Second chapter of Acts, the opening passage.
When the day of Pentecost was fully come,
they were all with one accord in one
place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven
as of a rushing, mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like
as of fire, and it sat upon each
of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy
Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues
as the Spirit gave them utterance.
And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout
men, out of every nation under heaven.
Now when this was noised abroad, the most
two came together, and were confounded, because every
man heard them speak in his own language.
And they were all amazed and marveled, saying
one to another, Behold, are not all these
which speak Galileans?
How hear we every man in his own
tongue wherein we were born?
And it names seventeen different languages.
And they were all amazed and were in
doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?
And some said, These are full of new
one, are always the mockers present, these are
full of new one.
But the seventeen people, the seventeen languages said,
We do hear them speak in our language
the wonderful works of God.
Now tonight, I don't know, but what this
will be, probably the most controversial of the
messages that I bring, though my purpose is
not to be controversial, but to be helpful,
that I find you can't please everybody.
That some say you go too far, and
some say you don't go far enough.
And very few are ready to pat your
little head and say, Well, I think you
about hit it.
Mostly, we're either too far or not far
enough.
So because you can't please everybody, I compromise
by trying to please nobody, but trying to
get the truth out and trust that the
Spirit of God will apply it, and that
the hungry sheep will come to the pasture
field.
Now tonight, here's what I want to do.
I want to try to discover the abiding
elements in Pentecost.
What came and stayed, and what came and
went.
Because I'd like you to know this, and
I want you to take this with you,
and remember it, and if you had any
occasion to, you could quote it.
I don't mean to leave the impression that
you're going around quoting me, but if you
ever had occasion to, it's all right to
quote it, because I won't say anything that
I have to back out on, or if
I do, I'll gracefully back out.
But this I won't back out on.
I do not believe in a repetition of
Pentecost, but I believe in a perpetuation of
Pentecost.
There's a vast difference there, my brother.
I do not believe that Pentecost is to
be repeated, but I believe it's to be
perpetuated.
Now that doesn't contradict anything else I've said.
I believe that Pentecost did not come and
go, but Pentecost came and stayed.
And if we'd only get hold of that,
that Pentecost came and stayed, and that you
and I are living in the midst of
it if we only knew it, and would
only do something about it.
And I want to discover what stayed and
what went.
Some things went and some things stayed.
What were they?
Well, it's true here, as it's true of
all spiritual or at least all religious experience,
there are elements that were external, and so
were variable.
God doesn't care very much for the external.
Now, we ought to get hold of that.
We ought to let the Holy Ghost teach
us that, that God doesn't care very much
for the external.
So the external, it may be variable.
Then there are the elements which are internal
and of the Spirit, and so they are
permanent, and they're always about the same.
Then there are elements which are incidental, and
so of relative importance.
I wouldn't say they're not important, but I
say that they're not critically important.
Then there are elements that are fundamental, and
so of vital and eternal importance.
Now, I read the historic fact.
What did happen there that day in that
upper room there in Jerusalem?
Well, they were sitting around, it says they
were sitting, I suppose they'd gotten off their
knees, and there were about 120.
And I've always wondered why when the Spirit
of God moved Luke to tell you the
number of people there, he gave an approximate
figure.
He said about 120.
That could have been 119 or 122, but
he said about 120.
And while they were there, suddenly there was
a sound in the room as of a
rushing mighty wind.
Now, it didn't say that a rushing wind
went through there, blowing everything, a whirlwind, nothing
like that happened.
It said there was a sound as of
a rushing mighty wind.
Did you ever hear a sound that you
got the impression that there was a great
wind blowing somewhere?
That's in nature, that's what it means.
It means it was like a rushing mighty
wind, the sound of it.
And then, while they were wondering what it
was, suddenly there appeared a gray cloud of
fire, and it divided up into little bits
and sat upon the forehead of each one
present.
