...passage, when the day of Pentecost was fully
come, they were all with one accord in
one place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven
as of a rushing, mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like
as of fire, and it sat upon each
of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy
Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues
as the Spirit gave them others.
And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout
men, out of every nation under heaven.
Now, when this was noise abroad, the mouths
who came together, and were confounded, because every
man heard them speak in his own language,
and they were all amazed and marveled, saying
one to another, Behold, are not all these
which speak Galilean?
How here we every man in his own
tongue, wherein we were born, and it named
seventeen different languages.
And they were all amazed and were in
doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?
And some said, These are full of new
wine.
There were always the mockers present.
These are full of new wine.
But the seventeen people, the seventeen languages said,
We do hear them speak in our language
the wonderful works of God.
Now tonight, I don't know, but what this
will be, probably the most controversial of the
messages that I bring, though my purpose is
not to be controversial, but to be helpful,
is that I find you can't please everybody,
that some say you go too far, and
some say you don't go far enough.
And very few are ready to pat your
little head and say, Well, I think you're
about hit it.
Mostly, we're either too far or not far
enough.
So because you can't please everybody, I compromise
by trying to please nobody, but trying to
get the truth out and trust that the
Spirit of God will apply it and that
the hungry sheep will come to the pasture
field.
Now tonight, here's what I want to do.
I want to try to discover the abiding
elements in Pentecost, what came and stayed and
what came and went, because I'd like you
to know this, and I want you to
take this with you and remember it, and
if you had any occasion to, you could
quote it.
I don't mean to leave the impression that
you're going around quoting me, but if you
ever had occasion to, it's all right to
quote it, because I won't say anything that
I have to back out on, or if
I do, I'll gracefully back out.
But this I won't back out on.
I do not believe in a repetition of
Pentecost, but I believe in a perpetuation of
Pentecost.
There's a vast difference there, my brother.
I do not believe that Pentecost is to
be repeated, but I believe it's to be
perpetuated.
Now that doesn't contradict anything else I've said.
I believe that Pentecost did not come and
go, but Pentecost came and stayed.
And if we'd only get a hold of
that, that Pentecost came and stayed, and that
you and I are living in the midst
of it if we only knew it.
And would only do something about it.
And I want to discover what stayed and
what went.
Some things went and some things stayed.
What were they?
Well, it's true here, as it's true of
all spiritual, or at least all religious experience,
there are elements that were external, and so
were variable.
God doesn't care very much for the external.
Now, we ought to get a hold of
that.
We ought to let the Holy Ghost teach
us that, that God doesn't care very much
for the external.
So the external, it may be variable.
Then there are the elements which are internal
and of the Spirit, and so they are
permanent, and they're always about the same.
Then there are elements which are incidental, and
so of relative importance.
I wouldn't say they're not important, but I
say that they're not critically important.
Then there are elements that are fundamental, and
so of vital and eternal importance.
Now, I read the historic facts.
What did happen there that day in that
upper room there in Jerusalem?
Well, they were sitting around.
It says they were sitting.
I suppose they'd gotten off their knees, and
there were about 120.
I've always wondered why, when the Spirit of
God moved Luke to tell you the number
of people there, he gave an approximate figure.
He said about 120.
That could have been 119 or 122, but
he said about 120.
While they were there, suddenly there was a
sound in the room as of a rushing
mighty wind.
It didn't say that a rushing wind went
through there, blowing everything.
A whirlwind, nothing like that happened.
It said there was a sound as of
a rushing mighty wind.
Did you ever hear a sound that you
got the impression that there was a great
wind blowing somewhere?
That's in nature.
That's what it means.
It means it was like a rushing mighty
wind, the sound of it.
And then while they were wondering what it
was, suddenly there appeared a great cloud of
fire, and it divided up into little bits
and sat upon the forehead of each one
present.
This fire was a divine kind of presence,
and it divided up and sat upon the
forehead of each of them.
It says tongues of fire.
You light a candle and you will see
that it takes the shape of a tiny
tongue, broad at the bottom and tapering up.
That's all it means.
It hasn't any reference whatsoever to language.
It says that the fire sat upon their
foreheads.
Now, that's about all I could except, of
course, they began to speak in other languages,
and the people heard them speak in these
languages.
Now, what can't be repeated?
What happened there that can never be repeated?
Well, let me give you some facts.
First, there was the physical presence of all
the Church together in one place.
