Now, I begin tonight a series of thoughts
from the Book of Acts on the Spirit
in the Book of Acts, and will be
only over the month of April, 570 nights.
I know that's over Easter and all that.
I also know that the Holy Spirit is
very, it's very important that we know about
him and know what he can do and
know his office work and his person, and
the more particularly seasonal preaching I hope to
do during the morning times.
But in the evenings it will be on
this topic and now.
Now, in the Book of Acts, verse 8,
Acts 1, 1-8.
A former treatise have I made, O Theophilus,
of all that Jesus began both to do
and teach, until the day in which he
was taken up, after that he through the
Holy Ghost had given commandment unto the apostles
whom he had chosen.
To whom also he showed himself alive after
his passion by many infallible truths, being seen
of them forty days, and speaking of the
things pertaining to the kingdom of God, and
being assembled together with them, commanded them that
they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait
for the promise of the Father which saith
he ye have heard of me.
For John truly baptized with water, that ye
should be baptized with the Holy Ghost not
many days hence.
When they therefore were come together, they asked
of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this
time restore again the kingdom to Israel?
And he said, It is not for you
to know the times or the seasons which
the Father hath put in his own power.
Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall
be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and
in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto
the uttermost parts of the earth.
Particularly that 8th verse, ye shall receive power
of the Holy Spirit coming upon you.
Now it is written here that he was
taken up.
Incidentally, I received a letter from someone, a
very sincere letter, telling me that I don't
know where they heard this, they heard me
preach somewhere or something that I had written.
But this person said, Did I not know
that the Holy Spirit never spoke of himself?
He was so self-effacing that he talked
about the Father and the Son, but never
did he talk about himself.
That is a commonly held mistake in Christian
circles, because he shall not speak of himself.
Of himself has been misunderstood to mean he
shall not speak about himself.
I wrote a letter back saying this.
I said, You are confusing the expression he
shall not speak of himself with he shall
not speak about himself.
The truth is, everything written in the Bible
about the Holy Spirit was spoken by the
Holy Spirit.
For the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, and
every bit of information we have in the
Bible about the Spirit was put there by
the Spirit.
So the Spirit does speak about himself.
But what is meant by the phrase, he
shall not speak of himself, he shall not
speak from his own authority?
He speaks from the authority of the Father,
and therefore is not the originator of the
truth he gives, but he gives it by
inspiration, but he gives it from the Father.
So the Holy Spirit wrote this, and what
we have here is by the Spirit.
It's written here that he was taken up,
that is, Jesus our Lord was taken up.
And this was the triumphant joy cry of
the Church.
He was taken up.
Not only did he show himself alive after
his death, but he was taken up and
he made his triumphal entry into his ancient
position, vacated when he came down.
He prayed, O Father, glorify thou me with
the glory which I had with thee before
the world was.
And now, says the Holy Spirit through Luke,
he was taken up and introduced back into
the ancient glory which he had with the
Father before the world was.
Full and eternal favor with God the Father.
But when he went back to heaven, he
took something that he did not bring down.
When he came down from heaven, he was
the eternal word all-divine.
When he went back, he was the eternal
word all-divine, plus the new nature which
he had taken on himself in the womb
of the Virgin Mary.
So this that went back to the right
hand of God was not only the eternal
word which had come from the right hand
of God, but the man which had been
born in the world and now goes back
to the Father, the eternal word took our
humanity back with him to the right hand
of God.
So this man is now Lord over creation
and head over the Church and potentially King
of the earth.
But before he ascended, the scripture says, after
his resurrection, he was seen of them 40
days.
Now, 40 days is a testing period, the
period of testing and verification.
Moses was in the mount 40 days, and
Christ was in the wilderness, tempted by the
Devil for 40 days.
And now Christ is seen of them for
40 days, full verification.
And they saw him and heard him and
touched him and ate with him and questioned
him and heard him speak and knew that
he was no ghost, no spirit, but that
he was truly the man that had died.
