“Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It“
Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
September 29, 1959
Now, it is a privilege any time to take the Word of God and expound it to any group of people anywhere. But it is particularly, it is a particular privilege to be able to preach to preachers, because when you preach to a preacher, if it does him any good, then you are preaching to everybody he preaches to after that.
If you preach to a congregation, you preach to a congregation. But if you preach to preachers, you preach to everybody they preach to after that. So, it is a particular privilege for me to address the members of Conference, and it’s odd that the congregation is composed almost exclusively of the delegates.
Now, there are two little passages of Scripture that I want to read. One is found in the first chapter of Acts. When they were come together, they asked Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?
And He said unto them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons. You see, He caught them up on a word. Wilt Thou at this time, and He said, it’s not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power, but ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
Then, in 2 Corinthians 7:10, 11, for godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold, this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort. What carefulness it wrought in you, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what revenge, and in all things ye have proved yourselves to be clear in this matter.
Now, I want to talk first about the offer of our Lord, that we should have power. And then, try to show why we don’t have, and that will be the second text.
Now you will notice that in the verses from Acts, that the word power occurs twice. Greek sharks complain all the time that the Greek has so many meanings in it, that they can’t find any English word that has enough meanings. But it so happens that here we have an English word that has too many meanings, and that’s the word power. It has enough meaning in that one word to take in both Greek words. For in verse 7 it says, which the Father hath put in His own power, verse 8, but ye shall receive power. The same word in English.
But this English word has two meanings, and so it covers the two Greek words. One meaning ability, and the other meaning authority. In Luke 4, verses 35 and 36, we read of our Lord performing an act, Luke 4, and it says that the power and authority of Jesus, it refers to His power and authority, and there you have both of the meanings.
Now, authority is the right to do, and power is the ability to do, but it so happens that power in English means both of these things. We have to distinguish. Jesus here did not promise authority. That is dealt with elsewhere, but here the word authority, or the thought of authority, is not present. He’s talking about ability to do.
And He said when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, you shall have moral ability to do. This supernatural potency, he said, was to come upon them. It was to be an invasion from outside of them, from beyond them. It was to invade their nature. It was to come into their personality from outside of them.
And here is the great gulf that separates between the faith of Christ and all forms of occultism. There’s Baha’ism and New Thought and Unity and Yogiism and Applied Psychology and Autosuggestions and New Thought and what have you.
Well, they all try to do the same thing, and you know the odd part about it is that they’re not all bad. They have a little good in them.
If a fellow is downcast and hand-pecked and brow-beaten and discouraged and blue, and you can talk him into believing that he amounts to something, it’ll help him a little. You know, he’ll go home and back and face it, or he’ll go to his work and face it. It does him a little bit of good.
Thinking positively helps a little bit. But all of these occult or psychological religions say the same thing, wake up the giant within you. Some of us have no giant, we have a mouse in us. But wake up the giant within you. Others say tune in your hidden potentials.
A man sent me a book called, “You Are Greater Than You Think,” and he autographed it for me, inscribed it, said he knew I’d enjoy it. And then another fellow says, make friends with your solar plexus and learn to think creatively.
Now, all of these are the occult, forms of occultism and psychology. And I say that they’re not wholly bad, not wholly bad, because they help a man to get his chin up and take it. And it’s better than nothing at all for a short time.
But it isn’t what Jesus was talking about. These things have nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever. Our Lord had nothing like that in mind. He knew there was no giant within us. He knew that our hidden potentialities were potentialities for sin. And He knew that our solar plexus was simply the central switchboard for fallen nerves. He knew that. And He knew that we could think until the world came and not create anything. He knew it.
So, He said, what you’re going to have to have is an invasion from outside of you, an afflatus from above, a potency that has come from another world. And you’ll receive that when the Holy Ghost comes upon you. You’ll receive that moral ability that you don’t have now. You’ll receive it.
