Proverbs chapter 9 verse 10 tells us, The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is
understanding.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy
is understanding.
Let us bow and pray.
Father, we ask that tonight as we go
into this missionary conference, we may sense thy
presence, remind us that mission is on thy
heart.
This is the primary commitment and concern and
burden of the Godhead, to get this message
of thy love and thy grace and mercy
in Christ out to those for whom he
died.
Show us again, our Father, that we don't
understand thy book, unless we realize it's the
unfolding of thy great eternal missionary purpose.
And give to us also, Father, the realization
that the Church is the missionary society.
This is the meeting of the local missionary
society now.
Father, we have missionary service agencies, but granted
we'll always recognize what they are, what their
role is, and realize that it's only the
local Church whom thou hast given this task
of sending those who will carry the message
of thy grace.
Go to that end.
Bless us now and in these three days
that follow that will come so quickly.
Let everything be done that will bring honor
and glory and praise to the Lord Jesus
Christ, for we ask it in his precious
holy name.
Amen.
I had the joy and privilege of being
associated as a close friend, colleague with A
.W. Tozer, during the two or three years
that he was writing that very, very important
book that I trust you have or will
get entitled, The Knowledge of the Holy.
I recall him saying to me that this
is probably the greatest contribution that I can
make to the body of Christ.
And on one occasion, for he had a
premonition of his rather early death, on one
occasion he said, God has promised me that
I'm going to live long enough to see
the book published and know that it's been
received.
And he did, but only a few months
after that.
And it's so important for us to understand
that the fear of the Lord is indeed
the beginning of wisdom.
Now, what is fear?
The word in the Hebrew, in the Greek,
implies reverence.
But we've lost the sense of the meaning
of reverence.
I remember one saying that it is reverence
of God, godly fear is a reverential trust.
Some years ago, I was driving in North
Carolina.
There were well-marked limits to speed on
the highway.
I was anxious to get back home, and
so my foot got heavy.
And after a while, I heard that sound
that I'm grateful to say is not too
familiar, but is always frightening.
That siren and that light, those days the
state highway police used the red tourist light.
My children described it as being the surrey
with the cherry on top.
Well, the surrey with the cherry on top
was up next to me, and the light
was shining at me, and the siren was
howling, and the officer was pointing.
Now, I want to ask you, do you
think that what I felt was reverential trust?
I reverenced him as a state police commissioned
by the governor to keep people like me
from breaking law.
He was going to do his duty, there
wasn't any question in my mind about that.
He was, I trusted him implicitly to do
his duty, and I reverenced him.
But what I felt didn't seem to me
to be either reverence or trust, it was
plain old fear.
The fear of the Lord is that.
Reverencing who he is and what he will
do, then it's the beginning of wisdom.
Now, friends, if you aren't aware of the
fact that God is God, you haven't started
to get wise yet.
The fear of the Lord is that kind
of awareness that God is God.
Now, the difficulty we have is to understand
the nature of man.
I'd like to ask you to turn to
Romans, the third chapter, and I'd like to
begin reading with the ninth verse, because this
describes the kind of people that God sent
me to, and it's the eighteenth verse that
will give to you some insight as to
what we find out about those whom we
call Gentiles, Paul calls Gentiles, and another word
for Gentiles was pagan or heathen.
But then are we better than they?
No, we're no wise, for we have before
proved both Jews and Gentiles that they are
all under sin.
As it is written, there's none righteous, no,
not one.
There's none that understandeth.
There's none that seeketh after God.
They are all gone out of the way.
They are together become unprofitable.
There's none that doeth good, no, not one.
Their throat is an open sepulcher.
With their tongues they have used deceit.
The poison of ass is under their lips,
whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood.
Destruction and misery are in their ways, and
the way of peace have they not known.
Here's a summary.
There is no fear of God before there
are.
My wife and I were the first two
missionaries in the Anglo-Egyptian sedan, then called
Anglo-Egyptian sedan, now known as sedan, which
is west of Ethiopia, south of Egypt, north
of Kenya and Uganda, and west of Chad,
straddling the Nile River for about 1,800
miles.
The sedan is as large as the eastern,
the half of the United, or part of
the United States, east of the Mississippi.
So you're talking about a rather large country.
