This will be, tonight, the third and last
in a series of three talks which I
have been giving on the gifts of the
Spirit.
And I want to read some from the
Scriptures, and if you will be so kind
as to allow me to read the same
Scriptures again, because I want to keep refreshing
your minds with the Scriptures.
You can turn to chapter 12 of 1
Corinthians, where the man of God says, There
are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are differences of administration, but the
same Lord.
And there are diversities of operations, but the
same God which worketh all in all.
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, to the same Spirit, to another
faith, to the same Spirit, to another gifts
of healing, to the same Spirit, to another
the workings of miracles, to another prophecy, to
another discerning Spirit, to another diverse kinds of
tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
But all these worketh that one in this
selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man several as
he will.
For as the body is one and hath
many members, and all the members of that
one body being, many are one body, so
also is Christ.
Now, I think I'll read another passage, Ephesians
4.
There is one body and one Spirit, even
as you are called in one hope of
your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God, Father of all, who is above
all and through all in you all.
And unto every one of us is given
grace according to the measure of the gift
of Christ.
Therefore he saith, When he ascended up on
high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts
unto men.
And he shows that it's Jesus in verses
9 and 10.
And he says he gave some apostles and
some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors
and teachers for the perfecting of the saints
to the work of the ministry, for the
edifying of the body of Christ, till we
all come in 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, that we henceforth be no more
children tossed to and fro, carried about with
every wind of doctrine, but a slight of
man and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in
wait to deceive, but speak the truth in
love, and grow up into him in all
things, who is the head, even Christ, from
whom the whole body, fitly joined together and
compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according
to the effectual working in the measure of
every part, maketh increase of the body unto
the edifying of itself in love.
Then I want to read this also, just
two verses, 1 Corinthians 12, 31 and 14.
1 Corinthians 12, 31 and 14 says, But
covet earnestly the best gifts, and yet show
unto you a more excellent way.
I realize that verse 31 has been a
hiding place for a lot of current Christians.
They say, gifts, gifts, talk about gifts.
Love is better, but they don't have love
either.
And then 41.1, Follow after love and
desire spiritual gifts.
Now, my method of dealing with any subject
has been, tear right into it and say
what has to be said.
And so, I have been talking about the
great need of the gifts of the Spirit
back in the Church.
And what I have been saying is being
echoed, not my voice, but it's being echoed
and re-echoed all over the world.
I don't mean that they're hearing me, but
I mean that God is saying the same
thing to many thousands of people around the
world, every denomination, so that it
seems to be that when God wants to
do a thing, he doesn't start only in
one local place, but he says the same
thing to various people in various parts of
the world.
And they finally know each other and harmonize.
When I was in Canada with the EISES,
International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is part
of InterVarsity, I there met a man that
I had known of and corresponded with for
some time, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is
the pastor of the great cathedral, or chapel,
they call it, I think, Westminster Chapel.
It's a vast church right under the shadow
of Westminster Abbey.
They have there a very large church, and
I'd heard of this man.
And when I heard him preach, and he
heard me preach, it was an astonishing thing
how we harmonized.
He has been a great reader, has been
down the years, of the Puritan divine.
Now, of course, he's first of all a
great Bible student.
He couldn't be anything else and be in
the church that Campbell Morgan founded.
But he had been a great reader of
the Puritan divine, and he had arrived at
certain conclusions regarding the Holy Spirit as a
result of his reading the Puritan divine.
Well, he's in London, and I'm in Chicago,
and we had never met before.
And I had not read the Puritan divine.
I know who they are, Bunyan and Owen
and the rest.
But I had never taken to them very
much.
But I had taken very strongly to the
mystical divine, the mystical theologians, Augustine and Julian
and Eckhart and the great number that have
come from Spain, Scopoli and Molinas and Penelon
and Towler and many others, and the great
Scotch divine, who is the only mystical Calvinist
that I know about, Samuel Rutherford.
And I had read those books, and he
had read over on the other side.
But we had arrived from two different paths
at exactly the same conclusion, so that when
I heard him, I thought I was listening
to myself preach.
Only he did it better.
And when he heard me, he felt he
was listening to himself preach.
Now, this is unusual, but it is God
saying the same thing to men who have
their hearts open.
And so what I have said about the
gift of the Spirit, and which I'll say
tonight, is not a private view of a
little man who doesn't know his way home
after midnight.
