Father, we thank you this morning for this
privilege of fellowship.
We would be still and know that thou
art God.
Lord, we care not whether you come in
the earthquake, or in the wind, or in
the fire, or in the still small voice,
but we see a world outside of us
so reckless, so hell-bound, so sin-bound,
so blind, so deaf, so smart scientifically, and
so dumb in the areas of spirituality.
And you've called us to be shepherds, to
be leaders.
You've called us to be Joshua's to lead
the church on to victory.
And we recognize, Lord, the staleness that there
is around.
We do not see the pillar of fire
hanging over the sanctuary.
We do not hear the rushing mighty wind.
Will you speak to our hearts today?
Grant, Lord, we shall be edified after we
have been here and have new incentives, a
new vision, a new purpose to do the
will of God.
We remember the suffering church throughout the world,
the millions of precious Christians who today have
to bow their necks and bow their backs
to the smiters who know no relief from
their misery.
We thank you for the testimony that still
flourishes amidst all that wickedness and violence.
Lord God, we thank you for every good
and every perfect gift that you bestow upon
us.
Thank you for our freedom.
Thank you for your word which you've preserved
right through the centuries.
And I ask you again, Lord, that we
may be a vital link between your eternal
song and this troubled world outside, this lost
world.
And I give you praise in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Thank you.
I'm not really going to preach a sermon
this morning, but I want to have a
launching pad, and the launching pad is in
the little book of Joel in the second
chapter.
Joel chapter 2 and verse 17.
I'll go back, pardon me, to chapter 1
and verse 13.
God yourselves and lament ye priests, howl ye
ministers of the altar, come lie all night
in sackcloth ye ministers of my God, for
the meat offering and the drink offering is
withholden from the house of your God.
Sanctify a fast and call a solemn assembly.
And then to verse 17 of the next
chapter, let the priests, the ministers of the
Lord, weep between the altar, the porch and
the altar, and let them say, spare thy
people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage
to reproach, but the heathen should rule over
them.
Wherefore should they say among the people, where
is your God?
Most of the prophetic books have a kind
of historical framework or a setting in which
it's comparatively easy to discover that which provides
a key to the interpretation of the book.
This book of Joel, to me, it's timeless.
I know the word of God is timeless,
and it differs from other books because there
are no kings of Israel or Judah mentioned
in the book, no great empires like Assyria
or Babylonians and Egyptians and so forth, and
scholars dispute whether it's earlier than Amos or
later than Micah, and I don't think that
matters too much either.
I get literature from all over the world
because my books are in a number of
languages, and then everyone that writes to me
quotes 2 Chronicles 7 14, which I'm sure
you know, I'll remind you of it, if
my people who are called by my name
will humble themselves and pray and seek my
face and so forth.
Now I do not believe that that is
the key verse for our day.
It's a valid scripture, but you see it's
comparatively easy to use it because it throws
the responsibility on the few.
If my people are called by my name,
I don't believe the key to revival is
in the few, I believe the key to
revival is in the prophet.
There's an old saying that a river will
never rise higher than its source.
A few years ago before he became the,
a few years ago before he retired, Dr.
Carl F.
Henry, the founder and editor of Christianity Today,
sent out a questionnaire to what he called
20 of the leading intellectual preachers in the
country.
There must be more than 20 because I
didn't get them on anyhow, and the question
that he sent out was this, what do
you see for the church of Jesus Christ
by the year 2000?
I remember only one of the replies, it
was given by Elton Trueblood, the Quaker philosopher,
and Elton Trueblood said this amazing thing, by
the year 2000 the church will be a
conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant militant paganism.
I followed that hook line and thinker, and
woke up with mental and I think spiritual
indigestion about two o'clock in the morning.
The world by the year 2000, the church
will be kind of crunched in, which will
be a conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant
militant paganism, and then I began to realize,
well you better back up a bit.
I think we need to remind ourselves that
Christianity was not served up to the world
on a silver platter.
Christianity was born in a sophisticated totalitarian society.
We used to live in the city of
Bath in England, it was founded in 55
BC, 55 years before Christ, and when Christianity
was born, it was born in a slave
system that dominated almost the whole world.
I use the figure sometimes again of when
we stood on the southern lip of the
Grand Canyon, and there read the legend, which
I'm sure you've read, it's fixed on one
of the rocks that this is the Grand
Canyon, and it gives some statistics about it.
The yellow ribbon in the distance is the
Colorado River, it's seven miles away, it's about
350 feet wide, it's about 45 feet deep,
and so forth.
And if you look down, and you see
the ground level of the canyon, the walls
on either side are a mile high, and
I don't know why except it seemed the
Lord said to me, well how would a
child get out of that situation?
A little child couldn't surely swim the Colorado
River, a man couldn't do that even.
How could it scale the walls on either
side?
They're almost perpendicular, and immediately I came to
my mind, it was a picture of the
early church.
The early church was walled in on one
side with the mightiest military machine in history,
the Roman power.
It was walled in on this side with
Greek intellectualism.
It was blocked ahead by the Jewish monopoly,
as they thought, of the gospel.
And you know, one of the things that
really hurts today is the snobbishness even in
Christianity.
If you don't have a degree, I don't
have any degrees, after all you can have
32 and still be frozen, but those men
who turned the world upside down had no
colossal intellectual capacity, they had no great financial
backing, they had no social standing, they were
about the most despised men in and around
Jerusalem, and yet they broke out somehow, and
they, the later, it was said that they
turned the world upside down.
I think at least once a week, sometimes
I think of it once a day, where
Dr. J.B. Phillips, that gave us the
Phillips New Testament, one day turned round rather
wearily in his office, and he picked up
a book which happened to be the Acts
of the Apostles, which happened to be in
Greek, which he happens to understand very well,
and he read through to about the fifth
chapter, and then he summarized it this way,
this is the church of Jesus Christ before
it became fat and out of breath by
prosperity.
This is the church of Jesus Christ before
it became muscle-bound by over-organization.
This is the church of Jesus Christ where
they didn't gather together a group of intellectuals
to study psychosomatic medicine, they just healed the
sick.
This is the church of Jesus Christ where
they did not say prayers, but they prayed
in the Holy Ghost.
There's a vast difference.
The tragedy in our colleges and seminaries right
now, we turn men out because they know
the Word of God.
That's never going to move the world.
The question is not whether they know the
Word of God, the question is do they
know the God of the Word?
And just to give a man a license
to preach because he has some academic ability,
and then he can frame the little thing
on the wall, you know, to say he
got his degree because his grandmother put him
through college, you know, and he likes to
show this thing off.
To do that is like giving a blind
man a driving license.
