Father, we thank you tonight that while you
are the high and lofty one who inhabited
eternity, in majesty incomprehensible to us, yet we
bless you that you, through the miracle of
your Son Jesus Christ, come descend to dwell
in humble and contrite hearts.
We thank you that you veiled your majesty
in flesh.
Concerning Jesus, Wesley said, Mild he laid his
glory by, born that man no more may
die.
Born to raise the Son.
Lord, maybe there's not one person here that
isn't acquainted with the gospel tonight.
But they still may be unacquainted.
Maybe they've witnessed blessing, but never shared a
meeting in which there's been a divine invasion.
We welcome you tonight, Holy Spirit of God.
We bless you for this indestructible, infallible, inerrant
book.
You banished it, and yet it stands at
the graveside of us.
Because you have said that your word, that
heaven and earth may pass away, but your
word will never pass away.
We thank you for one more privilege to
bow in your presence.
One more opportunity to hear your voice.
And truly we say with another point tonight,
beyond the sacred page we seek thee, Lord.
We ask that we may lose sight of
the preacher, lose sight of each other.
Lord, we ask you that somehow you'll transfer
us into eternity tonight.
We're so earthbound.
We're so conscious of visible things.
And so unconscious of the invisible.
Again, so conscious of the temple, and so
unconscious of the eternal.
Do some miracle in our hearts tonight.
Let nobody leave this place as they came
in.
Make every one of us to have an
encounter with God.
Again, we thank you for this word, and
we turn to it with expectation, and pray
the Spirit to inspire the holy men of
God, who were moved by the Holy Ghost,
that we may be moved by that same.
I want to read a scripture from the,
or if you're English, Isaiah.
So either way, it's chapter 6 of Isaiah.
Reading from verse 1.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I
saw also the Lord sitting upon the throne,
high and lifted up, and his train filled
the temple.
Above it stood a set of hymns, each
one had six rings.
With train, or with two, he covered his
face.
With train did he cover his feet, and
with train did he fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord.
Of hosts, the whole earth is full of
his glory.
And the pulse of the door moved, and
the voice of him that cried, and the
house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, always me, for I am
undone.
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips.
For mine eyes have seen the King, the
Lord of hosts.
Then threw one of the seraphims unto me,
having a life coal in his hand, which
he had taken with the tongues from off
the altar.
And he said, Lo, this has touched thy
lips.
Thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin
purged.
Also I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, Whom shall I send, and who will
go for us?
Then said I, here am I, send me.
And he said, Go.
The title for this message tonight will be
Vision, or more correctly, a Threefold Vision.
The chapter, in my opinion, is self-dividing,
at least up to the part where I've
read.
Three simple definitions.
So simple you could remember them if you're
a Ph.D. In verse 5, the word,
Woe.
In verse 7, the word, Lo.
Second is the word of a seraphim, and
the third is the word of God.
Touch thy lips.
The third is the word of commission, Go.
In the very first verse we have a
timetable, if you like.
In the year that King Uzziah died.
Uzziah was one of the most marvelous kings
that Israel ever had.
For a minute, let's skip back over to
the second book of Chronicles, chapter 26.
We have a summary here of the achievements
of this young man.
He took over a kingdom at 16 years
of age, remember, as it says in verse
1.
In this 16th chapter, we have a record
of all his dazzling achievements.
Chapter 26, verse 1, Then all the people
of Judah took Uzziah, who was 16 years
old, and made him king in the room
of his father Amaziah.
Verse 3 says, 16 years old when he
began to reign, and he reigned 50 and
2 years.
Therefore he died at 68 years of age.
It says of him here in verse 5,
And he sought God in the days of
Zechariah, who had understanding of visions.
And as long as he sought the Lord,
he was made to prosper.
Verse 6 says, He went forth and he
slew the Philistines.
Then it tells you a list of the
enemies that he subdued.
He liberated his nation.
He took over.
Let me check, can you hear properly, because
I can't hear myself.
You can hear alright.
My English is bad, but you'll get used
to it.
He subdued his enemies.
He managed to revive the whole economy.
He built the greatest army that they'd ever
had.
He invented new machines of war, which were
those huge catapults that threw great rocks on
the wooden buildings and so forth of the
enemy.
And his record is one of continual triumph.
You could change the figure and say he
was like King Midas.
Everything that he did turned to gold.
He subdued all his enemies.
He changed the heart of the nation.
He changed the heart of the economy.
Again he built up the greatest army they
had ever had.
And while he sought the Lord he was
made to prosper.
But you know there were more people failing
in prosperity than in adversity.
It's a very difficult thing to handle prosperity.
In verse 15 he says he made Jerusalem,
in Jerusalem, engines.
He invented cunning men to throw, and he
built towers.
And they threw great stones.
And at the end of the verse he
says he was marvelously held till he was
strong.