That could be there because there were only
about 120 Christians, but it never could be
after that, because that day there were 3
,000 more Christians born, and at another time
there were about 5,000 Christians born.
That made 8,000, and I'm sure they
had no place in Jerusalem that would have
seated or even housed 8,000 people.
As the gospel went from day to day,
the Lord added daily to the Church such
as could be saved, so that finally it
got out of hand and the number of
Christians became so large that no auditorium anywhere
would have housed them, no street corner, no
open field, no beach, as our Lord sometimes
spoke from the book.
No place could they have gotten together.
You hear a word in our time, ecumenical
and ecumenicity.
Well, now, don't get scared and run when
you hear these big words.
Preachers like to toss them around because it
gives the impression they're very learned.
But ecumenical only means universal.
It means all over the world, and the
ecumenical Church just means all the Christians that
there are, or as it used to mean,
the representative of all the Christians that there
are.
So an ecumenical council of Christians would be
either all the Christians there are in the
world, or at least official representatives of all
the Christians there are in the world.
Well, you could have that, I suppose.
I don't think it would ever be, but
you might envision a gathering of people where
there were representatives from all the churches all
over the world.
Even that would create such a crowd.
There isn't a place in the whole world
that would house them.
So the physical presence of all Christians together
in one place never was repeated, that I
know of, again.
They went on Solomon's port, but there was
only a small number of them, because when
those words were spoken, there were running up
into the thousands of Christians, and you couldn't
get thousands of them on Solomon's port, so
that merely meant some of them were there.
Then that was one thing that happened, it
never can be repeated again, and as far
as my knowledge of history goes, the sound
from heaven was never repeated again.
That is, I have not read anywhere among
the Methodists, among the Moravians, among the Presbyterians
or Anglicans, nowhere have I read of any
gathering of Christians where there was a sound
as of a Russian mighty wind.
I have heard that when Moody called the
Christians together, took them out under the pine
trees out in the eastern part of the
United States, kept them there several days and
nothing happened.
Then one day he got up before them
and said, now the meeting closes tomorrow, and
we can't go home without being filled with
the Holy Ghost.
So he said, let's go up and try
it once more and wait on God.
They went up among the pine trees and
the mighty Holy Ghost came down on them.
They went back that evening or the next
morning and took trains in all directions, and
the historian says that everywhere they went, they
went like Samson's foxes going through the fields
setting fire every place they went.
The Holy Ghost had come, but he had
not come with a sound of a wind,
so that wasn't repeated.
And then I don't read anywhere in Christian
history where there was the appearance of a
great body of fire.
You can get some Christians who are just
a little bit off-beam, you can get
them to say anything you know, but I'm
talking about trustworthy and reputable Christians who would
not overstate things.
I don't know any place that there was
the appearance of a great body of fire
dividing up on the foreheads of the people.
And I don't read anywhere else at any
other time that everybody present began to speak
in a language that everybody else could understand
without an interpreter, and yet that's exactly what
happened here.
And I don't read any place where, without
an interpreter, seventeen different people could hear these
people speak and all know what they were
talking about.
So I say those are elements which obviously
never were repeated, because in every instance they
were external.
The sound from heaven was external.
The sight of the fire was external.
The speaking with languages was external, and the
hearing and the understanding, all was external, so
that they never repeated, and I suppose never
needed to be repeated.
Now right here, some of you won't like
that, but then as I've said, I'm going
to tell the truth and trust God and
hope for the best.
But now here's the logic of it, brother,
that if these things were necessary to the
Church and necessary to the perpetuation of whatever
took place there at Pentecost that was basic
and fundamental, then if it was necessary to
the Church's life and it was never repeated,
then the Church must have ceased to exist
the day she was born, or at least
ceased to exist the day that they died
who were present there, that about 120, so
that obviously these external things were not the
basic things.
They were there and they were present, but
they were external, they were incidental, they were
elements that belonged to that particular historic scene,
and there something was born, something came to
pass, something was given, a deposit was made,
something happened, and that that happened was internal
and heavenly and permanent and lasting.
Now what was it that happened that didn't
pass away, didn't pass away with the sound
of the wind, didn't pass away with the
sight of the fire on the forehead, didn't
pass away with the 17 languages being spoken
all at one time, or being understood at
least by 17 people of 17 languages?
What didn't pass away?
What is the eternal and abiding element in
Pentecost?
Well, in order to discover it, of course,
we have to go and find out what
was promised.
And he shall send you another comforter, said
Jesus, and he shall take the things of
mine and show them unto you.
