Beginning with verse fourteen and reading to verse
twenty-one.
But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted
up his voice and said unto them, Ye
men of Judea, and all that dwell at
Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken
to my words.
For these are not drunken, as ye suppose,
seeing it is but the third hour of
the day.
But this is that which was spoken by
the prophet Joel.
And here's what was spoken.
It shall come to pass in the last
days, saith God, I will pour out of
my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons
and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young
men shall see visions, and your old men
shall dream dreams.
And on my servants and on my handmaidens
I will pour out in those days of
my spirit, and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in heaven above
and signs in the earth beneath, with blood
and fire and vapor of smoke.
The sun shall be turned into darkness and
the moon into blood before that great and
notable day of the Lord come.
And it shall come to pass that whosoever
shall call on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.
Let's pray.
Dear Lord, we are to hear and to
speak.
Thy servant is not worthy to speak, nor
the hearers to hear.
We appeal to thee, the God of all
grace, be gracious to us, we pray.
Be, O be, thy loving Spirit into every
troubled breast.
O Spirit of the Father and of the
Son, do thou gather our thoughts in, enable
us to think thy thoughts after thee, say
to us what we should hear, eliminate what
we should not, reduce the human element to
a minimum, and let us hear the divine
voice with maximum efficiency.
Let grace be upon us for Christ's sake.
Now, I have broken into the narrative here.
Peter used the term, the expression, the last
days.
It shall come to pass in the last
days.
And the last days is a technical term
covering a period from Jesus' first coming to
his second coming.
We're in the last days.
We've been in that period of the last
days since Christ came.
That's what is meant here.
And before that period of the last days
ends, there shall be a great demonstration of
the divine wrath, blood and fire and vapor
of smoke and signs in the sun and
the moon.
But during this entire period, from that first
historic outpouring to the second coming of the
Lord, during that entire period, these are the
words that cover it.
I will pour out my spirit.
And this is not a once-done act,
but a continuous process.
He said, rivers of living water.
And a river, as it flows, is not
a once-done thing.
It is a continuous thing.
Now, God wills what I have called the
perpetuation of Pentecost.
And that's my topic tonight.
The perpetuation of Pentecost.
Not a repetition of Pentecost, but a perpetuation
of Pentecost.
The little lad that was born tonight into
the wreath home at 630 was born once.
Now, if he's a good, healthy boy, as
we think he is, his life will be
perpetuated for a normal span.
His birth will not be repeated, but it
will be perpetuated.
And so when the Holy Ghost began to
be poured out at Pentecost, he did that
which he continues to do, not by repetition,
but by perpetuation.
And it is God's will that his, this
outpouring, should be perpetuated among companies of believers.
Now, what God wills here tonight is that
not that there should be a repetition of
Pentecost, but that the conditions of Pentecost should
be met by us, in order that Pentecostal
power may be perpetuated in our midst.
And as I have said at some other
time, I don't remember which message, but I
have said that God has given us power,
and power means ability to do, to make
service effective, to make it productive and fruit
-bearing.
Now, there's a great deal of secret disappointment
among the Lord's people.
There's no question about that.
Secret disappointment because of lack of ability to
do.
We work without getting anything done, and labor
without results, and children are brought to the
birth and there's not strength to deliver, a
most distressing situation.
And this is the sad condition almost everywhere.
It is the sad condition almost everywhere among
the Evangelical Christians.
The children are brought to the birth, but
there is not strength to deliver.
Now, it is God's will that this flowing
tide of power should be here, in order
that we might know deliverance from Satan's power.
God's people are being cuffed and pushed and
hindered and mocked and stopped dead in their
tracks almost everywhere.
And our very prayers and our efforts only
tighten things up.
You remember in the Old Testament when God
began to pour out his great miracles on
the land of Egypt and Moses began to
demand deliverance from Pharaoh, it only made it
worse.
Instead of making it better, it made it
worse.
They began to put greater pressure on than
they had before, Pharaoh did.
