In line with a series of proofs which
I have been, proofs which I have been
bringing, I want today to speak on the
gifts of the Spirit.
And many of the things that I say
will be repetitions.
It is, I will have said them at
some time in my life, and maybe at
some time in your hearing, the hearing of
some of you.
But I will sum it up and bring
it all together in one place this morning.
In 1 Corinthians 12, once more let me
read.
There are diversities of gifts, but the same
Spirit.
There are differences of administration, but the same
Lord.
Diversities of operations, but the same God which
worketh all in all.
But the manifestation of the Spirit is given
to every man to profit withal.
For to one is given by the Spirit
the word of wisdom, to another the word
of knowledge by the same Spirit, to another
faith by the same Spirit, to another the
gifts of healing by the same Spirit, to
another the working of miracles, to another prophecy,
to another discerning of Spirit, to another diverse
kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of
tongues.
But all of these worketh that one and
the same Spirit is provided to every man,
severally as he will.
Further on in that chapter, verse 27, Now
ye are the body of Christ, and members
in particular.
And God hath set some in the church,
first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that
miracles, then gifts of healing, health, governments, diversities
of tongues.
Are all apostles?
Are all prophets?
Are all teachers?
Are all workers of miracles?
Have all the gifts of healing?
Do all speak with tongues?
Do all interpret?
Those questions are what's known as rhetorical questions.
The answer, of course, is no.
Now, in the book of Romans, the twelfth
chapter, we read this.
After that famous I beseech you therefore brethren
passage, which everybody quotes, then we come to
this passage which scarcely anybody quotes.
For I say, through the grace given unto
me, to every man that is among you,
not to think of himself more highly than
he ought to think, but to think soberly
according as God hath dealt to every man
the measure of faith.
For as we have many members in one
body, and all members have not the same
office, so we being many are one body
in Christ.
And every one member is one of another.
Having then gifts differing according to the grace
that is given to us, whether prophesied, see,
let us prophesy according to the proportion of
faith.
For ministry, let us wait on our ministry.
For he that teaches on teaching, for he
that exalteth on exhortation, he that giveth, let
him do it with simplicity.
He that ruleth with diligence, he that showeth
mercy with carefulness.
And in the book of Ephesians, the fourth
chapter, verse 8, wherefore he saith, when he
ascended up on high, he led captivity captive,
and gave gifts unto men.
Now, that he ascended, what is it but
that he also descended first into the lower
parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same that ascended,
that is Christ, far above all heavens, that
he might fill all things.
And he gave some apostles, and some prophets,
and some evangelists, and some pastors, and teachers,
for the perfecting of the saints, for the
work of the ministry, for the edifying of
the body of Christ, till we all come
to the unity of the faith, and of
the knowledge of the Son of God, and
to a perfect man, and to the measure
of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
Now, let's sketch something here that is known
to us all, but in order to arrive
at where we're going, when you're going into
a new area, you always have to drive
over familiar streets, the ones you know best
to get where you're going, if nothing else,
just to get away from your house.
So, the doctrine of the body of Christ
here, that the Church is the body of
Christ, with Christ ahead, and the true Christians
are parts of that body, and that the
Holy Spirit is to the body what our
soul is to our body, the life, the
union, that is what unites it, and the
consciousness.
That the soul is the body, and all
the parts of the body cease to function.
The spirit in the body gives to it
life, cohesion, and consciousness.
And each member recapitulates the local Church, that
is, every Christian, every human body, is an
illustration.
Paul uses it in three of his epistles,
and asserts it three different times in his
epistles, not simply as an illustration to pass
by, but something very carefully worked out and
at great length.
And each local Church recapitulates the entire Church.
Now, always illustrations break down, and parallel break
down, particularly when we come to the sacred
and infinite things of God.
For a man's body to function, it all
has to be in one place.
If you separate him and scatter him around,
he's dead.
But the body of Christ doesn't all have
to be in one place, because its unity
is the unity of the Spirit.
And therefore, the Church is never all in
one place.
Some are in heaven.
I was wondering this morning what proportion of
the members of the body of Christ are
in heaven.
I would suppose that 98% of them
might be in heaven, having two thousand years
gone to die and go to heaven.
But whatever the percentage, the largest number are
in heaven, and the remainder are on earth.
And not all are on earth at the
same time, nor in the same place.