This fire was the divine kind of presence,
and it divided up and sat upon the
forehead of each of them.
It says, tongues of fire, you light a
candle and you will see that it takes
the shape of a tiny tongue brought at
the bottom and tapering up.
That's all it means.
It hasn't any reference whatsoever to language.
It says that the fire sat upon their
foreheads.
Now, that's about all that was true, except
of course they began to speak in other
languages, and the people heard them speak in
these languages.
Now, what can't be repeated?
What happened there that can never be repeated?
Well, let me give you some facts.
First, there was the physical presence of all
the church together in one place.
That could be there because there were only
about 120 Christians, you see.
But it never could be after that, because
that day there were 3,000 more Christians
born, and at another time there were about
5,000 Christians born.
That made 8,000, and I'm sure they
had no place in Jerusalem that would have
seated or even housed 8,000 people.
And as the gospel went from day to
day, the Lord added daily to the church
such as should be saved, so that finally
it got out of hand and the crowd,
the number of Christians became so large that
no auditorium anywhere would have housed them, no
street corner, no open field, no beach, as
our Lord sometimes spoke from the book, no
place could they have gotten together.
You hear a word in our time, ecumenical
and ecumenicity.
Well now, don't get scared and run when
you hear these big word.
Preachers like to toss them around because it
gives the impression they're very learned.
But ecumenical only means universal.
It means all over the world, and the
ecumenical church just means all the Christians that
there are, or as it's used to mean,
the representative of all the Christians that there
are.
So an ecumenical council of Christians would be
either all the Christians there are in the
world, or at least official representatives of all
the Christians there are in the world.
Well you could have that, I suppose.
I don't think it would ever be, but
you might envision a gathering of people where
there were representatives from all the churches all
over the world.
Even that would create such a crowd, there
isn't a place in the whole world that
would house them.
So the physical presence of all Christians together
in one place never was repeated that I
know of again.
They went on Solomon's porch, but there was
only a small number of them, because when
those words were spoken, there were running up
into the thousands of Christians and you couldn't
get thousands of them on Solomon's porch, so
that merely meant some of them were there.
Then that was one thing that happened that
never can be repeated again.
And so far as my knowledge of history
goes, the sound from heaven was never repeated
again.
That is, I have not read anywhere among
the Methodists, among the Moravians, among the Presbyterians
or Anglicans, nowhere have I read of any
gathering of Christians where there was a sound
as of a rushing mighty wind.
I have heard that when Moody called the
Christians together, took them out under the pine
trees out in the eastern part of the
United States, kept them there several days and
nothing happened.
Then one day he got up before them
and said, Now the meeting closes tomorrow and
we can't go home without being filled with
the Holy Ghost.
So he said, Let's go up and try
it once more and wait on God.
And they went up among the pine trees
and the mighty Holy Ghost came down on
them.
They went back that evening or the next
morning and took trains in all directions.
And the historian says that everywhere they went,
they went like Samson's foxes going through the
fields setting fire every place they went.
The Holy Ghost had come, but he had
not come with a sound of a wind.
So that wasn't repeated.
And then I don't read anywhere in Christian
history where there was the appearance of a
great body of fire.
Now you can get some Christians who are
just a little bit off beam, you can
get them to say anything you know, but
I'm talking about trustworthy and reputable Christians who
would not overstate things.
I don't know any place that there was
the appearance of a great body of fire
dividing up on the forehead of the people.
And I don't read anywhere else at any
other time that everybody present began to speak
in a language that everybody else could understand
without an interpreter.
And yet that's exactly what happened here.
And I don't read where any place where
without an interpreter, 17 different people could hear
these people speak and all know what they
were talking about.
So I say those are elements which obviously
never were repeated because in every instance they
were external.
The sound from heaven was external, the sight
of the fire was external, the speaking with
languages was external, and the hearing and the
understanding all was external.
So that they never repeated and I suppose
never needed to be repeated.