If he doesn't know God, why is he
in this business?
I come to this conclusion recently about two
things.
We've got to make up our minds that
this book is absolute or absolute salute.
It's either got the answer for our generation
or forget it.
And the other thing is that preaching is
not a profession, it's a privilege.
I remember going down the street, the High
Holborn in London, a few years ago.
Well, it is a few, 25 I guess,
and a little lady was going to the
mailbox there.
Her feet were like Charlie Chaplin's, and she
was very, very stooped, and she shakily put
her letter into the mailbox, and then she
turned to go into a building, and somebody
said, you know who that is?
I said, not the slightest idea.
That's the widow of Hugh Price Hughes, at
one time the king of the, at least
of the Methodist pulpit in England.
His daughter gave us a huge biography of
her father, and she said, when he came
back on a Sunday night from the service,
preached morning and night, when he came back
at night, if nobody had been saved, he
was inconsolable.
You couldn't comfort him, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't drink, he wouldn't even take his long
coat off.
He threw himself over his bed, and he
sobbed, and he sobbed, and he sobbed, and
said, why, why, why?
Isn't it staggering when you think that one
sermon on the day of Pentecost produced three
thousand people, and we had some cities yesterday
where three thousand sermons were preached, and nobody
was saved?
And he doesn't even say this.
The church used to be a lifeboat, now
it's a cruise ship.
We're not marching to Zion, we're sailing there
with ease.
In the apostolic church, it says they were
all amazed, and now in our churches everybody
wants to be amused.
The church began in the upper room, despised,
in the upper room with a bunch of
men agonizing, and it's ending in the supper
room with a bunch of women organizing.
We must take rattle for revival, and commotion
for creation, and action for unction.
Look, I think in this critical hour in
history, and it is the most critical hour
in history, the Middle East is ready to
blow up.
The prestige of the nation has gone down,
as we know in this nation we love.
From Walter Gates, it's gone down, down, down,
and we've never been as humiliated.
And if you want to see the bankruptcy
of humanism, all you have to do is
ask why we poured billions of dollars into
the into the United Nations, and what did
they do?
We saw Cambodia raped.
It was the most hideous example of genocide
in the history of the world, and Nixon
and Kissinger knew about it.
They inaugurated the bombing, or they connived to
it anyhow.
Do you know as many as three million
people had to march out of one city?
They actually went in when surgeons were doing
surgery, and they pulled the surgeons away, and
they took the people off that were open,
and they flushed them on the floor, and
they marched people down the road till they
were treading on each other's heels, and taking
their skin off.
There are not a million people left.
If you get last year's issue, I think
it was March issue of Reader's Digest, it
has the most horrible article on the rape
of a quiet country, I think it called
it, the rape of a gentle country.
You talk about hideous things, you talk about
unlimited wickedness, you talk about the brutality of
man.
Shakespeare said, in those dreamy days when he
lived, that man's inhumanity to man makes countless
millions mourn.
I jotted some notes the other day, I
haven't memorized them yet, about the condition of
the world, and this is given by men
outside of the church of Jesus Christ.
Carl Jung says, and he's quoted by Paul
Kaufman, it is becoming more and more obvious
that it is not starvation, or microbes, or
cancer, but man himself who is the threat,
who is the greatest danger to mankind.
Anthony Storr says we are the cruelest, most
ruthless species that have ever walked over the
face of the earth.
Paul Toneo says the dance of death and
violence goes on round about us daily.
Another man whose name I do not know
says we live in a theater of the
absurd.
I'm old enough to remember years prior to
1914.
I remember the war broke out on August
the 4th, 1914.
My cousin had been to our house about
a month before that, as straight as a
ramrod.
He had his red jacket with its lovely
gold buttons, and I looked at him and
I thought, my, what a marvelous thing to
be a soldier.
On the 4th of August, he went with
millions of other men to fight.
He came back a total physical wreck.
But you see, the slogan to World War
I was this, this is the war to
end wars.
War is not only unchristian, it's uncivilized.
And then after that we had, from 1919
to 1939, we had 20 golden years of
peace, when the church had the greatest opportunity
since Pentecost, in my judgment.
And all we did was try and get
a kind of a peace situation between the
liberals, and what they used to call German
rationalism, and find out how much of a
Bible we could concede.
Then came the second World War.
Prior to World War I, we had a
group of intellectuals in England called Fabian Socialists.
The red bearded man who gave us plays
like Pygmalion, and My Fair Lady.
George Bernard Shaw was one of the super
intellectuals.
I forget the names of all the others,
but Bernard Shaw was one.
One of the helpers was in the same
group.
But really the leader was a self-anointed
and self-appointed prophet of a new world
order.
His name was H.G. Wells, a cocky
little man.
Those men did not talk about redemption, they
did not talk about sin.
They were just rationalists, they were just humanists.
Funny.
But way back in 1912, H.G. Wells
said, two years before the 1914 war, H
.G. Wells said, it is possible for us
to have a new race of people by
intellectual and biological processes.
We don't need the Bible, we don't need
the church, we can pull down the hills
of wealth, we can fill in the valleys
of poverty.
He didn't talk about sin and redemption and
wickedness.
He talked about the adequacy of materialism.
He talked about the inevitability of progress.
He talked about the sufficiency of man.
And they were going to bring in a
new millennium by their own genius.
And then a shadow came over the sky.
We had the 1914-18 war.
And at the end of it, H.G.
Wells and the gang weren't so sure about
things.
1939 came, the second world war.
Well, H.G. Wells had written his crux
ansata that got him into trouble with the
Roman church, and then he had written his
outline of history.
But the last book he wrote in the
middle of World War II was not this
rosy optimism that man has innate power to
cleanse the human system and bring peace and
civilization and order.
His last book was mind at the end
of its tether.
And he says there is no hope for
humanity.
But he did say one sensible thing.
He said there's a little cavity somewhere in
the human breast which can be filled by
God and only by God.
We feel a little a little nervous these
days of talking about human depravity.
Well, heaven knows there's never been as much
depravity around as we have today.
The things that were done in a corner
25 years ago now are big business.
People are not ashamed to be naked.
You can go on the beach there on
Fire Island, New York.
You can go to a beach in Southern
California and see a thousand people on Sunday
without a stitch on them, from little things
like this to tottering old men.
They play volleyball, they play their games in
stark nakedness, and make good targets of course
for the hundreds of cameras that are there.
We live in a day again which parallels
the iniquity that was on the earth when
when the prophet Elijah came on the scene.
The nation was in bondage to idolatry and
impurity and infidelity and indifference.
There's a Jewish scholar years ago by the
name of Butch Basin.