But it is the conviction arrived at by
vast numbers of persons of the evangelical persuasion
in many parts of the world in many
denominations.
I had said also, and want to say
very carefully, that what I'm saying to you
is not a result of any contact that
I have had with those good people who
are called the tongue people.
I have told to you at great length
why I could not go in with that
group of people.
There are many, many of them, the Church
of God this, and the Church of God
that, and the Church of God this, all
over the country.
And they're losing their testimony.
The holiness people have long ago lost theirs,
and the tongues people have lost theirs because
they're keeping quiet on the one thing that
made them stand out.
And the fundamentalists are losing theirs and are
looking around for something better.
And God, I want you to say, is
not leading in any direction.
I have not changed my mind, and this
is not a fine way of saying it
was nice to know you.
I'm going among the tongues people.
I couldn't possibly do it for the five
reasons I gave you two weeks ago.
Or maybe it was only a week ago.
Two weeks ago, yes.
Now, having said that, I want to tell
you why the gifts of the Spirit in
the Church of Christ are not only desirable,
but they're absolutely imperative.
Let me, in my usual fashion, begin way
back and move up.
Now, let me show you why it is
absolutely necessary that we should have the gifts
of the Spirit in the Church, and in
this Church.
Because one of the results of the fall
is a two-fold blight, which we call
temporality and mortality.
Now, man, however brilliant he may be, and
however wise, all men everywhere has written across
their hearts these two sentences.
You must go, and you must die.
Now, those two sentences are written by the
great God Almighty.
Temporality and mortality.
Temporality says, You must go, you can't stay.
And mortality says, You must die, you can't
live.
Now, because this is true, then all the
works that man does partakes of what man
is.
And the same blight that rests upon sinful,
fallen man, namely temporality and mortality, rests upon
every work that he does.
All the work of a man's hand, however
noble it may be, however inspired by genius,
however beautiful, however wonderful, and however useful, and
however inspiring, all the work of fallen man
has these two sentences written across it.
You can't stay, and you can't live.
You came to go, and you came to
die.
So that everything from a sonnet, to an
oratorio, to a great bridge, to a great
canal, to a great painting, to a great
poem, to a great novel, everything has on
it this.
Temporality and mortality.
It's got to die, and it's got to
go.
Perpetuity and eternity are not in men.
And they cannot impart it to what they
do.
But God is bringing into being a new
order.
God is bringing into being a new order,
and a new order which shall have exactly
the opposite of temporality and mortality.
That new order is to be of eternal
duration and to be infused with eternal life.
And this new order, it'll finally show itself
in the new heaven and the new earth.
It shall show itself in the city that
comes down from heaven as a bride adorned
for her husband.
And all this has in it eternal duration.
It does not come to go, it comes
to stay.
It does not come to die, it comes
to live.
Now, my brethren, of this new creation Christ,
Jesus is the head and the church is
the body.
And individual believers are the body members.
Now, there's a simple picture, anybody can see
it.
But there it is.
The old Adam fell down, and all of
which he was the head fell down with
him, and God wrote across it, mortality and
temporality, you must die and you must go.
But the new man came and died and
went and rose and lives in order that
he might be the head of the new
creation which has not upon it temporality but
perpetuity, which has not upon it the mark
of death but the mark of life forevermore.
Now, these believers are yet in their unredeemed
body.
I want you to hear me.
Every believer, I don't care whether it be
the sweetest saint that kneels in prayer tonight,
redolent of sweet perfume and incense, or whether
it be the newest convert that blundered into
some mission somewhere tonight and was saved, every
believer has an unredeemed body.
Now, it's potentially redeemed, but it's not actually
redeemed.
And in case any of you might worry
about my orthodoxy, let me read it to
you.
It says, For the creature was made subject
to vanity, not willingly, but because the creature
itself also shall be delivered from the bondage
of corruption into the glorious liberty of the
children of God.
For we know that the whole creation, growneth
and travelleth in pain together until now.
Not only they, but ourselves also, which have
the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves
grown within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to
await.
What?
The redemption of our body, so that the
saints of God live in an unredeemed temple.
They live in an old body, and upon
their brain is written two words, It came
to die and it came to go.
And upon their mind, the mind of the
saints, is written, It came to die and
it came to go.
And upon their nerves and faculties and powers,
even redeemed men and women, they have within
them the seed of God and eternal life,
but they dwell and express themselves through this
unredeemed fallen body, and the result is that
upon their brain and mind and nerves and
faculties and powers and talents and gifts, there
God is saying, It's got to die and
it's got to go.