In terms of square miles.
But we were the first in that country
to have the training from the Summer Institute
of Linguistics.
And when they found out that we'd had
that training, the civil secretary asked the mission
if they would second my wife and myself
to the government to do a survey.
They had been wanting to get someone to
survey an area in which there were no
missions working, and in which there was no
education.
And so we were put under the direction
of the deputy director of education in charge
of all education activity in the southern sedan.
The deputy director of education met with us,
he drew out on the map an area,
and he said, apart from the Sudan Interior
Missions Station at Charlie O'Neill, we have
no insight at all, no understanding of how
many tribes are there, what languages they speak,
whether or not those languages are related, and
if one or more of them might be
useful as an educational medium.
Can we use one of these languages?
Can we, must we use Arabic, or should
we use English?
These are the problems we want you to
help us answer.
So we organized, I organized the trip to
go down into the area, and in the
course of that time, I went into a
village of a very small tribe, as near
as we could ascertain, there were only about
300 people in the entire tribe, but a
separate language.
In that area, we found 10 tribes, we
found some with as few as 50 people,
but keeping alive that culture and that language,
and in some cases we found as much
as a 95% incidence of syphilis, or,
and yawns, sometimes together, both of them spirochete
diseases.
So we'd gone, I'd gone into this village,
and was welcomed there, and they called the
people around, using an Arabic speaker who knew
the language as my translator.
I proceeded to try to find out what
the people knew.
I picked up a stick that was there,
a branch of a tree with some leaves
on it, and I said, who made it?
And immediately, the answer came, Wanamish.
Well, where is Wanamish?
They said, he lives at the head of
the river up there in Ethiopia, in the
sky.
What has he made?
And they said, well, he's made everything, had
a name for the creator.
And then they had a name for Satan,
the evil one.
He said, Wanamish is good.
And then they, they just said, described the
other one who was there, who was evil,
and they, I proceeded to ask if they,
what was sin, what was wrong, what, what
pleased Wanamish?
And they said, oh, he's very angry against
lying.
Who told you?
Our stomachs tell us.
Who, what else?
Oh, he's very angry against murder.
He's angry against stealing.
He's angry with people because they don't say
what's true.
Who told them?
Where'd they find it out?
Sounded like somebody'd been there giving them a,
a daily vacation Bible school, teaching them the
Ten Commandments.
But I was the first one ever to
come into the village with a Bible.
I was the first one, so they said,
to ever mention the name of Jesus there.
To our understanding, we can find that there'd
never been anyone through there that had named
the name of Christ to open the word
of God, nor that they had contact with
Muslims, other than as traitors do, they might
go to get some cloth or some salt.
So I found out that they knew a
great deal more than my professors in school
had taught me to expect.
They knew the name of God.
They knew that God was holy.
They knew that God didn't bother them when
they were alive.
He was going to punish them when they
died, because they'd been doing things that were
bad, and that they'd been lying and stealing
and murdering.
And they had described all of this without
my having to open the book before them.
The next day, after I'd spent this time
with them, and I won't take you further
in it, but the next day I saw
the chief go by, and he had a
chicken by the feet, and he was walking
rather rapidly.
I asked him to stop and visit.
He said, oh no, no, no, I've got
to go to the witch doctor.
Well, why are you going to the witch
doctor?
Because my grain is not doing well, and
I've got to make a sacrifice to the
evil spirit so that I will have grain
to feed my goats, and I'll be able
to have food for the family.
Well, why don't you sacrifice it to Wanamish?
And he laughed.
He said, Wanamish doesn't want chickens, or at
least we don't know that he wants chickens,
and he never bothers us.
It's one thing I would call you would
know as Satan.
He's the one that bothers us.
He's the one that ruins our crops and
kills our goats, makes our children sick, and
we have to take all the chickens we've
got to him.
We can't waste them on Wanamish.
Now I want to read the 18th verse
again.
In the way of peace they have not
known, there is no fear of God before
their eyes.
They knew him.
They knew all about him, but there was
no fear of God.
Now to confirm this, I want you to
go to Romans chapter 1 verse 32.
Previously, from verse 29 through 31, we're told
about all the things which are described there
by the words in the 32nd verse, who
knowing the judgment of God, that they which
commit such things are worthy of death.
