Verse 8 and 9, verses 8 and 9.
That 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 part of the
earth.
And when he had spoken these things, while
they beheld, he was taken up, and a
cloud received him out of their sight.
Now, ye shall receive power.
I think every Bible teacher everywhere would agree
with me that this, if read like this,
would give it the real meaning.
But ye shall receive the power of the
Holy Ghost coming upon you.
Not ye shall receive power after, but the
Spirit is the power.
Tonight I want to talk about the Holy
Spirit and the Christian witness.
And I'm very conscious as I begin my
talk that a certain false cult has risen
in the latter days that have taken this
word witness and put a copyright on it
before the Christian public and before the world.
But I refuse to admit the validity of
their claim or the rightness of their use
of the term witness or witnesses.
I want to use it in its biblical
sense and in the sense that it is
used here.
Now, our Lord said, ye shall be witnesses
unto me.
And it is a touching and solemn thing
that in the time of the exile of
our Lord Jesus and the extreme unpopularity of
God, for don't you fool yourself for a
minute.
Everybody's talking about God, but God is extremely
unpopular.
As long as God is around to help
us when we need him, we'll talk about
him and even pray to him in the
world and in the popular church.
As long as he keeps his place and
doesn't intrude upon our plans, we're very God
-conscious these days.
Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, politicians, everywhere, God's in
this and God's in that, everywhere from being
a co-pilot, which means second from the
top, the pilot's first, the co-pilot's second.
On the up and down the scale, God
is talked about, but that's the God who
minds his own business, except when you're in
trouble.
God is like the doctor that lives across
the street.
As long as he lets you alone, he's
all right, except when you get sick and
then you send for him.
That's the God that men talk about today.
And his son Jesus Christ in exile, he
said that when he sent the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit would witness to righteousness because he
went unto the Father.
And it is such an insolent thing, I
say, that in an hour like this, there
is yet, it is yet possible for some
people to have the high honor of speaking
for him among his enemies.
Now, he says he shall be witnesses, and
I want to talk a little about what
it means, this witness.
A witness is one who tells.
He's not repeating stories, and he's not presenting
philosophical concepts.
He is witnessing, he is telling something that
he has seen or heard or experienced in
some way.
Isaiah witnessed by saying, I saw the Lord
high and lifted up.
And Ezekiel witnessed by saying that he saw
one sitting on a throne.
And Peter witnessed by saying that in the
tenth of Acts, that the Lord had come
back from the dead and that God had
anointed him with the Holy Ghost and power
before his crucifixion.
Then he had come back from the dead,
and now he forgave whoever believed on him.
John witnessed, and there were about 500 brethren
at once, Paul said, who saw Jesus after
his resurrection, and they witnessed.
All of them told what they had seen
and heard.
Now, these tell what they have seen and
heard or what they have experienced, and sometimes
these are the same.
You'll notice Paul's testimony had to do with
what he had experienced.
And the historic testimony given by the word
witness is that the witnesses so often died
for their witness that they were called martyrs
because the Greek word witness is the word
martos where we get our word witnesses.
So that because they witnessed and were killed
for their witness so often, they said their
witness was a martyr, and a martyr was
a witness.
It was the same thing.
However, not all witnesses have died for their
faith, but because so many did, the word
witness and the word martyr has come to
be very much the same.
And as Brother Newell knows, it's very much
the same, is the same thing in the
Greek language.
Now, he says, I want you to notice
this very clearly, that ye shall be witnesses
unto me.
Now, this is the substance of the apostolic
witness.
The apostles and those early Christians and always
wherever there is anything of revival in the
Church, wherever the Church is moving, she never
moves by heavy theology, although theology must be
there as the basic groundwork for a witness.
But she witnesses not to ideas.
It's entirely possible to spend our lifetime playing
with ideas and never give a witness unto
him.
He says that we are to witness unto
him.
They went forth and they talked about a
man who was also God.