And the more miracles and the more insistence
that Moses had that they should get out,
the tougher the man Pharaoh became.
And I want you to know that we
are dealing with another Pharaoh by the name
of the devil.
And the devil never bothers a quiescent and
passive Christian.
A Christian that has accepted the status quo
built for him by the devil.
The devil doesn't bother him particularly, but as
soon as Christians begin to move a little
and arouse themselves and say, listen, we've drugged
in this mountain long enough, it's time that
we should get up.
Then we run into fierce and violent opposition
from the devil.
And so that your prayers will often make
things worse.
Now hear me, my brother.
Your prayers will often make things worse.
Because, as it used to say in war
times, things will get worse before they get
better.
Just as the insistent prayers of Moses made
things worse until he finally got delivered, he
went to God and he said, now listen,
God, I have gone to Pharaoh and I
have prayed to thee, and nothing has happened
up to now.
That was in the fifth chapter.
Nothing has happened up to now.
He said, we're worse off now than we
were before.
This was Moses talking to God.
And he said, For since I came to
Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath
done evil to this people, neither hast thou
delivered thy people at all.
At all, he said.
And then the Lord said unto Moses, Now,
now shalt thou see what I will do
to Pharaoh.
For with a strong hand shall he let
them go, and with a strong hand shall
he drive them out of his land.
Then God spoke unto Moses and said, I
am Jehovah.
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and
unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty.
But by their name Jehovah I was not
known.
But now I have heard the groaning of
the children of Israel.
Wherefore, say unto the children of Israel, I
am Jehovah, and I will bring you out
from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
Now, that pattern is repeated wherever God's people
begin to pray.
It is quite widely known by the praying
people of God that when they begin to
urge God for something, things get worse instead
of getting better.
And one of the reasons for this is
that the Spirit has not flowed in so
as to deliver us.
But it is the will of God that
we should not be cuffed about and pushed
about and hindered.
Remember that if you get kicked around by
the devil, it's your own fault.
You don't need to be.
For the Lord is risen indeed, and he
has all authority in heaven and in earth,
and he is the one person of whom
the devil is afraid.
The devil isn't afraid of you and your
whole family.
The devil isn't afraid of the whole Canadian
army.
He isn't afraid of all in the U
.S. Navy.
He isn't afraid of all the powers of
the West or the East.
The devil isn't afraid of people at all.
But there is one man that he trembles
before, and that is the man Christ Jesus,
whom God hath anointed and given him a
name that is above every name.
And the devil is afraid of him, all
right.
And he turns pale when he sees that
mighty, mighty man rise and move toward him.
So we're not to be victims.
We're not to be cuffed about.
You say, if praying makes things worse than
I shall not pray.
Well, if you don't pray, you're already bound
and handcuffed and tied and boxed in and
hermetically sealed.
And it's when you begin to pray that
God Almighty begins to move.
And when he begins to move by the
flowing tide of power, then things begin to
break.
Now, our very prayers, I say, sometimes tighten
things for us.
And yet, he said, that there should be
power.
Ye shall receive ability to do.
You, you shall.
And it's the will of God that this
Church should not be on the verge of
blessing, but that it should be in the
tide of blessing.
It's the will of God that this Church
should not be timidly praying for something and
then backing away, but pushing and praying on
until there's a breakthrough and things get better
instead of worse.
Now, the flowing tide of power, I want
to talk about it a little bit.
It rises and accumulates and carries over.
Do you know what the average Sunday services
are?
They're simply getting a restoration from the backsliding
and coldness of the week.
That's the way we do it.
We regain territory last lost during the week.
During the week, starting about Monday noon, the
average Church member begins to go backward a
little.
He's not conscious of it, maybe, but he's
losing out a bit.
He's busy and maybe he's not sinning, but
he's losing a little.
Then if he's a good fellow, he's at
prayer meeting Wednesday, and that's a little blood
transfusion that helps him a little bit.
But by Saturday night, he's bushed again, spiritually.