By being there 40 days and living with
them, he proved and demonstrated his total resurrection.
Now, the Bible teaches the perpetuation of our
total being.
We Christians have been jockeyed into another philosophy
and another kind of belief by the pressure
of unbelievers and philosophers and psychologists and half
-believers, so we think that the resurrection means
a sort of oozing out of a spirit,
a ghost, and that the Christ who rose
from the dead was an eerie something but
not the real man.
I tell you that the same man they
put in the grave was the man that
came out of the grave, and whatever they
put in the tomb was what rose from
the tomb again.
They did not put his spirit in the
tomb, for in his spirit he went and
preached to those spirits in prison and led
captivity captive and gave gifts unto man.
They did not put his spirit in the
tomb, but they put his body there.
And when he rose from the dead, what
they put in the tomb rose from the
tomb glorified, but this still the man.
In the Bible, the idea of a spiritual
resurrection is unknown.
There isn't anything in the Bible, either Old
Testament or New Testament, either by prophet or
psalmist or by Christ himself or any of
his apostles, that would give us any right
to believe in a spiritual resurrection as opposed
to a physical resurrection.
The only use of a spiritual resurrection is
when it's meant in a regeneration, when it's
used figuratively of regeneration.
But when we talk about the resurrection of
the dead, we do not mean a spiritual
resurrection.
They said he is not here, he is
risen, crucified, dead and buried, we say in
the Creed, and the third day he rose
again.
Now, it says that just before he was
taken up, he was among them, speaking of
things pertaining to the kingdom of God.
I think this must have been the greatest
Bible conference of them all.
They have had great Bible conferences over the
past years on this North American continent, when
great Bible teachers and evangelists and missionaries have
met and contributed their part to a great,
vast Bible conference.
But this must have been the greatest Bible
conference of them all, because they were hearing
the vibrant, living, life-giving voice of the
very living, resurrected Jesus teaching them.
And what did he say to them?
I want to tip you off how sometimes
you may be let off if you don't
watch yourself.
God's people mustn't be suspicious, but they also
mustn't be credulous.
They've got to keep their guard up.
I remember talking to a man one time,
and he told me something that I thought
wasn't true, that is, he gave me a
doctrine I didn't believe, and I told him
so.
And I said, Where do you find that
in the Bible?
Well, he said, In the book of Acts
it says that our Lord for forty days
was with his disciples speaking of the things
pertaining to the kingdom of God.
And he said that was one of the
things he spoke about.
He didn't identify it, and so you see,
that's a basket you can throw anything in.
If you say, Now he spoke of things
pertaining to the kingdom, and then you come
in with a false teaching, that anybody would
come in with a false teaching, and you
say, Where is it?
Well, those are one of the things he
talked about to his disciples.
How they knew that, of course, we don't
know.
So watch yourself and keep your guard up,
and from 8 chapter and verse, and don't
let anybody play with your serious theological views.
But I do not think that we need
to go far astray in knowing what our
Lord talked about, because he talked about what
he was, who and what he was determined
what he said.
For instance, being who and what he was,
we can know that he spoke of what
and who he was.
He was and is the Eternal Son, so
there can be no doubt that he talked
much of the Eternal Father.
Is there any reason to believe that what
he had to say varied very much from
what he had said before he went into
the grave and came out again?
I think not.
He talked about the Father when he was
on earth walking with men, he talked about
the Father undoubtedly when he came out of
the grave again, for he was soon to
go unto the Father.
He was and he is the Savior of
men, so he no doubt spoke of his
atoning death.
He was and is the head of the
church, and so therefore he must have spoken
of his church.
How could you think that he could talk
for forty days to his disciples off and
on in his conversations and not talk about
his church?
He was going to found his church when
the Holy Ghost came, and that church was
the apple of his eye.
It was that church that he had died
and risen and was about to ascend into
the presence of the Father to establish and
perfect and keep.
So can you imagine him talking and not
talking about his church?
Then he was the light and is the
light of the world, so he spoke of
the world's evangelization.