And yet the body is not torn nor
divided, because it is held together by the
Holy Spirit, who is the life of the
body.
And each local group has all the functions
of the whole group, and recapitulates, that is,
gathers up in itself, and sums up all
of the offices and gifts and workings of
the entire Church of Christ.
Now the members, according to Paul, we're still
on our familiar streets.
The members, according to Paul, are designed for
a function.
He says the eye is designed to see,
and we all know that.
That's what it's there for.
And the ear is designed to hear, that's
its function.
The hand is designed for very, very many
purposes.
The foot for another purpose, the lungs for
another, the heart for another.
And so all the parts of the body
have their particular function.
And they're designed to cooperate and act in
concert with each other.
And in the body of Christ, the motto
might be a good boy scout motto.
I thought when I was thinking of it
here, that somebody might say, well this is
a pep talk, because actually it can be
summed up like this, all for each and
each for all, for that is what Paul
says.
He says that the whole body exists for
its members, and the members exist for the
whole body.
And that therefore God gives gifts that the
body might profit with all.
And remember one final thing, and it is
that all take direction from the head.
Cut the head off of a man's body
and there's no direction anymore.
We've all seen the familiar country scene of
the chicken having its head cut off and
still imagining that it was called upon to
fly away.
So it fluttered all over the barnyard.
But it wasn't going anyplace, it had no
direction.
Its direction was taken away from it and
it soon died.
So the body has its direction from the
head.
And the body of Christ, the church of
Christ, gets its direction from its head, which
is Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now I've talked about the functions that Paul
has, and what are these various functions?
Well, there are abilities which are called gifts
in the Bible.
Gifts according to the measure of faith, and
gifts according to grace.
There are gifts, there are graces, variously called.
And it says, having then gifts differing according
to the grace, that's in Romans 12.6.
Now concerning spiritual gifts, read in 12.1,
covered earnestly the best gifts, 12.31. And
when he ascended up on high, he gave
gifts unto men, 4, 8.
And then in Romans it says, let nobody
think of himself more highly, but everybody judge
himself according as God has given him gifts.
Now I find that there are more than
nine gifts in the scriptures.
I find that there are about 19.
And I've marked down 17 of them here,
but in reading Old Refuge, it comes to
two more, Evangelist and Pastor.
But because in this Corinthian passage, Paul develops
it by saying that there are diversities of
gifts, and then names nine of them, we
say those are the gifts.
But Devon, if you will read the rest
of the scriptures, and read what Paul says
in the passages I read today, and then
read what Peter says, you will find that
there are more gifts than nine.
And it could be that in saying there
are 19, that I haven't named too many,
because it's possible some of them are synonymous
with each other.
So that if that's the case, then of
course, if you were naming your family, and
you had one named Billy, and you also
called him Willie, and you were counting him,
and you said Willie and Billy, you'd get
one too many, because he's the same one.
You'd give him a synonymous name.
So that if we are counting the gifts
of the Spirit as revealed in the New
Testament, if we should by accident find, or
we should find that the Spirit had designated
one gift by two names, then we'd have
to cut it down that much, and say,
well, I'm sorry, that's just using a synonym
for the same thing.
But now here are the gifts as are
found in the passages I read.
The gift of an apostle, which means an
ambassador or a messenger or one commissioned to
go.
And it's generally believed, I think, by all
sound Christians everywhere, that the twelve apostles, as
we knew them, had a particular office which
had not been perpetuated.
Because it talks in Revelation of the twelve
apostles of the Lamb.
Judas by apostasy fell away, and Paul was
added to make up the number of the
twelve.
And yet the word apostle is only a
name.
It's a designation.
It means an ambassador.
And here sitting back in our congregation this
morning are two who have gone as ambassadors
for Christ, or maybe others.
Two missionaries who have gone as ambassadors for
Christ, and as messengers for Christ, as those
commissioned to go.
So that I am not at all sure
that while the twelve apostles certainly were a
group in themselves, and their offices have not
been perpetuated, still I am not sure that
it's not proper and permissible, if we know
how we mean it, to call a missionary
of an apostle.
Because we often hear people call the apostle
to the Jews, the apostle to this or
that.
Maybe we might call one of our missionaries
that went into the Bowling Valley the apostle
to the donning.
Meaning simply an ambassador, a messenger, as someone
commissioned to go.
The second is the gift of the prophet.