So he thanks God for Sunday, and so
do I thank God for Sunday, because if
you're down, thank God for anything that gets
you up.
But the people of God should not live
this zigzag life, spending from Monday morning to
Saturday night holding their own or maybe stepping
back a little, and then using Sunday as
a means of getting back up again and
then going through the old rigmarole all the
time.
Back a little, up a little.
They used to have a funny question they'd
ask if a frog in a well hopped
up one hop and fell back two hops
and then hopped up two hops and fell
back one hop, how long would it take
him to get out?
And you can make that as complicated as
you want, and the poor frog is in
the well when it's all over, because he
hops up two and hops and falls back
one.
And the church is like that.
We have a revival campaign.
We bring somebody in from Ireland or from
somewhere else, and everybody goes all out.
And we have a wonderful time, so we
think.
And everybody is blessed during that time, and
then he goes.
And when he is gone, we slowly move
backwards.
Some churches just literally carry on like that.
They get a blood transfusion three times a
year.
They call it a revival meeting.
I heard of one man who wired the
evangelist.
He said, Hurry, hurry, come immediately, the revival
has broken out.
And he wired back, Hold it until I
arrive.
Well, this is going on all the time,
and the people of God are paying for
their little revivals and then backsliding again in
a mild kind of way.
Why is this?
It is because we don't know what is
meant here when the Lord says, I will
pour out my spirit during this period, and
I will perpetuate the miracle and wonder of
Pentecost, and the flowing tide of power shall
continue during the long period between Pentecost and
the second coming of Christ.
Now, that's the business and purpose of God,
that we should as a people know this
power.
Christians without this flowing tide of power are
no more what Christians ought to be than
a fish is without water.
A fish without water is helpless and a
hopeless thing.
And the children of God without this flowing
tide of Pentecostal power were a hopeless bunch,
too.
But the terrible thing about it is that
we have managed somehow to compromise this and
to rationalize it and think our way out
of it so that the average evangelical church
has found a way to live in the
dust and the sand without the flowing tide
of power.
But it's not the will of God.
God says that his people, when they meet
together, his people, when they meet in one
place in one accord, they should know this
perpetuation, this continuous flow of the tide of
power.
But what is the difference?
Well, I believe that sinners will be caught
when the presence of God is nearer.
See, Christianity is weak and pale and anemic
because we're putting hot evangelism on without having
the tide of power that makes evangelism effective.
I mean that our churches every Sunday night
we preach to sinners.
And the people who sit around, 95 percent
of them are in desperate, critical need of
a revival to bring them up, to make
out of them what they ought to be
in order they're good examples for the new
converts that are made.
Remember another thing, we cannot convert a man
to God.
Nobody can do it.
Not all of the preachers in the world
can do it.
Only the Holy Ghost can convert a man
to himself.
And if the Spirit of God is not
flowing in a church, we only convert men
to our own backsliding.
Two sick people, chronically sick, will have sick
children.
And a sick church, chronically sick, will have
sick converts.
And we'll count the numbers and take their
offering and send in our report and feel
we've done God's service.
All we've done is make cross lights to
a church that doesn't know the flowing tide
of power.
Sinners will be caught.
They'll come normally and naturally.
And they will be caught by the Holy
Ghost.
When he has come, he will convict the
world of sin and righteousness and judgment.
It's as normal for the Holy Ghost when
he's in a neighborhood, when he is in
a congregation of people.
It's normal for the Holy Spirit to lay
hold on sinners.
The church where I was pastor, often we
wouldn't give an evening service invitation, but they
would come and say, I want to be
baptized.
Why?
When were you converted?
And we find that they had been under
such conviction of God that they went somewhere
and got converted in their own bedroom or
somewhere during the week or sent somebody home.
They'd found God and gave a sound, vivid
testimony to conversion.
The Holy Ghost, whenever he is free in
a church, he lays hold of one here
and he lays hold of one there and
he gets hold of this young fellow here
and this young lady here, and he wins
them to himself.