It wasn't an idea, and it wasn't even
truth primarily, but it was the man who
was truth, and because he was the word,
he was the idea of God incarnated in
human flesh.
And they went forth declaring that they had
seen a man and that there were certain
things true about that man.
Peter told about it in Acts 2 at
length, he told about it more in Acts
10.
And they said that this witness concerned him,
this man, who was also God.
They said he was God, and they said
he was the redeeming God, and there wasn't
any hope for anybody apart from him.
And they said he saves by dying for
men and rising again.
And they focused the attention of people upon
the man.
I think John the Baptist was a good
witness and a good illustration of what I'm
trying to say.
John pointed to Jesus and said, Behold the
man, behold the Lamb of God, the Lamb
of God.
Now that Lamb of God, that man was
the Lamb.
And he called attention to him and then
faded out.
For the witness is not so important, but
the one about whom he witnesses is all
important.
Now this witness that the church gave was
the shell for its power.
And here is a tragic thing, and I'm
sorry about it.
That it's entirely possible to give a Christian
witness without power, as seen in some denominations
today, they're sound in theology, but worldly in
conduct and carnal in heart and earthly in
spirit.
Because there's no Holy Spirit in their witness,
they are far worse than if they did
not witness at all.
A man once, they said in old days,
they said they once saw a man dressed
in the habit of a monastery and they
heard him preaching the gospel.
And they looked a little closer and they
found it was the devil.
The devil had the religious habit on.
And somebody went to the devil and said,
Why do you preach the gospel?
You're out there preaching the truth.
You, the devil, that hates truth.
Why should you preach the truth?
And he said, The truth preached by a
bad man is worse than error.
And he may be entirely right about it.
I don't know if the devil ever said
that, but I think it's a good idea.
And I want to pass it on, that
truth that is simply given because it's logically
accepted and traditionally believed may do more harm
than good.
He said, Ye shall receive the power of
the Holy Spirit and ye shall be witnesses
unto me.
For remember one thing, the Holy Spirit is
the only effective witness.
You and I can talk until we're blue
in the face and get no results at
all.
But it is the Holy Spirit that is
the only effective witness.
It is a most significant, it's a solemn
thing, that everybody that's ever been converted to
Christ soundly in the world was converted by
the Holy Ghost.
Nobody was ever able to convert anybody else.
That is, you can turn them around and
get them going in another direction, you can
get them to adopt another creed, you can
get them to believe another set of truths,
you can get them to join another church,
your church, but you can't regenerate them and
you can't make Christians out of them.
Only the Holy Spirit can make a Christian
out of a sinner.
Only the Holy Spirit.
And when Jesus our Lord said, When the
Holy Spirit is come, he shall testify of
me.
And we have the word again.
So that what we have before us here
is the teaching of our Lord himself.
And it's substantiated by the rest of the
scriptures that God means a people to go
forth into a world that's hostile, but badly
in need of the testimony.
Those people are to go forth testifying that
God sent his Son and he died for
men and they rose from the dead and
he's coming again and the kings of the
earth shall wail because of them and that
he will be in charge of the world
and the Lord God omnipotent will reign.
They are to go forth telling this.
And their witness is to be about him,
not arguing modes of baptism, not giving forth
profound ideas, but telling about a man, the
man who is God.
Now, only the Holy Ghost can give this
testimony.
The scripture says, The Spirit shall witness, he
shall testify of me.
But Christian witness without power, I say, it's
not only inadequate, but it can be altogether
injurious if we don't look out.
There must be a power-endued witness and
nothing can stand before a power-endued witness.
You see, in the day in which we
live, here's the way we do it.
Christians lie around and give no witness at
all, but they are willing to pay certain
gifted men to witness for them.
That's why we have evangelists and men of
big name who can get crowds to hear
them.
They give the witness that we should be
giving.
They should be giving theirs, too, but the
individual should be giving theirs.
But instead of letting an evangelist supplement the
witness of the individual Christian, the individual Christian
puts the bill and pays and lets the
other man be his proxy.
And that's the trouble in the world now.