But when he became strong his heart was
lifted up in vanity to destruction.
And he transgressed against the Lord.
You see he ran the government, he ran
the economy, he ran agriculture.
He was a big shot, he was the
big chief in everything.
So he decided to take over the religious
side of the nation.
And though he knew it was a violation
of God's law, which would incur a penalty
of death, he still tried it.
You read a little further down in this
chapter here.
It says in verse 17 that Azariah the
priest went in after him with four score
priests of the Lord that were valiant men.
So you have 81 men trying to keep
one man from getting there to commit suicide
in the sanctuary.
But he fought against them all.
No man could hold him down.
We're reading now, just finishing off anyhow, the
second book of Chronicles chapter 26.
And at verse 17, Azariah the priest went
after him with four score priests of the
Lord who were valiant men, they were strong
men.
And they withstood Uzziah.
But verse 16 says Uzziah was wrath.
He had a censer in his hand which
he was not allowed to have.
And thought he could minister by virtue of
being a king.
He believed in the divine right of kings.
Now remember he's a 16 year old youngster
that's taken the economy, he's revised it, he's
raised armies, he's had inventions.
He has a supernatural touch from God and
yet he wastes it.
Then Uzziah was wrath, verse 19.
And he had a censer in his hand
to burn incense.
And while he was wrath with the priest,
the leprosy rose over him.
Verse 21 says, And Uzziah the king was
a leper until he died.
Until, he was a leper, until the day
of his death.
And dwelt in a zebra house, or a
leper house.
For he was cut off from the house
of the Lord.
And eventually he died.
Go back now to Isaiah 6 which is
our chapter.
Remember the five simple words, the simple words
in verses 5, 7 and 9.
Verse 5, the word law, woe.
Verse 7, the word law.
And in verse 9, the word go.
A word of confession, a word of cleansing,
a word of commission.
The word of a man, the word of
a seraphim, the word of God.
Now this man has this threefold vision.
Listen, let me tell you what it says
here very clearly.
In the year that King Uzziah died.
Somebody will die in this meeting tonight.
Not physically.
This is God's last call to you.
He's been after you for years.
You heard your prayers of your godly mother
or father.
Time and again he's thrown a roadblock and
you resisted.
Like this man resisted 81 men that were
standing in his way.
He has a vision of God.
A vision of heights because he saw God
high and lifted up.
A vision of depth because he saw into
his own nature.
A vision of breadth because he saw lost
world.
He saw a vision of beauty because he
saw God.
He had a vision of depravity because he
saw in his own nature.
He had a vision of duty because he
saw lost world.
When he saw the Lord high and lifted
up.
It was a vision of holiness.
The cherubim were not singing.
And this is the only place in the
Bible, remember, where cherubim are mentioned.
They're a seraphim, but not cherubim.
Excuse me a minute.
He sees God holy.
And he sees from the vision of holiness
into his own being.
The vision of hellishness.
He sees a lost world.
The vision of hopelessness.
Again a vision of deity, an inward vision
of depravity, an outward vision of duty.
The Lord is high and lifted up.
And his strength filled the temple.
And the cherubim were not singing or the
holy beings were not singing about the attributes
of God.
They were not singing about his omniscience or
his omnipresence or his omnipotence.
They were singing about his character.
How many people do you think have staggered
out of churches in America or England today,
overwhelmed with the holiness of God?
We've lost sight of God's holiness.
And because we've lost sight of God's holiness,
we've lost sight of hellishness.
We've lost sight of sin.
This man has the most revolutionary vision, I
think, in the whole of the Word of
God.
He has a vision of God, a vision
of majesty.
He has an inward vision of mystery.
And he has an outward vision of misery.
Where there is no vision, the Word of
God says the people perish.
A young man named Gilmore went to Mongolia,
in that frozen country, and he labored there
for seven years without seeing one convert.
Why did he go?
Because he had a vision.
In the late 1890s in England, there was
a young man who was called the most
eligible, desirable bachelor ever in the nation.
He was a brilliant scholar at Oxford.
He was only 21 years of age.
He won the senior prize, the Smith Prize,
that had never been won by anybody at
that age.
He was a senior wrangler in the university.
He was gifted beyond most men.
Everybody said he was going to have a
political career.
He may become the Prime Minister of England.
He may become the leading scientist.
And one day Jesus Christ laid hold of
his life.
What did he do?
He went to India.
What did he do in India?
He lived for seven years and he died.
What did he do in the seven years?
He took the original Greek and translated it
into one of the most difficult languages.
In fact, he translated it from Greek, directly
from Greek, into Arabic, a more difficult language.
He settled down and he took another spell
of study.
And he translated scriptures into a number of
languages there.
Only seven years there, but he left his
mark on the nation to this very day.
What did he do?
He had a vision of the lostness of
men.