There can be no doubt about that.
He did before he died, I should suppose
he would surely after he had risen.
He was the anointed of God, and so
he would naturally speak of the Holy Spirit
who anointed him.
He was and is the coming King, and
so we could expect him to talk about
his return and the coming of the Kingdom.
But we do know in the 8th verse
about one thing he did talk about, and
that particularly I would talk to you about
tonight, and that is that ye shall receive
power.
The word power in English means two things.
It means authority and it means dynamism, but
he didn't use the word that means authority
here.
He did not say, ye shall receive authority.
Though I believe in the authority of the
believer in Christ, he did not talk about
it here.
He said, ye shall receive that dynamic power
which we'll call ability, and it's ability to
be and to do.
That is, the ability to achieve moral ends.
That is the power.
In the book of Galatians, the Apostle by
the Holy Ghost defines for us, or breaks
down for us, what it is that he
gives power to be.
It is character.
Love and joy and peace, he said.
Long-suffering and gentleness and goodness, he said.
Faith and meekness and temperance, he said.
It is quite significant that these are exactly
what the natural man does not have, and
what he cannot be.
He cannot be these things.
But ye shall receive power to be and
power to do, for that's what power means.
It means ability to be and to do.
The quality of the power, we'll notice here,
he said it was love and joy and
peace.
This love he's talking about here is another
kind of love from the kind you and
I know, the kind that Liz Taylor carries
around on her sleeve, that we hear about
in the papers so much.
I don't know what you think about it,
but I'm all for romantic love.
I think that is natural and right and
good, and I don't believe that we ought
to be so spiritual that we forget a
man can love a woman and they can
love their children and be perfectly normal and
right and even spiritual in doing it.
But romantic love has been degraded to the
level of the barnyard animals.
In fact, a decent, respectable, dignified cow wouldn't
be as low or as beastly as a
lot of that so-called love we hear
about now in the world.
But the love here is another thing altogether.
This love is as pure as the heart
of God, because it is the heart of
God.
Then there is joy here, and the joy
we have here is not the joy that
makes you giggle, it is not the joy
that you'll work up, it is the joy
of triumph.
You see, the joy of Jesus was the
joy of the other side of the grave.
Now, here lies the grave, that awful, ominous,
hollow place in the hill where men are
buried.
And when you approach that from this side,
there is always a certain sadness upon the
heart.
Even our Lord Jesus Christ did not look
forward to dying.
He was the Prince of Life, and dying
was an unnatural thing to him.
And when he died, he died not because
he had to, but because he would.
He laid it down, and he did not
have to do it.
He said, I lay it down of myself,
because so my Father wills.
He laid his life down.
But there was a sadness over his heart.
And so the four Gospels have about them,
in a minor key, the music of the
four Gospels always is in the minor, and
there's always a shadow of impending death and
a grave.
But after the grave is over and the
Lord is out and he's on this side
of the grave, there is pure joy, and
the music of the church rises to the
major key, and there's no longer any of
the sadness, the muted sadness that was upon
the heart of our Lord and upon the
heart of those wondering disciples who looked forward
and wondered what he meant when he said
he was going to die.
But after he had died and risen again,
the rising again, put the grave behind him.
If you knew you didn't need to die
ever and the grave was behind you, you
certainly could never be sad again for a
moment in your entire lifetime.
And this joy of the Lord is the
joy of triumph over the grave.
And then there is peace here, too, and
longsuffering.
And of course, impatience is the opposite of
longsuffering.
Longsuffering is a disposition to bear injuries patiently,
not to bruise us in the pains of
life only.
I said to Pastor Gray this morning when
I came in, feeling kind of bruised, I
said, Brother Gray, do you feel it, too?
Life just has a way of wearing you
out.
It just wears you out.
All you have to do is stay around
long enough and you'll be worn.
It has an abrasive effect, a wearing effect.
Life has that.
And longsuffering is the ability to take that
grinding effect of life.