The Holy Ghost can do this and only
he can do it.
And you get vigorous converts when there is
a flowing tide of spiritual power in the
church.
You get vigorous and healthy converts.
Another thing he does is give supernatural radiance.
Have you noticed that the Gospels are in
the minor key and the Book of Acts
in the major key?
I mean by that that there is a
difference in mood between the Gospels and the
Acts.
The Book of Acts is a radiant book.
Its mood is the mood of joyous victory,
where the Gospels are not.
They are looking forward to the cross, they
are looking forward to being scattered abroad, they
are looking forward to the Lord being taken
from them, they are always looking forward to
the shadows and the tomb.
But after the Gospels are over and the
Book of Acts has come, they are looking
backward to the tomb, and the victory is
now theirs.
The Holy Ghost has come and he has
brought to them the silver waters of joy.
And so the key is now in the
major, and they sing with great joy.
There is no longer the shadow of impending
death across their hearts, but they rejoice, people.
You will find in the Book of Acts
that the Spirit of God made men generous.
There in the early chapters, they had an
impulse of generosity.
They are people of God that have to
be milked, that have to be argued into
giving, that have to be squeezed to give.
I was in a convention one time, in
the last convention, where a pastor was trying
to take an offering.
And I was the evangelist, or the preacher,
and he got up to take his offering.
And he said, Now it is your duty
to give.
He said, You remember that you come here
to church and you owe this church something,
and so it was you owe this, and
it's your duty to do this.
And I said to myself inside, I didn't
want to hurt him, I hope he learned.
But I said, This is no way to
take offerings, it's no way to approach the
people of God at all.
Anybody come to me and look me in
the eye and solemnly tell me what my
duty is, you won't get any cooperation from
me at all.
Because there's something better than duty, ladies and
gentlemen.
There is such a thing as an impulse
of joyous generosity.
And the Holy Ghost comes on a man,
he doesn't have to have somebody read him
a lecture on his ethical duties.
He does what he does because he's happy
to do it, and he's a pleasure to
do it.
The Christian Missionary Alliance has always been great
missionary people, great missionary givers, but outside of
that one time, I never heard anybody get
up and lecture on our duties.
Why, my brother, it's a privilege, a great
privilege to serve God.
It's a privilege to give of our money,
it's a privilege to give and to serve
and to sacrifice.
But you'll never know that until the Spirit
of God teaches it to you.
So they brought everything they had and they
threw it down at the apostles' feet.
Then the Holy Spirit gives a certain heavenly
insignia.
Back in Israel, it was the cloud and
fire that stood over.
There was the cloud and the fire.
I get out among a great many Christians,
a great many Christian groups everywhere, and I
do my best, I try.
Well, I'll tell you, putting live chickens under
dead hens never makes the hen live, but
it kills the chicks.
And there's an awful lot of preaching good,
live truth among people that are so dead
that the truth dies before the meeting's over.
But there's something wonderful and marvelous about when
there's a flowing tide of power in the
Church.
You don't have to do so much advertising.
I think it's all right to tell the
people we're here, and I've always done it,
and I think it's right we should do
it.
But to get PR men, you know, public
relation men, to give a good image to
the public.
Let the public have a good image of
you.
Brother, if you were right, the Holy Ghost
would see that the world gets the image,
the right image.
When the Spirit came at Pentecost, an old
public relation man got up and started his
double talk.
But one blunt man got up and said,
You know what this is?
This is that that was prophesied by the
Apostle, by the Prophet Joel.
And then the Spirit of God laid hold
on men, and the insignia was on them,
the mark of the Spirit of God.
I have prayed and earnestly prayed, and I
believe in some major, God has heard it,
that when I preach, I want heaven to
be sort of open so that people are
conscious they're not listening to a man only
but that there's a little something of overtone
of heaven about it.
And I wouldn't want to preach five minutes
or anywhere in the world any time unless
I could know that the Blessed Holy Ghost
was giving a bit of that evidence, that
proof of his presence.