Therefore God can't use them to do a
permanent and eternal work.
God can't use a man who is impermanent
to do a permanent work, and he can't
use a man who's got to die to
do a deathless work.
The eternal spirit alone can do an eternal
work.
I wish you could write this across your
heart.
The eternal spirit alone can do an eternal
work.
Now let's look at the illustration for just
a little bit.
You know, we think our eyes do a
work.
The artist thinks his hand and his eyes
do the work.
And the musician thinks his fingers do the
work.
And the singer thinks his throat does the
work.
And the gifted people everywhere think that their
feet do the work, or their hands or
their ears or their tongue or their nose.
They think that the members do the work.
Well, there never could be a greater mistake
made anywhere than to think that your hands
ever did any work, my brother.
Your brain does the work through your hands.
And if the brain should suddenly be cut
off or die, your hands would lie helpless.
It is the brain of a man that
does the work.
It is the brain of a man that
plays that piano, and the brain of a
man that paints a picture.
It's the brain of a man that smells
a rose.
It's the brain of a man that hears
musical sounds.
It's the brain of a man or woman.
It's the brain that does the work, not
the hands.
They are simply the instruments through which the
brain works.
Now that's common physiology.
You'll learn that in high school.
Any doctor knows it.
Any common person knows it.
You and I know that it is not
the man's members that do the work.
Nothing originates with your hand.
You crochet or you paint or you cut
or trim or glue up or fasten your
work.
Nothing originates with your hand.
It originates with your brain.
And your hand is the organ through which
it works.
Nothing that the eye doesn't see anything.
The brain sees through the eye.
You might as well say when you put
the pair of binoculars to your eyes and
look across on the other side of the
hill, you might as well say the binoculars
are seeing.
No, they're not seeing.
You're seeing through the binoculars.
Your intelligence is using the binoculars as an
organ through which you can see.
And so your eyes never originate anything.
It originates in your brain.
Your ears never originate anything.
It originates in your brain.
And your ears bring the sound in mechanically
and your brain says, that's flat, that's sharp,
that's beautiful, that's rockless, that's sweet.
Your ears, your brain tells you that.
Now that's the illustration Paul gave.
I didn't give it.
I'm only expatiating a little, as the brother
would say, on what Paul said.
That the brain works through the organs and
that if the brain is not there or
if it stops functioning, then all the organs
stop functioning too.
And the eternal spirit alone can do an
eternal work because the Holy Spirit must do
the work through the members.
He must himself do it.
There is a sense in which you and
I can't do work at all.
There is a sense in which we are
unable to do any spiritual work of any
kind.
The Bible says, it is God that worketh
in you to will and to do.
So that instead of my doing it, God
is doing it and using me as the
organ.
Instead of my eye doing the seeing, my
brain is doing the seeing through two binoculars
called eyes.
And so the Holy Spirit takes men and
uses them as organs through which he can
express himself in the body of Christ.
It is Jesus that does it through the
Holy Ghost operating through the members.
Now, my brother, we can't operate through ungifted
members.
For instance, here I have a pair of
hands.
They're about average and a little large for
my size.
I figure I got that working on a
farm when I was a kid.
But there is something about these hands that
I must tell you.
I can't play a violin.
They're ungifted hands.
I can't paint a picture.
They're ungifted hands.
I can't play that organ.
They're ungifted hands.
I can barely hold a screwdriver, and I'm
getting worse as I get older, if I
have to screw a screw in somewhere at
home to keep the place from falling apart.
So I have not any gifted hands.
And no matter how much genius might lie
in that brain, there are a dozen, but
supposing just a wild shot in the dark
that there did, these two ungifted hands lie
helpless.
They can't do anything.
The brain can't call them up, can't call
them up.
The brain says, told her to go down
and play something on the organ.
I say, brain, I'd love to do it,
but I have ungifted hands.
I can't do it.
The brain says, told her to go paint
a picture.
And I say, I'd love to do it,
but I haven't a gift.
There's nothing in me that responds.
Color, I don't quite get it.
Form and outline and perspective and all the
artist's stuff, I can't do it.
I have a pair of ungifted hands.
All right, my brethren.
Now, if we allow that in the body
of Christ there is such a thing as
living members who are yet ungifted members, then
you can see how we slow God down
in his working for to bring into being
this everlasting new thing that must stay and
that must live.