You may remember him.
He gave us a sign book on the
prophet of Isaiah, and it's my contention this
morning brethren that this pulpit is no place
for puppets in this day in which we
live.
It's prophets that we need, and Butch Basin
says that the prophet by the very nature
of his calling is a tragic figure.
He has a fierce loyalty for God, and
he has a broken heart over a lost
nation.
Read about the prophet Isaiah that he stays,
as we would say, in a shopping center.
He lies naked there.
He's an aristocrat, and yet he's consumed with
love for God, but he isn't afraid to
be fought a fool.
You read in Ezekiel's prophecy where for, what
is it, 349 days he had to lay
on his left side.
He wasn't even allowed to turn on to
his right side because of the iniquity of
the nation.
We're going to have no broken-hearted people
till we have broken-hearted preachers.
Let the priest weep between the altar and
the doorposts.
It's amazing when you think of it, you
know.
There's no way that you can organize revival.
It doesn't need to be advertised.
It can't be subsidized.
It can't be nationalized.
It can't be denominationalized, and it sure can't
be rationalized.
Right now there's a breath of revival in
one country, only one I know of, but
it could be other places, and that is
over there in Nagaland in northeast India.
It broke out in 1977.
True revival changes the moral climate of the
community.
Most of our revivals don't get under the
door of the sanctuary.
When a lady was arguing with a Protestant
lady arguing with a Catholic lady about a
piece of land that was being excavated, the
lady said, well our denomination is building a
new church there.
The Catholic lady says we don't want one.
Why not?
Because we just built a church up the
road, and I don't want my children going
to a church, a daily vacation, bible school,
and getting tracts, and getting other stuff.
Oh no, the Protestant lady said, now let's
not argue about this, you know.
We'd better join together and fight the Communists.
You know that was the thing that the
old square-headed Georgian, what was the dictator
in Russia?
Stalin, Stalin, thank you, Stalin, sitting there at,
was it Yalta?
I think it was Yalta, and Stalin was
there, and Mr. Roosevelt was sitting in the
middle, and Winston Churchill was over there, and
Stalin said, look you've got an enemy called
Germany, and I've got an enemy called Germany,
and America has an enemy called Germany, so
we are friends fighting one enemy.
It was very clever, and it worked, though
it was wrong.
We have a problem, we've got to fight
Communism, so let's link up.
There's no difference between your religion and mine.
And the other lady said, I thought there
was a big difference.
Why, she said, I go to church, and
I confess my sins about every six days,
and you don't do that in the Protestant
church, do you?
And the lady said, no, no we don't.
Have you ever seen a sign outside of
one of our churches?
Revival.
Yes, I've often wondered, what do you do?
Well, she said, you see, you go and
confess your sins every six days, and in
our church, we save our sins up till
we have a revival, and then we all
go up to the front, and cry, and
confess our sins, and we have a great
time, and everybody's happy, and then we go
back and start our sinning all over.
Isn't it about time we told the world
that while there's a study of comparative religion,
Christianity is not a comparative religion, it's a
superlative religion?
And we mix them up, and we try
and tell people who are morally good, and
very excellent, many of them, that Jesus Christ
came into the world to make bad men
good.
He did not.
That's a fringe benefit.
The first argument God has with a man
is not that he's bad, it's that he's
dead in trespasses and in sin.
And Christianity is the only gospel in the
world, the only message in the world, where
a man's God comes and lives inside of
him.
The Mormons claim that last year they had
more converts from Evangelical churches than the Evangelical
churches had from Mormonism.
They're funding to make you think.
Again, somebody said that Mormonism last year was
the most rapidly growing religion in America.
Somebody said, forget it, that's not true.
Bromagainism is the rapidly growing thing.
And oh, how the preachers are concerned about
the White House.
I wish that God were half as much
concerned about God's house as we are about
the White House.
The White House is never going to govern
the country.
The White House is supposing we have a
moral majority.
Why, bless your life, Jesus could have had
a great time with a moral majority who
were more moral than the Pharisees and the
Sadducees.
You see, we're always trying to help our
poor, bankrupt Christianity out, one way or another.
So, it doesn't work that way, let's work
it this way.
We've glamorized it.
Sunday morning, you turn your TV on, you
see people in gorgeous dresses.
You watch people going to church, and you've
got to say, there's more passion than passion.
Come on, where's the brooding of the Holy
Ghost these days?
When revival comes, you don't daringly say, Joe
Smith is coming to preach Sunday night, and
he finishes next Sunday night.
Where in the world did you get the
idea the Holy Ghost only comes at 11
o'clock Sunday morning, and you send him
home at 12, and you want him back
at 7 at night till 8, and we
don't need him till Wednesday night?
That's not facetious, that's true.
When revival comes, the lights don't go out
in the sanctuary for weeks and weeks and
weeks and weeks.
I spent an afternoon in Wales in 1931
-32 with an old man who had been
one of the right-hand men in the
Salvation Army revivals back in the 1880s.
The man was 80 years of age.
He told me about the amazing things that
happened in their revivals.
The men that would sit on the back
seats, the scum almost of the earth, and
they'd come in just to get warm, and
they'd have a hymnbook in their hands, and
they'd get so worried when the old preacher
of William Booth particularly was preaching his hellfire
messages that they'd shred their hymnbooks, leave a
hymnbook shredded.
And Begbie, in his, I think, definitive work
of William Booth in the first volume, I
think it is in the first volume about
the third chapter, talks about the holiness meeting,
and he said when the Holy Ghost came
down and men resisted the Holy Ghost, the
Spirit of God would lift people from the
back of the sanctuary and carry them over
the ordinance and drop them at the altar.
And we think we've seen everything because two
or three people get healed.
Again, you cannot standardize revival.
I'm not thinking of a church revival, I'm
thinking of a national revival.
There's only one hope for America, not one
or two, there's one hope for America, and
that is that we have a divine intervention
in the nation.
Forget your denomination, forget your empty seat.
Let's see first of all how much God
grieves over the sin of the people.
After all, when you look in the Old
Testament, God's argument was not with the Amalekites
and Hittites and all the other acts.
God's problem in the Old Testament was Israel.
God's problem in the world today is not
communism, Mormonism, Mulniism, or any other ism.
God's problem is his church in the day
today.
Less unworldly.
I live in an area which is quite
unusual.
I suppose if you if you leap straight
behind me across the fence there, David Wilkinson
lives about a mile away, and up to
our left the Agape Force, and down to
the right Keith Green.