Now right here some of you won't like
that, but then as I said I'm going
to tell the truth and trust God and
hope for the best.
But now here's the logic of it brother,
that if these things were necessary to the
church and necessary to the perpetuation of whatever
took place there at Pentecost that was that
was basic and fundamental, then if it was
necessary to the church's life and it was
never repeated, then the church must have ceased
to exist the day she was born.
Or at least ceased to exist the day
that they died who were present there, that
about 120.
So that obviously these external things were not
the basic things.
They were there and they were present, but
they were external, they were incidental, they were
elements that belong to that particular historic scene.
And there something was born, something came to
pass, something was given, a deposit was made,
something happened.
And that that happened was internal and heavenly
and permanent and lasting.
Now what was it that happened that didn't
pass away?
Didn't pass away with the sound of the
wind?
Didn't pass away with the sight of the
fire on the forehead?
Didn't pass away with the 17 languages being
spoken all one time or being understood at
least by 17 people of 17 languages?
What didn't pass away?
What is the eternal and abiding element in
Pentecost?
Well in order to discover it of course
we have to go and find out what
was promised.
And he shall send you another comforter, said
Jesus, and he shall take the things of
mine and show them unto you.
Somebody was coming that should make Jesus Christ
real.
Do you know what happened when he came?
Here's what happened.
Peter leaped to his feet and said, Men
and brethren, these men are not drunk, but
something has happened.
And here's what has happened.
God has made this Jesus, whom he crucified,
Lord and Christ, and has set him at
his own right hand.
And this which ye now see and hear,
this outpouring was shed forth by the man
at God's right hand, that is the Lord
Jesus Christ.
And then he said he will, he will
convict the world.
I tell you the truth, John 16, he
will convict the world, the presence of the
Holy Ghost, in showing the Christians Christ and
showing sinners their sin.
Then he said, tarry in the city of
Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from
on high.
As I tried to explain one or two
Sundays ago, power means ability to do.
Now that's all it means.
Because there's a Greek word from which our
English comes, our English word dynamite comes, some
of our brethren try to make out that
the Holy Ghost is dynamite, forgetting that they've
got the thing upside down.
That dynamite was named after that Greek word
and that the Holy Ghost and the power
of God wasn't named after dynamite.
We ought to remember that.
Dynamite was discovered only less than 200 years
ago, but this Greek word from which we
get our word power goes way back to
the time of Christ.
Well, it means ability to do, that is
all.
It's just ability to do.
One man picks up a violin and he
gets nothing out of it but unconscionable squeaks
and impossible rocket sounds.
He hasn't got the ability to do.
Another man picks up the violin and he
is soon playing beautiful, rich melodies.
One man steps into the prize ring and
he can't even lift his hands.
And the other fellow walks in and he
has power to do.
And pretty soon the man who can't lift
his hand is sleeping peacefully on the floor.
The man who has ability to do.
One businessman, he can't run a peanut stand,
he'd go bankrupt if he tried even to
sell peanuts down on the corner.
He hasn't ability to do.
And incidentally that describes me.
I would starve to death.
If God hadn't called me to preach, I'd
have starved to death years ago because I'm
no businessman at all, none whatsoever.
Anybody can cheat me that can find me.
And if I'm not protected by the law,
I have no business ability, ability to do.
There, here you have it.
One man can step up, open his mouth
and a song will come out.
I can step up and no song comes
out.
You know, nothing anybody want to hear.
So ability to do, that's what the word
means actually.
It means a dynamic ability to be able
to do what you go to do.
And ye shall receive ability to do.
It'll come on you.
If you're a soul winner, you'll have ability
to win souls.
If you're a preacher, he'll give you ability
to make the word plain.
Whatever you do in the name of God,
he gives you the ability to do.
And he gives you the ability to be
victorious in your life and to live right
and to behold Jesus and to live with
heaven in view.
It's ability to do.