There must be the gifts of the Spirit
present.
They are the organ through which the Holy
Ghost works to do his work.
Now, religious work can be done by ungifted
man.
Religious work, I repeat, can be done by
ungifted man.
But it is only the human mind doing
a human work.
It is only a mortal mind doing a
mortal work.
And every work that a man does, whether
he builds a church or writes a hymn
or a book or promotes a movement or
plays or sings or prays or organizes, no
matter what he does, how early in the
morning he may be or how late he
may be up at night working on religious
subjects, doing religious things, it is only a
mortal brain doing a mortal job.
And across all of it, God will write,
it came to die and it came to
go.
Mortality and temporality are written all over the
Church of Christ today because men are trying
to do in the power of the flesh,
that is, the power of their own genius,
what only the Holy Ghost can do.
Genius cannot do an immortal work.
Genius can only do a mortal work.
And don't be fooled by the loose use
of the word immortal.
We say Michelangelo painted his immortal paintings.
That's only a careless use of the word.
There are no immortal paintings.
There are no immortal sonnets.
There are no immortal musical compositions.
There is nothing immortal but what is in
God and what God is in.
So we can do work.
And I would guess, if you were to
ask me, this would be maybe a rash
guess, but since I'm in the mood, I'll
tell you that I think about 90%
of the religious work in evangelical circles is
done by ungifted men, that is, men who
know how to do things but have not
the gift of the Spirit.
And they're operating through the gifts of nature.
And it is not grace operating but nature
operating.
It is not the eternal workings of the
eternal Spirit, but the mortal workings of man's
mortal mind.
Now, we are thrown back upon psychology and
aesthetics, and that's what we have.
And this makes the gifts absolutely indispensable in
order that God might do his mighty and
mysterious work with permanence and eternity in his
heart.
I would rather, I would rather do one
little work and have it live forever than
to be the Pope and have what I'm
doing done.
The Bible says, in a rather cynical smile,
better a living dog than a dead lion.
And I'd rather work the littlest poodle that
ever waddled along the sidewalk and have it
alive than to have the biggest stuffed lion
there is in the zoo.
And I would rather do a tiny little
bit of religious work and be unknown and
live and die unheralded and unsung and yet
have God Almighty right across my little bit
of work this thing to live and laugh
than to have some great big work going
on and have God right across it, this
too shall pass.
And brother, when the Holy Spirit, working through
a man, does a work, as the brain,
working through an eye or a hand, does
a work, when the Holy Spirit, working through
a gifted member, does a work, then God
will say of that work what the psalmist
said of God, Thou remainest.
Thou remainest.
The heavens shall be folded up like a
garment and as a mantle Thou shalt change
them.
Thou remainest and thy years fail not.
Now that man can't do anything is a
great shock, comes a great shock to a
lot of carnal Christians, to a lot of
saintless.
The saintlings, you know, the gobbling of the
young goose, I suppose the saintlings, the young
saint, and a very young saint.
And so these saintlings that believe in Jesus
Christ and have their New Testament with them,
but have never discovered that you can't do
God's work in man's sense, that have never
found out that an eternal work can't be
done by a mortal man, and that a
lasting thing cannot be done by a man
who can't last, that somebody else has to
do it.
And that somebody else is the Holy Ghost.
And when we get to this, it glorifies
God and humbles man.
We like to think we can do something.
And there's many a mother-in-law who's
praying that her handsome son-in-law might
be called a priest because he has such
a marvelous pulpit presence.
This brother, the fact that the Holy Ghost
has to do a work or it can't
last, rules out all men's boasted gifts.
For instance, charm.
This is the day of charm, and there's
a lot of charm in religion.
But I've been tough enough and cynical enough
to see it and recognize it and had
enough of the gift of the Holy Ghost
to know this charm stuff.
This Liberace business with its candelabras and its
beautiful stained presents.
Dear friends, I love you all.
And rather this charm stuff and then this
pulpit presence.
They say, oh, he has such a charming
pulpit presence.
The greatest man that ever lived, the man
that God Almighty worked through.
And I say he worked through it.
Had this said about him.
His letters are weighty and powerful, but his
bodily presence is weak and his speech consensual.
The learned Corinthians said, that man Paul, they
said, well, you don't want to listen to
him.
He writes tremendous letters, all right.
They'd been reading 1 Corinthians and they'd say
that got stuck.