I remind you again, it was an upward
vision.
He saw the Lord.
It was an inward vision.
He saw himself.
It was an outward vision.
He saw the lost world.
You know, this meeting can settle down to
mediocrity.
You just listen to somebody with a little
different voice.
Or you can say, Lord, speak to me.
There's a world outside.
There are more lost people in the world
tonight than at any given point in history.
You listen to one of those stupid men
on TV.
They say, send us money.
TV is God's new agent to send the
gospel into countries where they can't even afford
a pair of shoes.
To send the gospel up the Amazon where
people are still savages.
Maybe not two people here tonight have prayed
for Afghanistan, one of the neediest countries in
the world.
But you see, we don't have much capital
interest there, and therefore Afghanistan has gone out
of our reckoning.
China now has a thousand million, no, it
has 900 million people, the largest population in
the world.
India has 800 million people.
It has 400 languages or dialects.
And here are these countries without God and
without hope.
And they've got to be without God and
without hope unless there's a revolution in our
hearts, in our thinking, in our understanding.
The last vision is a vision of a
lost world.
And I believe we're responsible for, I believe
that this generation of Christians is responsible for
this generation of heathens.
Not just to send mysteries, but to go
and be mysteries.
And invest our lives in some of the
most difficult things it's possible for a man
to undertake as a human being.
You know, when you talk about vision, people
get a bit suspicious.
You hear people say, now be very careful,
you know.
It's all right to be spiritual, but don't
be too spiritual.
Nobody ever says get money, but don't be
too rich.
Nobody ever says get educated, but don't be
too wise.
You could be, you're in trouble if you
have vision only.
Sure, if you have vision, you'll be a
visionary.
A vision without a task makes a visionary.
A task without a vision is grudgingly.
A task wedded to a vision makes a
missionary.
Oh, we have these pretty little phrases in
our churches.
I've heard them in Australia, other countries, you
know.
People say now, let me warn you a
minute, you know.
You can be so heavenly minded you know
earthly use.
Isn't that wonderful?
You think Shakespeare said it.
You can be so heavenly minded you know
earthly use.
Well listen, I'm going to protest and tell
you tonight that my generation is not so
heavenly minded, it's no earthly use.
It's so earthly minded, it's no heavenly use.
The church is earthbound, materialistic.
We live like the world, talk like the
world, dress like the world, think like the
world.
We're as interested in sports as the world
is.
Some of the kids couldn't find this passage
of Scripture, but they'll tell you the baseball
scores right now, who's knocking the most home
runs and who's doing this, that and the
other.
We're saturated in holiness.
We want to be holy on Sundays and
calm on Mondays.
We want to try and persuade God how
tall we stand in the spiritual life, but
God isn't interested.
No, this is a vision that comes to
a man.
There's nothing more disturbing.
He doesn't really see as he sees in
chapter one.
You remember about the nation, he says in
chapter one, my whole nation is sick, it's
full of wounds and putrefying sores, it's full
of corruption, there's no healing for it.
Again, he's in the most extreme category of
men the world has ever had, and they're
not men who walk on the moon.
They're not men who invent diabolical things to
barbecue a nation.
Aren't we wonderfully educated now?
You know, if you'll be around here a
hundred years ago, going down the road, ooh,
you pull an arrow out of your back,
you say, that dirty Indian shot me when
I wasn't looking.
We didn't expect him to send you a
note, did you?
That's a hundred, two hundred years ago.
We shot arrows into the backs of people.
We don't do that.
We're educated.
Oh, the finesse and intellectualism we have.
Now we just drop a bomb on a
city and barbecue the whole city.
We're civilized, we've cultured.
You tell somebody who went up the Amazon,
you saw some bones there that maybe are
three thousand years old, very brief, three million
years old.
Go to the government, they'll give you a
grant.
You can go live like a king, you
can hire a yacht.
You can go digging in the dirt.
You can dig up some bones and come
back with them and put them in the
Smithsonian Museum and get your name in one
of the record books.
You can get any subsidy.
They subsidized a man recently to go up
the Amazon collecting butterflies.
They gave him $26,000.
They gave some scientists $150,000 to study
the mating habits of frogs.
Won't that be good news when we get
it?
The government's interested where we came from.
I listen, I use a bad word.
It doesn't care a damn where we're going.
You can get thousands and thousands of dollars
for nonsense.
I don't care where we came from.
I know where we're going.
Everybody, once you go through that door tonight,
you're going to a lost eternity or you're
going to eternal happiness.
As I said the other week when I
preached here, I wonder I got back.
But anyhow, I've not preached so long tonight.
I've got Referee before me.
I said these are the most amazing breeds
of men.
Breed of men.
They're called what?
Prophets.
By the very nature of their calling, of
his calling, a prophet is a tragic figure.