Now, this has to come. And that’s why ethical Christianity is not sufficient. You know, evangelicalism in one fringe at any rate, very important fringe, is moving the way liberalism moved 50 years ago, going the same direction.
And they’re beginning now to talk about the importance of Christian ethics. Well, Christian ethics, my friends, simply means obeying the commandment of Christ. That was the name for it. But that sounds too dumb. So now we’ve invented terms to sound more learned, so we can hold up our heads among the PhDs.
And all of this ethical Christianity is inadequate. It isn’t enough because it doesn’t bring something to you. It simply whips up a weak dog. It whips up a weak animal, that’s all. When you lay the lash on an old spaven swayback mule, all you can bring out of him is what he’s got in him. If you want an Arabian stallion, you have to have an Arabian stallion.
And so all that books on Christian ethics can do is to whip up the poor old spaven Adam nature that you’ve got, and it isn’t enough. It isn’t sufficient. It won’t do.
So, the Lord Jesus Christ said, you shall receive a potency from above. You shall receive an afflatus of power coming upon you with ability to do, moral ability. If Christianity doesn’t provide this, then it is only one more of the religions of the world.
Now, this power of course is the Spirit of God, and I will say “It” sometimes, meaning the power, abstracting in thought, the power from the Spirit, who is the Power, but only in thought. There can be no division, no cleavage between the Holy Spirit and His power, but I shall talk about power and sometimes say “It.”
So don’t think that I’m going wrong here. It is only the weakness and ineffectiveness of human language that forces me to do it. The power of the Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the Father, He is the Spirit of the Father, and therefore this power that God, that our Lord offers us, is the power of God.
Now, I want to talk a little about how that power operates. It operates by an unmediated force applied directly to the human spirit by the Holy Spirit.
The wrestler works in the same way. He operates by applying physical power to physical power. The great bruiser applies, he reaches his ends and succeeds, that is, in pinning the other man by applying great lumpy muscle to another fellow who has great lumpy muscle, but maybe not quite as much.
So, the wrestler achieves his end by the pressure of body on body, and the thinker achieves his end by the pressure of ideas upon the mind. And it’s amazing what an idea will do when it gets into the mind.
That little peasant that was over here from Russia the other day, he’s a brainwashed fellow. He’s sold on his proposition. Ideas hit his mind, and they bend him and shaped him and molded him. And even though an Iowa farmer can raise 16 times as much corn to the bushel, he thought he knew how to tell the farmer how to raise corn. That’s because ideas have hit his mind, and the raw force of ideas on a little shrewd mind has turned him into a devoted communist.
Of course, ideas don’t have to be communistic. They’re ideas all up and down the scale from bad to good, and they achieve their ends by naked contact with the human mind.
Then when we come to morals, morals achieve their end by the pressure of obligation upon the conscience. A man does right because his conscience has obligation. He feels a sense of moral obligation upon his conscience.
Now, those are illustrations merely, but when we come to the Holy Spirit, we come to something else altogether. He may make use of ideas, and He may make use of a sense of obligation and a conscience. He may make use of it.
Though I preached a sermon on conscience one time up in your district, the one you came out of, brother, before you came out of it, I mean before you got in it, years ago, and they ran me ragged for talking about conscience.
I believe in conscience. The words in the Bible, and I’ll never run from the words in the Bible, it’s there, the Holy Ghost may use conscience, the Holy Ghost uses ideas. But when Jesus said, Ye shall receive power, he was not particularly thinking about ideas nor about conscience. He was thinking about the application, the pressure of the Spirit of God upon the Spirit of man, the ability of God being brought into contact with the Spirit of man, enabling the man to do what he couldn’t otherwise do or ever hope to be able to do.
Now, it can be experienced, this power, but it can never be described, and never worry about that, any of you preachers. If anybody runs you in the corner and says, define, never worry about that at all, because no scientist can define, no philosopher can define, you can’t define at all. You can only describe.