And now the second chapter of Acts has
bought 100 acres there, and now Jimmy Owen
has bought 10 acres just up the road,
and we have the Agape Force there, and
we have Youth with a Mission here, and
just a bit further over the road there
we have Calvary Commission, and Barry McGuire lives
there, and Dallas Holm lives there, and Keith
Green, one of the top musicians.
Boy we've got such a proliferation, they're calling
it the New Jerusalem, which I'm sure it
isn't.
You know I tease those fellows some days,
I say you know you guys, I have
to sweat and fast and pray and weep
before I go to a so-called revival,
and you guys can walk up with a
smile and say a few things and wang
your guitar, and in two nights you can
get more money than I get in a
year.
Now that doesn't make me envious, but you
know I see the pitiful state of the
church, when you can get three or four
thousand people on a Saturday night to pay
five dollars, plus all the expense of traveling,
plus the fact they have to eat before
they go home and eat before they come,
and you can get thousands of people and
clap and applaud and have a great time.
When I read of a young man that
could walk out in the snow, and the
snow up to his chin sometimes, wrestling in
prayer from sunrise till sunset with a tubercular
body, that when he sneezed he sprayed the
snow with blood, that when he coughed he
spit up what looked like the leaf a
peckle from a rose, and if you've got
it you could stretch it like that, it
was a piece of his lungs.
That a young man could die at 28
years of age, like Robert Murray McShane died
in Scotland at 29 years of age.
When I heard about a man who wrestled
in prayer like that, I was dumbfounded, and
since the church I went to was pretty
sleepy and I was only about 17.
I went out into Sherwood Forest, I lived
on the edge of it, and I started
praying by myself at night.
We have some bracken there, it doesn't go
out this way like a fountain, it starts
and it comes out like a ball, and
it grows seven or eight feet high, and
I used to creep in it and weep
and groan and pray for revival.
I used to stand on the hill outside
the city as Jesus did over Jerusalem, and
three years after I started praying, revival came
to that city because I prayed.
No, no, no, I was just one of
a number, but a man called George Jeffress
came.
George Jeffress came, there's a book about him
called the Ministry of the Miraculous.
He was very humble.
No, no, no, no, no, he never stopped
to make, you never heard money mentioned.
He just came there, they sang about one
chorus he'd minister, and the authority of God
was on him, and again the acts of
the apostles were repeated.
I don't think that's the only answer.
In fact, I think we could bypass that.
In the last 30 years, America has had
more great healing crusades than all the nations
of the world put together, and look where
we are.
What we need now is a revival of
holiness, a revival of character, a revival of
people who are utterly selfless and prepared to
lay their lives on the altar for God.
Again, going back to that thing up there,
which Keith Green said to me the other
day, why don't you go, I'll pay you
fair, let's go see what's happening in Nagaland.
Well, one thing, we have a language barrier,
but Paul Kaufman, who I consider one of
the leading missionary statesmen in the world, he
lives in Hong Kong, went to see what
happened and expected something like Phinney, and when
he got there, there were signs and wonders
and miracles.
Cripples were healed, blind people were seen, every
distorted, perverted thing was put right.
So what?
Hey, did you ever hear of a revival
like this?
The government has made an inquiry.
Why has the drink traffic gone down?
Why is it the kids are behaving in
the streets?
Why are we not having a problem with
drugs?
You've a pretty hefty problem around here with
it, I guess.
Do you know a city in the nation
that hasn't?
Miami, now England, the other day said Miami
is the murder capital of the world, and
some people say, no, no, no, no, that's
up there in Atlanta.
Well, how does this eruption suddenly come?
Why is the nation convulsed?
Why is the government asking?
We were the most rebellious, lawless state in
India, and now we're the calmest.
The crime has gone.
People are civilized and gentle and loving.
Well, it's the same old story.
They discovered a group of people, underground people,
who've been praying 20 years for revival.
I live 50 miles from a young man,
32 years of age, who prays 10 hours
a day in busy America.
A man outside of Waco is 60 years
of age, he prays five hours a day.
No man, I don't care how colossal your
intellect, no man is greater than his prayer
life.
To stand before men on behalf of God
is one thing, to stand before God on
behalf of men is something entirely different.
We've urged people to to tie, haven't we?
But we only mean their money.
You see, we want a revival, a painless
Pentecost.
We want something that won't disturb our status
quo.
Well, it's easy street everywhere else, so why
not here?
There never has been a revival at Eichentrace
that hasn't been bedded back there with true,
true, true intercession.
In the city of Leeds, where I lived
in England, I say the revival came through
George Jefferson, it did.
But it came because there was a little
man there, he was unlettered.
He knew that shouldn't worry us too much,
that the world, what does the world know
about spiritual values anyhow?
The trouble is, lots of denominations have fallen
for it.
You can't have a minister unless he has
so many degrees.
This little man had no degrees, but boy
did he have a burning heart.
And he labored, and he had three breakdowns,
not mentally, physically.
Do you know why?
Because he fasted so much, but he had
authority.
Paul says in Ephesians 6.19, pray for
me that utterance may be given me.
In other words, he means let the word
be threaded with that mysterious thing that you
can't define and nobody can give.
The thing that we call unction, the anointing
of God.
If money could buy it, my, some of
you would sell your house to get it,
but you can't get it with money.
And you can't get it by, you know,
extracurricular stuff at the university.
No sirree, I've been praying for a long
while in my secret heart that in this
last day, when wickedness is so arrogant, the
church is going to end up as a
conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant militant paganism.
That's how it was born.
That's how it is today.
That's how it will be until God pours
out his spirit with one final movement of
compassion.
Until again, you don't have to show Christian
films.
Oh boy, we've tried to, we've tried to
make the gospel roll along, haven't we?
Christian films give our children hayrides and sleigh
rides.
We have some girls and folk not far
from us with Keith Green's group who used
to be in the Mooneyites.
Man alive, you think West Point's tough.
West Point's a nursery compared to the way
those guys had to live.
The food they got, the discipline in their
lives, the hours they have to ponder over
the word, the time they have to be
up in the morning.
That's about the last aspect that we present
to people, isn't it?
We're so keen to get them all saved
and you're going to heaven and we forget
to tell them you're the soldier of Jesus
Christ if you're really born again and you
have no rights.
Now we're trying to marry Christianity to prosperity
and popularity and personalities and it isn't working.
Oh, you can preach the prosperity doctrine because
that feeds our carnality.
Everybody wants, look, why don't those men who
preach that go to the third world and
preach it where they need it?
I know wealthy people, I know many millionaires,
I know lovely people and I believe God
lets them have a ministry in supplying needs.
But the church of Jesus Christ, when the
church is prosperous, he never has revival.
It's when she's poor.
Prayer is the language of the poor.