And so we have a listing up above
of things which those who do them are
worthy of death.
It then declares they not only do the
same, but they have pleasure in them that
knew them.
No fear of God before their eyes.
They know the judgment of God, and they
have their pleasure with those who are under
judgment with them.
And in the first verse of the second
chapter, Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever
thou art that judgest.
For wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself,
for thou that judgest doest the same thing.
But we are sure that the judgment of
God is according to truth against them which
commit such things.
And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest
them which do such things, and doest the
same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of
God?
No fear of God before their eyes.
No escape.
Judging others, and it sounds to me like
the media, doesn't it, to you in the
present time, that are so quick to morally
pontificate doing identically the same thing.
Judging those whom they think they're now vulnerable,
and yet no fear of God before their
eyes.
I can expect that from the worldly godless
media.
I saw a sign the other day on
a bumper.
It said, let's exchange the media for the
hostages.
And I thought that there was wisdom that
should be observed.
But at any rate, the media seems to
take such great pleasure in indicting those who
have named the name of Christ and who
had failure in their lives.
I don't object to that.
The thing that I find so tragic is
Christianity that loses its fear of God.
I don't expect anything else from the world,
but I do think we have a right
to expect more from the Church of Jesus
Christ.
There was a time back in the middle
of the 19th century when there was an
advent of something we've come to call higher
criticism, modernism.
We've known it as liberalism.
It attacked the veracity of the word of
God.
It attacked the deity of Christ.
It attacked the necessity, the resurrection, the virgin
birth, the holy sinless life, the atoning death,
the resurrection of Christ, that it was all
men.
There were another company of people who believed
in the authority of the word of God
and the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the victory of Calvary and in his
resurrection.
These people became known as those who held
to, adhered to the fundamental.
The people that stood at that time in
the beginning of that conflict had an experience
with God.
They'd met God.
They'd been born of God.
And they were simply articulating a list of
essential truths they called fundamental truths.
But they had a real relationship with God.
Their children came along.
Some of them met God, but many of
them adhered to the fundamentals.
And their grandchildren, and now their great-grandchildren
and their great-great-grandchildren, have been led
to believe if they give an intellectual assent
to a list of essential truths, they can
assume that they're born of God.
And what we have done has been to
fill the churches of America with people that
have nothing more than an intellectual assent to
a plan of salvation, that have never been
born of God.
This isn't new.
In 1950, living in Greenville, South Carolina, there
was a, in Spartanburg, thirty-five miles to
the east, was a South Carolina Southern Baptist
Convention, and the main speaker was Robert G.
Lee from the great Bellevue Baptist Church in
Memphis, Tennessee.
The next day after Dr. Lee had spoken
on this subject, three people who'd been present
in that meeting came to see me because
they knew the concern I had.
I'd expressed it in their presence.
This is what Dr. Lee said.
For forty years, I've been a close observer
of what is going on in our Southern
Baptist churches, and I am convinced that no
more than one out of our ten of
our people have any experiential knowledge of the
new birth.
And the preachers went, and he said, Brethren,
if I'm an error, I've put it too
high.
If the facts were really known, it's probably
far less than ten percent.
Andrew Blackwood, in his book of twenty years
ago called Contemporary Evangelical Thought, said he was
convinced that probably no more than ten, one
out of ten of the members of the
Evangelical churches of America knew anything experiential about
the new birth.
And A.
W.
Tozer, writing on one occasion and speaking on
many, said that in his opinion, based on
his close association with Evangelicals, and he said,
including my own fellowship, I seriously question if
any more than one out of ten of
our people know anything about the new birth.
Out of the mouth of two or three
witnesses.
I'm not here to confirm or to correct
what they said.
I'm only here to say that there are
a multitude of people in that community called
Christian, Evangelical Christian, that have never understood anything
about the fear of God.
Because when they are told that sin is
a congenital disease, that they'll be only because
of its inheritance factor, and because all they
need to do is nod their head or
say uh-huh in a half a dozen
places, and signs, walk somewhere and sign something,
and that they're now qualified to take their
place among the company of the redeemed, you
can expect that there will be no fear
of God before their eyes.