Definitions are for dictionaries, and they belong there. I cannot define how the power of God works in a man, I don’t know, I can’t define, but you’ve seen it work. You’ve seen the Spirit of God come into a drunkard and kill the desire for liquor, you’ve seen that. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a dope fiend and take away that terrible love of dope. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a man with a fiery, vicious temper and calm him down and smooth him off and make him as quiet as a lamb. You’ve seen that. It can’t be explained.
The Holy Ghost does this, He uses the awe and fear of the supernatural. He secures the end, independent of the intellect.
Now, the greatest force, of course that the Holy Ghost has, the greatest force is His ability to make spiritual entities real to the mind. When the Holy Ghost has come, He shall take the things of mine and He shall show them unto you. There is a veil between the mind of a man and spiritual things until the Spirit of God comes and makes it possible for him to see them.
The Holy Ghost doesn’t create the objects any more than the sun, when it comes up in the morning, creates the landscape. You can stand on a hillside and look down on a valley where there are beautiful farms and lovely farm buildings and little lakes and flowing rivers and see nothing at all, for it’s dark there.
Then the sun comes up in its blazing glory and you see the silver rivers and the little lakes and the farmhouses and the fields all laid out in squares and the highway weaving between. The sun didn’t create those things, they were there, but you didn’t see them. But when the sun came, you saw what was there.
The Spirit of God comes to show you what’s already there. He doesn’t create them. He doesn’t project imaginary things out of your mind. They’re there, but you can’t see them. Then when He comes, He shows them to you. I say this full effectiveness is when the Spirit of God reveals Jesus Christ unto us and enables us to do what you have to do, He enables you to do.
Now, the next question is, with this promise here, with its having been fulfilled at Pentecost and with the perpetuation of Pentecost, and I will say, I do not believe in the repetition of Pentecost, I believe in the perpetuation of Pentecost.
Pentecost is not to be repeated, it is to be perpetuated. But if you have been brainwashed by some of the dispensationalists, why, you will be asking me the question or quietly and smugly, smiling at my ignorance and saying, don’t you know that Pentecost came and went? And I reply, no, I know nothing of the sort. Pentecost came and stayed, it did not come and go.
The Spirit of the Lord, God, came down into human flesh, and wherever there’s a heart that’s open to His incoming, he still does the same thing. But somebody says, that happened back there once for all, that can’t, we never can have that that they had back there.
I say that I might as well try to live on a meal that Peter ate in Jerusalem, as to live on the blessing that Peter got in the upper room. And if I can’t have the same afflatus of power, the same incoming of potency from beyond me, then what good did it do Peter? Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost, but Peter’s dead. Much, much wind has blown over the moor since that hour. In another part of the world, in another age, way back yonder, Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost in the upper chamber.
And they say, now, shh, be quiet, let it go at that. That’s what it meant; you shall receive power. That happened back there, but they’re all dead.
Neither the church died with them, or else the Lord Jesus Christ meant that that should be perpetuated to the end of the age. I believe the latter. I believe that the Lord meant that the power of the Holy Ghost he offered His church here should be perpetuated to all His people and beloved friends. If you read your Schofield Bible margin, you’ll find He believes it too.
Now, why don’t we have this? We Alliance preachers, we claim to believe in the deeper life, the Spirit-filled life. But I preach for an awful lot of people. When I go to New York next week, I’m going to preach for a week in the Alliance church, and then I’m going to preach to a convention of Pentecostal preachers, believe it or not. Then I’m going to preach to a convention two days later of Baptist preachers. And I’m going to preach just about the same thing.
And I’d like to say to you Alliance preachers, I find that we don’t have a thing the rest of them don’t have. We don’t have a thing except the memory of A. B. Simpson. Where are you going to go to find Alliance preachers that have anything extra? Why don’t we have? We’ve got Christ in the Bible series, we have days of heaven upon earth, we have all of those books. We’re supposed to believe in these things. But we’ve learned the ways of the denominations. Some denominations are ahead of us, edge us out.