Now, how can we cooperate with him in
this as a people?
Well, first of all, we've got to put
away all doubts.
Cold reason and past defeats and twisted theology
and all these things, we've got to put
them away.
Faith will receive.
And so we've got to have faith.
If we could just sort of turn over
in our poor bed and try new sides
once.
But we're in the rut pretty much.
Toronto's in the rut.
We know what we're going to find when
we get to church.
We know what we're going to hear.
We know about the mood that people are
going to be, about 68 Fahrenheit.
And we know what it's going to be
like.
A little low, a little chilly, but bearable.
And so we judge what is to be
by what is, and we judge what is
by what was, and so we're caught and
we never go on.
We've got to be exercising some faith.
Definitely exercising some faith and daring to believe
that God is going to do something.
But you say it's hard to get everybody
in that mood.
Well, let me reassure you that a revival
does not wait for all the people to
get in the mood of believing.
A certain number, God will honor the faith
of numbers.
I don't suppose ever in the history of
the Church has there been a time when
everybody, unless it was at Pentecost, when they
were all together in one place, and a
limited number of them, 120.
But as the Church wore on and time
went on, this history of God's working down
the centuries would seem to indicate that if
he can get a core, the word nucleus,
I don't like it, but we use it
now.
If God can get a nucleus of people,
he will honor that nucleus, that core of
people, and will bless others for their sakes.
Then I would say we must put away
all divisions in the body.
Rifts in the body prevent the perpetuation and
the flowing tide of power.
There must be unity of many minds, but
not on all things, only on the things
that matter.
Remember that.
The Spirit of God does not require us
to be all trimmed down until we look
like so many hundred cookies cut out with
the same cookie cutter.
We can have our individuality and our differences,
but as long as we agree where it
matters, the Holy Spirit accepts that as unity.
You know it.
You know that.
Harmony, unity, is identity at points of contact.
And where the people of God meet and
where there is moral and spiritual contact, if
we are one there, then the blessed Holy
Ghost comes in power.
We may differ on other things.
He does not require that we all like
the same colors, that we all like the
same food, that we all enjoy the same
songs.
He does not require that we all have
the same tastes, but he does require that
in Christ we all want the same thing,
that we all serve the same Lord, and
that there is no gaps, no gaps that
divide.
If there were a river flowing, but there
were places in the river where there was
no water, what kind of river would it
be?
All the fish would die as one lump
of water went along before the other lump
arrived.
Rivers have to be continuous and perpetual.
So if the people of God are divided,
there can be no power.
Then we are to stir up our desires.
We have as much as we desire.
I think that we have some, but we
have only as much as we really desire.
Then we must begin to expect and work
along with the Holy Ghost.
That's what the company of Christians can do.
But what about the individual?
What shall we do?
Any company of Christians is an aggregation of
individuals.
And as I have said before in other
contexts, that the company will only be what
the individuals are that make up the company.
Any choir director knows that his choir will
be what the individuals that make up the
choir, what they are.
And if you take a hundred people without
any voice, the fact that there are a
hundred of them won't enable them to sing.
They've got to have a voice.
And if you have fifty out of the
hundred that have no voice or bad voices,
and the greater the number of bad voices,
the worse the choir.
The greater the number of good voices, the
better.
It's the individual voices that make the choir.
And it's the individual Christians that make the
company.
And it's the individuals baptized and anointed and
filled and flowing in this tide of power
that gives tone and spirit and power to
a company, to a congregation.
And what God will do for this church
depends upon what he can do for the
individuals that make it up.
Now, God waits expectantly, and sometimes at any
rate, if one person, if one person breaks
through, if one person meets God's conditions and
breaks through, it's encouragement to other persons.
This often happens.
It's great encouragement to other people.
So God waits for us, and he waits
for us to expect.
And then God waits expectantly for us to
expect.
And what is this all?
It's a sudden baptism of the loving nearness
of Christ instantaneously bestowed upon a congregation.
