Why was Satan dethroned in heaven?
Did they find him stealing a slab of
gold off Main Street?
I don't think so.
You'll find some Christians up there doing it,
the way they go after gold down here,
there'll be gold diggers up there.
But, no, I don't know that Satan was
found stealing a slab of gold.
And he wasn't beating Michael up.
And he wasn't creating a disturbance.
He decided he was going to run his
life the way he wanted to run it
and not the way God wanted to run
it.
And therefore, because of that, he got pitched
out.
And by the same token, the boy, the
fellow, got thrown out of the Garden of
Eden because he wouldn't run his life God's
way.
And when the prodigal got to the end
of the journey, he came back and he
said, Father, I have sinned against heaven in
thy sight.
Make me as thy hired servant.
Why?
Why didn't he come swaggering in and say,
I'm a son and I'll always be a
son and I'm coming back and I'm going
to live here anyhow and I don't care
what you say.
In other words, he said this, Father, I've
tried living my life my own way.
It won't work.
Make me as a servant.
I want to be in bondage to the
will of my Father.
I want you to govern my life.
I can't manage my life.
That's why so many Christians have lives that
are so full of failure because they're trying
to run them.
And they haven't subjected themselves in complete sovereignty
to the sovereignty of the personality of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And listen, if Jesus isn't Lord of all,
he isn't Lord at all.
The Holy Ghost is the coronation gift of
Jesus.
He says, I can't send the Spirit.
I'm a satan.
And he must be enthroned.
And then when he ascends, then the Spirit
descends.
And you can speak with tears and you
can speak with grief and you can complain
about your spiritual bankruptcy and you have no
consistency in prayer and you have no power
to witness and you have no passion for
the Lord.
You can do that over and over again
in a few tears here, until you come
to the place of complete total subjection to
the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Lordship of
Christ, and then you're a candidate for the
fullness of the blessing in my judgment.
Again, I tried living my life my own
way.
It won't work.
Make me as a servant.
I want to be in bondage to the
will of my Father.
I want you to govern my life.
I can't manage my life.
That's why so many Christians have lives that
are so full of failure because they're trying
to run them.
And they haven't subjected themselves in complete sovereignty
to the sovereignty of the personality of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And listen, if Jesus isn't Lord of all,
he isn't Lord at all.
The Holy Ghost is the coronation gift of
Jesus.
He says, I can't send the Spirit.
I'm a satan.
And he must be enthroned.
And then when he ascends, then the Spirit
descends.
And you can speak with tears, and you
can speak with grief, and you can complain
about your spiritual bankruptcy, and you have no
consistency in prayer, and you have no power
to witness, and you have no passion for
the Lord.
You can do that over and over again
in a few tears here, until you come
to the place of complete total subjection to
the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Lordship of
Christ, and then you're a candidate for the
fullness of the blessing in my judgment.
Again, I say Christianity is not a sinning
religion.
It's a victorious religion.
What did Jesus say to the woman who
came in sin to him?
Go unsinless.
Right.
Oh now, now, you're preaching sinless to her.
I know nothing of the kind.
I'm not saying it's impossible for a man
to sin.
I'm saying it's possible for him not to
sin.
I crossed the Atlantic, I don't know, about
20 times by boat, as well as flying,
and had to go through the usual drill,
and put my life jacket on, and stand
on the deck, and you get loaded with
this immense thing, it can hardly see over,
and some little lady says, what's this for?
I've always thought if I were the officer,
I'd say, well, you're going to play tennis,
my dear, what do you think?
You've got a life jacket around your neck,
and they show you how to tie it,
and then he says, now, ladies and gentlemen,
this is for when the ship goes down.
For what?
Oh, this is for when the ship goes
down.
It's been tested, and that little thing there,
you just flick it like that, and it
will blink a light when you're in, you
know, two miles of water beneath you, two
thousand miles to England, a thousand miles back
to America, but take comfort, you've got a
little light there, about as big as a
cigarette, and somebody will be up in a
plane, and he couldn't see it if he
tried.