I run into people, I run into preachers who are hungry for God, that it’s pitiful. A pastor of a Bible church, a Calvinistic Bible church that’s not supposed to believe in these things, told me this. He said, Brother Tozer, I’m so hungry for God, I can feel it in my body, in my flesh. I long for God with a longing that I can feel in my body. I know what he meant, for David said, my flesh and my heart cry out for the living God. I haven’t had an Alliance preacher say that to me in 25 years.
I’m preaching to Alliance preachers, but brethren, if I were preaching to Baptists, I’d never say this. I’m as loyal as a dog when I’m preaching to others, but I’m talking to you, I want to be frank, tell you what I think of you. Why don’t we have this? Why do we preach about it and not experience it?
Why are we satisfied to take a little church, preach to a few people and stay three years, then write the superintendent and get shifted and then two years more, go someplace else and quit and go into evangelism, and evangelism for a year and then go back into the pastorate? Why are we satisfied to do that kind of thing? Why must we always be little and without much ministry?
I’ll tell you, my brethren, why. And incidentally, it’s not because this truth doesn’t stand here, ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you. Isn’t it that we’ve misinterpreted that? No. It’s because we don’t have what Paul called, a vehement desire. A vehement desire creates a vacuum in the human spirit.
And just as nature loathes a vacuum, so God loathes a vacuum. And He never allows a vacuum to stay in the human spirit. If we empty ourselves out and long for God until a vacuum is created, only one thing can happen, the Holy Ghost will rush in to fill the vacuum.
This longing for God is a vital ingredient in the religious life. It’s found interwoven, of course, with the experience of the saints everywhere. It has other names in the Bible, hunger, for instance. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. Covet is another word Paul used. Long for, yearn, ardor, and fervency, all of these words. But vehement desire, desire that stops being conventional.
The trouble with us, brethren, the trouble with you, is you’re too conventional. You’ve got a cheap brand of sophisticated Christianity, and you’d rather be conventional than to please God. And you’d consider it a terrible thing if anybody said you were fanatical. If you’re going to please God, you’re going to have to run the gamut, and you’re going to have to be accused of everything.
I’ve been accused of everything imaginable, including being a liberal, if you can imagine that. But I’ve been accused of being a liberal. I’ve just had a little of everything. But you’ve got to be what Paul said here. Yeah, what indignation!
A man has to be a little bit tough and a little bit mean to serve God. You know what I mean by that? I mean, if you’re a soft pussy afraid of your reputation and afraid of what the superintendent will think of you, afraid of what the chairman of the board will think of you, afraid of what the women’s prayer band will think of you, you’ll always be a little mouse.
But if there’s a longing for God and a repentance and a sorrow of heart over your own weakness, that is of a godly sort that works in you, carefulness and a clearing of yourself, and indignation not against others but with yourself, and fear and vehement desire, you’ll get a reputation of being different, of course, and they’ll say, he’s weird, he’s different. And somebody says, let’s get so-and-so as our pastor, and somebody says, just a minute, just a minute, I know that fellow, because he’s vehemently longing after God.
But if you’ll go ahead anyhow, if you’ll do it anyway, if you’ll seek the face of God anyhow, if you’ll shut yourself up and seek the face of God until the afflatus from God comes on you, give yourself five years, they’ll be coming to you. The first year they’ll run away from you, and the next four they’ll be coming to you. Remember that. What longing after God, Paul said.
Now, the effect of absence of desire is all around about us. We examine our own hearts, it’ll confirm the truth of what I’ve said, the state of our spiritual desire.
Now, here you are at conference, and you’re going to elect a new district superintendent, and I think that I could safely and charitably say that who your new superintendent is, is the most important matter in the minds of most of us. Brethren, it doesn’t matter much at all. Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you shall be visited by a supernatural afflatus from another world. That’s what matters.