They said that he writes tremendous letters, but
they said he's disappointment.
They said when the people come in back
to place to see the man that wrote
that letter, here's a man whose bodily presence
is weak and whose speech is compensable.
And here was the Holy Ghost doing an
everlasting work through a man that had no
pulpit presence at all and had no golden
qualities in his voice.
He would have flunked out if he'd have
tested out for a radio announcer.
Nobody would have had him because he didn't
have the golden, seductive, and delectable qualities that
should be in a voice to get the
ladies to buy what he wants them to
buy.
Now, a personality is another quality.
They say, well, the man, the man's personality
simply sparkles.
Down the years, I have watched those sparkle.
Do you ever notice what a sparkler does?
How it excites every kid for four blocks
around for one minute, and then you hold
a hot stick in your hand that soon
cools off and that's your sparkler.
And these fellows were the sparkling personalities that
have come up and gone.
Here I am, an old cub jerk, and
I had lived to see a positive, gorgeous
George Parade of lover boyniks who have come
up and sparkled and gone down and sparkled
and gone down.
Well, the Holy Ghost, my friend, is going
to rule out all this sparkle and charm
and pulpit presence and magnetism.
That's another word.
Magnetism and dynamism.
Those are lovely words.
And talent, but they don't mean anything because
the man that God works through was the
man who had a contemptible look and a
weak, a contemptible speech and a weak look.
Now, I don't say that God couldn't take
a handsome man and work through him, but
he would not work through his handsomeness.
I do not say God could not take
a man with a dynamic personality and work
through him, but he'd never use his dynamic
personality.
He would work through that, beneath that, and
beyond that, but he'd never use that.
The Holy Ghost doesn't need it.
What does the mighty Holy Ghost, whose breath
brought the world into being, what does he
need of your vibrant voice or mind?
He doesn't need it.
This is awful humbling, and we'd like to
be able, we'd like, when we retire, to
have people come around and say, look at
all this that this man did.
If he did it, it'll die.
If he did it, it'll pass.
But if he was a humble organ, through
which the Holy Ghost did it, it'll live,
and it'll last, and hell can't burn it
up, nor time can wear it out, because
it'll have the qualities of deity in it.
Thou remainest so, God.
Thou remainest.
You get a lot of religious people well
fed and coffeed up, and get them in
a warm room with a lot of good
-looking women and bald-headed men and a
good musical instrument, and you get them to
going, and brother, they can move into the
flesh fast.
You think to hear and look and see
and behold, and let as a mouse eats
his way into a cheese and thinks it's
heaven, so a lot of us Christians are
eating our way into the kingdom of God.
Come and believe on Christ and let's go
eat.
And so we're busy eating ourselves, eating ourselves,
into the work of God.
My brother, we all have to eat.
Some of us ought to eat more than
we do, I suppose, and get a little
flesh on, but the work of God is
something else altogether.
The work of God doesn't depend on good
social spirits.
It's another thing.
It is the eternal spirit working through gifts
which he has imparted, which are also eternal,
to do an eternal work.
And anything that falls short of it is
simply religion.
So God gets all the honor in man,
stands reverently with his head bowed, and says,
Thine be the glory forever and ever.
Now I repeat the critical need in the
church is the church should have these gifts,
these organs, through which the spirit can do
his work.
And because the gifts are so rare, now
don't think the gifts are not present in
the church.
They are.
There has never been a time when there
weren't a few of the gifts present somewhere
in the church, or the church could not
have clung together.
The fact that there is a consecutive link
upon link and link upon link and a
chain of spiritual Christianity down the years shows
that the spirit's gifts have always been present
in the church, even sometimes among those who
didn't understand or didn't believe.
Now, what does the Scripture say?
The Scripture says, Ye shall receive power when
the Holy Ghost is come upon you.
And it says, Be filled with the Spirit.
And it says, Covet earnestly the best gifts.
And it says, Seek after love, but desire
spiritual gifts.
Paul never meant to say to the Corinthians
what a lot of fundamentalists have made him
say.
He never meant to say to the Corinthians
that they were to choose between love and
the gifts of the Spirit.
He said, Follow after love, but desire spiritual
gifts.
And then he said, In case you want
to know what gift I think is the
most important, why rather that you might prophesy.
And by prophesy he did not mean foretell
events.