But there you are, you've got something that
will keep you buoyant, and instead of the
shark eating you all at once, they'll just
nibble you bit by bit, you see, because
the other end will be floating up.
You'll be all right, just take it comfortably.
Look, if he said to me, this is
for when the boat goes down, I'd say,
hold it a minute, do you mind backing
it up and let me get off?
I don't want to be on a luxury
liner when it goes down.
But he doesn't say that.
He doesn't say, this is for when the
ship goes down, he says, this is for
if the ship goes down.
But those ships crossed the Atlantic, one of
them crossed the Atlantic five hundred times, it
never sank.
I remember R.
R.
Brown telling me about the time two ladies
were arguing near his home, and one of
them said, well, what are they doing around
the corner?
They're going to put a new Baptist, we
don't want a new Baptist church.
We've just got a church to our lady
around the corner.
Oh, the lady said, now look, let's not
quarrel about religion.
The great enemy of America is communism, not
religion.
Now, now, now, the Baptists are very nice
people, and I don't want Baptists around here.
They'll have a daily vacation, Bible school, they'll
give my children facts, and the kids will
come in singing like they did in the
last town, we don't want a Baptist church
here.
So the lady persisted, she said, now look,
there's no difference between Baptists and Methodists and
Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Catholics, we're all the
same, just one God, one heaven, one hell,
one Bible, and there's no difference.
Well, the lady said, that's news, I always
thought there was a difference.
Not a bit of difference, she said.
Oh, that's interesting.
Now, how do you figure that out?
Well, as you said, now I'm a Catholic,
and every six days, I go to confession.
I kneel down in a little box, and
I tell the man all the bad things
I've done, and he says, all right.
And I go, and I go to communion.
The priest stands up, makes a sign of
the cross, says, absolvo deus, and I'm all
right.
It's a Monday morning, and I start all
over again, and then at the end of
the week, I take in the next lot
of sins.
Well, the Baptists don't do that, they don't
have a priest and an altar and a
mass, do they, and a Presbyterian.
No.
Not much difference.
A lot of difference.
No, no, no.
She said, you see my dear, what you
do, you go every six days to confession,
don't you?
Yeah.
Did you ever see a big sign outside
of a church that says R-E-V
-I-V-A-L-M-N?
Sure, they got one down the street right
now at the Methodist church, a revival.
Right.
She said, you see, the difference is this.
You Catholics go every six days in confession
sins, but Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists, they
save them all up for six months, and
then they have a revival in church, and
they get rid of the whole lot at
the end of six months, and then they
start again, and they save them up for
another six months.
It's only a case of whether you go
every six days or every six months.
Now, that's funny and yet serious.
It is not impossible for a believer to
commit sin.
No, it is not impossible, but it's possible
for him not to commit sin.
And it says not only that he that
is born of God doth not commit sin,
but it says that he that is born
of God loveth the brethren, and that's Harry.
He that is born of God loveth the
brethren.
Now, you can soon discover your spiritual health
because, you see, there are some things a
must do.
You can't carry the analogy out perfectly because
no analogies are perfect.
A babe has no choice in its own
birth, and you and I do have a
will.
And God won't smash your will.
He reasons, he argues, he presents truth.
But you see, that little baby has been
born of its parents, right?
Now, if it's going to stay alive, there
are some things it's got to do.
It's got to breathe, it's got to be
fed, it's got to have some kind of
utterance.
They say when a child is born, if
it doesn't make a noise, they hold it
up and spank the little thing till it
does yell, and then it fills its lungs
with air and it's going.
You know, if you're really born again of
the Spirit of God, we've got something to
talk about.
No, not just something, someone, the person of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And if you're going to live, you've got
to breathe, and prayer is the Christian's vital
breath and the Christian's native air.
English good or bad, prayer is something you
do or you don't.
It's something you feel conscripted to do or
under the hand you say, my, here it
is, the greatest minister I can have in
the world, a relationship with the living God.