Now, the gift of the prophet in the
New Testament was only secondarily a gift of
foretelling events.
In the Old Testament the gift of the
prophet was to foretell events mainly, and to
warn, and to plead, and to call back
early men to God.
But in the New Testament the gift of
the prophet is not so much to foretell
events inasmuch as the Bible has been written,
and the prophecy stands, and all events have
been foretold that God wants to foretell.
But the gift of the prophet in the
New Testament is to tell forth, and to
see with an anointed eye, and to give
leave in due season, and not simply to
be a mimicker, but to tell out what
God has to say for a given time.
Then there is the gift of the teacher.
Not everybody can teach, we might just as
well admit it, and even of those that
teach, not many can teach.
There is a gift of the teacher.
It is both a natural gift, and it
is a gift of the Spirit.
And then there is the gift of the
exhorter.
Let him exhort, says the apostle.
Well, now an exhorter is not known in
our day.
But the old Methodists were wise enough that
they had an office of an exhorter.
They commissioned him, called him a lay preacher.
He had a license, he couldn't marry people,
and he couldn't give the Lord supper, but
he could get up and burn up sin,
and tell how wonderful God was, better than
most preachers can do.
And it might be interesting to remember that
it was a lay preacher, an exhorter, that
won Sir Spurgeon to the Lord.
Spurgeon came in out of a snowstorm into
a Methodist church, and got up in the
balcony, and sat and listened to young Spurgeon.
And an exhorter, who wasn't much of a
preacher at all, but he had the gift
of exhorting, and he was exhorting the people.
Spurgeon said, I believed in Jesus Christ right
there, and I could have stood up with
the best and the oldest saints, and sung,
There's a fountain filled with blood.
He was converted.
Then there is the ruler.
Now, a ruler is used in the same
sense as a ruler of the synagogue.
He's not a legal ruler, he's simply somebody
that takes some direction, and reads the scripture,
and teaches, and I don't know whether he
might be synonymous with a pastor or not.
Then there's the gift of wisdom also, and
the gift of knowledge, and the gift of
faith, and the gift of healing, which a
few people have had, and the gift of
miracles, and the gift of tongues, and the
gift of interpretation of tongues, the gift of
discernment, the gift of health, whatever that is,
I do not know, but I sometimes think
some people are gifted just to be helpers.
Then there is the mercy-shore, which I've
called for want of a better name, and
this mercy-shore appears to be someone who
is particularly gifted by the Holy Ghost to
go about helping people that are discouraged, and
helping the poor, and otherwise going about doing
good, as it was said of Jesus.
Then there's the gift of government, and that
might be the same as the gift of
ruling.
Then there's the gift of giving.
Somebody says, aren't we not all to give?
Yes, we're all to give, just as we
are all to have some wisdom, but there's
such a thing as the gift of wisdom.
We're all to have some discernment, but there's
such a thing as the gift of discernment.
We're all to show mercy and be helpful,
but there's such a thing as the gift
of helping and showing mercy.
And so, we're all to give, but there's
such a thing as the gift of giving.
And I believe that God enables some men,
if they will align by the Holy Spirit
to sow, control, and run business, that they'll
be able to support the Church, and the
cause of missions, and the cause of Christ
on earth, and to help the poor in
a way that we, the average people, can't
possibly do.
Then there's the gift, also, of the evangelist.
And everybody knows that there's the gift of
an evangelist.
We've met that today.
Then there's the gift of the pastor.
Now, I've named nineteen.
Now, my brethren, these are gifts given by
the Holy Spirit to individual persons, just as
the gift of sight is given to my
eye, the gift of hearing is given to
my ear, the gift of smelling is given
to my nose, the gift of taste is
given to my tongue, and the gift of
manipulation is given to my hand, and particular
gifts are given to every member of the
body, so God gives to his Church, of
which Christ is the head, these gifts.
Now, the work of the Church is to
be done by the Spirit working through these
gifted members.
Now, you'll hear me.
The work of the Church is to be
done by the Spirit working through these gifted
members.
Now, I'll go further than that.
I will say this.
That in the judgment, when we all receive
the gifts for the deeds we've done, the
rewards for the deeds we've done, and we
know as we're known, and that which is
chaff and wheat and straw and stubble is
separated from that which is gold and silver
and diamonds, and all that that is of
the flesh perishes and passes away, and that
which is of the Spirit alone stands, you
will find that not only does God design
to do all his work through gifted men,
but he does do all his work through
gifted men.