And if we could meet God’s terms, and we could create by indignation and a clearing of ourselves and a yearning after God, if we could create within our hearts a vacuum and this mighty Spirit of God would flow in, almost anybody will help us to lead us. But we take the least important things and make them to be important, and the one important thing we overlook.
When Peter later on got up and grabbed his hat and started to preach the gospel to every creature, the Lord called him back and said, Peter, you’ve misunderstood me. I said you should go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, but you’re not ready to go yet. Don’t go yet, because ye shall receive power, then you go. But never go until you do.
I’ve always claimed that before any man is ordained, he ought to give proof that he either has been filled with the Holy Ghost or he’s longing with vehement desire. But we never ask him that question, at least we rarely do.
So, we grade up and down from practically no desire at all to a very little desire, to a desire that’s stronger than any emotion in the human breast. A longing after God, a longing for God’s Spirit, a longing for holiness of heart, a longing for ability to do.
And if you’ll remember this, that our spiritual state always corresponds with the intensity of our desire. Everybody listening to me has as much of God as he actually desires. You are as holy as you want to be. You are as full of the Holy Ghost as you really want to be.
Remember, that we can think we want to be filled with the Spirit of God, but not want too bad enough to pay the price to be filled. We cancel out our longing and we don’t want to be at all.
If you can make terms with God; a man will kneel at the altar and begin to make terms with God. He’ll never be filled. Man will kneel at the altar and begin to argue with God. He’ll never be filled. It’s when desire goes beyond all dickering and all making of terms and becomes a vehement thing, a tempestuous thing, a torrential thing, then God will bless and fill that man with the Holy Ghost.
I preached to a conference of Baptist preachers some time ago, a few years back, and I preached about Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up. Two years later, two Baptist preachers came to my home out in Longwood Drive and said, we’d like to talk with you, Brother Tozer. I said, Come on in. I knew one of them, and the other was introduced to me. One of them said, do you remember when you preached to a conference of Baptist preachers up in the name of the town up north of Chicago? I don’t remember which one it was. I said, I remember.
Well, he said, you remember when you preached on Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up and he saw that he was no good, he was all dirty inside, he needed to have a hot coal, a flaming coal to touch him. I said, I remember this sermon.
Well, he said, You know what happened to me? I conceived that day such a longing to be filled with the Holy Ghost that it ruled my life, it controlled me, it became the biggest thing in my life.
And he said, For months and months I sought God. I went on with my pastorate, but I sought God. And he said, one day, after more than a year, one day I stood in the middle of my living room floor and I suddenly looked up and I said, God, I won’t wait any longer.
And he said, Instantly and suddenly, wonderfully, there came down an afflatus of the Holy Ghost upon my life. Oh, Brother Tozer, he said, what God did for me. I said, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to the Pentecostals. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m going right back and preach right the way I’ve been preaching. But he said, Oh, I got what you preached about.
I could illustrate by telling you case after case, person after person, who, whatever their shade of theology might have been, I never worry much about that, as long as it’s orthodox. But the point is, when they get a longing after God sufficiently, then the Spirit of God will rush in and fill the vacuum.
And always remember, I repeat, you have as much as you want. Maybe you don’t have as much as you’ve prayed for, but you have as much as you really desire. It is wonderful what strong desire will do for a man.
Paul Rader used to tell about a man cast up on an island with just one can of beans. He said he just had a can of beans that floated up there, and he was alone. He said he hadn’t a thing. He didn’t even have a fountain pen. He said, there are the beans. He said, as the days went on, that man got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier. But there were the beans in the can, and he didn’t even have a sharp rock.
But he said, do you know something? That man will get that can open somehow, and he will. You put a man up on an island with a can of beans and let him get hungry enough, he’ll get that can open somehow.
And the man who wants God bad enough, he’ll get God. A man who wants that afflatus of power badly enough, he’ll get that afflatus of power. It may take him five years to figure it out theologically, but the power of God will come upon that life. And this is what we need in our day. This is what we need.