Because he has his eyes on the majesty
and holiness of God and he has his
eyes on the corrupt generation that can't be
moved except God comes and does some miraculous
thing.
And he's in torment.
He suffers for the people.
He suffers with the people.
He suffers by the people.
These men don't sleep normally.
They don't eat normally.
They don't think normally.
They've enough to contend for materialism.
They have no price tag.
This man who sees his nation so corrupt,
also saw other things.
In the 64th chapter he says this, Thy
holy cities are a wilderness.
Zion is a wilderness.
Jerusalem is a desolation.
Our holy habitations, our beautiful house of God
which our fathers praised in, is burned with
fire.
Come on now.
You claim somehow to be 32nd cousins to
Azusa Street, don't you?
Where the glory of God came down.
And remember again, there is nothing more attractive
in the world than fire.
Whether it's physical fire or spiritual fire.
When the fires were burning in Azusa Street
in 1904 when the Holy Ghost came, I
remember a man who lived not far from
us, a distinguished Church of England minister, though
he's a Welshman, a very brilliant man.
He sold his property, sold his furniture to
get on a boat and go to New
York.
Discovered when he got to New York, New
York is just as far from London as
New York is from California.
And he had to get a loan to
go the rest of the way.
When he got there he told me afterwards,
30 years after he told me, he said
it was the most amazing thing I've ever
been in.
God rewrote the record books as it were.
The spirit of the living God came.
Men that were twisted and perverted and depraved
were cleansed and sanctified and filled and anointed
and they went out with a profit man
from them.
I don't know how you pray.
I'm very simple.
I pray simply.
One of my regular prayers in the closet
or with my prayer class on a Friday
night.
Again and again I thank God for the
incorruptible Holy Ghost.
It doesn't matter if your checkbook is that
length, you can't buy a soup of baptism
of the Holy Ghost with a billion dollars.
All he asked for is brokenness and contrition
and emptiness and a recognition of my bankruptcy,
a recognition the world is going to hell.
The government can't help America.
If you're depending on the White House, forget
all about it.
It's God's house that's going to save America,
not the White House.
It's not presidents, it's prophets.
It's not men full of wisdom, it's men
full of the Holy Ghost.
This man is weeping, he's groaning.
The place where God's glory dwells is empty.
I remember in my class the other night
that when Jesus came around the shoulder of
the hill there and he looked on Jerusalem,
he wept.
Why did he weep?
He's just been whipping the Pharisees.
He's going into the temple to whip them
again.
Why is he weeping?
Because once Zacharias stood there.
Once the glory of God filled the temple
until the priests had to back out, they
couldn't stand God's glory.
I make a wild guess here, none of
us have ever seen God's glory either.
If God came and smote us with his
eternal glory, with his brilliance, with his majesty,
with his holiness in this meeting tonight, we'd
be on the floor in five minutes.
At the turn of the century, there was
a great poet in America, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
His father was a deist.
He lived at the end of the last
century.
But Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a hymn, Lord
of all beings, throne of fire, thy glory
flames from sun and star, center and soul
of every sphere, yet to each loving heart
how dear.
Our midnight is thine, our midnight is thy
smile withdrawn.
Do you know when God moves his smile
from you?
Do you go to misery?
Do you go to that rotten old TV
and watch PTL or something that fuck you
up?
Come on, you're filled with the Holy Ghost.
Why don't you mourn with the Holy Ghost?
Why don't you grieve with the Holy Ghost?
We want the joy of the Holy Ghost.
Who wants the burden of the Holy Ghost?
Who wants the grief of the Holy Ghost?
People say, I have a prayer language.
Do you?
I don't know what you mean by that.
If you mean praying in tongues, that may
go so far.
But there's something beyond tongues.
There are groanings which cannot be uttered.
And they are put only in the heart
when the Holy Ghost is cleansed and the
man is cleansed of all his ambition, all
his selfishness, his self-seeking, his self-worry,
his self-pursuit.
And God cuts all the flesh.
The scripture calls it circumcising the heart.
Just like a boy is taken and circumcised,
take the superfluous flesh away, and God comes
and circumcises the heart and cleanses it, then
he indwells it.
Listen, if you say, Jesus Christ lives in
me, and if you're not, if you can't
say that, then you're not saved.
We're not saved because we pray the sinner's
prayer.
There are millions of people in hell who
prayed the sinner's prayer and got baptized, and
that's all.
We need to rediscover the miracle of regeneration.
If any man, any man, anywhere, at any
time, is in Christ, he is a new
creation.
His desires have changed, his appetites have changed,
his vocabulary has changed, his interests changed.
He is a new creation.
He's not the old creation, that self that
is leaking.
He's a new creation.
A new heart, a new spirit, a new
will, a new desires.
That's what Jesus died to make us.
But then there's something beyond that.
Being born of the Spirit, there's an endowment
of the Spirit, an upon-baptism.