You men who have business, take me.
I don't have any business, but I've got
Uncle Sam on this hand and Canada on
this hand.
Right now I'm trying to make up two
sets of income tax.
Well, just that's enough to kill the average
man, figuring out to put it on line
4 but not on line 5, and add
line 6 to line 7, and it's miserable.
Just to live in the middle of this
world of ours is a terrible thing.
Just to be here, just to read the
headlines, just to feel the pressure and the
tug of gravitation down toward the earth, but
you've got to bear that with longsuffering.
It says longsuffering means the ability to suffer
a long time.
Anybody can suffer a sudden twinge of pain,
but they have to suffer it for a
long time.
Not only I say that, but the injury
is inflicted by the injustices of someone.
Then there is gentleness, and its opposite is
harshness and severity.
Then there is goodness, its virtue and kindness,
moral goodness, pure, clean, honesty, goodness, that kind
of goodness.
Then there is faithfulness, which is the opposite
of instability, which is always flopping about, fidelity
to a trust.
Faithful is what Peter was not, and what
Demas was not, and what Mark was not,
but faithful is what Daniel was and Paul
was.
So we set Peter, when he denied his
Lord over against Daniel, who refused to do
it, and he would have vividly illustrated the
difference between the man who was faithful and
the man who wasn't.
Demas, who loved this present world, and Paul,
who turned his back on it.
There you have it illustrated in men.
I know that Peter got right, and I
hope that Demas did, and I am sure
that Mark did.
But for the time being, they illustrated faithlessness.
Then there is neatness.
Neatness is the opposite of arrogance.
My father was an Englishman, as I've often
said, and he was an arrogant Englishman.
You know what that means.
He was so arrogant that when he finally
left the farm and went to work in
a factory in the city of Akron, Ohio,
he was so independent that he refused to
take orders from his boss.
He said he didn't want to be bossed
around by anybody.
He was getting paid for it, but that
was the way he lived.
It was that arrogance.
I used to say to my father that
in the New Testament they slapped you on
one cheek and you were to turn the
other, and his eyes used to blaze.
He said, That couldn't be, couldn't be, couldn't
think of this, that anybody should be so
meek as all that.
I didn't understand at the time, but now
as I get older, I find that instead
of growing meek, I'm going the other way,
and it takes the power of God to
keep me from standing out and telling people
off.
Meekness is not a natural thing.
It would be to some people.
I know that there are some people that
are meek, they have no chins, and they
go about with an apologetic look on their
face, and their heads usually bob up and
down, a perpetual yes to anybody and everybody.
But mostly we're not like that.
Americans aren't, and Canadians aren't, and we of
the Western world that have had a good
deal of freedom and liberty, we don't like
to take orders from anybody.
But here is meekness, softness of manner.
Then there is temperance, which of course in
temperance is the opposite of it, the masterfulness
in controlling self.
The will of God for us, my dear
friends, is that we should always demonstrate, because
we always have these qualities of love and
joy and peace and faith and meekness and
temperance and longsuffering and gentleness and goodness, that
we should not rise to them occasionally during
a revival campaign, but they should be the
level and average of our living, that we
should be like that all the time, that
we should have them and their opposites never
should be present.
This can only be by the indwelling of
the Holy Ghost, because it takes Adam and
turns Adam exactly inside out and upside down.
Remember that when you clench your fist and
set your jaw and say, you can't boss
me around, you're acting like Adam, because that's
Adam's nature.
But when Jesus our Lord stood before Pilate
meekly and answered not a word, he was
not acting like Adam because he owed nothing
to Adam.
He was acting like God, because he was
God.
And it's his Holy Spirit in us that
enables us to be like this.
Now, this can only be, I say, by
divine indwelling, because the flesh of Adam never
can produce it.
I know that there have been certain moral
philosophers and certain religionists that have come very
near to it.
For instance, the Stoics.
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were two of the
celebrated Stoics.
If you read Marcus Aurelius, you will see
there so many qualities that you wish you
had yourself.