They've never understood that when God wants to
bring a cannibal out of, then change him
into a Christian or a savage and turn
him into a saint, there's some things he
does.
In this same tribe, that same day, I
was learning about what God had made and
what the people knew about him.
I thought that because they, I said to
one of them, you say it's wrong to
lie and steal and murder?
Yes.
How do you know?
Our stomach tells us.
That's where we say heart, but they said
stomach.
We had one tribe nearby, when we translated
that verse, be not afraid, it is I,
because they put the seed of personality in
another organ.
The way the verse came out was, don't
get a shiver in your liver, it's only
me.
So we have to recognize that organs have
been associated with the seed of personality in
different cultures.
And I said, how do you know that,
well, how do you know it's wrong?
Because my stomach, have you ever, because I
said to one man, boy, have you ever
committed murder?
He said, looked at me, he squinted, he
said, do you work for the government?
I said, no, I don't work for the
government.
He said, you tell the government what I
say?
No, I don't tell them what you say.
He said, yes, I've killed people.
Now, because they knew they were sinners and
knew they had sinned and they knew what
sin was, I thought they were ready to
be converted.
And I said, would you like, I've got
a message from one of me.
I've got a message from him.
He loved you.
He gave his son to die for.
And if you'll accept him, he won't punish
you when you die, but you can go
to be with him.
Would you like that?
About four of them understood what I was
saying.
And they said, yeah, we would, we would.
I got the idea.
Well, I said, come over here.
So I went into the inquiry room that
was over under the next tree and we
sat down there and I started to talk
just to them.
And so finally I got around to giving
them a prayer and taught him what to
say and they prayed it.
And then I had to leave and I
only spent a little more time with them.
But boy, when I got back to my
tent, I want you to know I wrote
a letter to the church, Calvary Baptist Church
in Grand Rapids, Michigan that supported us because
I wanted them to know what a good
investment they were making.
We'd only been in that tribe one day.
We had three converts, four converts.
Well, about two and a half months later,
I was back there and I found that
my, they call themselves Jesus boys.
They were, I said, where are, oh, you
mean the Jesus boy?
We'll call him.
One of them came, he was staggering drunk.
They'd just been to a beer feast and
they were still Jesus boy.
They still went to the witch doctor.
They still went to the demon dance.
They still went to the beer feast and
they were Jesus.
And yet they'd done everything the people that
I had, quote, led to the Lord back
in, in the States had been expected to
do.
Only difficulty back in the States, they slept
between sheets, ate with silver, didn't have beer
feasts.
And so here they were.
I realized then I had to go into
the scripture and find out what God wants
to do when he turns a cannibal into
a Christian.
Back in Indiana, we had a, I was
pastor of a country church.
And during time I was at Taylor University,
every Sunday I'd go out there.
They have us eat our lunch in a
different place.
That was a day of meat stamps, you
know, and it was kind of nice to
have a good meal when you didn't have
to pay.
I never asked what they did about it,
but they always had plenty of everything.
But they had a quaint thing.
They'd make that schedule out three, four months,
five months, six months in advance.
And I remember one day I was at
the door greeting the people, and there were
two older men down beside.
And one of them said to the other,
who's eating the preacher today?
Well, that was their way of saying what
family is taking the pastor and his wife
home for dinner?
But when I got among these people, I'll
tell you, that eating the preacher had a
double meaning.
Because they had a reputation of having had
a salty flesh, they liked it.
And some of their neighbors who didn't go
home at night ended up in a stew,
not with their wives, but with the people
that they, whose territory they crossed.
And so I figured that I'd better find
out.
I read in the scripture that, take heed
lest ye be devoured one of another.
But it had a meaning there that I
didn't think Paul intended to convey.
And so as I went back to the
Word, I find that there's three things God
does when he wants to bring a cannibal
to Christ.
First, he puts a sample of his grace
up next to him to live Christ.
And then he puts an intercessor up next
to him to intercede, legally represented, and then
someone to witness to him.
Maybe the same one in all three offices,
but often it isn't.
And then the first thing that God does
is to awaken the sinner.
He expects the witness to use the appropriate
scripture.
And then, having been awakened, is to use
scriptures that bring that sinner to a realization
of his crime.
Ah, now we're getting down to the fear
of the Lord.