You can't show me one man who has
moved men in history that didn't have a
baptism of the Spirit.
Okay, go on, quote Mr. Spurgeon.
Mr. Spurgeon says, this is the level where
the world lives.
This is the level where a regenerate or
born-again man lives.
But he says there's another higher level up
there where a man filled and anointed with
the Holy Ghost lives.
If you say Christ lives in me, he
must see through your eyes, he must look
through your heart, he must weep through your
eyes, he must groan through your spirit.
If self has gone off the throne and
Christ is there, you'll live a Christ-like
life, you'll have Christ-like habits, you'll have
Christ-like outlook, you'll have a Christ-like
understanding.
To be born of the Spirit is the
most amazing revolutionary thing in the history of
the world.
Go back here to Isaiah 6 for a
minute.
I'm sorry, get me to Isaiah 20, chapter
20.
If any of you tonight are ambitious to
become a prophet, let me tell you this.
The prophet's chair is empty in America.
The prophet's chair is empty in England.
People call me on the phone, write in
letters, come and see me personally.
Where is David Wilson?
He lives a mile down the road from
me.
Is he a prophet?
He says he isn't.
You never find a prophet swaggering.
He carries the burden of God, he knows
the heart of God, he knows the mind
of God, he has the fear of God,
he has the love of God.
He's consumed with a desire to be consumed
by God.
He's a total property in his thinking, in
his living, in his sleeping, in everything he's
a property of God.
Let me show you what it's like to
be a prophet here in this 20th chapter.
I read, let me see from the second,
the second verse there.
And it says, At the same time spake
the Lord to Isaiah, the son of Amoz,
saying, Go and arise, and go and loose
the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put
off thy shoe from thy foot.
And he did so walking naked.
Now he did not walk stark naked because
God's never interested in that business.
He wore a small garment underneath.
But for three years, this man of God
goes to the Bible school of the Holy
Ghost.
There were schools of the prophets.
The Bible school may make you a preacher,
only God can make you a prophet.
You can be a preacher and be mediocre,
you cannot be a prophet and be mediocre.
And prophets are the men who, they're gods
in my judgment.
A prophet is God's emergency man for a
crisis hour.
He's a man who no longer lives for
time, he lives for eternity, he doesn't live
for the visible, he lives for the invisible.
He doesn't have any fear of man, he
fears only that he may grieve and disappoint
his Holy Father who called him to that
office.
This man has to walk barefooted.
Some of us remember, I remember three forty
years ago, in America they used to sing
marvelous Negro spirituals, they don't sing them anymore.
And one of the ones, I got shoes,
you got shoes, all God's children got shoes.
When the prodigal came home, his father said,
put shoes on his feet, he's an embarrassment
to me, he's a slave.
He's a nobody.
And this man has to become a nobody.
So many people want projection, they want to
be somebody, they want to be seen.
God is looking for nobodies.
God is looking for men who hide away
in a secret place.
And this precious man has to stay here
for three years, walking barefooted, a sign and
a wonder.
I won't quote it to you, I'll quote
it to you just without reading it.
There's a worse thing there in the fourth
chapter of Ezekiel.
The nation had drifted from God for three
hundred and ninety years.
Now listen, God is talking to a man,
he's not talking to a seraphim, he's talking
to a man.
And he says to him, you're my prophet,
come on Ezekiel, the nation has sinned for
three hundred and ninety years.
Now he says, you find a corner, find
a place and lie on your left side,
your left side, for three hundred and ninety
days.
Cook your food with human excrements.
Become the off-scouring.
For three hundred and ninety days he can't
even turn from his left side to his
right.
You do that at night on your beauty
rest mattress, don't you?
You sleep five minutes, oh I can't sleep,
over you go and back again and back.
God says you stay there on the floor
for three hundred and ninety days.
And he so loved the will of God,
he wears, as it were, the harness of
obedience.
People come by and scorn it, what do
they think he's doing?
I say what he's doing, he's listening to
God, he's obeying God.
He's going to make a mark on the
history of that nation, a mark on the
history of the world.
Some of our men studied on their TV
this morning, their big stuff.
Five years from now they won't have enough
money to run it, in my judgment.
Where will they be then when they've no
projection?
When they don't get showered with letters and
gifts and money.
If I wrote another beatitude it would be
this, blessed is the man who is shut
up to God.
A man lying on his left side isn't
going to see much, is he?
He's not going to be distracted by the
lovely weather, he's not going to be distracted
by the crowds.
He's set his will to do the will
of God.
Be ye thought the biggest idiot in the
world, what does he care?
Isaiah sees a lost world out there.
If he hadn't seen the holiness of God,
if he hadn't seen the twisted corruption, if
he hadn't seen the nation like a manure
heap, because the more he saw God's holiness,
the more he saw man's sinfulness, if he
hadn't have seen those extremes, he would never
have cried as he does later in his
book, when he says, O that thou wouldst
render heavens and come down.