Bow down thine ear and hear me for
I'm poor and needy.
The self-satisfied don't need to pray.
The self-sufficient don't want to pray.
The self-righteous cannot pray.
But the man who realizes I need something
outside of anything that's human at all, he
wants to bathe his soul in prayer.
I went to a little Bible school in
England, there were only 35 students, but my,
I'm glad that the man who was the
principal was a man of prayer.
He wrote a book, Samuel Chadwick's book, The
Path of Prayer.
It's reissued right now and then after that
he wrote a book that seemed logically to
follow the way to Pentecost.
The weakest, weakest meeting in almost any church
without exception is the prayer meeting.
And when we're not strong in prayer, we're
saying to God, we can manage because we
shall pray if we have an invasion, we
shall pray if we have a famine.
We have a great utility God.
Very often we say to young people, now
look, very often we say to young people,
now look, now you've got to read your
Bible and maintain your prayer.
You need to maintain your prayer life to
pray.
No, not so, not so.
You need to maintain your Christian life in
order to pray.
The greatest expositor in the world living today
told me personally, he said, I don't have
any trouble.
I'd like to expound the word.
My books, he's written many, many books, but
he said, I've always found prayer so tough.
I just, just found, find prayer the most
difficult thing in the world.
Read the Acts of the Apostles and all
you read about is prayer, prayer, prayer, prayer,
prayer.
When they had prayed, the place was shaken.
If you want to read the prayer life
of Jesus, you would read the gospel according
to Luke, because in every instance he gives
Jesus as a praying man.
While the other evangelists say that Jesus was
baptized in Jordan, Luke says it was as
he was praying he was baptized, whereas he
was baptized he was praying.
And the others say, of course, Jesus was
crucified, but Luke says it was, it was
while he was, while he was crucified even,
he was praying.
The evangelists say he was on the Mount
of Transfiguration.
Yes, but Luke says it was while he
was praying he was transfigured.
I guess there's not a preacher here that
doesn't get discouraged sometimes.
If not, you must be a very wonderful
guy.
You think, well, are they listening?
Do they hear?
Do you know, I'm convinced of this, that
95 percent at least of the people that
came to this sanctuary, or any other sanctuary
in yesterday, did not come here to meet
God.
They came to hear a sermon about him.
When did you last sit out of the
sanctuary and you dare not say a word?
I remember a series of meetings we had
in Wales in 1949, and after three days
a lady, Mrs. Lewis, said, Brother Ray, no,
this is the nearest thing to the Welsh
revival that we've had.
That was 40 years after the Welsh revival.
Mrs. Lewis, what's the point of identification?
Because they walk up the hill, which they
call a mountain.
And she said, last night, the night before,
the night before that, when we got to
the crossroads in Welsh, Gaelic, Welsh Gaelic, instead
of saying good night, they say nos dar.
And she said, it wasn't until we got
to the crossroads that we realized each night
that nobody had said a word.
We were so awed with the majesty and
the presence of God.
Our people don't get off the doorstep.
Hey, you think cowboys will win today?
Boy, I think they have a chance, don't
you?
Do you think you'll get in the playoff?
It's drivel, it's nonsense.
The church has to rediscover two things.
One, the majesty of God, and the holiness
of God, and the other, the sinfulness of
sin.
Prayer is not the easiest thing in the
world.
Prayer is the hardest thing in the world.
Prayer is the most demanding thing in the
world.
I had the pleasure of praying very often
with Duncan Campbell, the man God used in
the Welsh in the Hebrides revival, 1950 onward.
I asked him one day about a certain
event, and he said, yes, that's right.
We were in the sanctuary.
We'd been different places, and revival had moved
on, you know, revival that lasted all night.
People didn't go home.
But he said, when I was ministering, the
place was like iron.
It seemed as though God was a million
miles away, and my message, which usually went
over so well, no, no, it's like throwing
a rubber ball at a wall.
My words came back on me.
In front of him were all kinds of
ministers, and I don't think you'll find a
minister in Scotland that doesn't have a degree
or double degrees.
But he didn't say anything to the preachers
and the deacons and the elders.
He pointed to a boy sitting over here,
and he called him by name and said,
would you, laddie, laddie, will you pray?
A 16-year-old high school boy.
And he stood up, and you know sometimes
when somebody says something here about a thing,
you say, you know, in Scotland they say,
ah, here's a solemn assembly of people.
Here's a 16-year-old boy that walked
with God, and he stood up and he
said, ah, what's the good of praying if
we're not right with God?
And he began to quote Psalm 24, who
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?
He that hath clean hands and a pure
heart, and so forth and so on.
And when he finished, Duncan said, the stillness
of eternity was on the building.
And the boy prayed 10 minutes, 20 minutes,
30 minutes, 40 minutes, 45 minutes.
And then when he prayed, as though he
could see some of it there, he said,
Satan.
Oh, I've heard people say this almost facetiously
in a meeting, get the devil out of
this place.
He stood there and said, Satan, I rebuke
you, get out of this territory.
In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Ghost, I plead the
blood of Christ be gone.
And just as though God pulled a switch
in heaven, God came on the meeting, but
he came on a covenant at the end
of the world, and people left it.
And he came on a dance down the
road, and people left it.
We have to drag people to the altar.
There are no altars in the New Testament,
if you want to be really scriptural.
Altars are an invention when the Holy Ghost
doesn't mean new people.
I was talking to a lot of Baptists
the past week, and I like to tease
them, you know.
I like to tease a lot of people.
You know, when you finish the meeting, people
should go out sad or mad or glad.
Not many go out under the last bracket
when I preach, I'm afraid, but anyhow.
Some of these boys there, you know, all
they did was talk about their Baptist church.
They said, I know some of the greatest
Baptist guys in the world.
And then I said, you know, the first
person who ever preached on the issue of
Baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire was
a Baptist.
What?
Well, that's the first record.
John Baptist was the first one to preach
the issue of Baptism with the Holy Ghost
and fire.
And then when the Pentecostals think they have
a corner on it, I say, hey, you
are the first to preach it.
The Baptists are the first to preach it.
But my, that apostolic church must have been
something, wasn't it?
Okay, this boy prayed the Holy Ghost came,
that whole community vibrated with God.
You see, preacher, you've only two things to
do, not 22.
You're not supposed to be the janitor and
be running a business and finding about the
church's bank balance and all that junk.
If you're going to be a true biblical
preacher, you've got two things to do according
to Acts 6.4. Give yourself continually to
prayer and the Word of God.
That's all you have to do.
Who's going to bring it to stake?
The deacons.
Who's going to bury the dead?
The deacons.