It raises the level of that congregation.
It raises the temperature of it.
It raises the moral tone of it.
It raises the emotional tone of it.
And it changes it to something more wonderful,
nearer to God and nearer to the heart
of God.
There isn't anything more distressing than to hear
a bunch of half-dead Christians singing, Fill
me now, fill me now.
Jesus, come, fill me now, fill me now.
I've been around the church now, it seems
to me, for a hundred years, and I
have never known anybody yet ever got blessed
singing that song.
We still sing it, you know.
We just drone through it.
We say, Oh God, forgive us, we're miserable.
Fill me now, fill me now.
Well, we can sing that song, and others
like it, but it's pathetic, really, pathetic.
Because there's no faith there, no expectation there.
If he ever did it, we'd have to
stop singing it.
We're not going to stop singing it.
We're going to keep complaining to God that
we'd like to be filled, but we wouldn't
be filled.
If the Lord would come and say, Now
listen, Deacon Jones, you have been singing now
for 23 years come this Easter.
You have been singing, Fill me now, fill
me now.
This morning I'm going to fill you.
Thank you, Lord, you're going to fill me.
But, Deacon, there are conditions to be met.
You're carnal.
I'm what?
You're carnal.
You're proud of your position in the church.
You're a dictator.
You make it tough for the pastor.
You're like the Mr. Chairman of business here
and there.
You're a boss.
You've got to get rid of that and
humble yourself.
You've been praying, Fill me now, for 23
years now I've come.
I'm going to fill you, but you're going
to have to get rid of that.
Another thing, you snap at your wife.
You grumble at the toaster's bunch.
You've got to get rid of that.
You've got to go home and tell honey
that you're sorry that you've been praying, Fill
me now, for 23 years and living like
a grouchy bear.
Deacon Jones begins to reconsider.
He says, Excuse me, Lord, I was just
singing.
I didn't really mean it because I'm not
going to confess to my wife that I
haven't been living right.
And I am not going to be run
over by any board.
I was put in there by the people.
I was trusted.
They trusted me and elected me and I'm
going to stand up for my rights.
And God walks sadly away and the old
deacon goes back to his off-key singing
of Fill me now, fill me now every
Sunday night.
Another 23 years of his health holds out.
He'll sing that same song and he'll never
be filled because he will not meet God's
condition.
I've said and I repeat, nobody was ever
filled gradually and nobody was ever filled who
didn't know it.
But our trouble here is unbelief.
People come to me and say, Mr. Toaster,
I have put myself on the altar.
What shall I do?
They write me and they come to me.
What shall I do?
Well, unbelief is a chronic thing, a chronic
thing.
It's like anemia.
You've got it and you don't know you've
got it.
It's there.
And unbelief is always ready to read biography
and believe that God filled men with the
Holy Ghost back, say, in Luther's day or
Wesley's day, some other day but not now.
They believe that the Lord filled the Moravians
with the Holy Ghost or the Methodists, somebody
else but not us, somewhere else but not
here, some other time but not now.
That's unbelief, kind of respectable unbelief, but it's
unbelief nevertheless.
Dear man and woman, when God has all
of you and there's no more fighting and
there's no more resisting and no more wanting
your own way and there's perfect willingness to
confess where confession is necessary, make restitution where
restitution is necessary, straighten things out where you
need to straighten them out, when you arrive
at that place in utter humility before God,
then you must exercise the belief that anything
God ever did for anybody, he'll do for
you.
That anything God ever did any time, he'll
do now.
And that anything God ever did anywhere, he'll
do here.
Now, how many of you are in an
optimistic, expectant mood?
I venture not many.
Because you see, the mood of the reticence,
the mood of what we have seen, we
don't expect anything better and we really don't
want anything better because the cost is too
high.
It's going to cost you something, really cost
you something.
Occasionally there are, few are here and there
throughout the country.
And as I've said, denominational men, one after
the other.