A church will sit around and give no
witness at all for a generation, but call
a man in once a year to give
their witness for them.
And usually he gives it to the same
ones who have heard it before.
Or we'll send a man out, a widely
known man like Billy Graham or Billy Sunday
or some other man known around the world,
and they go giving the witness that we
should be giving.
And if the Christian individuals were giving a
witness, their witness would be more powerful.
And there would be more Christians everywhere because
an individual, a thousand individuals giving their witness
in the Holy Ghost, are more powerful under
God in the winning of converts than any
evangelist that ever lived from St. Paul to
the present hour.
This is not to speak against the evangelists
or to slight them in any way.
It is to say they have their place
in the church and the whole pattern of
God, but the church should be the witness.
This church, you, you who love our Lord,
should give the witness.
And he says, Verse 8, He shall receive
the power of the Spirit and ye shall
be my witnesses, for it is he that
is witnessing in you.
He shall testify of me and bring to
your remembrance whatsoever I have told you.
Now, the work of the witness you will
find elsewhere.
You shall receive power.
In the 5th chapter of Acts, in verses
31 and 32, we read these words, "'Him
hath God exalted with his right hand to
be a Prince and a Savior, for to
give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.
And we are his witnesses of these things,
and so also is the Holy Ghost, whom
God hath given to them that obey him.
They were the audible witnesses, but the Holy
Ghost whom God had given to them that
obey him was within them the true witness
giving the power.'" And in Acts 4.33,
notice what it says there, in the fourth
of Acts, 31 and 33, "'And when they
had prayed, the place was shaken where they
were assembled, and they were all filled with
the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word
of God with boldness, and with great power
gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus.
And great grace was upon them all.' Now,
that was in the early days of the
Church of Christ.
The work of the witness, then, is not
the same as the work of the teacher.
It isn't to cry down the teacher.
You see, we have a habit of what
the philosophers call the either-or.
We either have this, or else we have
it out and we have this.
We forget that you can have not either
-or, but both-and.
And when I say that everybody ought to
be a witness, I say that the witness
is different from the teacher.
That is not to speak against the teacher,
for teachers are needed, too.
The teachers say in the Bible's college out
here at Regina, they are not witnesses, they
are teachers.
In another capacity they may be witnesses.
They may be witnesses to the man next
door to them, they may be witnesses where
they meet other men in the educational fields,
but in their capacity as teachers they are
not witnesses, they are teachers.
So a teacher can teach theory and he
can spend his lifetime teaching theory, but a
witness doesn't talk about theory at all.
A witness says, I saw and I heard,
and here is what God did for me,
and this has happened to me.
I am most delighted to find, and I
say this with a considerable sorrow and shame,
and I don't know whether I should be
sorry about it at all or not, but
I find that among the denominations that in
the Alliance we tend to rule out and
call them old-line denominations, as if that
was bad.
But I find that there are a lot
of people seeking God in those denominations.
I told you last Sunday night there was
a man who was going to come to
see me when I got to Philadelphia.
He was one of the editors of the
magazine of one of the largest denominations, if
not the largest in the United States, and
decided to beliberal that denomination.
Well, this man wanted to see me, and
when I got to the hotel there was
a note there saying he had already been
there and gone, but he was coming back
in half an hour.
So I got my suit out and hung
up, hung the wrinkles out of it, as
they always do first thing, and there the
phone rang and said, This is so-and
-so, I'm down in the lobby, I want
to come up.
Well, I confess I stalled a little bit
because I was terribly tired.
I'd had a hard week, as they say,
and I wanted a little rest before I
went that night, but I'd promised to see
him.
So I said, All right, come up.
I hoped that he wouldn't stay too long.
He stayed exactly two hours.
And it was nearly time for me to
grab a bite to eat and rush off
to the church service.
He stayed two hours.
Now, this man, an editor of one of
their national magazines in a liberal denomination, nevertheless
had met God with a wonderful filling of
the Holy Ghost that had transformed his ministry
and his life.
