Tonight I want to talk about the Holy
Spirit and the Christian witness, and I'm very
conscious as I begin my talk that a
certain false cult has risen in the latter
days that have taken this word witness and
put a copyright on it before the Christian
public and before the world, but I refuse
to admit the validity of their claim or
the rightness of their use of the term
witness or witnesses.
I want to use it in its biblical
sense and in the sense that it is
used here.
Now, our Lord said, Ye shall be witnesses
unto me.
And it is a touching and solemn thing
that in the time of the exile of
our Lord Jesus and the extreme unpopularity of
God, for don't you fool yourself for a
minute, everybody is talking about God, but God
is extremely unpopular.
As long as God is around to help
us when we need him, we'll talk about
him and even pray to him in the
world and in the popular church.
As long as he keeps his place and
doesn't intrude upon our plans, we're very God
-conscious these days.
Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, politicians, everywhere, God's in
this and God's in that, everywhere from being
a co-pilot, which means second from the
top, the pilot's second.
On the up-and-down-the-scale, God
is talked about, but that's the God who
minds his own business except when you're in
trouble.
God is like the doctor that lives across
the street.
As long as he lets you along, he's
all right except when you get sick and
then you sin for him.
Now, that's the God that men talk about
today.
In his son Jesus Christ in exile, he
said that when he sent the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit would witness to righteousness because he
went unto the Father.
It is such an insolent thing, I say,
that in an hour like this, it is
yet possible for some people to have the
high honor of speaking for him among his
enemies.
Now, he says he shall be witnesses, and
I want to talk a little about what
it means, this witness.
A witness is one who tells.
He's not repeating stories, and he's not presenting
philosophical concepts.
He is witnessing, he is telling something that
he has seen or heard or experienced in
some way.
Isaiah witnessed by saying, I saw the Lord
high and lifted up.
Ezekiel witnessed by saying that he saw one
sitting on a throne, and Peter witnessed by
saying in the tenth of Acts that the
Lord had come back from the dead and
that God had anointed him with the Holy
Ghost and power before his crucifixion, and he
had come back from the dead, and now
he forgave whoever believed on him.
John witnessed, and there were about 500 brethren
at once, Paul said, who saw Jesus after
his resurrection, and they witnessed.
All of them told what they had seen
and heard.
Now, he didn't tell what they had seen
and heard or what they had experienced, and
sometimes these are the same.
You'll notice Paul's testimony had to do with
what he had experienced.
The historic testimony given by the word witness
is that the witnesses so often died for
their witness, that they were called martyrs.
Because the Greek word witness is the word
martyr, we get our word witnesses.
So that because they witnessed and were killed
for the witness so often, they said the
witness was a martyr and the martyr was
a witness.
It was the same thing.
However, not all witnesses have died for their
faith, but because so many did, the word
witness and the word martyr has come to
be very much the same.
And as Brother Newell knows, it is very
much the same thing in the Greek language.