When he, the spirit of truth, has come,
he will convict the world of sin.
And what is that?
It's sin.
What is it?
I use the word disparagingly.
People think sin is a congenital disease.
No!
Sin is a high treasonous crime against Almighty
God.
It's treason.
It's rebellion.
It's anarchy.
It's transgression.
And the sinner is an enemy.
And he's not prepared for grace until God
the Holy Ghost has brought him to conviction.
And the reason we don't see more people
saved is because we don't see more people
lost.
And no one is going to be saved
until they've discovered their lostness.
And yet we've almost lost the skill of
preaching to give to sin the character of
transgression and to cause, prepare sinners for grace.
If I had my way, and I don't,
and it's probably wise and good I don't
have it, but I would declare a moratorium
on the public preaching of the plan of
salvation in America for 12 months and demand
the preaching of the holiness of God and
the righteousness of God and the law of
God until sinners begin to cry out, what
must I do to be saved?
We've gospel-hardened a generation of sinners telling
them how to be saved long before they
discover they have any need to be saved.
We've filled our churches with the unconverted who
have no fear of God before their eyes.
What a tragedy it is.
But you expected more.
I came to the baptism of the Holy
Spirit back in 1953.
There wasn't any charismatic movement then.
It was just a hungry heart that sought
God and wanted Him.
I was a member of a Baptist church.
I was deputation secretary for the Sudan Interior
Mission with a national ministry and missionary meetings.
And then I became hungry for God and
I was filled with the Spirit of God
and He gave me several gifts of the
Spirit, including the gift of tongues and my
friend, I got the order of the boot.
I've almost decided to have minted a cowboy
boot and put on the lapel.
I discovered there's a lot of people that
are members of the royal order of the
boot.
And I was one of them.
Kicked out of the church and kicked out
of the mission society.
Why?
Because God had met my heart in and
of Himself.
And then there came a...
I paid a terrific price.
One of the best known names in America
had a businessman leave Wheaton, Illinois and go
around the world to warn the mission societies
to have nothing to do with Ferris-Reed.
It was like a tree falling that was
heard around the world.
And I didn't deserve that attention.
I wasn't worthy of it, but I got
more free advertising then and people would be
able to pay for it.
I didn't particularly feel thrilled about it, but
I did find out I had to give
thanks to the Lord for it because He
said giving thanks always for all things.
So I did it.
Though I could have gotten along without it,
if you don't mind my saying so.
Then came the charismatic movement.
Oh, I was thrilled.
The burden of my heart in seeking God
was that I might have power for witness
and ministry.
When I went to Africa as a dispensationalist
trained here in this city, my Bible was
the size of a Sunday school quarterly.
Ephesians, Philippians, part of Colossians, all the juicy
parts had been assigned to somebody else, but
that was really all that was ours, the
church epistles.
Everything else belonged to the Old Testament, the
Future Testament, the Jews, the Tribulation, somebody else
had it.
Now I'm out with people that have never
seen a white man, never heard the name
of Jesus, never been taught...
I could have said Christ was born 40
years ago and died yesterday and they wouldn't
have known the difference.
They had no idea of history.
And I remember going before God and saying,
I think it's a dirty trick, Lord.
You're sending me out here to finish Paul's
work and you took away all the equipment
you gave Paul.
I don't see what's right and fair about
that.
If I've got to do Paul's job, why
couldn't you have left Paul's equipment around?
Because I'd been told we didn't need mighty
signs and wonders anymore because we had the
book.
But it was the book that told me
about them.
And here I'm being told they're not for
us, they're not for today, we don't need
them.
My heart was hungry for that I might
be affected in my witness to the loss.
And now I'm hearing about people being baptized.
I'm hearing about a great movement.
I'm hearing about full gospel business.
And I'm expecting that what Christ said when
he left, that after that the Holy Ghost
has come upon you, you shall be witnesses
unto me, both in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the
outermost part of the earth.
And it never happened.
It never happened.
I talked to one of the business leaders
and I said, what's happened?
Where is this movement?
What's gone wrong with it?
Here's what the word says.
When the Holy Ghost has come upon you,
you will be witnesses.
Well, we had our international convention in Singapore
last year.
There were 2,500 of us.