This book of Isaiah, I guess you know
that well enough anyhow, it has 66 chapters.
And most of the scholars divide the book
from chapter 1 to chapter 39, and in
that division, chapters 1 to 39, the holiness
of God is mentioned 12 times.
From chapter 40 to chapter 66, the holiness
of God is mentioned 17 times.
This man insists on giving us a concept
of the holiness of God.
Let me suggest to you some nice reading
this week, instead of that little thing you
read from.
Every morning this week, we read the 40th
chapter of Isaiah.
He shows you this God, the high and
lofty one who inhabits eternity, sits on the
circle of the earth.
He counts the stars, he knows them all
by name.
A contemporary of Wesley wrote a piece of
poetry in which he said concerning the stars,
that God, he knows the stars, those heavenly
flames, he counts their numbers, calls their names.
His wisdom's vast and knows no bound, and
deeper than our thoughts are drowned.
He sees all the nations of the world,
he sees all history, history like one drop
in a bucket.
He's the God of incredible glory, he's the
God of incredible majesty.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I
saw the Lord.
Who is the Lord?
Well, the Lord is referred to in the
12th chapter of John.
Because this person sitting on the throne, I'll
mention him tomorrow night in another dimension, this
one sitting on the throne is none other
than Jesus Christ.
And he's described later, you remember, with eyes
like a flame of fire, his feet are
like burnished brass, his face is like the
sun in its strength, his voice is like
the sound of many waters, his tongue is
a sharp, twedged tongue.
That's the Christ and glory he sees there.
Well, how do you deal with extreme holiness
and see a nation like ours, which is
riddled with immorality tonight, which is riddled with
venereal disease, which day by day sucks an
unborn babe from its mother and puts it
down the john?
That's civilization, that's modern scholarship without a conscience.
We're more drunkens in the nation tonight than
ever we've had.
We're more people with VV than ever we've
had.
We're more people imprisoned.
We're more people with broken homes.
Poor children that don't know the difference, they
just live without a daddy or without a
mummy for years.
And God looks on this misery.
What does he do about it?
He must do one of two things.
He must either send a cleansing wave of
revival or burn the nation up.
And this precious man stands there.
He says, Oh, that thou wouldst render heavens
and come down.
What we need is not a stronger dollar.
What we need is not a bunch of
smarter men in politics, for they all go
the same way.
What we need in America is a divine
invasion, is some miracle of God whereby the
house of God is so filled with majesty
that the lights don't go out for two
or three weeks and people out there dare
not lust and they dare not drink and
they dare not do their devilish work.
That's what revival does.
Revival isn't a crowded meeting with a good
preacher.
Revival is an invasion of God interfering in
the affairs of men and stopping them before
they go and burn in hell forever.
I say tonight, we've more lost people than
ever in the world.
Because we've lost sight of the holiness of
God, we've lost sight of the sinfulness of
men.
We've lost sight of their peril.
I have a precious son who's a very
outstanding man.
Well, it would be, of course, if he
were my son.
And anyhow, but apart from that, he is
in South America.
He's a great, wonderful man of God.
Went there by faith, has been there twenty
-odd years and he still is there.
Recently on the phone, he said, Daddy, I
was reading a book, listen to this.
And he told me about a man who
lived over in Maryland.
The man had a daughter who was extraordinarily
beautiful.
But somehow, how strange it is, what opposites
are drawn together.
She fell in love with a drunk, a
drinking, dopey guy.
But delighted in how much he smelled of
sweat and his hair was long.
And he was a horrid sight to look
at, but she loved him with a passion
and he loved her.
The man came home one day to find
a note.
The wife had left a note and said,
I've gone off with the girl.
We're going down to Chicago.
We'll have to change planes or trains in
Chicago.
We're going out to the West Coast.
And she's going to get married there.
Well, the man was in despair.
He tried to guard the girl, he tried
to instruct the girl, he prayed over the
girl, and now she deliberately walks out with
a scoundrel, a man who could be no
good to her in any shape or form.
And she's going to get married to him
and settle down?
What did he do?
Couldn't call the FBI.
He got down on his face in his
room and he said, God, there's my darling
daughter.
I prayed for her, I love her.
And she's going to meet that scoundrel and
marry that scoundrel?
And if she should die on the journey?
And these are his exact words.
He didn't say, my charming, beautiful daughter, if
she dies, we'll go to hell.
This is what he said.
He said, God, I cannot bear to think
that my daughter will marry that man and
she may die?
And if she dies?
These were his words.
If she dies without God, if she goes
to everlasting burnings, I'll be an embarrassment in
heaven.