And when you read the sayings of Epictetus,
you see something there that is near true,
but not the fruits of the Spirit.
And of course, the contemplative religionists of the
East did arrive at something very close to
this.
But the trouble is this.
Because it was Adam's tree, the fruit it
bore was only Adam's fruit.
We often notice one thing, and be careful
in our teaching and preaching.
We have, in order to draw a sharp
contrast between the sinner and the Saint, we
have painted the Saint always at his best
and the sinner always at his worst.
And when we talk about a sinner going
to hell, we think of a Hitler or
a Bluebeard, and we're always painting somebody as
very evil.
And the evangelists love to tell about people
on their way to commit suicide.
In fact, I've never heard of anybody in
recent years who has been converted, except he
was on his way to commit suicide.
Somebody is always on his way to commit
suicide, he says.
Most of them don't, but they are on
their way.
And then they hear, Salvation Army, and go
get converted.
It's all very well, but a little too
bad to be true.
Not all people are hopelessly bad from a
human standpoint.
I've known a lot of lovely people in
my time.
I've known sinners who could hold their temper.
I've known sinners whose mouths were clean.
I've known sinners who never raised their voices
to their wives.
I've known sinners who were free and generous
with their money as much as any Christian.
I've known sinners that were gracious and kind
and thoughtful of other people, and I know
sinners like that today.
But it's fruit growing on the wrong tree.
It is Adam, nevertheless it is still Adam.
And except a man be born of the
Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
Let us not forget that Adam is capable
of infinite refinement, but not refinement enough to
save him.
Let us remember that a son of Adam
can become a very good man, but not
good enough to save him.
Let us not, when we talk about people
being lost, let's not always think of them
both fiends and hollocks on their way to
commit suicide.
Certainly there are a lot of them, but
there are also very, very many more lovely
people you'd like to live next door to.
But they're not Christians, and the fruit they
have is a carefully cultivated Adamic fruit, and
it's just no good, it's just no good
before God.
It's another kind of fruit altogether that a
Christian bears.
It's the fruit of the Spirit.
Now, it would be a wonderful thing if
I could stand here and tell you that
when you bear the fruit of the Spirit,
you instantly cease to bear any other kind
of fruit.
I wish that I could draw a picture
of light and dark, I wish I could
draw a picture like checkerboard, either holy white
or holy black, and say you're either one
or the other.
But honesty forces me, and Scripture forces me
to say that the man in whose heart
the Holy Ghost dwells has also another nature
that's always trying to hinder and blight the
fruit of the Spirit, always trying to blight
the fruit of the Spirit.
So it isn't fair to a Christian to
present the typical norm as being the saintly
saint you know.
Dear brother and sister, there are godly people
who bear the fruit of the Spirit, but
who are nevertheless greatly troubled by the flesh
of Adam.
But it's not the will of God that
we should continue to lie down under it.
It's not the will of God that we
should bear two kinds of fruit.
It's the will of God that we should
crush the earth's serpent under our heels, and
that we should rise into the fullness of
the Spirit, and that the Holy Ghost should
come into the ascendancy, and that we should
live the spiritual life.
Have you thought about how they put a
man in orbit and send him around the
earth?
Well, when they send a man up from
Cape Canaveral, they send him up at a
speed which will escape the gravitational tug of
the earth.
It has to go up to about 17
,000 miles an hour.
And that thrust upward is exactly balanced by
a drag downward.
Glenn, when he was up there going around
the earth, was always falling a little toward
the earth, always falling, always falling.
He didn't know it, but he was always
falling.
You say, why didn't he come down?
Because the earth fell away from him.
As he went around, he fell, but the
earth fell away from him.
So he just kept right on going, and
he'd be up there yet if they hadn't
put some brakes on and pulled him down.
But the point is, there was a balance
there between the upward thrust which had sent
him into the orbit and the downward tug
which was pulling him down.