He meant that God would put in the
heart and the body and mind and throat
and nerves of a man a strange, beautiful
ability that would enable that man or perhaps
that woman to speak with a strange quality
of conviction and everlastingness.
Maybe it's a housewife.
Maybe it's a man who sweeps the street.
Maybe it's a bishop.
Maybe it's an evangelist.
Maybe it's a humble pastor in a country
parish unknown.
Whoever it may be, he has a strange
quality to speak with conviction and inspiration and
lip that is not human but divine.
And the results, while they may not be
vast, for grace and size have a lot
to do with it, they'll be eternal and
permanent.
So what is not an either-or, either
take thirteen, which is love, or twelve, which
is gifts.
But the man of God said, both, both,
covet earnestly the best gifts.
And yet I show you a more excellent
way, not another way to take in contradistinction
to the way of gifts.
But the way to make your gifts matter
and mean something.
That is love.
Now, somebody says, but what about it?
Isn't everybody that...
And every Christian has.
And in 1 Corinthians 12, we are told
that.
We're all baptized into one body by one
spirit.
And Paul says in Romans 8, that if
any man have not the spirit of Christ,
he is none of his.
And Christ dwells in you except he be
reprobate, so that every Christian does have a
measure of the spirit.
But the same chapter in which Paul explained
this, he said, I don't want you to
be ignorant about spiritual gifts and covet earnestly
the best gifts.
So if the fact that we have a
measure of the spirit when we're converted was
all Paul wanted to know, he'd have said
that and quit.
But he went on to explain at great
length.
And all this is the Christian's birthright.
It's not alone for the great.
It's the birthright of the humblest saint.
1 Corinthians 1, 18-29 tells us that
the people that were Christians in those early
days were simple people.
He said, where is the wise, where is
the wise, where
is the wise, where is the wise, where
is the wise, where is the where is
the wise,
where is the wise, where is the wise,
where
is
the wise, where is the where is the
wise, where is the wise, where is the
where is the wise, where
is the wise, where is the where
is the wise, where is the wise, where
is the where is the wise, where
is the wise, where is the where is
the than a good voice.
God took the despised and weak things of
the world to confound the mighty.
Now, what shall we do about all this?
Shall we freeze up and hide and say,
I'm not going to go fanatical?
Let me say to you, as far as
I know you, brethren, you could move in
the direction of fanaticism at sixty miles an
hour for twenty-four hours and still be
a hundred miles short of it.
You hear me?
There's not much chance of anybody being fanatical
around here.
We're stone cold.
That's our problem.
We're stone cold.
If it isn't fanaticism we need to be
afraid of, it's frost.
What shall we do then?
Now, if you were in danger, I'd warn
you.
If there was anybody around here that would
start back there and do handsprings down the
aisle, I'd warn you, and I'd say, watch
that, that's not God.
Danger of fanaticism.
But there is no danger of fanaticism here.
I get a grunt now and then from
McAfee and nothing from the rest of you.
So there's no danger of fanaticism around here.
What shall we do?
We sang it, bring your empty earthen vessels.
Now remember, you can't all rush up here
and stand around and look embarrassed and sing,
bring your empty earthen vessels and go out
and say it wasn't that wonderful.
You might just as well have stayed home.
To be filled with the Spirit is a
most solemn and most searching and most sometimes
at first painful experience to go through.
The actual Holy Ghost is not painful.
He's the gentle love of God.
But getting ourselves ready, getting cleaned up, getting
poured out, getting confessed out, getting forgiven out,
getting straightened out with people, getting restitution made,
that can be pretty painful.
So I'm going to give you three D's.
I'm not a literature preacher, but I'm going
to give you three D's.
And I'm going to tell you, the first
two D's won't do you any good, except
as the first two steps will take you
to the third, so these two first steps
will take you to the third.
They are desire, determination, and desperation.
Now you put those down back in your
mind.
Now you slick, well-ordered, well-taught toters
of Big Bible, you will never be filled
with the Holy Ghost until you desire to
be.
Second, you will never be filled with the
Holy Ghost even if you do desire to
be, until you become determined to be.
And though you should be determined that you
are going to go through, you will not
be filled until in desperation you throw yourself
into the arms of the devil.
I wrote something and I preached something here
a few weeks ago, in which I said,
around the shining light which is God, there's
a zone of obscurity, and we can't think
our way into it.
We have to close our eyes and make
the leap of faith into the arms of
Jesus.