Then I went to the church, connected with
Temple University, the Temple Baptist Church, and I
didn't know what to expect of the doctor
who was the pastor of the church.
He came to the hotel for me, and
we hadn't gotten away from the hotel toward
the church until he began to give me
his testimony.
God had done something new for him in
the last year.
A middle-aged man, but God had done
something new for him.
The Holy Spirit had come to him and
was teaching him.
He was as evangelical as possible for a
man to be, and sick me on to
pour the truth out, all that I knew.
The Lord is saying this.
Now, what I say I'm sorry about is,
why isn't this happening inside our denomination, and
why isn't it happening around here?
Why is it having to happen among the
people?
I should tell this or not, but I
got a long-distance phone call from the
Middle West, and it was a call to
come and preach on the spirit-filled life
in the convention next July, and who do
you suppose it was from?
The Lutherans.
I wonder if God isn't going to have
to go outside of us smug, neat people
who are so smug and so neat.
I just want to read you something here.
It's amusing, but it's also a terrible indictment.
A man writes me a letter on a
letterhead of a company in the city of
Glendale, California, and he says, Dear Joseph, Orthodox
evangelical Christianity would say I belong to a
fine church and then he names it what
I want.
He says, Yet ninety-five percent of the
members of my church, ninety-five percent of
its team goes up to blow the whistle.
Committees, suppers, services, special speakers, camps, and with
these activities, the church membership and the finances
keeping up and all, pastors and officers as
well as memberships seem happy and sleepy.
In a church of some five hundred members,
it's difficult to get twenty out once a
month to do calling.
The church is out of joint with the
army of the Lord, he says, quite content
to sit in the pew, or to spend
most of its efforts in dress rehearsal, or
in polishing its weapons, or attending the social
functions within the fort.
And the aggressiveness is left to the Seventh
-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Mormons.
And yet we often speak of this poor,
lost, dying world.
I wrote to that man and said, Please
write me an article and say the same
thing, I want to publish it.
But he wrote back and said he couldn't
possibly write, he was no writer.
But I think he said something there, brother.
I think he said something.
That we, the soldiers of the Lord, spend
most of our time sitting out the war.
We're sitting out the war.
The fight is on and we're taking our
girl to the function one night, and going
to the men's group the next night, and
to a camp week in the summer, and
off here somewhere.
We're praying instead of fighting.
We are sitting about instead of getting up
and being witnesses.
We are witnesses, he said, and we are
to be witnesses unto me.
The Witness testifies.
He testifies to what is true factually, the
resurrection of the dead.
Even though his eyes didn't see it, he
knows it's true.
He testifies to what he has experienced personally,
what he has seen and heard and felt
by the Witness.
I often think of the dear old brother
who believed in the anointing of the Holy
Ghost, call it what you will, baptism, the
fulness of the Holy Spirit.
He was taken one night by a man
who didn't believe it, to hear a man
lecture.
The man's lecture was going to prove that
there wasn't any such thing as the Holy
Spirit coming on a man and making him
a strong witness.
He said there wasn't anything to it, so
he gave a very powerful lecture to prove
that it just wasn't so, but nothing to
it.
On the way out, the brother who had
invited his friend took ahold of his arm,
and with some triumph in his voice, he
said, All right, what do you get to
say now?
He said, Wasn't that powerful?
He said, I'll admit that was powerful, all
right, but the trouble is I heard it
25 years too late.
He said, 25 years ago, God did for
me what this man tonight proved couldn't be
done.
There's your answer, sir.
A witness is a man who says God
did it, and then he smiles while somebody
proves it can't be done.
It's like the cartoon I saw, a fellow
was in jail looking out through the bars
and said, You can't put me in jail.
He was in jail all right.
At least, they say, but I've had them
write to me, You can't, Mr. Toad, you're
wrong!
Well, wrong or no wrong, I know what
God's done for my soul.
The witness is one who testifies what's happened
to him in God through the scriptures and
through prayer and faith.