Somebody was coming that could make Jesus Christ
real.
Do you know what happened when he came?
Here is what happened.
Peter leaped to his feet and said, Men
and brethren, these men are not drunk, but
something has happened, and here is what has
happened.
God has made this Jesus, whom he crucified,
Lord and Christ, and has set him at
his own right hand, and this which ye
now see and hear, this outpouring was shed
forth by the man at God's right hand,
that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
And then he said he will convict the
world.
I tell you the truth, John 16, he
will convict the world.
The presence of the Holy Ghost in showing
the Christians Christ and showing sinners their sin.
Then he said, Carry in the city of
Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from
on high.
As I tried to explain one or two
Sundays ago, power means ability to do.
Now, that's all it means.
You know, because the Greek word from which
our English comes, our English word dynamite comes,
some of our brethren try to make out
that the Holy Ghost is dynamite, forgetting that
they've got the thing upside down, that dynamite
was named after that Greek word and that
the Holy Ghost and the power of God
wasn't named after dynamite.
We ought to remember that.
Dynamite was discovered only less than 200 years
ago, but this Greek word from which we
get our word power goes way back to
the time of Christ.
Well, it means ability to do, that is
all.
It's just ability to do.
One man picks up a violin and he
gets nothing out of it but unconscionable squeaks
and impossible raucous sounds.
He hasn't got the ability to do.
Another man picks up the violin and he
is soon playing beautiful, rich melodies.
One man steps into the prize ring and
he can't even lift his hands.
And the other fellow walks in and he
has power to do.
And pretty soon the fellow who can't lift
his hand is sleeping peacefully on the floor.
The man who has ability to do, one
businessman, he can't run a peanut stand, he'd
go bankrupt if he tried even to sell
peanuts down on the corner.
He hasn't ability to do.
Incidentally, that describes me.
I would starve to death.
If God hadn't called me to preach, I'd
have starved to death years ago because I'm
no businessman at all, none whatsoever.
Anybody can cheat me, they can fine me.
And if I'm not protected by the law,
I have no business ability, ability to do.
There you have it.
One man can step up, open his mouth
and a song will come out.
I can step up and no song comes
out.
You know, nothing anybody want to hear.
So ability to do, that's what the word
means actually.
It means the dynamic ability to be able
to do what you go to do.
And ye shall receive ability to do.
It'll come on you.
If you're a soul winner, you'll have ability
to win souls.
If you're a preacher, he'll give you ability
to make the word plain.
Whatever you do in the name of God,
he gives you the ability to do.
And he gives you the ability to be
victorious in your life and to live right
and to behold Jesus and to live with
heaven in you.
It's ability to do.
Now those are the vital and essential and
eternal things that took place and that came
and stayed.
They came and stayed.
The wind and the fire and the appearance
and all that, never been repeated so far
as I know.
And all the Christians coming together in one
place, that couldn't be repeated now because they're
scattered all over the world.
You couldn't get them together.
But that the Comforter came and that he
came and filled them and that he came
and abode in them and that he came
to make Jesus real and that he came
to give them inward moral ability to do
right and inward ability to do God's work.
That stayed.
That's still here.
And if we don't have it, it's because
we've been mistaught, because we've been scared out
of it.
The teachers have scared us out of it.
And then some Christians have scared us away
from the Holy Spirit.
When I was a young fellow on the
farm in Pennsylvania, when they wanted to, when
they planted a field of corn and they
wanted to save the field from the crows,
they would shoot a crow.
It wasn't an easy task because they're pretty
wise, but they'd shoot a crow and then
they'd hang him by his heels in the
middle of the cornfield.
The point was this.
Now, this is a good field of corn,
but you see what happens to crows that
come into this cornfield?
And that was supposed to scare off all
the crows for miles around.
They were supposed to hold a conference and
say, look, there's a field of new planted
corn, but don't go near it.
I saw a dead crow over there.
Well, now that's exactly what Satan has done.
He's taken some fanatical, weird, wild-eyed Christian
that does things that he shouldn't do, and
he's hung him up in the middle of
God's cornfield and says, now, don't you go
near that doctrine about the Holy Spirit, because
if you do, you'll be acting like them.
I went, a fellow called me one time
to his home, wanted me to come over
and see if I could untangle his wife.
And I went over, and he said, now,
Brother Tozer, he said, I'll tell you, my
wife, he said things are pretty bad with
her.