The scripture clearly says, let the dead bury
the dead.
You see, we want the church to function
our way.
God bless our plans.
God bless what we do.
We despise the ritualism of the church.
The old state churches, they have so much
ritualism and we've changed it to ritualism.
When Alexander MacLaren went to that great big
church in Manchester, England, and ministered in that
church, the deacons, great bedded fellows they were
in those days, asked him a host of
questions which he answered, and finally they said,
we'll ask you to be the pastor of
this great church.
Each may be a couple of thousand folks.
We'll give you a new house.
We'll buy your carriage and pair, as we
say in England, or used to say, a
carriage and a team, and a new house,
and we'll furnish it, and we'll give you
a large salary, and they went on and
on and on, and will you accept this?
He said, all right, I'll accept it.
Now, that is if you accept my terms.
You have terms?
You know, most churches think when they get
a pastor, they're renting a Hertz car.
You'd better come in and fit in with
this plan if you don't, but I'll tell
you, we can soon get you out of
this book, don't you worry about that.
Some churches have an amazing record of kicking
preachers out, tragically enough.
Well, what are the conditions?
They laid some down, but this was one
vital thing he laid down.
I shall do no visiting.
Dr. Tolton and I loved that precious man
and talked with him often.
Just the two of us in his office
and prayed with him, and the way to
discover how near the man is to God
is not to hear him preach.
People say, we've had a new preacher this
Sunday.
Oh boy, he was great.
He was a lovely personality.
Well, if the guy doesn't have two super
messages in 10 years preaching, he ought to
be sweeping garbage anyhow.
And usually he comes up with two star
sermons.
I've got to impress this congregation.
Dr. Tolton never went to Bible school.
He never went to seminary.
He's one of the most learned men I
ever met.
He's read everything of the mystics, from John
of the cross to the cloud of unknowing,
and the ladder of sanctity, and the holy
marriage, and the long night of the soul.
You mentioned it, he knew it.
Taught himself some Greek, taught himself some Latin,
but you know what?
I stayed in a house, a member of
his church, and she said, I've gone to
his church 25 years, and he hasn't been
in my house five times.
But I'll tell you what, when he spread
the table, and that's all you have to
do.
You know brethren, you never have to advertise
a fire.
You never have to advertise a fire.
You don't have to advertise in the newspaper,
forget it.
You let the glory of the Lord fill
the temple, people come a hundred miles, because
it's starvation everywhere.
My phone rings constantly, I'm going to move
here, I'm going to move there.
Do you know a church that really is
on fire for God?
A church where they have all night prayer
meetings.
No church should function these days without a
whole night of prayer.
I don't care how rich you are.
What do you want?
Social standing?
You just want numbers of people?
You want to fill the pews?
I said last night, I think the greatest
honor that was ever given to a preacher
in history was not given by men, it
was given by demons.
When those demons said, you know, after they'd
had some trouble with some preacher fellows, and
the demons turned around and beat the men
up, and they said this amazing thing, Paul
I know and Jesus I know, or Jesus
I know and Paul I know.
Come on preacher, do you think if the
devil has a dangerous of the ten most
wanted men in America, are you one of
them?
I would rather be the last man on
the devil's dangerous than the first man on
any role of honor you could give us
about preaching.
I'll say it again, if it sounds facetious,
brother, if you're not known in hell, you're
not worth a hill of beans.
The sooner we realize we're not just fighting
a local situation, we're not fighting drug addiction,
we're not driving massive pornography, we're surrounded by
an arrogant, relentant paganism.
If you told your grandfather 40 years ago
that 40,000 homosexuals would march down the
main street of a city, at the same
time there were 50,000 marching in another
city, and in another city there were 40
,000 marching there.
He would have said, not in America.
Why, it used to be men used to
rush down to see strippers, the fancy women.
They don't go anymore now, they're fading out.
Homosexuals do the vile thing.
I think maybe we should change the language,
don't you?
And go back to some bible language.
Instead of saying that that Zed is born
out of wedlock, it would be rough if
you said he's a bastard.
Can you think anything more ridiculous than saying
to a man who's engaged in the filthiest
thing there is that he's a gay man?
What's gay about homosexuality?
It's got damnation on it.
We don't talk about this adultery anymore, they're
just having an affair.
Do you know why adultery is getting to
plague, divorce is getting to plague proportions even
in the church of God?
Do you know there's a new book on
divorce in the pulpits?
Why, man alive, we don't have decent morality
in some churches, never mind spirituality.
We don't elect deacons because we're full of
faith and of the Holy Ghost.
To speak the truth, we appoint them because
they own two Texas ghost stations in the
hot dog stand.
Another thing Jesus did, he prayed all night
before he chose the disciples.
If we prayed all night before we chose
our deacons, I guarantee half of them wouldn't
get in if they got the witness of
the spirit about it.
You see, I don't have people say, why
don't you write a book on some methods
of revival?
No, no, I can't do that.
We don't need to find the formula for
revival.
The formula for revival is in the word
of God, that's the reason why.
The formula for revival is preachers need to
hit the altar and weep because they have
no tears, groan because there's no moving of
the Spirit of God, apologize to God that
we've kind of manipulated the supernatural.
Now, I'm not just thinking of miracles of
twisted limbs and other things.
I believe the greatest miracle God can do
is to take an unholy man out of
an unholy world, and make that unholy man
holy, and put him back in an unholy
world, and keep him holy.
But we're more afraid of holiness today in
the church than we are of sinfulness.
I read that Saul, the king of Israel,
was an evil man, and therefore he did
evil things.
Jesus talks about people who are unclean, and
therefore they did unclean things.
Well then, if an unclean man with an
unclean spirit does unclean things, if a man
who's vile does vile things because there's a
vile spirit, surely the man who has the
Holy Spirit in him will live a holy
life.
I don't ask people if they're saved anymore.
Forget it.
Everybody's saved.
It doesn't mean a thing.
If you happen to turn the TV on,
there's a girl with a bosom almost exposed
with a cross, and she's telling you, yes,
I'm born again.
You go to politicians living corrupt, they're born
again.
Don't ask a man if he's born again.
Just look gently at him.
It doesn't matter who he is.
Pentecostals to Presbyterians, Methodists to Mennonites.
Just say, brother, does Christ live in you?
Well, isn't that the standard of the new
birth?
Isn't that what Paul says?
Christ in you, the hope of glory?
I hear an awful lot about gifts of
the Spirit.
That's all right.
I hear less about the fruit of the
Spirit.
I hear less still about having your fruit
unto holiness.
I hear less still about bringing forth fruit
meat for repentance.
Do you know why some people don't believe
in our converts?