There is an illuminating passage in the 22nd
chapter of Acts, verses 14 and 15.
The details vary, but the law is revealed
here, the way God does it is revealed,
it says, The God of our fathers hath
chosen thee, that's Paul, that thou shouldest know
his will, and see the just one, the
righteous one, and should hear the voice of
his mouth, and be his witnesses unto all
men of what thou hast seen and what
thou hast heard.
Now, somebody, if you're hostile, and I don't
think anybody's here hostile toward me, but if
you should be, somebody might say, Well, you
mean that you've seen visions and that you've
seen angels?
No, I've never seen an angel.
I'd like to, but I've never seen an
angel.
I'm talking about what your heart has seen
and what your ears have heard within you.
You have a set of ears and eyes
inside of you, and a heart that's just
as sensitive as your external eyes are sensitive
to the light of the sun.
Now, how this operates in time is found
in Acts.
Christ promised his people, When the Comforter comes,
he shall testify of me, and he also
shall bear witness.
In Mark 16, it says, The Lord was
received up into heaven, and sat on the
right hand of God.
And they went forth and preached everywhere, the
Lord working with them, confirming the word with
signs following.
Once I heard a great missionary explain this.
I heard a great missionary who had just
come back from China, that was before the
Communists took over and the work in China
was moving along, and he told in a
fast-moving, dramatic way of his experiences and
what God had done in China.
He said, The Lord working with them, confirming
the word, confirming the word all the way
through.
The Lord was confirming the word with signs
following.
By signs following I do not mean, for
in any sense of the word, I do
not mean the cheap trumpery that men and
women and hysterical and neurotic people drag in.
I mean God doing his great deeds in
the Holy Ghost.
When God converts a man, when God saves
a man, when God raises a man up
from the brink of death, when God changes
the mind of a politician or a ruler
so the Church is allowed in, and that
kind of wonderful miracle God is still doing
for his people.
Hebrews 2, salvation spoken by the Lord, confirmed
by the testimony of the Apostles, witnessed to
by the Holy Ghost in signs and wonders
and divers, miracles.
So that's quoting phrases from Hebrews 2.
Now, my dear friends, I believe, and I
don't hope that this will get across tonight,
that is, I don't think that this sounds
so radical and out in left field that
I don't suppose very many people will know
quite what I mean, though in a general
way you'll be sympathetic.
But do you know something?
I believe that if we were to become
Spirit-filled witnesses and realize that you have
just as much burden lying on you to
be a witness as Billy Graham has, or
Charles Kinney had, or as any other of
the more celebrated leaders have had, you have
that burden resting on you, and it's not
only an obligation, it's a wonderful, wonderful privilege.
Are you ashamed when you travel abroad to
say, I'm a Canadian?
Are you ashamed?
No, you're not ashamed.
If you are, you ought to be ashamed.
Am I ashamed, wherever I may be, to
say I'm an American?
No.
Americans do things I'm ashamed of, but the
human race does that.
But I'm not ashamed of my citizenship, and
I am not ashamed of being a Christian.
Not ashamed of being a Christian.
On the plane yesterday, coming up from New
York, I sat beside a man, a very
inquisitive fellow, asking me questions, and I answered
his questions, and we talked about books and
writings and publishers and so on.
He had studied physics and mathematics, and now
is with Prudential Life Insurance Company.
And we went on a while, and finally
I said to him, I'm a minister, would
you know it?
He said, no, I'd like that part.
He said, no, I wouldn't know it.
And then we began to talk about religion,
and then we began to talk about the
Lord converting people.
He was an elder in a certain church,
but if I had been a ham, I'd
have been a smoked ham, because he tried
to smoke me all the way up.
And I finally said to him, well, I
take religion seriously, and things of God seriously.
And before we were through, he even talked
on until we were getting through going through
customs.
And even after he'd waved to his friends
who were meeting him, some of his sisters
up here, he was still talking to me.
He said, we have a budget of $110
,000 in our church, and plenty of some
of it goes for missions.