Now those are the vital and essential and
eternal things that took place and that came
and stayed.
They came and stayed.
The wind and the fire and the appearance
and all that never been repeated so far
as I know.
And all the Christians coming together in one
place, that couldn't be repeated now because they're
scattered all over the world.
You couldn't get them together.
But that the Comforter came, he came and
filled them and that he came and abode
in them and that he came to make
Jesus real and that he came to give
them inward moral ability to do right and
inward ability to do God's work.
That stayed, that stayed, that's still here.
And if we don't have it, it's because
we've been mistaught.
It's because we've been scared out of it.
The teachers have scared us out of it.
And then some Christians have scared us away
from the Holy Spirit.
When I was a young fellow on the
farm in Pennsylvania, when they wanted to, when
they planted a field of corn and they
wanted to save the field from the crows,
they would shoot a crow.
It wasn't an easy task because they're pretty
wise, but they'd shoot a crow and then
they'd hang him by his heels in the
middle of the cornfield.
The point was this.
Now this is a good field of corn,
but you see what happens to crows that
come into this cornfield?
And that was supposed to scare off all
the crows from miles around.
They were supposed to hold a conference and
say, look, there's a field of new planted
corn, but don't go near it.
I saw a dead crow over there.
Well, now that's exactly what Satan has done.
He's taken some fanatical, weird, wild-eyed Christian
that does things that he shouldn't do, and
he's hung him up in the middle of
God's cornfield and said, now don't you go
near that doctrine about the Holy Spirit, because
if you do, you'll be acting like them.
I went, a fellow called me one time
to his home, wanted me to come over
and see if I could untangle his wife.
And I went over and he said, now
Brother Tozer, he said, I'll tell you, my
wife, he said things are pretty bad with
her.
He said, well, he said, Reverend, what would
you do if you'd wake up in the
middle of the night and your wife was
standing over on the floor in her nightgown
making a noise like a vacuum cleaner?
Well, I didn't know what to do with
the fellow, you know.
I didn't know what to do with him,
and I didn't know what to do with
her.
She just stood around and smiled.
She didn't give any demonstrations of a hoover
sweeper while I was there.
But because there has been a lot of
this weird stuff, why, God's children are frightened,
and as soon as you start to talk
about it, they start to run for cover.
They say, none of that for me.
I've seen dead crows out there in the
middle of the field.
I will not be frightened out of my
heritage.
I will not be scared out of my
birthright, because somebody didn't know what to do
with it, birthright, or found something else that
wasn't a birthright.
I want God all, all that God has
for me.
Now let me point out something here.
When Christ was born, many external things happened.
They weren't of ultimate or vital importance.
When Christ was born, the angels were notified,
and they came.
But he would have been born whether they
came or not.
When Christ came, the kings came from the
east.
But he was born whether kings came or
not.
When Christ came, he was born in a
manger, and there were all sorts of external
circumstances, but there was one great vital fact
that never has been taken back.
He was born.
He did come into the world.
He became flesh to dwell among us.
He did come and take our human nature,
and the Word was made flesh to redeem
mankind on a cross.
That did take place, and it remains forever.
So these external things are not important.
It's the internal things that matter.
Thousands of people felt the saving power of
Christ who had never seen the angels, and
thousands felt his healing touch who had never
seen the wise men.
Now, this is the eternal meaning of Acts
2, that the comforters come, that there are
the deities in our midst, that God has
given himself to us.
The liquid essence of deity has been poured
out.
He has shed forth this which ye now
see and hear.
He has shed forth this.
Now, let me point out something to you
here, that unless we have an outpouring of
the Holy Spirit, if we continue to go
the way we have been going in fundamentalist
evangelical circles just a while longer, the fundamentalists
will all be liberals, and most of the
liberals will be Unitarians, and there won't be
very much left but a few empty buildings.
It is my opinion that what we need
is for God's children to realize that they
have a heritage which they have not taken
advantage of.