Because they don't go back and clear up
the dirty mess that they made as far
as they can.
The money they stole, the girl they got
into trouble, maintain the baby, some other thing
that they should do.
Bring forth fruit.
A healthy tree doesn't bring forth fruit.
It's the tree that has overflowing life that
brings forth fruit.
The church of Jesus Christ, again, began with
a mighty, mighty endowment of power.
No financial backing.
Man alive.
I think sometimes of the way things could
have, God could have done things and he
didn't, you know, my poor little man.
I think about the greatest event in history.
After all, Sir Ambrose Fleming, he didn't, he
didn't discover penicillin.
He rediscovered it.
Pharaoh used penicillin 5,000 years ago.
But anyhow, this fella discovered that on your
old mushrooms and your bacon, you leave and
it grows fur that there's penicillin.
But he said an amazing thing.
He said that the resurrection of Jesus Christ
is the best-attested fact in history.
As I quoted the other night, when one
day Napoleon ran his index finger around the
great country, he was talking to his generals
and he said, there lies a sleeping country.
Let it sleep!
Because, he said, if that country ever wakes
up and harnesses its manpower to its mineral
power, it will shape the world.
He said that before his defeat at Waterloo
on the 18th of June in 1815.
There lies a great country, let it sleep.
A sleeping giant, let it sleep.
The country he outlined, in case you're interested,
was none other than China, our biggest headache.
Do you think China's planning our welfare?
She'll destroy us, just like the devilish communists
will in another country?
They may have yellow faces, but the same
devilish policy to destroy us.
And we're handing our lives away to them.
There lies a sleeping giant, let it sleep!
If it ever reads it, if it ever
discovers its power and begins to march, it
will shake the world, will change the characters.
And I say, see Jesus, see the devil
standing there, he's running his finger around the
mouth, he's running his finger around the church
of Jesus Christ, and he says, there is
the church of Jesus Christ asleep.
Let it sleep!
Because, if it ever rediscovers the power of
the Holy Ghost, if it ever rediscovers the
resurrection power of Jesus, it will shake the
world.
I sometimes wish that the morning Jesus rose
from the dead, he'd gone down the street,
into the bedroom of the high priest, and
pulled his beard.
And when he woke up, he'd said, well,
now what are you going to do?
I wish he'd gone down the road to
the Roman, or gone over to Rome.
It would be easy, he'd have no problems,
he could be there in a flash.
I wish he'd appeared to the Roman rulers,
and said, you crucified me, but here I
am, I'm back again.
He didn't do that.
So, we're very arrogant in our evangelism.
Holy things now, do you think people fall
down and weep at the presentation of the
gospel we put over most radio stations and
TV?
Do you think if Elijah preached one Sunday
on TV, he'd get back next Sunday?
We need to rediscover the power of the
Holy Ghost.
We ought to refuse, never mind deacons, never
mind a full congregation.
If you don't have the anointing, say, sing,
I don't have the anointing yet, and if
I don't get it, I won't preach.
Oh, we talk about John Loss, you know,
the man who said, give me Scotland or
I die.
But one day, when St. Giles Cathedral was
jammed with more than 2,000 people, and
he went through all the preliminaries, and they
said, would you kindly stand?
I bestow the benediction on you, I have
no word from God this morning.
Would you and I have the courage to
do that?
You'd have hashed up an old one, wouldn't
you?
You'd have warmed it up very quickly.
Oh, I always get away whenever I preach.
Everybody likes this sermon.
The congregation's heard it six times, but they
forget, and you go to town.
I wonder how much of our lives is
really dominated by the Spirit of God.
No, no, no, we can't go to the
congregations.
Let the priest weep between the altar and
the doorpost.
And as I said, I walked round the
front of that podium that day, and they
think it's wonderful college, 1,400 students listening.
I just walked round and said to the
professors, gentlemen, you're teaching young men to be
preachers.
They're going to guide the church, in one
sense, in the future days.
Tell me this, do you have a course
on weeping for them?
And if they graduate, do you have a
course on howling?
You hardly find any emphasis in Bible schools
or seminaries.
One of the students this past week said
to me, Mr. Rainer, we tried to get
you in the college chapel.
I said, well, I know what the answer
is.
They won't let me go in.
They'd rather have the devil in some of
them.
One of our old professors is coming to
hear you tomorrow night, and the old man
came and sat at the back.
And he believes in old blood and fire,
hell fire preaching and holy living, and a
church being something which God has deposited in
the world just to show people how he
can redeem us and get a bride for
himself.
And you know all the other professors in
that university say, the old man said, no.
I like an old statement that was made,
I think, by Montgomery.
All earthly things with earth will fade away,
but prayer grasps eternity.
And if we're going to see as God
sees, and just recently when I've been praying,
the Lord just seemed to say this to
me, if you claim to be filled with
the Holy Spirit, the things that grieve the
Spirit will grieve you.
Bring your burden to the Lord and leave
it there.
Who does the Lord cast his burdens on?
Does he roll them away into the oblivion?
No, no, no, no.
He says, my yoke is easy, my burden
is light.
We don't want people to think we're depressed.
I mean, everything's depressing outside.
Why cover it over?
We're heading for judgment faster than you could
ever think, unless there's a divine intervention.
And the key again is the priests weeping,
the priests howling, the ministers getting together.
Every city I was in in England, somehow
I managed to get the preachers together, not
a lot came.
And we would either meet one day in
the week, or we would meet one night
and we would pray, and we weren't concerned.
We weren't just praying, just bless the Methodist,
or bless the Baptist, or bless the Pentecostal.
We weren't, I wasn't concerned that I had
a revival in my church, I was concerned
that God would be glorified in that city.
We sure need a heaven-born, earth-shaking,
hell-terrifying revival.
And it only comes through brokenness.
It comes through honesty.
It comes when we admit, which is true
most around these days, we just have a
form of godliness.
Thank God we're not filthy, and we're not
dirty, and we're not drunkards, and we we
don't have a woman, you know, some spare
woman, a husband, or something.
We're pretty good, ah yes.
Just like Israel, they got out of Egypt,
and they got to Kadesh Barnea, and instead
of going to the Promised Land, they got
stuck.
Kadesh Barnea was supposed to be a gateway,
and it became a goal.
It was supposed to be a thoroughfare, it
became a terminus.
It was supposed to be a stepping stone
to something else, it became a stumbling block.
Let me wind this up.
I was reading, and I guess I read
it every week, or I recite it to
myself, that amazing chapter that we call the
faith chapter in Hebrews 11.
Faith is mentioned 24 times in that chapter.