He said, well, he said, Reverend, what would
you do if you'd wake up in the
middle of the night and your wife was
standing over on the floor in her nightgown
making a noise like a vacuum cleaner?
Well, I didn't know what to do with
the fellow, you know.
I didn't know what to do with him.
And I didn't know what to do with
her.
She just stood around and smiled.
She didn't give any demonstrations of the Hoover
Sweeper while I was there.
But because there has been a lot of
this weird stuff, why, God's children are frightened.
And as soon as you start to talk
about it, they start to run for cover.
They say, none of that for me.
I've seen dead crows out there in the
middle of the field.
I will not be frightened out of my
heritage.
I will not be scared out of my
birthright because somebody didn't know what to do
with it, birthright, or found something else that
wasn't a birthright.
I want all that God has for me.
Now, let me point out something here.
When Christ was born, many external things happened.
They weren't of ultimate or vital importance.
When Christ was born, the angels were notified,
and they came.
But he would have been born whether they
came or not.
When Christ came, the kings came from the
east.
But he was born whether kings came or
not.
When Christ came, he was born in a
manger, and there were all sorts of external
circumstances.
But there was one great vital fact that
never has been taken back.
He was born.
He did come into the world.
He became flesh to dwell among us.
He did come and take our human nature,
and the Word was made flesh to redeem
mankind on a cross.
That did take place, and it remains forever.
So these external things are not important.
It's the internal things that matter.
Thousands of people felt the saving power of
Christ who had never seen the angels, and
thousands felt his healing touch who had never
seen the wise men.
Now, this is the eternal meaning of Acts
2, that the comforters come, that deity is
in our midst, that God has given himself
to us.
The liquid essence of deity has been poured
out.
He called it, he has shed forth this
which ye now see and hear.
He has shed forth this.
Now, let me point out something to you
here, that unless we have an outpouring of
the Holy Spirit, if we continue to go
the way we have been going in fundamentalist
evangelical circles just a little while longer, the
fundamentalists will all be liberals, and most of
the liberals will be Unitarians, and there won't
be very much left but a few empty
buildings.
It is my opinion that what we need
is for God's children to realize that they
have a heritage which they have not taken
advantage of.
There is God that has promised us a
unica pletis, a seizure and invasion from beyond
us, that is to come to us and
to take over, and is to be in
us what we couldn't possibly be by ourselves.
Would you, if you were going to, suppose
that you were going to try to write
a bunch of sonnets as good as Shakespeare
wrote, suppose that you were going to write,
shall I compare thee to a summer's day,
and all that, well what would you want?
What would you have to have?
I'll tell you what you'd have to have.
You'd have to have the spirit of Shakespeare.
You'd have to have the intellect of Shakespeare
enter your personality, because if you and I
tried to write, shall I compare thee to
a summer's day, we'd never get any further
than that.
Winter would come before we'd get the second
line written, you see, because we couldn't make
it.
But Shakespeare could make it, he knew what
to do with words.
Emerson said that he was the man who
above all men that ever lived in the
world could say anything he wanted to say,
and he did say it.
But now, how could you write like Shakespeare?
I remember seeing a book one time not
so long ago, one of these weird sisters,
these, they call them these madam so-and
-sos, you know, that sell fortunes, and all
that spirit.
Well, she claimed to have the spirit of
Shakespeare, and she was writing sonnets.
But oh brother, if they were written by
the same man who wrote Shakespeare's other sonnets,
he must have gone into dodage before he
started to write, because they were cheap imitations.
She was just writing out of the back
of her own little head, and Shakespeare had
nothing to do with it.
But if you wanted to write like Shakespeare,
what would you have to have?
The intellect of Shakespeare.
If you wanted to compose music like Johann
Sebastian Bach, what would you have to have?
You'd have to have the spirit of Bach.
And if you wanted to be a statesman
like any man you might name, a Gladstone
or an Israeli, what would you have to
have?
You'd have to have the spirit of those
men.
And now, if we are going to, if
we are going to reproduce Christ on earth
and be Christ-like and be like Christ
and show forth Christ, what are we going
to have to have?
We're going to have to have the spirit
of Christ.
If we're going to be the children of
God, we're going to have to have the
spirit of the Father to breathe in our
hearts and breathe through us.
So that's why we have to have the
spirit of God.
That's why the Church has to have the
spirit of Christ, for the Church is called
to live above her own ability.
She's called to live up so high that
no human being can live like that.