But that's not mission.
That's not mission.
Mission is when you go and you live
with the people and you see the gospel
planted, the church planted, and the people built
up and established in the Lord.
A few people making a trip to a
beautiful hotel.
I don't care where it is in the
world.
Only one could get any witness there, the
elevator operator.
I was in a hotel and the elevator
operator says, oh boy, I'm glad you're not
like them.
I never told her.
I just wanted to find out what them
were.
And she said, I've been saved four times
today already.
Then I went to the first one that
came.
I got mad that they would button in
my, and my boss said, look, when these
folks are here, the only ones they get
nerve enough to talk to are the elevator
operators because they're captive.
And so she said, just go along with
them.
Say yes, yes, yes.
And if you say yes often enough, five
or six times, then they'll leave you alone.
She said, I've been saved four times already
today.
Now that's not mission.
That's not mission.
It's going in where the people are, learning
their language and living with them and serving
them.
That's mission.
And I thought I was going to see
it, and I didn't see it.
My heart ached.
They said, are you going to become part
of this movement?
And I said, no, not until they become
biblical.
What do you mean biblical?
I said, not until they get the fear
of God before their eyes, and they understand
that Christ said, if you love me, you
will keep my commandment and my commandments as
you go and teach all nations all that
I've given you to teach them.
And when the Holy Ghost is come upon
you, you'll receive power that you can be
witnesses, both in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the
outermost part of the earth.
And I said, when they become biblical.
And I despaired that there was a full
gospel church, a charismatic church anywhere in the
country that had a missionary burden.
And then, God, in his sweet grace, gave
me an invitation from a church here in
Minneapolis called Soul Fire Calvary Temple.
And Harry Kahn said, go.
They got a missionary vision, and they got
a missionary burden.
And I came, and I discovered that there
was a church that had the world upon
its heart.
And I began to realize that maybe God
had a possibility.
And I dare to believe, I dare to
believe that the great, untapped resource for mission
is in the charismatic, full gospel church.
The fundamentalists who have nothing but the word
written in the book and the fear of
God, afraid to disobey the word, have carried
the heavy end of missions for a hundred
years in Britain and America.
Because the word said go, the people went.
It said give, and they gave.
Because of fear of God and because of
love for the Lord, because of a desire
to serve him.
But often without power.
Without any power.
And then God gave this movement.
We have a list of 5,600 independent,
charismatic, full gospel churches in America.
Did you know there were that many?
5,600.
Several of them being formed every week.
Many of them every month now.
One of the most, oh, so few have
a burden for the world.
A burden for the world.
No fear of God.
A very young man whose name you might
recognize had left where he was, was in
our area.
His mother had been a great blessing to
me, and I knew his stepsister.
And so I asked for a meeting with
him, and we had lunch together.
He came as my guest.
We sat there, and I said, Peter, now
that you're free, the one thing I've noticed
in your ministry that is missing is a
real understanding of mission.
I said, if you're willing to go to
the field and minister the word, I will
be responsible with some others to raise money
so that you can go to the field
as many months as you want.
And he said, oh no, I'm not interested
in mission.
I said, what?
I'm not interested in mission.
I don't believe that missions are relevant for
us today.
I think everything that God is doing is
right here in America.
My heart was aching, but I knew where
he was.
I knew where he was.
And I've been crying out to God now
for some 20 years that there would be
a breakthrough among the full gospel churches, the
charismatic churches, and that they would have, but
I know what it is.
They must have a fear of God.
A fear of God.
Let me illustrate it.
Would you turn, please, to Acts chapter 2.
Acts chapter 2, and I want you to
read verses 41 to 43.
Acts 2, 41 to 43.
I want you to see it, because I
believe the spirit of God wants to say
something to us tonight and in this conference.
I believe he has something that is important
that he wants us to have.
Then they that gladly received his word were
baptized, and the same day there were added
unto them about 3,000 souls, and they
continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship
and in breaking of bread and in prayer.
Now listen.
And fear came upon every soul, and many
wonders and signs were done by the apostles.
Always that way, when people begin to fear
God and reverence his word and obey what
he's revealed, God begins to work.
I will confirm it out of a second
perspective.
Would you turn to Acts chapter 5, verse
5.