Now, he doesn't carry on all religious activity
through gifted men.
You don't have to have a gift of
the Holy Ghost to be a preacher.
You don't have to be a gift of
the Holy Ghost to be a Bible expositor.
We can be Bible expositors by reading commentaries
and going to Bible school and learning what
men say is true of the scriptures.
And a man can get up and preach.
A politician can get up and preach.
Turn from politics if he's talking to a
religious group and preach like a house on
fire.
You only have to be able to talk
and know how to use religious phrases to
be a preacher.
But if you're going to preach so that
it'll stand in the day of the fire,
then you're going to have to speak by
a gift of the Spirit.
And any preaching that is not done by
a gift of the Spirit is not the
true preaching of God, for it's written that
Jesus Christ was anointed by the Holy Ghost
and went about doing good.
And he said that the Holy Spirit is
upon me because he has anointed me to
preach the gospel to the poor and to
open the eyes of the blind and so
on.
Even our Lord Jesus Christ worked by a
gift of the Spirit on his human nature.
So if you're giving and serving and working
and it's not by a gift of the
Spirit, you may lose everything you've done, and
everything that you've put into it may go
down the drain in that day.
And if we don't have the gifts of
the Spirit, then where these gifts are not
present and the Church is thrown back upon
four or five things which I won't name,
all of them should be talked about at
length.
But of course I can't talk for two
hours here, you wouldn't stay, and I wouldn't
blame you.
But we will fall now upon talent.
We use the word talent, that is, some
fellow can whistle to his feet or somebody
else has a marvelous gift for impromptu composition
of poetry.
Somebody else is marvelously gifted in mathematics.
You can give him a whole handful of
numbers, talk them up, and by the time
they've been lit he'll tell you the sum
of them.
Now those are talents.
Some people are talented composers.
Some are talented musicians, and some are talented
singers, and some are talented talkers, we might
as well admit it.
Some of you dear, honest, good, godly people
haven't opened your mouths in public because you
just don't have any gift for it, and
it doesn't mean that you're dumb or ungifted,
it just means that isn't your gift.
But some of the hollowest, most hopeless people
in the world can run off at the
mouth and talk like everything.
So, talent, that's the next thing, talent.
And the talent runs the church.
Not the gifts of the Spirit, as God
intended, but talents run the church.
Just as you can keep a body alive
by a little while or keep it functioning
by, you know how Colonel Lindbergh and his
men did?
The man who wrote the great book about
man?
I've forgotten his name, it doesn't matter.
But they took a chicken's heart and kept
it alive for a month.
But it was being done by artificial stimulus
from the outside, so the church can be
run like that.
And then another method religion can carry on
with is psychology.
And a great many people are skilled master
psychologists.
They know how to handle people, really.
They're amazing how they know how to handle
people.
So, the church can be run, a new
man comes in, and the crowds come, and
first thing you know you have what looks
like an amazingly successful church.
But that man is simply a shrewd psychologist
who knows how to say Jesus in the
right place and say tender things.
Then other religious work can be done by
business methods.
And a lot of it is being done
by business methods today.
And then some use political techniques, and some
use plain sales methods.
And so with Christianity now, the church, this
church, any church, can be carried on by
the exercise of human talents without a touch
of the Holy Ghost, by sharp use of
psychology without a touch of the Holy Ghost,
by business methods, by political techniques, and by
sales techniques that have not one trace of
the Holy Ghost in it.
But I'm telling you and warning you, my
dear friend, that when this takes place, we
may not know it until the great and
terrible day when our deeds are burned with
fire, and only that which was rocked of
the Holy Ghost stands.
Jesus said, even now the axe lies at
the root of the tree, and whatever isn't
of God and wasn't planted by my Father
and doesn't bring forth fruit shall be cast
down.
And much of the religious activity during the
centuries has been an activity wrought by talent
and psychology and business methods, political techniques, and
sales methods.
All right, you say, now Mr. Pope, let's
be honest about this.
If you say that the gifts of the
Spirit ought to be in the church, and
I emphatically do, and that the people of
God could have these gifts of the church
and could labor in these gifts, then why
don't we simply throw in our lot with
the tongues people, the Pentecostal people, by various
names.
There are, I guess, 17 or 18 different
splits and divisions of them.
