.
You know, they claim we're parasites.
We preachers, Bill and I, William and I,
we're supposed to be parasites.
The Communists say we are, and a lot
of others, they say we're social parasites, that
we don't turn a hand or anything, we
just live like a parasite.
You know a tick?
We used to, a dog used to come
in flapping his long ears and whining, and
I thought, well, he's got a tick on
his ear, and they'd hunt a tick.
A tick is a little flat nothing that
fastens itself on a dog's ear and drinks
dog blood until he's puffed up something, full
of dog blood, and you have to pull
that out, you know, and if you pull
it out, then the head pulls off and
they get sore, or it's a mess.
But anyhow, they say we're parasites, that we
drink the blood of society and don't produce
a thing.
I have seven children and sixteen grandchildren, and
that's not too bad, and he has four
children, and I think we've produced all right.
And beside that, the scripture says that he,
that the ox, that the ox that Harvard
works in the cornfield, feed him, it says,
that's my version, it says, feed the ox.
So I don't have any, I'm not, they
don't get me down on talking about it
like that.
I know how God does things.
If I, if I were driving a truck,
for instance, how could I preach sermons on
Sundays?
So the Lord says, you, you, I have
lots of truck drivers, you, you, you get
in your room and get quiet there and
read and sing and get up sermons and
talk to the people, and I'll talk to
you and you talk to the people.
So I'm not worried about them, what they
say about us being parasites.
But I believe that the church ought to
be useful to the whole community, that because
we're here, everybody ought to be better.
Now fellows sneak in with some, with some
nitroglycerin and soap and he'll blow a, he'll
blow a, a safe, but that, that fellow,
we, we can't help him any.
Please turn over the cassette for the continuation
of The Marks of a Spirit-Filled Church.