After they've been through instructing you, after the
last verse you can remember hasn't done the
work, after every trick and every thing you
know to move toward God has failed, and
yet your desperate heart cries, fill me now,
fill me now.
Then you move into that zone of obscurity
where the human reason has to be suspended
for a moment and the human heart leaps
across into the arms of God.
Then I say, man's talent and man's glory
and man's honor and man's beauty and man's
favor all goes out into the darkness of
yesterday, and everything is God's honor and God's
glory and God's beauty.
You've been broken and melted.
It will not do us any good to
come down here and stand.
It will not do us any good even
to come down here and kneel.
I got a letter from old brother Nichols.
Remember the Irish evangelist that God used?
He's used probably no man in the last
200 years.
I got a letter from him the other
day.
He said I had a good loss when
I read your editorial about the danger of
personal workers coming down and using a text
to try to get the secret through, pat
knees back and say an amen and another
convert's been made.
He says it's a trick of the devil,
brother told her, and he said I've got
to the place where I'll scarcely even give
an altar call anymore because that's the way
to handle me converts.
He said they pat him on the back
and give him a text and say now
tell.
The fellow gets up bewildered and confused and
befuddled and goes out and says I'm a
Christian because I wasn't cast out and that's
that.
Brethren, we ought to have such holy conviction
upon us that we leap into God's arms
past all personal workers and past all so
-called helpers.
Sometimes I think they're dog's comforters.
And find God and be filled with his
mighty spirit to such a degree that no
man can change our mind.
When I was 19 years old, kneeling in
the front room of my mother-in-law's
home before I was baptized, I was baptized
with a mighty infusion of the Holy Ghost.
And I've been up against everything.
Jesus only tongues-ism and holiness-ism and
Calvinism and all the isms that there are,
they've all tried to beat me down.
Some say I went too far and some
say I didn't go far enough.
But brother, I know what God did.
And any time you work God ever did
through me dates back to the hour.
And I was filled with his spirit.
Come back tomorrow night for a greater preacher
than you've yet heard will be preaching.
And he'll be preaching very close.
Oh dear Lord, time is short and the
hour is late.
And we have such little time to go.
And religion has gotten organized now.
Thy religion, Lord Jesus, so that anybody can
do it.
Anybody.
You don't have to have thy gifts anymore.
The tragedy and the terror of it all.
But Lord, still men build their Babylon's, call
them by thy name, but they go down
and perish.
Oh, we want our work to last.
For soon we shall be where the wicked
cease from troubling in the toil worn our
dress.
And only what the Holy Ghost does will
last.
We would yield our earthly vessels.
We would bring our empty vessels.
We would, if need be, come and ask
thee to begin to scrub the rust and
the filth until our hearts are shining, gleaming
repositories for the blessed spirit.
God bless everybody that listened tonight.
Now, make us all see this.
Make us all understand it, Lord, how tragic
it is that Peter will out at last
and be cobblers in the kingdom of God
and fool around and put patches on the
roof and prop the temple with sticks.
Oh, God, and it's everywhere men are doing
it.
We confess, Lord, God, that we feel like
being sick when we read the pages of
the Sunday papers and some of them religious
magazines.
Adam's brain is busy trying to do God's
work.
We wonder, Lord, if it isn't offering strange
fire on the altar of God.
We wonder if it won't bring judgment in
that day.
Oh, Lord, save us from offering strange fire.
Any fire we offer, we want to be
off the altar, thy fire.
Bless us now as we separate.
Please don't let us eat our way through
yard of pizza tonight and forget all about
this.
Great God, we pray thee, give us gravity.
That boy in his early teens is here
tonight with exuberance and nervous energy, making it
grave and serious.
When you think of that sixteen-year-old
handmaid who yielded to the Holy Ghost and
was the instrument in some places of the
revival, we don't excuse our sixteen-year-olds
who think they are caught in the pulse.
We don't excuse the parents who think that
their children ought to be permitted to just
play when actually, Lord God, the crisis is
on, the world's on fire, and the judgment
is drawing near, and the coming of the
Lord draweth nigh.
Will thou send us out brave and thoughtful
to meditate on thy word?
Give us, we pray thee, desire and determination,
and then push us on till we're pushed
over the cliff in desperation, and then as
a mother eagle stirreth up her nest, and
then dies down and captures her young, thou
wilt catch us and fill us and gift
us, and the work we do, though it
may not be fast, will have eternity in
time.
Let us stand, please.