Why don't we throw our lot in with
them?
What I'm going to say now is going
to hurt some of my friends.
And God Almighty made me do it.
He made me do it.
And he makes me draw blood and hurt
my friends.
I don't want to do it.
I'd rather love them and have them love
me and go around telling what a nice
boy I am.
But I must tell the truth.
And so I have studied those who are
of what we call the tongues persuaded since
1918.
That's about 41 years, isn't it?
And in all love and charity, I tell
you my findings.
Not 41 years, no, but whatever it is,
my mathematics always loses me.
In all love and charity, and with complete
Christian kindness, I want to say this.
First, that there are some good, sweet Christians
among our tongues friends.
No question about that.
I've met some of them.
I've prayed with some of them.
And some pretty nice songs, and no great
songs, but say, Oh Sweet Wonder, for instance,
came out of the Pentecostalism.
And there have been a few lovely songs,
never any great songs, but a few good
little sweet songs have come out of it,
and some good people, and I have friends
among them.
And I'm not condemning, but I'm going to
tell you this.
That before I will become a part of
a movement, or a school of thought, or
a theological school of thought, or a church
group, or a denomination, I'm going to have
to test them and see what have been
the characteristics and the marks and earmarks of
that group down the years.
Now, with the full understanding that there are
many individual churches of which what I say
is not true, and with a full understanding
that there are individual Christians that are excellent,
wonderful, godly, sweet people, then I say this,
that the marks that have characterized the various
flips of divisions of Pentecostalism since the turn
of the century have been A.
A magnification of one single gift above all
others, and that, the one that Paul says,
was of least value.
B.
The unscriptural exhibition of that gift before the
people like a boy with a toy on
Christmas.
C.
A tendency to place personal feeling above the
scriptures, which is always an insult to God.
D.
An almost total lack of discernment, revealing itself
in a predominance of women in their leadership,
and sometimes women of questionable character.
A credulity beyond belief, allowing them to be
taught by little boy preachers, little girl preachers,
religious racketeers, people back from the dead, they
say, and allow them to adopt rock and
roll music long before Albert Pressley, and that
led them to splits and divisions.
E.
Free love, divorce and remarriage among their preachers
to a shameful degree.
E or E or whatever it is, unbecoming
public conduct not justified in the New Testament.
Now brethren, when a group of people say,
we have the gifts of the spirit, come
and join us, then I want to see
what cloud hovers over them.
Is it a cloud of purity?
Is it a cloud of sanity?
Is it a cloud of sharp discernment that
knows the flesh from the spirit?
Is it a cloud of moralism?
Is it a cloud of cohesion and unity?
Or is it a cloud of noisy flesh,
and sex extravagance, and careless moral living?
And if it is the latter, and it
is, then I want nothing to do with
it.
Realizing that there are among these brethren some
good people, and some sweet people, and if
they're mad at me, I'll grieve about it,
because I don't want them to be.
I'm only saying what can be proved and
would be agreed to by everybody that knows
the facts.
So therefore we cannot help ourselves by going
somewhere else.
Now I say we ought to have the
gifts of the spirit in the church.
Every church ought to have.
Well then somebody says, I believe what Tozer
says, I'm going to go somewhere else.
No brethren, I don't know of a group
or denomination, or fellowship, or communion anywhere in
the world that realizes the Pauline apostolic doctrine
of the body of Christ, with each member
recapitulating the local church, and the local church
recapitulating the entire church, and that work as
a team, and each one having a proper
gift, as God gave them to do, and
work thus in the Holy Ghost.
Now I know denominations and churches where there
are a few like that among them, but
I don't know denominations or groups of churches
where that is the regular and general and
common thing.
So I'll tell you this, you won't help
yourself by going somewhere else.
We here now, in this present moment, this
1956, 28th of October, I think it is,
we here and now can receive, this day
before the sun sets tonight, we can receive
an endowment of the Holy Ghost.
If we will pay the price, each one
of us, any one of us, all of
us, can receive a down-coming, an endowment
of the Holy Spirit.
And when he comes, he invariably brings these
functional graces, which will enable some to have
a sharp discernment.
Now you say, What gifts do you think
that we ought to expect?
And it says, Covered earnestly the best gifts,
and we have a right to pray for
these gifts and cover them before our God
that we might use them to bless his
church and glorify his name.