I said, I'm ashamed of that.
And I told him about this church, $50
,000 last year for missions.
A lot of Alliance churches everywhere give as
much as 50 to 60 percent of their
total budget for missions.
He said, well, listen, when you have a
pastor who doesn't believe in missions, what do
you do?
I said, you laymen who know God, put
the hooks in him.
That's what he said.
I said, put the hooks in him.
He has no right to sit there.
He said, he sits down on our missionary
activities, sits down on it.
Well, the fellow is confused a little bit
and mixed up and rather smoky.
But brothers and sisters, witnessing is an easy
and wonderful thing.
And I didn't come right out and get
him born again, as some of my eager
brethren sometimes do in five minutes.
But when he left me, he left me
knowing he'd been talking to a Christian.
We shall be witnesses.
Qualified persons are the only persons that can
be witnesses.
They must have been chosen by the Lord,
they must know God's will, according to the
texts I've been reading, and they must have
seen and heard the Holy One, that is,
in the heart by experience.
Isn't there such a thing as knowing the
Lord Jesus by spiritual experience to a point
where he is as real to you as
your friends, as real as the experiences around
about you?
I think there is such a thing.
The real Christian witness must bear a twofold
witness to Christ.
He must, to the unconverted, bear the witness
that Christ is the true Savior and Lord,
and that he, the witness, has experienced this
truth for himself.
And to the Christian believers, he must witness
to the glory of the separated life, and
the reality of the victorious life, and the
certainty and possibility of the spiritual life.
To do this will require, of course, that
we exemplify the life we witness to.
It's a terrible thing to witness to Jesus
Christ and not be yourself right.
It's a terrible thing.
I was very closely related to the Christian
Businessmen's Committee.
You have something like it here also and
in Oshawa, where I spoke to them, and
in Stouffville.
This Christian Businessmen's Committee is composed not of
preachers but of laymen businessmen.
There was one very active man in that
group, a very active man, tremendously so.
But he was a notorious church splitter, a
notorious church splitter.
A man came to me one time and
said, Mr. Tozer, and I knew who he
was and knew he was a fine Christian.
He said, so-and-so, and he named
this man.
He said, he's cheated me out of even
$1,500.
You think I should do something about it,
I should sue him?
And I said, listen, Charlie, you've lost $1
,500 because a Christian is crooked.
But I said, now listen, you can sue
him and get your $1,500 back, but
it will be tried before a court of
law.
Unbelieving, cynical lawyers will smile while two Christians
have it out, hammer and tong before the
courts.
And I said, you can well afford to
lose $1,500 to keep your testimony clean.
He thanked me and went away.
Next Sunday his wife came to me crying.
You know what you would ordinarily expect.
You'd think, well, I don't get that for
a coat.
But instead of that, she came to me
with tears on her eyes, literally crying, and
said, Oh, how I thank you for the
advice given to Charlie.
Well, Charlie went right on.
Pretty soon he opened up an affair, what
do they call it, a division to buy
a property and then put streets down it
and lay it out in lots and so
on and sell it, build houses on it.
And he did that, and he must have
been making money hand in fist.
So one day he came to me and
said, Do you know that I'd like to
have an Alliance Church down here in this
section, Dalton?
He said, I'd like to have an Alliance
Church down here.
And he said here, and he laid out
his lots, what do they call the thing,
blueprint.
And he said, Now here, I'll give this
to the Christian Missionary Alliance if you'll build
a church on it.
Well, I wasn't in the church building business,
and so I said, All right, Charlie, I'll
take it to the board.
So I took it to the board, and
finally they took it to the district, and
they said, We'll build a church on it.
And now there's an Alliance Church on that
lot, in a new area where there are
thousands and tens of thousands of people who
were cow pasturing five years ago.
Now there's a city growing up there, and
an Alliance Church popped right in the middle
of it, waiting for customers, and they're coming.
Brother, if this man, he was a Christian
businessman and he witnessed, these brethren are trying
to do what I'm talking about and do
it in some measure.