Last week I told me in Philadelphia about
it, not only the men I mentioned here,
but others I didn't, that God is meeting
them one at a time.
I yearn over you, as a mother over
her children, as a father over his family,
that the Holy
Spirit is present and he's here and there's
no repetition of Pentecost needed.
There is a perpetuation of Pentecost.
The carrying on of the flowing tide of
power which came back there and has never
left the earth.
What about it?
Are you a seeker, thirsty, thirster, hungry, longing
after God?
You are.
It shall come to pass in the last
days, those are these days, that I will
pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.
Pouring out is a continuous pouring out.
Wherever he meets anybody, finds anybody that meets
his conditions and dares to be with him.
Oh, that this congregation might know this, that
we might play less and eat less and
fool less and believe more and pray more.
We'd be more of a church and less
of a social organization.
Is that what your heart wants, what mine
wants?
Easy to slip into a social organization that
keeps itself up, frantically flapping its little wings
in banquets and all the rest.
I say they're all right occasionally, but some
churches just have to have them or they'd
fall apart.
The rule is if you need them, they're
doing you harm.
If you don't need them, you can have
them, they won't harm you.
We keep our church together by flapping our
tiny featherless wings and announcing we do this
Thursday, we do this Wednesday, we do this
Tuesday, we do this Monday, we do this
at four o'clock, we do this at
five o'clock, and all the time we're
flapping our little featherless wings.
Oh, brethren, that we might know the power
of the Holy Ghost coming upon us, that
we might be a Spirit-filled church.
Have I got anybody on my side on
this?
Are you with me on this?
That we might know what this is.
It doesn't make fools of you.
It doesn't make you act weird and queer.
It doesn't make you climb a tent pole.
It lets you into a tide of power.
It puts you where a fish is put
when he's thrown back into the river.
You're in your environment then.
The Spirit of God is moving and working
from class to class, from one group to
another group, from pastor to people, from people
to pastor, from deacon to elder.
He moves and flows, and instead of trying
so hard, we're getting more done.
Oh, our Lord Jesus, we've entered into what
men call Holy Week, and we're going to
be thinking this week about thy suffering and
thy death.
The next Lord's Day, we're going to celebrate
thy resurrection.
Oh, blessed Lord Jesus, we thank thee of
all that is past, and while we may
commemorate it now, it doesn't repeat.
It's not repeated.
Thou art not going to die Friday, nor
rise Sunday, nor send the Holy Ghost 50
days later.
All that's history and done.
We're the beneficiaries of it all if we
only dared believe it.
Help us to believe it, O Lord, and
forgive us for doubting.
We are the recipients of all that it
cost thee, and all that thou didst bring
by death and suffering and tears and groans
and sweat, and by resurrection and by ascension
to the Father's right hand.
We are the heirs of the ages.
Upon us the ages have converged.
We, O Lord, are richer, richer than angels.
Thou didst do this not for angels, but
for men.
We are thy church, Lord.
We are a people set aside here that
have met in this corner, in this building,
which thou hast graciously provided for us.
Here we are, Lord.
We're waiting, Lord.
We're expectant, Lord.
We need help, Lord.
O Lord, we pray thee, put thy arms
about us and squeeze us together so tight
that there be no pockets between us, no
non-conducting elements that ground or hinder the
power from flowing.
Let it be this week, let it be
on over Easter, let it be for the
days ahead.
We beseech thee, O Lord.
Let one after another of us, we pray,
O Lord, find a secret place in their
wake with our open Bible until our vessels
are clean and empty and we are waiting
and believing and that we believe that one
after the other thou will give power.
And we're looking forward, Lord Jesus, to that
moment when there shall be a sudden nearness
of the Savior instantaneously bestowed, lovingly bestowed upon
a thirsty people.
Save us, we pray thee, from the cheap
pattern of the worldly churches.
Bring us back to Calvary, back to Pentecost,
back to all that they meant and mean
and have now perpetuated for us.
O blessed Lord Jesus, amen.