I'll leave pools of tears on your golden
street because while I'm enjoying the bliss and
glory of heaven, a part of me, not
my daughter, a part of me will be
in hell forever and ever and ever perishing.
I guess one of the curses of our
modern religion is that people like Mormons and
JWs and all the rest of it do
not believe in hell.
And people say, isn't it awful?
We've got neighbors that don't believe in hell.
We've got this that don't believe in hell.
I'll tell you something.
You don't believe in hell either.
Theoretically you do.
Last night we had a prayer meeting in
the room down there in the old tabernacle.
It reached peaks.
At times it seemed a bit flat, but
it reached peaks.
There were times of groaning and agony.
Do you believe if you, can you really
say now sitting there that if you really
believe that your children who are on stage
are going to everlasting burnings, you wouldn't have
been in a prayer meeting?
I was raised in the city of Leeds
in the center of England.
Prior about the time of my birth we
had a super criminal there.
He was a combination of every kind of
wicked man you ever had.
Worse than any Al Capone.
He robbed banks.
He raped women.
He led a gang of cutthroats.
And he was elusive.
The police couldn't get hold of him.
And then one day he was brought into
court.
And the judge said, the jury men, the
manager of the jury said that you're being
found guilty.
You're to hang by your neck until you
die.
And according to law in England, a man
must have three weeks in which to repent
and get straightened out.
For the last three weeks of his life
he was put in solitary confinement.
He was guarded night and day.
He wasn't given a knife or fork lest
he should try to evade the law by
suicide.
There he was day and night pondering for
three weeks all his hideous record of crime.
He'd left blood and slaughter and wickedness and
he began to have some trouble about it
in his thinking.
The night before he was to go to
the gallows an officer came in and said,
Mr. Pease.
That was his real name.
It's a strange name for such a rebel.
Mr. Pease and Charlie Pease said, Yes, I
die in the morning at eight o'clock.
And you know what?
Ho, ho, I'll be here.
At eight o'clock the prison governor went
in.
A prison officer went in.
Pierpoint the hangman went in.
A doctor went in.
And they stood round him and Charlie jumped
up and said, So not what?
And then came the preacher wearing his robe
and reading somnolently, half asleep.
He's only thirty feet to go through a
door and the man stands on the trap
door and then they pull a switch and
he goes and he falls down there.
His neck is jerked out.
He dies quicker than being electrocuted.
When he got about ten feet from the
door away that he was going to go
through the preacher was reading about heaven and
about hell about everlasting bliss about streets of
gold.
And then he came to something else.
And as he did, Charlie Pease reached out
and grabbed him and spun him round and
said, What are you reading?
The frightened preacher said, I'm reading from a
book.
It's called The Consolations of Religion.
Charlie sneered and said, Consolations of Religion.
Listen, preacher.
Minutes ago you were preaching about the hell.
You said you go falling forever and ever
and ever and never reach the bottom.
You said that hell is a fire where
you burn forever and ever.
You never consume.
You said that hell is dying and never
dying.
It's the icy fingers of death round your
throat and you never die.
It may take a billion years but you'll
be in the grip of death and never
have the relief death brings.
He said, Preacher, tell me this.
Do you believe what you just read?
When I get off the end of that
rope and fall, will something go out of
me and go on fall forever and ever
and ever and ever?
Will I be burning forever and ever and
ever and ever?
Will I be dying and not have any
relief whoever I call to?
Because remember this, friend.
If you won't pray now, you'll pray in
hell.
I've got scripture for it.
A man in hell prayed.
He prayed from the wrong place.
He prayed to the wrong person.
He prayed to Father Abraham.
He prayed about the wrong things and he
got the wrong answer.
Oh yes, people pray.
I've no record of anybody praying in heaven
except Jesus Christ.
He's been praying there for 2,000 years
for the church.
The preacher looked at Charlie Peace and Charlie's
angry.
Preacher, he said, if I believe what you
and the Church of Jesus Christ say you
believe, you could cover England with broken glass
from that coast to that, which is from
Liverpool to Hull.
It's only about 130 miles.
You could cover England with broken glass and
force me to my knees and make me
crawl over the nation leaving a trail from
my hands that were torn, leaving a trail
of blood from my veins which had been
lacerated.
I would gladly walk, crawl from Liverpool to
Hull on my hands and knees to rescue
one other man from hell.
And when I got in a dying, exhausted
condition into Hull, I would say, Charlie, you
did well.
You not only saved yourself, you saved another
man from eternal misery.
Are you going to tell me that the
average believer, whether he's a Pentecostal or Presbyterian,
Methodist or Mennonite, that we believe in an
eternal hell where there's a million roads in
and no road out?
Where they sing only one song, the harvest
is past, the summer is ended and we're
not saved?
What in God's name does it take to
move us?
You can't find a man who's moved this
nation to God.
You can take Finn, if you like, one
of the greatest men who ever walked, as
far as I'm concerned.