You say, Then what are the gifts that
you would say would be the most needed
in the church today?
I believe the gift of discernment is one
of them.
We have in fundamentalism ruled the Holy Ghost
out, and because we have ruled him out,
we have gone blindfolded down these decades.
With the result that the church has traveled
way over into entertainmentism, way over into rationalism,
way over into worldlinessism, and the true church
of Christ is scarcely to be found anywhere
on the face of the earth.
It's because, not because men were bad, but
because men had fearfully ruled out the Spirit,
and so the gift of discernment was not
there.
The mighty gift that can discern.
Let me, I don't think he's here now,
but let me point out a man that
I believe has the gift of discernment.
I don't think he knows he has, but
I think dear old praying brother Tom has
the gift of discernment.
It's amazing how he can look at you
and see through you and tell you all
about yourself, and yet he doesn't make anything
out of it at all except to pray
and help you a little.
And if this gift of discernment had been
in our leadership, we wouldn't be where we
are today.
We wouldn't be locked up behind dispensationalism over
here and entertainmentism over there and something else
over here.
But we'd be in the middle of the
way going along.
Pray that the leaders of the church might
be endued with a gift of discernment.
Second, I believe the gift of prophecy.
That is, the gift of the prophet that
can see his generation, know what's going on,
and tell it abroad and make folks listen
one way or another and find the church
in the middle of things and help the
church through.
I believe we need that gift.
I believe we need the gift of faith.
Everybody has to have some faith or he
wouldn't be saved.
But there are those who have a peculiar
gift of faith.
And they come around.
When this church was being built, we were
trying to pay off the old ones in
the middle of things.
Why, there were a few people, I don't
know who they were all, but there were
a few that had the gift of faith.
Twenty-eight years ago, when this church and
the old building, meeting the old building, called
me here as pastor.
I wrote them back and said, thank you
very much, thank you, thank you.
But I'm not coming.
And they reported it properly because the church
of the board did not come.
But there was a little woman in this
church, still little, very old now, and she
was a member of the prayer band.
And she got up and said in her
broken Dutch English, she said the Lord had
shown her and answered her prayer and I
was coming.
I said, don't worry about it.
I did.
She said, this is all settled.
I said, here's the letter saying thank you,
but I don't feel it's right.
I'm not the will of God.
She said, that's okay.
She said, the Lord showed me.
I hadn't heard it yet, but God had
shown her.
She did it right to me.
That would have been a mistake for her
to try to be a messenger boy to
me.
She kept still and talked to God.
And shortly after that, I began to feel
it and sense it.
And that's what I mean.
That gift of discernment and faith that can
get through to God when everybody else is
excited, where everybody else is jumping up making
speeches, let's do it this way, let's do
it this way.
When the Bible school gets into difficulty, then
the members of the board, and here's one
of them, not this one, he wouldn't do
it, he knows better.
But members of school board, we've got another
one back here, chairman of the school board
of Bible College.
And the members jump up and say, well,
let's call in a money-getting concern that
for 29% of the proceeds they'll raise
the money for us.
Or let's make a film of our church
work, supposedly do that.
Let's photograph Brother Ruben Ecclestone in action.
And let's photograph Brother Chase in action.
And wave your arms and hold your Bible
high, and we'll take that around among the
churches and show that.
And thus we'll get the money.
Oh, brethren, that isn't the way it's done.
Somebody sitting by will say, God has told
me he'll look at this and we don't
have to assume to that.
And usually he's voted down.
But if he isn't voted down, and can
have his way, God will honor that faith
and bless that school.
Somebody said recently that in all the Bible
colleges and Bible schools, a great number, maybe
not all in America, but vast numbers of
them were examined.
And there were only six of them that
were going anyplace and increasing in numbers and
making progress.
And they were the ones that don't use
any business methods to get their money.
They just pray.
They have men on their boards that say
to God, now hear, God, you either do
this, or else the whole thing will blow
up in our faces.
And God doesn't.
I think I mentioned this briefly, that over
in Highland Lake, last July, I spoke for
a week there, and incidentally, I don't know
that week, six young men, but anyway, this
young man, Merrill Fuller is his name, 40
years old, just when I got there at
his birthday, and they sang Happy Birthday in
the dining room.
Well, this Merrill Fuller owns, I don't know
how many hundred thousand dollars' worth of property
right around there.