If he'd gone into court and fought this
man, he'd have lost his testimony, he'd have
never been in the Alliance Church down there.
Now you say, What happened to the other
man?
He went bad, began to drink and die.
You handle that future, I won't do it.
I don't know where he is.
He went bad, drank and died.
But the man who didn't sue him is
going big yet over near Chicago.
I mention this to show you that this
is not theory, ladies and gentlemen, this is
not theory, this is reality.
If your Christian witness is going to mean
anything, you're going to have to live right
and exemplify the life you're talking about.
Moody told humorously of the man who staggered
down the street and recognized Moody.
He came up to him, wheezing back and
forth as if he was on a ship
deck in a storm, and grabbed Moody's hand
and said, Mr. Moody, I'm one of your
converts.
Moody said, You look like one of mine.
If God had converted you, you'd be walking
straight up instead of staggering.
He said, I must have made you a
convert because God never did.
He's right.
That fella's no witness.
What kind of witness could he give?
I am a convert to Christ.
A drunk man a convert to the Holy
Lord Jesus, who says he gives men a
witness?
No.
Well, we are ready to suffer.
What about it?
You see, we need the Blessed Holy Spirit,
and we need to witness.
But don't think for a second that you're
to be influenced by what I've said about
witnessing tonight and determine, Well, starting Monday I'll
be a witness.
It wasn't worked that way.
Peter tried that one time, and the Lord
said, No, tarry ye until ye be endued
with power from on high.
Then you'll be a witness, because only the
Holy Ghost can witness.
You can give your testimony, you can talk,
you can let him have you, and he
can clothe himself with you as he did
with Gideon, and you can testify and witness,
but it's the Holy Ghost in you, or
there's no witness at all.
So when I preach about the necessity for
Christians to be Spirit-filled Christians, it's not
a theory that I'm giving you, it is
not attempting to bring people into conformity to
a certain interpretation of Scripture.
It is an imperative that will not be
denied.
Every individual here should be a witness, a
testifier, somebody who goes to others and tells
them that the Lord is risen indeed and
has appeared unto Peter, and that that risen
Lord has converted you.
But you can't do it by yourself.
No books on how to win souls are
any good.
Don't buy them.
The Holy Ghost is the best soul-winner
there is in all the wide world.
And if he comes in and takes over,
he'll make you want to tell what has
happened to you, and you shall receive power.
Now, the question is, have we endured?
I don't think so, in any large measure,
nor in very many people, because if we
had received power in the spirit of power
rested upon us, we would be witnesses.
We would feel within us an urge, an
urge to tell it.
Somebody wants to know how you'll get called
to preach.
I suppose it varies, but the psychological processes
vary with different men.
But after I got converted and sought the
Lord, I began to feel a sense of
a desire to witness so powerful and strong
that I could have no more resisted it
than I could have resisted God in combat.
I had to preach.
It was a necessity laid upon me.
Some people say to me, Why don't you
retire?
Are you going to retire?
Not as long as I can stand up
and talk, because the woe of God is
on my soul.
I must tell people, I must tell people.
Well, I am through for this evening, and
I've simply given to you a little word
about the necessity for individual witnesses to witness
to Christ, to witness in the world in
which you live, and shown you that until
the Holy Spirit has control of your life
and fills your being, you can't be an
effective witness.
You draw your own conclusions.
Should you or should you not be a
spiritual Christian?
The only answer is, Yes, my God, I
should be.
I should be a spiritual Christian.
This book has hardly any songs in it
at all about the Holy Spirit, but there
is one here, or two or three, or
half a dozen, I guess.
But I think that I want to do
this.
I enjoy hearing this young lady sing so
much, that I want to ask her if
she won't come up and sing for us.
What number did I say?
329.
And we'll just sit quietly while she sings
this beautiful number, 329.
Maybe, maybe Brother Newell will rise and we'll
all sing together the last stanza, after she's
sung the first three.