And I can say to that God, not
only is he the God, the maker of
heaven and earth, but he's my Father.
I can breathe his name in prayer.
And then, of course, you've got to eat.
And if you're going to eat, you're going
to eat the Word of God.
Wasn't it Job who said, I esteem thy
word above my necessary food?
Oh, what a marvelous thing when the Word
of God becomes as juicy and as tasty
and as lovely as anything that could ever
pass your lips.
In fact, your spiritual palate becomes so sensitive
and God begins to give you, if you
like, the honey and the wine and the
sweet things of Canaanland, and you, you rejoice
in all the profound and wonderful things and
mysteries that God has for those that love
him.
We have, and I finished again with this
because I'm sure that lots of people don't
have this but should have this again, and
that is the spirit of adoption.
The spirit of assurance.
We know, we know, we know.
I say again, if you lost your burden,
you're going to know about it.
If you get out of a dark prison
into the sunshine, you're going to know about
it.
If there's been an error of death and
that has been cleansed and life has come
in, in the person of the Lord Jesus
Christ and he lives in me, I'm surely
going to know about it.
And then there's this delightful and wonderful thing.
With all its privileges, the fact that we
are children of God and we have come
into a living relationship with him, that we
have found the one and only answer to
the sin problem.
That we are the only ones who are
in drought, thou get this.
We have a solemn obligation to tell this
message to men and women.
I think of a little boy in England,
and we have some schools there that are
called public schools, but they're private.
You have to pay, send your children there.
And you pay a heavy fee, particularly if
you go to a school like Eton or
Harrow where Mr. Churchill went.
This little fellow was taken to school one
day, driven there in his daddy's Rolls Royce.
He had the inevitable tuck boxes, suits of
clothes.
His daddy was a millionaire.
And the little guy always had money and
he always had food and oranges and apples
and candy when nobody else had it.
And he was very generous.
He used to give it out lavishly.
There was another little guy that wished he
could do it and he couldn't and he
was very envious of this boy's popularity.
One day when the boy had been giving
out very generously his dimes or quarters or
we say shillings and sixpences and packing out
candy and giving out oranges and other things
from this supply that never ended because there
was always new stuff coming.
The other little guy confronted him and he
put his finger, he said, I want to
tell you something.
He said, what do you want to tell
me?
I want to tell you that that fellow
that you call your daddy, that millionaire guy
that lives in that big castle that has
that big yacht and Rolls Royces, he isn't
your daddy.
And the little fellow pulled his fist back
and his eyes filled with tears.
He said, you say that again, I'll give
you a, I'll burst your nose.
He said, burst my nose, it's still true.
You ask him when you go home.
When the little fellow went home, after some
weeks, because they only go home and have
a recess at Christmas and Easter.
When he got home, he ran through the
castle, knocked at the door of his daddy's
office and his daddy said, hi John, come
in.
The little fellow stiffened up, he said, I
want to ask you a question.
Are you my daddy?
I'm like, what?
Are you my daddy?
He said, John, you wanted a white pony
for Christmas and I didn't ask you about
a pony.
Are you my daddy?
He said, say tomorrow we're going to Switzerland,
we're going skiing.
I didn't ask you that, are you my
daddy?
He said, come here John.
He took John on his knee, sat by
the window, showed him a beautiful park in
which they lived and a distant town that
the man owned and the mills there and
the chimney stacks, smoke stacks and everything.
When the little boy got back to school
one day, he said, he was confronted by
this boy again, he says, did you ask
your daddy?
He said, yes I did.
Well, is he your daddy?
No.
No, he's not, he said, he's not my
daddy.
Oh, he said, you're, oh, I told you
that, you started crying, you're mad.
Well, what did you do?
Oh, he said, he's not my daddy, that's
all.
And you're quite happy about it?
Sure, I'm happy about it.
How come?