And over across the Pennsylvania state line, he
owns another vast holding, which is going to
make a Christian high school.
He had no more idea how to run
a Christian high school than I know how
to run a B47.
But he said, Mr. Tozer, a whole faculty
came to me without my ever soliciting anybody.
He said, I want a job.
I want to teach.
A whole faculty, a Christian teacher, a whole
high school faculty came.
He said, we were just praying, that's all
they had me up at five o'clock
in the morning praying.
Five o'clock in the morning.
Boy, I never felt so old in my
life.
But I went up there and prayed, and
we had a great time.
Five o'clock in the morning, and then
he said this, every time he'd get up
he'd say, now friends, we have put this
whole business on the platform where it's either
God or total collapse.
If God doesn't hear our prayers and send
in the money, we'll all finish, and that's
the end of it, and we'll close this
place up and write Ichabod over it.
He said, I'm not going to pray and
then do something in such a carnal manner
that I won't know whether God answered or
whether my carnal methods worked.
So he said, we're going to walk out
and say, now God, here I go.
You either hold me up or I perish.
Now I ask him, do you think he's
going to fail?
Nah, he'll never fail.
The man who trusts on God will never
fail.
Well, the man of faith.
We need some faith.
And I think we could use some people
with the gift of showing mercy.
We're all so starry-eyed in the long
distance in our piety, and we tremble about
the Baleen Valley, but there are people within
the neighborhood that could use a little help.
You say, why don't you go do it?
Brother, I'm already staggered to bed at night
without what I have to do, and I'm
not gifted anyhow.
I'm not gifted to go to anybody and
help them much, but certainly some of you
could be, and maybe I could be, but
we all ought to be gifted.
I think a mercy shower would be a
great help around here.
And then I think that God should bless
some businessmen and give them a gift so
that honestly and without cheating or without praying
against a competitor, they could have money enough
that they could keep God's work humming along
like a diesel engine.
All right, brethren, we don't have to go
somewhere else.
God will not do anything for any church
that he won't do for this church.
And he won't do anything for any people
that he won't do for this people.
And he won't do anything for anybody that
he won't do for you.
We here now can receive.
Ye shall receive power, says the Holy Spirit.
He said Jesus about the Holy Spirit.
And when the Holy Spirit comes, remember this,
that he will bring not only the gifts,
but the graces and the fruits of the
Spirit.
So it is my earnest hope and my
earnest prayers that we God's children here, with
the dignity and self-control that belongs to
Christianity, with the calmness and sweetness that belong
to Jesus Christ, but with the abandonment that
belong to the apostles and the early Christian
church, might throw ourselves out on him with
an expectation that he should come and endue
us.
Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly dove, with all thy
quickening power, come shed abroad us, Savior's love
in these cold hearts of ours.
I believe he'll do it.
And he may easily come in great fullness
to some people that you and I are
kind of overlooking.
And he may pass over some that we
think are pretty big shots.
And some big shots may even look scant
and wonder if it's God.
But I believe that the Spirit of God
wants to do a new thing.
I believe he wants to do a new
thing.
Just about, I don't know, maybe about the
time I thought I was born, that would
be 17 years back.
No, it was more recently than that.
That's 1944.
How long was that ago?
Twelve years ago.
God and I had something out.
We had something out and settled.
And God began to fulfill in my poor,
ragged ministry what he'd promised me so long
that he would.
And I believe he's ready to do this
for us all.
It wasn't in 1944 that I was baptized
with the Holy Ghost.
That was when I was 19 years old.
I know that.
But twelve years ago, and I have lived
to see God do things he said he
would do.
I've lived to watch him work and do
the things he said he would do.
Until out of this poor, humble, uneducated, worthless
preacher, God has influenced, and influenced in the
right direction, men whose shoelaces I'm unworthy to
lose around this world.
Brethren, we don't have to go somewhere else.
We can now in here have all the
mighty outpourings of the Spirit.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if to
us in this church would come that which
came to the Moravians?
And they could only explain it by saying
it was a sense of the loving nearness
of the Savior instantaneously bestowed upon us.
A sense of the loving nearness of the
Savior instantaneously bestowed.
And then we'll come along with its scripturalness,
purity, cohesion, dignity, usefulness, high moral living, purity
of life, because that's the only kind of
nearness the Holy Ghost ever brings, and the
only kind of life He ever motivates.