The humblest Christian listening to me tonight is
called to live a life of miracles, a
life that is a moral and spiritual life
of such intensity and such purity that no
human being can do it.
Only Jesus Christ can do it, or could
do it and can do it, and so
he wants the spirit of Christ to come
to his people.
This afflatus, this seizure, this invasion from above
that affects us mentally and morally and spiritually.
Now, I believe that it might be well
for us, I said two weeks ago, that
if we just stopped all our busyness and
got quiet and worshiped God and waited on
him, because so carnal is the body of
present Christian, it doesn't make the people love
you to say this, and this is certainly
chapter two from How to Win Friends and
Influence People.
But it's true, nevertheless, that the body of
Christians is carnal.
We're a carnal bunch.
The Lord's people ought to be a sanctified,
pure, clean people, but we're a carnal crowd.
We're carnal in our attitudes and carnal in
our faith and carnal in everything.
The average Christian is.
Even the average gospel Christian is.
And the conditions are so shockingly irreverent these
days.
Over in Africa, one of our missionaries told
us, and I think he's a Canadian man,
what was his name, Herbert, Mr. Heber, Herbert,
some such name, told me this.
He said that he had been on one
of the fields in Africa, I believe the
Congo, and of course the church in the
Congo, they're very strong, several generations old, and
they're indigenous and they run their own churches.
They have almost complete autonomy without any missionary
having anything to do with it.
And he said they had some marvelous old,
he says, marvelous old saints.
He said one day some missionaries from the
United States went over there.
They had to leave the United States, always
me.
They went over there, and they started to
sing some imitation Negro spiritual, Seed That Sun,
How He Runs, and so on.
And this white missionary, those colored deacons, called
him aside.
They said, Teacher, we have a word with
you.
Called him in.
He said, Why do you allow a thing
like this?
He said, We gave up that junk when
we left the jungle and came to Jesus
Christ and got some clothes on and got
converted.
And why do you import from the United
States this stuff that we gave up and
left in the jungle?
And yet you hear it everywhere you go.
Everywhere you go you hear it.
Young fellows that ought to be padded.
And yet here they are.
I say shockingly irreverent, our Christian services are,
and degraded, so degraded our religious faith is,
so largely is our Christian service exhibitionism, that
unless there's a divine visitation, unless there's a
divine visitation, I don't know where we're going.
And wherever we're going, we're going pretty fast.
It'll never be cured, my brothers and sisters.
It'll never be cured by sermon.
It'll never be cured until there is a,
until the Church of Christ, you and I,
have been suddenly confronted with what one man
called the mysterium tremendum, the fearful mystery that
is God, the tremendous justice, the fearful majesty
that is God.
And this is what the Holy Ghost does.
He brings this mysterium tremendum, this fearful majesty,
fearful mystery, this wonderful thing we call God,
this wonderful one we call God, and presents
him to the human spirit, and we're confronted
with this.
And then out goes our irreverence, and out
goes our carnality, and out goes our degraded
religious taste, and out goes all that.
And the soul held speechless trembles inwardly for
the furthest fiber of it.
The Holy Ghost bestows upon us, bestows upon
us, I say, a beatitude beyond compare.
Brethren, you will never know more about God
than the Spirit teaches you.
You'll never know any more about Jesus than
the Spirit teaches you, because there's only the
Spirit to do the teaching.
Oh, Holy Ghost, how we've grieved thee, how
we've insulted thee, how we've rejected thee.
And yet he is our teacher, and if
he does not teach us, we never can
know.
He is our illuminator, and if he doesn't
turn the light on, we never can see.
He is the healer of our deaf ears,
and if he does not touch our ears,
we never can hear.
And yet churches can run for weeks and
months and years without ever knowing anything about
this, or ever having the Spirit of the
living God come at all upon them.
Oh, my heart, be still before him, prostrate
inwardly, adore him.
And this, I say, then, we can't contain
all of God, because God contains us.
But we can have all of God we
can contain.
And if we only knew it, we could
enlarge our vessel.
The vessel gets bigger as we go on
with God.
Deity is among us.
If some celebrity were here, he couldn't, the
ashid wouldn't know what to do with the
people.
I tell you, we have a celebrity in
our midst.
And it came to pass, suddenly, they were
all filled with the Holy Ghost.
Deity came down among us, and he came
down to stay.
Not to come and go, but to come
and stay.
And we have eyes, and we see not,
and we have ears, and we hear not.
We have hearts, and we feel not.