Well, he said, he took me on his
knee and he said, John, I want to
tell you something, we had a little boy
like you in this house and he took
sick and died and the doctor told us
we could never have any more little boys.
A lady's friend in a distant city and
if you take this note from me, she
is the matron of a large orphanage for
boys, they have 500.
And if you take this note, you can
go down there and select one of those
boys and we'll process this legally and you
can adopt a boy.
And he said they went down and they
selected 25 out of the 500 and then
they got from 25 to 5 and daddy
said, why don't we, suppose we start with
one?
And he said they started with 500, got
down to 25, got down to 5 and
finally after a lot of deliberation, they said,
we'll take him.
And he said, my daddy said, I have
to tell you this, that when they wanted
a little boy, they had 500 to choose
from, but when you came to your house,
they got to have you whether they wanted
you or not.
He said, you see, he selected me, he
adopted me and say, you know, I'm happy
because he showed me the town down there
and he said, son, your daddy and mommy
were killed in a fight in Liverpool in
one of the dirtiest quarters, they were drunk,
your father was a criminal, but we've forgotten
all about it.
I've not only adopted you, I've changed your
name, I've put it down in my will,
you're going to inherit all that property down
there, you inherit my yacht, you inherit the
other home, we have that as he said.
And you think the lousy world outside there
is going to bow, beat me when I
say that I was a child of the
devil, but God adopted me and he gave
me his name and he gave me his
name on my
forehead.
Well brother, you couldn't get more than that
as a child, could you?
There's one simple thing, after John Wesley was
born of the spirit, he went on and
he declares openly that there came a day
when he was consciously filled with the spirit.
He's had many biographies, I read one by
Villeneuve, a Belgian priest, and he said the
only thing that really happened to John Wesley
was in Aldersgate Street that night at a
quarter to nine he said he had a
fever.
Oh may the Lord send us a plague
of fever tonight.
I'd like you boys all to go out
spiritually.
I'd like you to realize that because you're
a child, when hours of God's joys they
don't enter the gifts of the spirit, they're
the gifts of Jesus, because he led captivity
captive and gave gifts sent to men and
we're living in this state of impoverishment because
we don't possess our possessions.
I pity our generation of kids, do you
know why?
Because they're very much like a boy I
taught to in Zemeck's village one day in
a coffee house and I got the coffee
and doughnuts and came along and sat down
and I kind of jotted a bit you
know or fenced a little to get to
him and then he said now you're going
to talk to me about the Lord, took
the wind out of my sails.
I suppose you're going to sit here and
say and he recited it right after, there
was a certain man named Nicodemus, the ruler
of the Jews, the same tempted Jesus by
night and Jesus said unto him, you must
be born again, he says brother I've heard
that priest said a different term for intended.
Oh when the preacher stands up Sunday night
he's going to come out with old Mick
again.
Dear old Nicodemus, he says, he gives me
the run over, he said I should tell
you more about Nicodemus later than you know
and you know one thing that used to
get to me and break my heart down
when I worked for two years with Dave
Wilkerson down there in Zemeck's village, you know
it used to get to me how many
of those kids that were prostituting those girls,
how many of those boys who were up
to their ears in crime and LSD and
prostitution and every unclean thing, stealing and everything
else, some of them have been dried out
at Lexington and come back to their drugs,
some of them have been in prison time
after time, some of them have been rejected
even by the courts in New York and
the thing that used to sting me to
the heart was this, that so many of
those kids were children of ministers and you
know not, I would say at least 25
or 30 percent of them were children of
Pentecostal ministers, you see our kids have never
seen revival, you've got to face it, all
our kids are in lectures about the risen
son of God or something else but a
manifest power of God all right along, along,
along with all my sisters, I've never said
anything, but God will answer that, you're going
to have to use you, but as I
see the church tonight, Jesus is coming here
reminded tonight, I must put it in the
bride's face, He's coming for a bride, but
the church is old and helpless, she's not
a bride, she's not vivacious, she's not full
of life and expectation, she has no sense
of resource.