There, God has promised us a unique afflatus,
a seizure and invasion from beyond us, that
is, to come to us and to take
over, and is to be in us what
we couldn't possibly be by ourselves.
Would you, if you were going to, suppose
that you were going to try to write
a bunch of sonnets as good as Shakespeare
wrote, suppose that you were going to write,
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day,
you know, all that stuff.
Well, what would you want?
What would you have to have?
I'll tell you what you'd have to have.
You'd have to have the spirit of Shakespeare.
You'd have to have the intellect of Shakespeare
enter your personality, because if you and I
tried to write Shall I Compare Thee to
a Summer's Day, we'd never get any further
than that.
Winter'd come before we'd get the second line
written, you see, because we couldn't make it.
But Shakespeare could make it.
He knew what to do with words.
Emerson said that he was the man who,
above all men that ever lived in the
world, could say anything he wanted to say.
And he did say it.
But now, how could you write like Shakespeare?
I remember seeing a book one time, not
so long ago, one of these weird sisters,
they call them these Madam So-and-So's,
you know, that tell fortunes and all that
spiritist.
Well, she claimed to have the spirit of
Shakespeare, and she was writing sonnets.
But, oh, brother, if they were written by
the same man who wrote Shakespeare's other sonnets,
he must have gone into dodage before he
started to write, because they were cheap imitations.
She was just writing out of the back
of her own little head, and Shakespeare had
nothing to do with it.
But if you wanted to write like Shakespeare,
what would you have to have?
The intellect of Shakespeare.
If you wanted to compose music like Johann
Sebastian Bach, what would you have to have?
You'd have to have the spirit of Bach.
And if you wanted to be a statesman
like any man you might name, a Gladstone
or an Israeli, what would you have to
have?
You'd have to have the spirit of those
men.
And now if we are going to reproduce
Christ on earth and be Christlike and be
like Christ and show forth Christ, what are
we going to have to have?
We're going to have to have the spirit
of Christ.
If we're going to be the children of
God, we're going to have to have the
spirit of the Father to breathe in our
hearts and breathe through us.
So that's why we have to have the
spirit of God.
That's why the church has to have the
spirit of Christ.
For the church is called to live above
her own ability.
She's called to live up so high that
no human being can live like that.
The humblest Christian listening to me tonight is
called to live a life of miracle.
A life that is a moral and spiritual
life of such intensity and such purity that
no human being can do it.
Only Jesus Christ can do it, or could
do it and can do it.
And so he wants the spirit of Christ
to come to his people.
This afflatus, this seizure, this invasion from above
that affects us mentally and morally and spiritually.
Now I believe that it might be well
for us, I said two weeks ago, that
if we just stopped all our busyness and
got quiet and worshiped God and waited on
him, because so carnal is the body of
present Christians.
This doesn't make people love you to say
this, and it isn't certainly chapter two from
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
But it's true, nevertheless, that the body of
Christians is carnal.
We're a carnal bunch.
The Lord's people ought to be a sanctified,
pure, clean people, but we're a carnal crowd.
We're carnal in our attitudes and carnal in
our tastes and carnal in everything that the
average Christian is, even the average gospel Christian
is.
And the conditions are so shockingly irreverent these
days.
Over in Africa, one of our missionaries told
us, and I think he's a Canadian man,
what was his name?
Mr. Herbert or Mr. Heber, Herb, some such
name, told me this.
He said that he had been on one
of the fields in Africa, I believe the
Congo, and of course the Church in the
Congo is very strong, several generations old, and
they're indigenous and they run their own churches,
they have almost complete autonomy without any missionary
having anything to do with it.
And he said they had some marvelous old
deacons, marvelous old saints.
And he said one day some missionaries from
the United States went over there, they had
to be from the United States, woe is
me.
They went over there and they started to
sing some imitation Negro spiritual, Seed that Son,
How He Run, and so on.