Back a few years ago in Nyack, some of the boys, one of them from this church, Harry Post, some of the other fellows from different places, they got the idea they wanted to have a prayer meeting.
So, they went down in the furnace room of the great big old Simpson Hall, I think they call it now, and they had what they called a glory hole. They were young enough, you know, to be kind of silly, but old enough to be longing after God.
So, they called it the glory hole. And down there they went. And they got to praying, seeking the face of God. And God got to meeting them and bothered the faculty terribly. So, they called them together and straightened them out theologically.
But they were just a little too late to head off the power of God. God had met this half dozen fellows, I could name them on my fingers, and everyone went out to be outstanding missionaries. Everyone. Not ordinary missionaries, outstanding missionaries. You know Harry Post. He gets up, you know, and flaps his ears and talks and moves people when he talks. God came on him. God came on these boys.
Always there’s somebody running and saying, let the Master alone, let the Master alone. When they run, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And some dig and said, let him alone, let him alone. Jesus said, you let him alone. I want to help him. What do you want? He said, I want to see. He said, okay. He touched him and he saw.
But we’re so afraid of getting fanatical. That’s what always tickles me when I get in Alliance churches. They say, now, we don’t want to become fanatical. We’re so far from being fanatical, we couldn’t get there by jet airplane in two weeks. No.
Fanatical? Fanatical, brother? Is a man likely to die of a fever when he’s only, he’s only, he’s only gotten a temperature of 80 in the shade? No, no. You won’t die of fever. We Alliance preachers don’t have to worry. We can go miles toward God, brother, before we strike any place where we’re likely to get fanatical.
And if you’re moving toward God, you’ll never get fanatical. It’s only when you stop moving toward God and start moving out after somebody. As long as you’re longing for God, you’ll never become fanatical. Ah, for the fanaticism of power, the fanaticism of Memminger, and the fanaticism of Dr. Wilson, and the fanaticism of these holy men that founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Well, what shall we do about this absence of desire? Well, we ought to consider it a deep soul sickness. We ought to consider something’s wrong with us.
Now, we can lead in prayer, we can read the Scripture, we can whip up a sermon, we can be chairman of the board, we can build a new church, we can do all sorts of religious things.
But you know, you can do that without God’s help. Did you know that brethren? You can preach a sermon without the Holy Ghost. You can. You can conduct a church for a year without the Holy Ghost. You don’t need the power of God to carry on a church the way we’ve got them organized now. All you need is a pleasant smile and a little patience.
Does that shock you? Well, thank God something happened anyhow. Is it shocking? It’s true, nevertheless. There are churches in this town where the Holy Ghost hasn’t been for generations, but they carry on just the same. All you have to do is get your constitution, get organized, get an understanding of who’s running things, and sing some, and give some, and preach some, and pray some, and visit some, and be nice, and you’ve got a church. But you haven’t got what God talked about.
Ye shall receive a potency from without you, that shall enter into you and give you moral ability to do. And if we don’t want this and we’re not longing for it, we ought to consider ourselves spiritually sick.
A man gets up in the morning and has no appetite, goes to noon and still has no appetite, at supper time his wife can’t persuade him to eat, and the next morning he has no appetite. He’s sick.
And the lack of longing, the lack of appetite, is a spiritual sickness. And we ought to consider how it’s keeping us helpless in this hour of the death struggle, this terrible hour of the death struggle, when evangelical Christianity is going off in four or five different directions.
Oh, how God needs sane, sound men with sound doctrinal position, but aflame with the Power. How desperately we need it, but we’ll not have it as long as we’re satisfied with what we’ve got. Give the average young preacher a little parsonage, second-hand car, and two weeks’ vacation a year, and pay his way to conference, and that’s about all he wants. He’ll probably have a couple of babies, or three, four. But that’s about all. He’s very happy.