Just this one thing, when you and I
get spiritually healthy, when preacher you're prepared to
burn some of your sermons or bury your
nose in the ground and say, God almighty
I don't have a broken heart over my
generation and the lostness of men.
You know there was a period, I think
it was the same time, the time 1837,
Mr. Spurgeon came to America, it was a
time of the Fulton Street prayer meetings and
Lancia was getting 2,000 men to eat
the lunch before 12 o'clock and come
and pray for the whole hour together and
2,000 men were praying in New York
and 3,000 men were praying in Philadelphia
and 2,000 other men were praying in
Cincinnati, that was some praying wasn't it, 7
,000 men a day on their faces.
You wonder there was an outbreak of revival,
Spurgeon headed back to England and he said,
get to praying, get to praying, the Americans
are.
That was in 1738, uh 58, 1800 rather
and 58.
In 1859 we had the great Irish revival,
we had the great revival in Scotland which
really was a result of the great outpouring
of the Spirit of God in America indirectly.
But you know they said that a hundred
miles out at sea, yes sir you can
say all you like about Mr. Finney and
I'm not going to downgrade his preaching, I
wish to God I could preach like him.
Finney could send a congregation, he could get
them so mad that while he was preaching
they'd stamp their feet and go out and
say, we'll never come and listen to you
again.
Well I can preach like that but he
could pray them back and I can't.
I can get them mad and they say
I never do a lot of great news
in town, that's all right I don't care
either in that sense.
But remember this will you that just as
Moses had Aram and Hur holding up his
arms, that Finney had old Father Terry on
one side and Father Nash on the other
side.
And when they came to the city where
of course 50 years before I was in
that city of Bolton in England I met
an old lady who remembered when they came
to town.
She said they came down a poor street
and they saw a little window below the
house window and they knocked and asked the
lady could they rent a room and she
said I don't have a room.
Do you have a basement?
I have a cellar.
They rented the cellar for 25 cents a
week and each of those men prayed 12
hours a day, 12 hours a day.
When one wasn't praying the other was.
They filled the 24 hours up with mighty
intercession.
Do you remember that when he was having
revival in Utica and Boston and other areas?
And listen don't let anybody tell you that
we're drawing the greatest crowds in history to
our evangelism, that's a lie.
Now dear friend before there were any blacktop
roads and cafes and motels and the like,
I have a record that 30 years before
John Wesley preached, no a number of years
before John Wesley preached there were two Frenchmen
drawing a crowd of 30,000 people a
night.
Do you know when George Whitfield came to
Boston the population of the city was only
12,000 and he drew 14,000 people
a night.
There were no blacktop roads and no automobiles
and no press announcements and no radio.
The Holy Ghost was there and people all
threw snow up to their knees.
The man said I robbed the old mayor
but she got too tired telling my wife
and I so he said I got down
and just let the wife ride and when
I got too wet and cold in my
legs I got on the old man and
George Whitfield was about 23 years of age
then.
And when he preached and he had no
financial back, no modern gimmicks, no advertising, you
don't need to advertise a fire.
When he descends everybody knows when God descends.
And they said when the Spirit of God
descended over Utica and a hundred miles out
at sea when boats got, it was just
as though they passed through a cloud or
a curtain and after that men didn't smoke
and nobody served liquor and people were afraid
to be perfect.
The influence of the Spirit of God was
reaching a hundred miles out into the Atlantic
and prevenient ways began to work in the
hearts of men and they were glad to
get to the place of safety and glad
to get converted by the time they got
back to this, into this coming place.
And God's just the same.
Oh brother, one great thing that I have
proved and everybody else has is God the
Holy Ghost has filled you.
There's one thing will be revolutionizing your life
amongst others and that surely is your prayer
life.
So there's only one way to pray and
that's there in the epistles of the uh
little epistle of Jude where it says praying
in the Holy Ghost.
And you know I'm afraid we don't tie
the devil up anymore.
We don't embarrass the devil, he embarrasses us.