If there had been no downward tug, he
would have just kept right on going, and
he would have been out there somewhere dead
by this time, but a couple of million
miles out into space.
But it was a nice balance between the
upward thrust and the downward tug that kept
him going in orbit.
I don't say that's a very good illustration.
Maybe I'd better have left that one at
home.
But I will say this to you, that
we Christians, if we had nothing but the
upward thrust, we would be on the Mount
all the time, Lord Biddletree Tabernacles.
We'd be there all the time.
But the Lord lets us know that we're
human.
I remember one time going into a barber
shop, and I got to talking to the
barber years ago about the Lord.
I was trying to go to the barber
shop now, but don't stay as long as
I used to.
I was talking to him about the Lord,
and then I got up in my eagerness
to talk to him about the Lord and
started to walk out without paying.
I'd forgotten all about it in my evangelistic
zeal.
He said, Don't you pay?
Red-facedly, I paid him.
I remember it was only 50 cents in
those days.
But I was bothered by that.
I thought, Now I've ruined myself here.
I was talking about the Lord to the
barber, and no doubt he thought that I
was keeping him interested so I wouldn't have
to pay him.
I said to a member of the church,
I told him this story.
He smiled and said, The Lord was just
reminding me that we were still down here.
He said, You're that type.
One man told me when I was a
young preacher, I began preaching when I was
19 years old, and he said, By the
time you are 30, you will have a
religion of your own.
Well, I had so much zeal there that
God had to just keep reminding me, so
he just let me have that red face
there a little to show me that I
was still here.
When some of you get great blessing from
God and great help from the Lord, then
you immediately feel that you are just in
orbit.
But the Lord lets little things come along
to let you know you are still down
here.
A man wrote me from down when I
had forgotten where now.
Well, I get letters from all over, but
this I think may be New Jersey.
He said, I was from Pennsylvania because he
came to see me at Pittsburgh when I
was down there.
He said, I wrote you that I had
gone to a certain Bible conference and I
had received such an amazing, wonder-filled experience
that I literally rode on clouds for a
couple of months.
Now, he said, it's all faded away and
I'm back down to the daily grind again.
I said to him, your trouble was you
fell in love with the experience instead of
with the Lord.
Your trouble was that you got your eyes
on how you felt instead of on him
who is the center of your hope for
all the time to come.
I hope he took it well.
I think he did.
He'll come out all right for he's a
zealous young man.
But listen, my brethren, if the constant downward
tug of Adam is on the world and
even is on the church, if there is
no upward thrust of the Holy Ghost, then
I say that we're not any above the
sinners round about us.
To talk to me about judicial blessings, blessings
that are given to me legally like my
father makes a will and then dies and
I get his money, I can't see that
at all.
I believe, of course, in the teaching of
justification and judicial act of God, I believe
the doctrines of the faith.
But I do not believe that I am
doomed to go to heaven simply as legally
saved, judicially converted.
I believe that God wants to impart to
my vibrant living human soul something of the
power that makes men good and makes men
holy.
But most Christianity is simply Adam at his
best.
We might as well admit that.
You go everywhere, you find Adam at his
best.
You go down to the dance halls and
you'll find Adam at his worst.
You go to the churches and you'll find
Adam at his best.
But it's Adam in both cases, until we
understand that there is such a thing as
regeneration and until we know there is such
a thing as the entering into the human
nature of the Holy Ghost, that we might
have power to be, power to be and
power to become, as well as power to
do.
So holiness of character is the product of
the indwelling Spirit.
One of the publishers in the States sent
me a manuscript and asked me whether I
would read it for them.
It's actually in galley proof now.
He said, Would you read it and then
write something about it so we can put
it on the book jacket?
And I thought, Well, here's another one.
I get them, and some of them I
read and some of them I refuse.
But this one I took along, and they
had the picture of the author on it.
And I have a weakness for old, old,
old people.
And this lady is pretty well alone.
She died when she was eighty-five.
She had begun writing this book when she
was seventy-eight, and it had taken her
seven years.