Here we're dealing with Ananias and Sapphira, who
had lied to the Holy Ghost.
Verse 5, and Ananias, hearing these words, fell
down and gave up the ghost, and great
fear came on all them that heard these
things.
And then in verse 11, and great fear
came upon all the church when Sapphira fell
down, and upon as many as heard these
things.
And by the hands of the apostles were
many signs and wonders wrought among the people.
When the people of God begin to fear
God, God is released to work.
And what we must have more than any
other single thing in this day and in
this time is a baptism of the knowledge
of the holy, the nature of God, the
wonder, the grandeur, the truth of God, and
the authority of the world.
Is it going to come?
I would submit to you that holy fear
of God has been and ever will be
one of the prime motivating forces in mission.
You're going to stand before the judgment seat
of Christ.
You're going to give an account of the
deeds you've done in the body.
You're going to give an account of what
you've done with your time, your talent, your
money.
You're going to explain to the Lord Jesus
why our obedience wasn't consistent with our worship.
We sing, oh, how I love thee, oh,
how I love thee.
And we do mean it, except he said,
if you love me, keep my commandments.
And his commandment was that we should go
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to
observe all things whatsoever he's commanded.
We have to explain what we've done with
our talent, with our money.
I say the fear of the judgment seat
of Christ, the bema, ought to be enough
to motivate us.
The love of Christ hasn't.
The love of Christ, said Paul, constrains me
not to live for myself, but to him
who died for me and rose again.
But apparently we've become so enamored with the
love of Christ, we've forgotten that he is
God.
We must see him again as John saw
him.
Every time I read the first chapter of
Revelation, I'm brought down on my face.
John on the island of Patmos, surrounded by
believers that have come to be with him
to have a Bible conference.
He's the last one.
He knew Jesus.
He leaned on his bosom, and he remembers
the good old days when he walked with
the Lord.
But you see, he's too pally with the
memory.
We read, I was in the Spirit on
the Lord's day, and I heard a voice
behind me.
He was looking back.
He was looking somewhere else.
And he said, I turned, and I saw
one like unto the Son of God, his
head like wool, shining like gold, his face
the brightness of the sun.
He heard about the paps with a golden
girl.
Out of his mouth went a two-edged
sword.
And he said, when I saw this Jesus
glorified, exalted, reigning on the throne, I, who
leaned on his bosom, fell at his feet
as dead.
And I believe he would have died.
But he said, I heard a voice, heard
him saying unto me, Arise, and stand upon
thy feet.
John, who'd lived with him and walked with
him, needed a revelation of who the Lord
Jesus Christ is, in his reigning authority, as
the sovereign head of the church.
How much more do we need?
And if John could fall at his feet
as dead, how much more ought we need?
Dead to ourselves and our plans, our aspirations,
our hopes, our programs.
Lord Jesus, what wilt thou have me to
do?
The mission begins with a revelation of who
God is, who the Lord Jesus Christ is.
And great fear fell upon all, and mighty
signs and wonders were wrought by the hands
of the apostles.
There is a relationship between our worship, our
fear of God, our trust in him, our
recognition of him, and what he's free to
do.
I see for this church a great future,
great ministry.
I told Mrs. Peterson that I'd been praying
since I'd learned of our brothers going into
the presence of the Lord, not for a
continuation of ministry, but a beginning of ministry.
A beginning.
And I sense today, with the anointing upon
Pastor Peterson and the sense of his presence
in the service, that there's a time of
new beginning.
But if there's one message that's got to
go from this pulpit and the pulpits of
the land until it's penetrated all of the
sister churches who share this truth concerning the
fullness of God's spirit, it is the holiness
of God, the righteousness of God, the nature
of God, until great fear comes upon the
hearts of all who love and worship him.
Might it begin tonight and in these days
as God draws us on our faces before
him.
Let us pray.
Hallelujah, Lord Jesus.
God, I just pray right now that our
hearts will be quickened together as we not
only love you, but our hearts are broken
with our reverence unto you, unto you.
I want you to stand with me.
I want us to come to the altar
and sing together this chorus.
I want us to come just all around
this altar.
Just come real close, everybody.
We're going to pray together, seek God together.
Oh, Lord, please light the fire.