You can take a humble shoe salesman like
B.L. Moody that God got hold of.
He had no scholarship.
He sat in a meeting one night where,
I forgot the name of the man, Harvest,
that somebody was preaching.
And that man just threw out a statement
which wasn't true anyhow.
But he said, the world has yet to
see what God can do through one man
who has totally emptied himself and filled with
God.
And the little guy there that usually sat
all day selling shoes, as he heard the
preacher say that, he said, by the grace
of God, I'll be that man.
He came to England.
They scorned him.
They said he murdered his English.
He said Daniel in one syllable, Daniel.
He said Jerusalem in one syllable, Jerusalem, he
said.
But there came a time when the Queen
of England asked him to come to Buckingham
Palace and have lunch.
How in the world do you fill an
auditorium, the largest auditorium in England?
He didn't have some of these raggling kids,
you know.
He didn't have some hot band that sings.
Do you know the poor guy only had
God.
Isn't it shocking?
That's all he had.
He didn't have a finance committee behind him.
He didn't have an organization running ahead of
him.
He didn't have big streamers in the newspapers.
He didn't have TV.
He had God upon him.
And people went in their tens of thousands
to hear that man.
Because God the Holy Ghost was upon him.
But listen, one of the outstanding things, he
preached on hell at least once in every
crusade he had.
I don't know if anybody on TV would
preach hell to death, unless it's Stragan, he
might.
And I respect that man very highly.
We had lunch with him, Brother Tommy and
Patty and my dear wife and I had
lunch with him a few weeks ago.
I told him how much I enjoyed his
preaching.
I told him, I said, your singing doesn't
attract me too much.
That was a bad shot, wasn't it?
It was a low shot.
He's right across the table.
I mean, he could have thrown the water
on me, he didn't, but that's all right.
I said, you know, your preaching isn't the
best I've ever heard in my life.
What moves me is you can weep and
you're not ashamed to weep on TV about
lost men and women.
The greatest of English preachers maybe ever was
George Whitfield.
And he said, when I see a congregation,
I don't see the back of the building,
I see the flames of hell ready to
consume them when they step out there, many
of them having rejected God.
How do you get vision?
I'll tell you.
Put some old ragged clothes on one night
and go down into Dallas and get around
those prostitutes on back streets and those criminals
and jailbirds.
Ask the police where the worst people are.
You talk about sense.
Do you know what we do for big
crusades?
We send hundreds of buses from the First
Baptist, the Second Baptist and the 101st Baptist
and the 101st Methodist.
We send church members to Billy Graham's meetings.
By the thousand.
We don't stop at street corners and pick
up the prostitutes.
We don't go to the jailbirds.
We don't go to the taverns.
We don't rescue the perishing and care for
the dying.
We go so that the people can string
the feathers up a bit and hear some
nice singing and hear some broken down film
stars that got saved so they'd jump on
the bandwagon and sing in big meetings or
broken down footballers.
But God loves lost men.
God loves the unclean.
God loves the poor.
God loves the destitute.
God loves those who look with suspicion on
the churches because they see no glory.
They see no power.
They see no lives revolutionized.
They live in an office with an executive
who's a big shop deacon somewhere but he's
mean.
He's scandalous.
He'll tell an off-color joke now and
again.
But what God wants to do is get
some holy people and I say again the
greatest miracle and I've seen God do wonderful
miracles physically but the greatest miracle that God
can do is to take an unholy man
out of an unholy world make that unholy
man holy put him back in an unholy
world and keep him holy.
And he can do it.
And he does do it.
And he is doing it.
And he will do it.
The lostness of men.
I need to see the holiness of God.
I'm going to speak on worship Tuesday night
I think.
It's the most unusual exercise in the life
of individuals.
I have preached.
I've prayed.
I've planned.
And I've written books about revival and about
prayer for 60 years.
I've discovered there's something greater than prayer.
And that's worship.
I'll tell you about it Tuesday night.
I need a vision of a holy God.
I need a vision of a broken lost
world.
Men that get that vision and get the
holy compassion of God in their heart change
history.
They write history.
They don't read church history.
They make church history.
I didn't know William Booth.
I believe I saw him once when I
was a little boy.
He died in 1912 actually.
I knew a man that lived with him
for years and he told me about that
awesome man.
I knew his daughter, the mother, very well.
Boy, you talk about holy ghost revival?
There's a place in London which is now
a theatre.
At that time it was a hall you
could rent.
William Booth rented it.
It was packed with about 2,000 people.
And men would sit on the back seats
there.
They were under such conviction of sin they'd
take their handbooks and have no hardbacks.
And they'd get so nervous that they'd shred
their handbooks and you could see where they'd
been sitting.
The same thing happened in the Irish revival.
I'd talk with W.P. Nicholson about revival
there.