And this white missionary, the colored deacons, called
him aside.
They said, Teacher, we have a word with
you.
He said, Why do you allow a thing
like this?
He said, We gave up that junk when
we left the jungle and came to Jesus
Christ and got some clothes on and got
converted.
And why do you import from the United
States this stuff that we gave up and
left in the jungle?
And yet you hear it everywhere you go.
Everywhere you go you hear young fellows that
ought to be paddled.
And yet here they are.
I say shockingly irreverent, our Christian services are.
And degraded, so degraded our religious taste, so
largely as our Christian service exhibitionism.
That unless there is a divine visitation, I
don't know where we're going.
And wherever we're going, we're going pretty fast.
It will never be cured, my brothers and
sisters, it will never be cured by sermons.
It will never be cured until there is,
until the Church of Christ, you and I,
have been suddenly confronted with what one man
called the mysterium tremendum, the fearful mystery that
is God, the tremendous justice, the fearful majesty
that is God.
And this is what the Holy Ghost does.
He brings this mysterium tremendum, this fearful majesty,
fearful mystery, this wonderful thing we call God,
this wonderful one we call God, and presents
him to the human spirit, and we're confronted
with this.
And then out goes our irreverence, and out
goes our carnality, and out goes our degraded
religious taste, and out goes all that.
And the soul held speechless trembles inwardly to
the furthest fiber of its being.
And the Holy Ghost bestows upon us, bestows
upon us, I say, a beatitude beyond compare.
Brethren, you will never know about God than
the Spirit teaches you.
You'll never know any more about Jesus than
the Spirit teaches you, because there's only the
Spirit to do the teaching.
Oh, Holy Ghost, how we've grieved thee, how
we've insulted thee, how we've rejected thee.
And yet he is our teacher, and if
he does not teach us we never can
know.
He is our illuminator, and if he doesn't
turn the light on we never can see.
He is the healer of our deaf ears,
and if he does not touch our ears
we never can hear.
And yet churches can run for weeks and
months and years without ever knowing anything about
this, or ever having the Spirit of the
living God come to all upon them.
Oh, my heart be still before him, prostrate
inwardly, adoring him.
And this, I say, then is the news
I have for you.
Deity is present.
Pentecost means that the Deity came to mankind
to give himself to man, that man might
breathe him in as he breathes in the
air, that he might fill men.
Dr. Simpson had an illustration which I think
was about as good as I've ever heard.
He said being filled with the fullness of
God was like a bottle in the ocean.
He said you take the cork out of
a bottle and sink it into the ocean,
and you've got the bottle full of ocean,
and the bottle is in the ocean, and
the ocean is in the bottle, and the
ocean contains the bottle, but the bottle contains
a little bit of the ocean.
And so he said it was with a
Christian.
We're filled unto the fullness of God, but
of course we can't contain all of God,
because God contains us.
But we can have all of God we
can contain.
And if we only knew it, we could
enlarge our vessels.
The vessel gets bigger as we go on
with God.
Deity is among us.
If some celebrity were here, he couldn't, the
usher would know what to do with the
people.
I tell you, we have a celebrity in
our midst.
And it came to pass suddenly they were
all filled with the Holy Ghost.
Deity came down among us, and he came
down to stay.
Not to come and go, but to come
and stay.
And we have eyes and we see not,
and we have ears and we hear not,
and we have hearts and we feel not,
and we ignore the presence of royalty.
How would your Queen, the gracious Queen of
England, feel if she were to come to
Toronto and not even a policeman on the
corner would know she was here?
Nobody, no one would know.
She walked down the street down past the
Royal York, and nobody even gave her a
glance.
Now I don't know, being the gracious little
lady she was, she probably would smile it
off.
But it would be pretty bad for us,
wouldn't it, and pretty bad for the people
to know that royalty is present and we
didn't even know it.
Oh, we've got higher than royalty.