But, oh, brother, was that a book!
There she was a schoolteacher, and she began
writing her daily journal, Conversations with God, she
called it.
Ah, it was like turning back the pages
of history back to the days of the
mystics, to read what this lovely, old, wrinkled,
sweet old Saint of God had to say.
Here was something that didn't grow on Adam's
tree.
Here was not refinement, here was love and
joy and peace.
Here was not culture, here was long-suffering
and gentleness and goodness.
Here was not simply education, though she was
a highly educated woman.
Here was faith and meekness and temperance.
Here's why.
So she jotted her little Conversations with God
down, and now it's going to be printed.
It's worth your buying, Conversations with God, by
Miss Oma, I've forgotten.
I've never heard of her before, but you'll
hear about it when it comes out.
Now, who we need, is there such a
thing as receiving this power?
Is this a built-in standard equipment that
every Christian receives the moment he's converted?
I wish I could believe it.
He certainly receives a measure of the Holy
Ghost, because without the Holy Ghost we cannot
possibly be pleasing to God, and we're not
pleasing or accepted to God.
But the Holy Spirit wants to pour a
horn of oil upon his people, a horn
of oil on that head that runs down
over us and will bring to us in
fulness the fruit of the Spirit.
In other words, moral character to be holy.
There has been a great error abroad in
fundamental circles over the past few generations, and
that error has brought us into the sad
state we're in now.
It is the error that assumes because we
can explain it, we have it.
Because we can teach it, therefore we have
it.
Oh, mistaken, my brother.
There is such a thing as having in
reality, working in your life, this power to
be, which is moral power, the power to
be loving, the power to be peaceful, the
power to be gentle, the power to be
good, the power to be meek, and the
power to be temperate.
It's the power to be.
We shall receive power to be, ability to
be.
Because we live below our privileges here, we
do not have these fruits of the Spirit
very much.
I long for the fellowship of the Saints.
I long for that type of church service
where the Holy Ghost can come like a
dove over his people, warm their hearts and
sweeten them, bring a few tears to their
eyes and a few quiet praises to their
lips, so that we can feel and sense
that he is with us, and so that
our people will be loving people, joyful people,
peaceful people, gentle people, good people, people of
faith and meekness and temperance.
This doesn't grow on religious trees.
This is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
But we'll remain as we are till the
absence of this becomes a pain in our
hearts.
Don't forget it.
If you can get on the way you're
getting on, God will let you get on
that way.
It's when your yearning to be holy becomes
a pain in your heart that God will
do something about your situation.
We'll remain as we are till we're done
with the deadly average Christianity.
Always remember this.
If you take average Christianity as we know
it on the North American continent, if you
take it as your standard, you're taking a
subnormal standard.
There is something better than the average Christianity
of the average evangelical church.
If you're satisfied with the average, God will
let you have the average and give you
no more.
We'll remain as we are till we no
longer care what other Christians say.
Our desire to please our brother who led
in prayer prayed against man-pleasing, and the
curse of man-pleasing is on the world.
The curse of man-pleasing is on the
church.
Rather than offend someone or rather than have
someone think we're extreme, we accept the cold
average of low-tempered church Christianity.
I'd rather offend every brother in Christ from
Singapore to San Francisco, New York and London,
than to grieve the Holy Ghost by accepting
the average as the norm.
What is revival?
It's when we stop being satisfied with the
average and determine to have the normal.
Average Christianity is subnormal.
God wants to give us normal Christianity, which
is the indwelling Holy Ghost and his outworkings
through us.
We'll remain as we are until we're willing
to turn against ourselves, and until we really
believe Christ meant what he said when he
told us that we should receive ability, moral
ability to be, and until we cease to
look to ourselves and look to him and
till we're through with ourselves, until we start
expecting.
I believe that it's the will of God
that his people should be as spirit-filled.
God has his dear people everywhere, not many,
I suppose, but some.
I received a letter, and I'm not going
to mention the denomination because it's got a
reputation for being frightfully terribly liberal.