I believe the key is not just the
word faith, I believe the key is the
sixth verse of the 11th chapter, when it
says, he that believeth, he that cometh to
God must believe that he is.
He is what?
He's everything he says in this word.
And then, you know, I read Hebrews 11,
they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped
the mouth of lions.
Women received their dead race to life again.
I read that, and then I went down
to pray in my office, and it's not
the Lord said, say that again.
So I said it, Lord, that these people,
far off, far off there, they subdued whole
kingdoms, they wrought righteousness, they stopped, they obtained
promises, they stopped the mouths of lions.
Women received their dead race to life, and
I don't know who it was, but somebody
said in this ear, and not one of
them ever had a Bible.
Did you ever consider that?
It's encouraging those people who are getting shaky,
strengthening weak hands, confirming feebly.
Let me take you back to a time
when God's chosen people wandered around in sheepskins
and goldskins.
Now we will find them flowing with milk
and honey, and churches full of mink and
money.
Again, people go to church so stylishly Sunday
morning as though it were a fashion parade,
as though God looks on the outside, forget
it, he looks on the inside.
Those people never had 66 books.
I don't know what if the world lasts
another hundred thousand years, which it won't, but
if it did, God hasn't anything to add
to that book.
He said all he's ever going to say
to man.
There's a hymn, how firm a foundation says,
what more can he say than to you
he has said?
What more?
What do you think?
I used to listen in my youth, I
used to go and listen in a Bible
class where Dr. G.
Campbell Morgan preached very often.
Fascinating Bible teacher.
I remember in my early teens, I thought
one day I'll stay behind and ask him
what kind of a Bible he has, because
all that stuff he has isn't in my
Bible.
I don't care whether you're thinking of Finney,
or Wesley, or Booth, or any great majestic
figure that that has ruled in the church
of God and seen revival.
Not one of them ever had a bigger
Bible than you and I have.
It's the same word.
Again, we'd better make our minds up whether
it's absolute or obsolete, but I'll tell you
what, if this, if this book doesn't have
the answer for a rotten, corrupt, stinking world,
there is no answer for it.
Move out since Sodom and Gomorrah.
Do you know there are 600 million Bibles
in America, and if you say there are
only 15 million people, that means that every
person in the nation has four Bibles.
Would you try to guess how many millions
or billions of cassettes, gospel cassettes, there are
in the nation?
Would you try to like to estimate how
many seminars there are, or seminars there are,
or Bible schools there are, or how many
gospel messages were preached throughout the nation, and
there were 5,000 radio stations that broadcast
something of the gospel?
Let me give you the other side, and
then pray.
We're the most broken nation we've ever been
in history.
We've more broken homes, we've more broken hearts
over those broken homes, we've more broken little
kids because of those broken homes, we've more
minds broken by drugs, we've more bodies broken
by VD.
Over a million girls last year got pregnant
under 17 years of age, and people were
marking a few years ago, we will stop
the war in Vietnam, stop the war.
It's no right to kill people, and yet
it's estimated in the last nine years we
have put more than 10 million babies to
death before they left their mother's womb in
a Christian country.
My Lord, what happens in a heathen country?
Do you think God Almighty is going to
wink at our sin much longer?
I don't, and the legislators can't help us,
and the banks can't help us, and the
government can't help us, and money can't help
us.
Our help cometh from the Lord, and the
only way is in submission and brokenness, that
we get and say, many of us say,
Lord I don't have the vision I used
to have, I don't have the passion I
used to have, I don't have the concern
I used to have, not for America, for
lost souls, lost souls first, America second.
I'm convinced the key is in the ministry.
Maybe the way to start revival in your
church is to stand up next Sunday morning
and say, look I want to tell you,
I have had no passion for the lost.
I shed no tears for lost mankind.
I had so many other things.
I believe the key to the apostle Paul's
life, amongst other things, one key was this,
this one thing I do.
He lived God, he thought God, he prayed
God, that's all.
You can lash him, you can't whip it
out of him.
He can float on a piece of wood
in the Mediterranean a night and a day,
36 hours, you can't wash it out of
him.
They try to starve him, you can't starve
it out of him.
He's had a vision of the cross.
He's had a vision of the resurrection power.
He realized the greatest thing this side of
eternity is to be a God-filled man,
and go out and proclaim that message.
Whether he goes to Jews, the barbarians, the
Greeks, the intellectuals, he's at home in the
religious capital of the world, Athens, as well
as he is in the intellectual capital of
the world, Jerusalem.
God never, never intended his church to backslide.
God never intended his church to function anything
less than apostolic Christianity in the acts of
the apostles.
And it's time to call the church to
prayer.
I believe if we were as spiritual as
we think we are, we'd have gone to
church yesterday in sackcloth, and a handful of
ashes to put on our heads, and mourn
that the glory has departed.
Man alive, we lock our churches up as
though they were banks.
We have to get through by promptly at
nine o'clock, and some of those same
folk will go to a disco till 11
or 12 or 2 or 3 in the
morning, and they'll go to an opera and
stay for three hours.
And the seats are uncomfortable, not in this
church, but in many there's still a lot
of old benches.
But they can go to a ball match
and sit and bake in the sun for
five or six hours, and that doesn't trouble
them.
Their church is in a mess.
And only the Holy Ghost can bring that
needed conviction, and bring us to the place
of brokenness, and bring us to the place
again where we cry, and I can almost
hear Duncan Campbell saying how they cried in
Scotland, oh that thou wouldst rend the heavens
and come down.
You see, we've never seen God move till
he stops the traffic, till people in the
shops are singing, till the lights don't go
out week after week, till the Holy Ghost
is moving in factories, and moving.
He's done that in the Shang Tung revival,
another revival is doing it in North India.
Isn't it amazing that with all our stately
churches, and our monopoly of TV, all the
other gadgets that we have, that the Holy
Ghost went right over us, and went to
a people that don't have any of those
preacher comforts, and they don't have an electronic
church.
And the New York Times said a while
ago, we have an electronic church today.
And immediately I thought, yeah, the church today
is electronic.
The church in the New Testament was electrifying.
There's a big difference.
Let me pray.
Lord, we recognize, or some of us recognize,
that you've called us to stand in the
gap, to be the repairers of the breach,
to bring the power to the world, to
come on this materialistic blind day in which
we live, on this sleepy Laodicean church.
When you're on earth, you cleanse the temple.
We feel it needs cleansing again.
Our willingness, our sports-mindedness, our materialism.
Lord, help us to search our hearts, as
well as search the scriptures.
Help us to be honest and admit where
we failed.
Seek the place of prayer, the place of
cleansing, and the place of anointing.
For your glory we pray.
Amen.