We have the Lord of Lords and King
of Kings, we have the blessed Holy Ghost
present, and we're treating him as if he
wasn't present at all.
I say this is terrible.
We resist him and we disobey him and
we quench him and we compromise with our
hearts.
We hear a sermon about him and we
determine we'll learn more and we'll do something
about it, and then our conviction wears off
and pretty soon we go back to the
same old dead level again we were in
before.
We resist the blessed comforter, the blessed comforter.
He's come to comfort, he's come to teach,
for he's the spirit of instruction.
He has come to bring light, for he's
the spirit of light, and he comes to
bring purity, for he is the spirit of
holiness.
He comes to bring power, for he is
the spirit of power.
He comes to bring these all to our
hearts, and he wants you to be nonetheless
have this kind of experience.
I don't know whether I ever told you
about this or not, but I was up
in a little town north of Chicago preaching
to some Baptists one time, here maybe five
years ago, six years ago.
And I preached a sermon which I told
them about Isaiah's vision.
And these Baptist preachers, they were Baptist preachers,
and they gathered around and then they got
down on their knees to pray afterward.
I went home then, always do, you know,
after a meeting you go home.
I did.
I went back to Chicago and got interested
in other things, and then that meeting sort
of passed into the back of my mind.
And later on, two years after that exactly,
two Baptist preachers came to my study, or
came to my home, and said, we'd like
to come in a minute, I have a
word for you.
So they came in, I knew one of
them, and he said, do you remember when
you preached about Isaiah?
I said, I remember.
Up in whatever town it was, I said
yes.
He said, I became so thirsty to be
filled with the Holy Ghost that I have
been the miserable man for two years.
Said, I've sought God, and I've sought God,
and nothing happened, and I sought God, and
he said here a little while ago, he
said, one day in my agony, I was
standing on the middle of my floor, in
the middle of my living room floor, and
I looked up to God and said, oh
God, you've got to do it.
And he said, I was suddenly, instantaneously, and
marvelously filled with the Holy Ghost.
Now, he said, I'm not going about among
the Pentecostal people, he said, I'm a Baptist,
and he said, I'm going to go back
and preach in the Baptist church, but he
said, I just had to stop by and
tell you that what you preached about up
there two years ago has now happened to
me.
Just a Baptist preacher, you know, that's all.
God will do that for people, he doesn't
ask your denominational background, doesn't ask whether you're
Armenian Calvinist or what you are, doesn't ask
anything except are you willing to obey, are
you willing to listen, are you willing to
stop disobeying, are you willing to stop quenching
the spirit, resisting the spirit, and throw up
your hands and say, I believe deity is
present, I believe deity is present, and breathe
in the Holy Ghost, and let him come
in and fill your life.
I only gave you one illustration, but I
could give you many more.
A young man the other night shook my
hand, I recognized him just a little bit,
not too much, and I went down and
he began to talk, and he said, Do
you remember when you preached to me so
many years ago in Chicago?
And I said, Now I do remember.
He said, Do you remember what I wanted?
Oh, he said, I wanted to be filled
with the Spirit.
He said, I left there and I went
to such and such a place, and he
said, You know what, I'm here, I can
tell you, it happened to me.
And the evidence on his face, all over
his face, was he knew what he was
talking about.
He wasn't giving a testimony that somebody had
given him.
Well, now that's it.
That's it.
Not as dramatic and colorful as you're taught
that things ought to be, I suppose, but
here we have it.
The Holy Ghost came and he's still here,
and all he wants is to yield, obey,
open our hearts, and he rushes in, and
our lives are transformed and changed.
In another Sunday or two, perhaps two weeks
from tonight, I'm going to speak on how
to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Next Sunday night, God willing, I'm going to
speak on the Dove of Noah's Ark.
The Dove of Noah's Ark is the Holy
Ghost.
But this is all I have for you
tonight.
Let's pray.