I could have no part in the denomination,
but I got a letter yesterday sent to
this church to me from one of the
editors of their publishing house.
He said, I understand that you're coming to
Philadelphia.
I want to see you.
I'm going to call you at your hotel
at two o'clock.
I hope I can have a talk with
you.
His name is on their letterhead as one
of their men in the publishing house.
He said, I've just had a talk with
Paris Reedhead, and I want to have a
talk with you.
He said, I want something from God.
Here is a man in a liberal denomination
that has forsaken God, and he's high up
there, and yet he's coming home to the
top.
God has a few here and there.
But don't take yourself for granted.
Don't take yourself for granted.
Because you belong to Avenue Road Church doesn't
mean this means you at all.
Each one of us alone, each one of
us individually as if there were none else,
we each lonely soul must wait in the
presence of our Lord and remind him of
his promise and look to him in the
quietness of the deep inner heart until he
comes and pours upon us a horn of
oil.
Ability, moral ability to be.
This I believe.
I don't want anybody going out and saying,
I don't think Brother Tozer meant that.
Yes, he did.
I'm not apologizing or putting any annotations or
editorial disclaimers in anything I've said tonight.
I stand for this.
I believe the woe of the Churches is
we're carrying on holy work by the flesh
instead of carrying on holy work by the
Holy Spirit.
And we're paying a tragic and terrible price.
Lord, oh Lord, we love thy Church, we
love thy kingdom.
Her walls before thee stand.
Here is the apple of thine eye engraven
in thy hands.
For her our tears shall flow, for her
our prayers shall rise, and for her we
promise to labor and work.
But oh Lord, thy poor Church is only
a ragged beggar woman when she could be
a queen, when she could be a princess
and lean upon the arm of her beloved.
Oh, Lord Jesus, we pray for thy Church.
We pray for thy people who believe thy
word or claim to believe it.
We cannot pray now at the moment for
the liberal, for the cultist, for the false
teacher, we cannot.
But we pray for those who believe the
Bible.
We pray for those who claim they're even
jealous, and yet they wear rags where they
should wear silks.
Oh, God, we pray thee revive thy Church
in the midst of the years.
Revive this Church, oh Lord.
Revive the Alliance, revive every denomination that stands
for the truth.
Oh, Lord, save us from fear and save
us from intimidation.
We have grieved thy Holy Spirit by neglecting
him.
We have quenched thy Holy Spirit.
We have listened to the blandishments of men
who ought to know better, and they have
made us afraid to believe in the power
of the Holy Ghost.
We grieve for this, and we apologize to
thee for it.
We pray thee, O God of grace, out
of infinite grace, send to this Church a
sweet wave of power to be, a sweet
wave of ability to be holy and good
and faithful and temperate and joyful and right.
Send, we pray thee, such a wave.
We thank thee for the Blessed Spirit, Father,
out descending to the earth to be our
advocate, our indweller, to show us the Lord
Jesus, to lead us as a shepherd leads
his sheep, and to be in us a
mentor and teacher, showing the things of Christ
to us.
We've acted as if he didn't exist, and
we're sorry.
We apologize and we repent for our neglect
of the Spirit and our mistreatment of the
Spirit.
O Father, wash us clean and make us
white in the blood of the Lamb, and
then pour a horn of oil on our
heads, for the poor world bleeds and dies,
and we have not to help them.
They starve and we have not to give
them.
Forgive us, Lord.
Breathe, O breathe thy breath upon us and
say, Receive thee the Holy Ghost.
Save us, we pray thee, O God, from
logicians and men with pencils and rules and
squares and levels, always driving us away from
the fountain.
Lord, we would put them behind us and
under our feet and rise on our dead
selves to better things.
Help us, we pray, over these evenings together.
May the total result be that one after
the other of us shall be filled with
a new power and a new grace and
a new ability to be and do that
we might show forth the excellency of him
who called us out of darkness into his
marvelous light.
We ask it in the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.