We don't go along and say you're not
going to pass or we should do because
amongst the other things that God has done,
Jesus delegated his power.
We scream and we shout and say Lord
you're over a good far more exceeding abundance
of all that we can either ask or
think and then everybody says amen.
But that's not the the scripture says that
God is over a good far more exceeding
abundance of all that we can either ask
or think according to the power of the
earth within us.
And the hold up is not in God,
the hold up is in us.
We don't love enough and weep enough and
pray enough.
There isn't a living man, there isn't a
demon can make God alive.
When men meet meet conditions, God meets them.
But it all begins here because if you
don't get the foundation right, you can't get
anything else can you?
And if you don't have biblical regeneration, we
can have a lot of exciting gifts that
are not necessarily gifts of the spirit.
We can have a lot of supernatural evidence
and all supernatural evidence is not born of
the Holy Ghost.
I believe God is these days one reason
why I came here.
Amongst other things I believe that God is
doing what he said he would do.
He's setting the solitary in families.
He's bringing people of like faith and like
ideas maybe with aspects of theology, pre-trib
and post.
That doesn't make too much difference as far
as I'm concerned here.
What he is concerned is he's after people
who are pure in heart, who are passionate
in spirit, who long to spread great outpouring
of the spirit so we can present to
Jesus.
And to me it's still consistent with a
world at rest.
You may say, well I've got my defenses
up by the way here because I know
what the Bible says and I know where
you're going to come.
You're going to say at the end time
there's going to be a great falling away.
You can't fall out of a basket if
you're not in it, can you?
People can't fall away from truth in our
senses because most of them have never heard
it.
But I believe there's going to be a
great confrontation of holy truth.
There's going to be a great visitation of
God who's going to raise up prophets, who's
going to raise up these great and wonderful
men for this end time.
And if we have 500 million people converted
in the next three years and that will
be the greatest revival in history, do you
know Satan would still have three billion people
left in the earth?
500 million isn't many out of the world
population today.
I look for a harvest.
I look for the greatest visitation of God
in the history of mankind.
I believe God's going to topple our systems.
I believe he's going to bring us naked.
We won't come full.
We're too fat and flourishing.
We've had our seven years of plenty and
all we've done is give God as little
time, as little money as necessary.
You say we give more commissions than any
other country.
True enough, but we don't give as much
commissions as we spend on dog meat.
All right, come on, come on, come on.
Not only true of our nation, it's true
of the Gentiles, it's true of the British,
it's true of the Church of Jesus Christ
almost universally.
And while I spoil the prospect of Jesus
coming, I still say, Lord, I hope you
don't come just, please, just once more.
Before you cut the tree down, give us
a year to dig round it and fertilize
it and let's bring many sons to glory.
Let's see the greatest outpouring of the Spirit.
Let's see you blast a hole into communism.
Let's see you destroy part of Romanism, twin
eagles as far as I'm concerned.
Both don't understand Protestantism.
I believe God's going to do it.
He did it through Wesley.
He had set the balance of power in
Wesley's day.
And the things that started then, part of
it, of course, was the destruction of slavery
because it started there, at least in the
British Empire, and so many other reforms and
so many other miracles there were.
It started because God got a man who
not merely wanted his rotten sins forgiven because
Wesley didn't have too many.
He wanted his personality to be filled with
God.
He wanted a God-directed intellect.
He wanted God-directed emotions.
He wanted God-controlled spirit, passions.
He wanted everything in subjection to the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
And when God got that man, in total,
he wrote another page in history.
And I'm convinced of this, that when we
get to a place of owning our bankruptcy,
and seeing us preachers getting down in the
dust and acknowledging that we go through our
sermons and we go through our, and we
go through a performance Sunday by Sunday and
our bottom houses don't break our hearts anymore.
Well, we're not going to have heartbroken congregations
till we have heartbroken preachers.
But when we get them, God will pour
out his Spirit on all things.
We will see the greatest revival that this
world has ever known.