Oh, for the men and women, the young fellows that won’t be satisfied with this. They’ll go off and seek God until something happens to their lives. I’d be happy if a young fellow who thinks he’s called to the ministry would seek God until he found whether he was or not.
You know this fellow, Duma. Is that his name? D-U-M-A, I think. Over there in Africa, South Africa. How he, ignorant fellow, Zulu, if I remember. No education, nothing, but he felt called to preach. He came to Dr. Cook, now at Fort Wayne Bible Institute College. He said, Mr. Cook, I believe God’s calling me to preach. And Cook tells it on himself. He said, I didn’t think any of these were ever called to preach. He was ignorant. He was uncouth. He had nothing.
He said, I told him, oh, you better give it up. I don’t think you’re called to preach. He said he disappeared and was gone two weeks. He went up in the hills and went in a cave. He spent two weeks waiting on God to be guided, to be filled with the Holy Ghost, to be prepared, to find out whether he was called or not. At the end of two weeks, he came back with his black face shining.
And he went to the Baptists and said, I’d like a church. And they said, all right. Gave him a church of six members. In a year or two, he had that many hundreds. It was only a little while until he became the outstanding preacher of South Africa.
They say that ignorant man, black as ebony, many times called into the homes of the white governors to pray for their sick. And he prays for their sick and they get well. Nobody, nobody doubted his call when he came back from his two weeks with God. He shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you.
Now, brethren, you can do anything you want with this. You can interpret it. And you can say that it’s not scriptural, a sound, scriptural position. Do as you please about it, but always remember, whatever you do about it is what you’ll have in your ministry. You’ll get as much as you’re hungry for. You will have as much as you long for.
And if the self-indignation and the clearing of yourself and the godly sorrow and the yearning after God that becomes vehement, if it takes over, you don’t know what God may do for you. Coming upon you in great power, the power of enabling, the power of moral enabling, the power of spiritual penetration, the power to see through the fog bank, power of x-ray vision. God wants to give you that, my ministerial brethren.
The price has all been paid on the cross of Calvary. No price yet to be paid, only conditions to be met. I pray that before this conference is over, some of you may have met those conditions. For when you meet them, instantly the work of God is done. You shall be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now, I know this is not a good motive to suggest, but I’m going to tell you something. The Christian and Missionary Alliance believes what I’ve preached tonight. But we’re doing so little about it that there are other groups who had not been taught it, but who have in recent years become hungry, and they’re going into the kingdom of God ahead of us.
Now, it’s not a good motive, of course, but I’m just warning you that if we won’t, somebody will. If we’re not, somebody is. May God grant that yet the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with its 850, nearly, missionaries around the world, may go back to Bethel, back to where we found God and start over. Let us pray.
O Lord Jesus, Thou knowest the propensity of the human heart to backslide. Thou knowest how quickly the temperature of the human spirit cools off. Thou knowest how easy it is to become satisfied with ourselves, to be at ease in Zion, to invent instruments of music and stretch ourselves on beds of ivory, and drink wine out of bowls, and care nothing for the captivity of Israel.
Lord, we see this among us. O deliver us, we pray Thee, from complacency. Deliver us from fallow ground. Deliver us from the unplowed heart. Deliver us from deadly contentment. O Lord, we beseech Thee, deliver us from taking by faith and not receiving.
Forgive us, we pray Thee, for our conventional Christianity. Forgive us, we pray Thee, because we’re afraid to be extreme. O Lord, cleanse our hearts from cowardice, and deliver us, we beseech Thee, from being little frightened preachers in the hour when we need lions and prophets and bold reformers and seers who wear the crown of spiritual ascendancy and rule by prayer and the Spoken Word.
We beseech Thee, disturb us, upset us. Let us not settle down to the grind of business, but rather let us, we pray Thee, while we do the business, always have the subconscious yearning, the longing, even if we have to push it out of our mind a little, may it come flaring back like a fire to burn in our bones. Until we seek Thy face and are filled with the Holy Ghost, we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.