And we ignore the presence of royalty.
How would your queen, the gracious queen of
England, feel if she were to come to
Toronto, and not even a policeman on the
corner would know she was here?
Nobody, no one would know.
She walked down the street, down past the
Royal York, and nobody even gave her a
glance.
Now, I don't know, being the gracious little
lady she was, she probably would smile at
all.
But it would be pretty bad for us,
wouldn't it?
And pretty bad for the people to know
that royalty is present, and we didn't even
know it.
Oh, we've got higher than royalty.
We have the Lord of lords and kings,
kings.
We have the blessed Holy Ghost present, and
we're treating him as if he wasn't present
at all.
I'd say this is terrible.
We resist him, and we disobey him, and
we quench him, and we compromise with our
hearts.
We hear a sermon about him, and we
determine we'll learn more, and we'll do something
about it, and then our conviction wears off,
and pretty soon we go back to the
same old dead level again we were in
before.
We resist the blessed comforter, the blessed comforter.
He's come to comfort, he's come to teach,
for he's the spirit of instruction.
He has come to bring light, for he's
the spirit of light, and he comes to
bring purity, for he is the spirit of
holiness.
He comes to bring power, for he is
the spirit of power.
He comes to bring these all to our
hearts, and he wants you to be nonetheless
to have this kind of experience.
I don't know whether I ever told you
about this or not, but I was up
in a little town north of Chicago preaching
to some Baptists one time, maybe five years
ago, six years ago, and I preached a
sermon which I told them about Isaiah, a
vision, and these Baptist preachers, they were Baptist
preachers, and they gathered around, and they got
down on their knees to pray afterwards.
I went home then, always do, you know,
after a meeting you go home.
I did.
I went back to Chicago and got interested
in other things, and that meeting sort of
passed into the back of my mind, and
later on, two years after that exactly, two
Baptist preachers came to my study, came to
my home, and said, Would you like to
come in a minute?
I have a word for it.
So they came in, I knew one of
them, and he said, Do you remember when
you preached about Isaiah up in whatever town
it was?
I said, Yes.
He said, I became so thirsty to be
filled with the Holy Ghost that I have
been a miserable man for two years.
Said, I've sought God, and I've sought God,
and nothing happened, and I've sought God, and
he said here a little while ago.
He said, One day in my agony, I
was standing on the middle of my floor,
in the middle of my living room floor,
and I looked up to God, and said,
Oh God, you've got to do it.
He said, I was suddenly, instantaneously, and marvelously
filled with the Holy Ghost.
Now he said, I'm not going about among
the Pentecostal people.
He said, I'm a Baptist, and he said,
I'm going to go back and preach in
the Baptist church, but he said, I just
had to stop by and tell you that
what you preached about up there two years
ago has now happened to me.
He's a Baptist preacher, that's all.
God will do that to people.
He doesn't ask your denominational background.
He doesn't ask whether you're Armenian or Calvinist,
or what you are.
He doesn't ask anything except are you willing
to obey?
Are you willing to listen?
Are you willing to stop disobeying?
Are you willing to stop quenching your spirit,
resisting your spirit, and drop your hands, and
say, I believe deity is present.
I believe deity is present.
Breathe in the Holy Ghost, and let him
come in and fill your life.
I only gave you one illustration, but I
could give you many more.
A young man walked right down here where
these flowers are the other night, took my
hand.
I recognized him just a little bit, not
too much, and I went down, and he
began to talk, and he said, do you
remember when you preached to me so many
years ago in Chicago?
And I said, no, I do remember.
He said, do you remember what I wanted?
Oh, he said, I wanted to be killed
with a spear.
He said, I left there, and I went
to such and such a place, and he
said, you know what, I'm here, I can
tell you, it happened to me.
And the evidence on his face, all over
his face was he was talking about.
He wasn't giving testimony that somebody had given
him.
Well, now that's it, that's it.
Not as dramatic and colorful as you thought
that things ought to be, I suppose, but
here we have it.
The Holy Ghost came, and he's still here,
and all he wants is to yield, obey,
open our hearts, and he rushes in, and
our lives are transformed and changed.
And another Sunday or two, perhaps two weeks
from tonight, I am going to speak on
how to be killed with the Holy Spirit.
Next Sunday night, God willing, I'm going to
speak on the Dove of Noah's Ark.
The Dove of Noah's Ark is the Holy
Ghost.
But this is all I have for you
tonight.
Let's pray.