In this sermon, Tommy shares a powerful story of his encounter with a witch doctor in a village. The witch doctor threatened Tommy and his group, but Tommy stood firm in his faith and preached the gospel to the villagers for three hours. The next morning, over four hundred people showed up at Tommy's house, eager to hear more about Jesus. Tommy then shares how the Church of Jesus Christ in that village grew from twelve to fifteen hundred in just six weeks. The sermon emphasizes the power of the gospel and the importance of sharing it with others.

You that have your outlines will note that we have now covered the first ten points, and this morning I'm proposing that we should see numbers fourteen through fifteen. I will give them to you. We're talking today about the fivefold ministry of the spirit-filled believer. I want you to turn, please, if you have your Bibles, to Acts chapter one, verse eight. You're familiar with it? I know that, but I still want you to see it. I begin reading with verse five and conclude with verse eight. For John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, 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 which the Father hath put in his own power, but you shall receive power. After that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. Let us bow in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we thank and praise thee for the presence of the Holy Spirit, to take in the things of Christ and show them unto us, to speak to our hearts, to find us where we are, show us where we ought to move next, what the next step in our growth and development is, how what of that great salvation we're to appropriate for our own. As we speak to this point in the sequence, we know there are many needs that will not be covered by the message that's been prepared for this hour, but thou art El Shaddai. Thou art the God who is enough, enough for every need, for every concern, for every aspiration, for every burden, for every problem. And so we're asking that somehow by that marvelous ministry of thy grace by the Holy Spirit, every need will be addressed. Let this not be a service when we are just having fellowship with one another about thee, but may we see thy face and hear thy voice and feel thy touch and know that we have met with thee. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Isn't it interesting that when the Lord Jesus said ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence, his disciples were so disinterested in what he was saying, all they could ask was, will you restore the kingdom of Israel at this time? You see, you've got to remember who they were and you're going to find out a lot about yourself and I'll find out a lot about myself by understanding them. You recall, of course, in John the fourth chapter when the Lord Jesus said, you've been saying four months then cometh the harvest. Now, I don't think he was talking about harvest of grain at all. I think these disciples were anticipating that about four more months the Pharisees would accept Jesus as the Messiah, would establish the kingdom of Israel and would give back to Israel the glory she'd had under David. And the reason I say that is because you remember the mother of James and John said, Lord, when thou comest into thy kingdom, let John sit on thy right hand and James on thy left. Of course, they had a fight among the boys. James wanted to be on the right hand and wanted John on the left. You see, they were politicians as well as disciples. They believed that Christ was the Messiah, that the kingdom was going to be established, and that when that happened, because they'd been with him and helped him, shall we say, get elected, that there were some jobs in that government that they'd have to fill. And here we find it's still happening, even after the so little insight, so little understanding, and so little realization of what the Lord's purpose was. He told them over and over again what they were to do and how they were to do it, but they still had this fixation, this tunnel vision, that kingdom is going to be given back and we're going to get what we deserve. Well, we're not far removed from them. How easy it is for us to be excited and interested about the first part of Acts 1.8. After that the Holy Ghost has come upon you, ye shall receive power. And most of the time when we think of power, we think in terms of our interests and our activities and our plan and our program, instead of realizing that God had a purpose in this, that he wanted to be implemented and completed. What was it? That the gospel should be preached to every creature, that everything that Christ had taught should be passed on, and that the ends of the earth should hear, that every person breathing the breath of human life should not only at one time but subsequently always, those that would be coming, have the opportunity of learning about God's great gift in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now for centuries the church has been in what I call a Babylonian captivity. You have to remember that the movement of modern missions as we know it is rather recent. In fact, it was the Moravians there out of Hornhut in Germany who first renewed the commitment to go to all the ends of the earth with the gospel. They had a very interesting way of doing this. They sent a whole community. There would be a harness maker and a blacksmith and a cabinet maker, and there'd be a teacher, preacher, a weaver, all the skills needed for a frontier community, and they would go as a body. They'd go as a company and establish their own life and livelihood there, and as people were brought to Christ, they'd come in and they would learn not only to read and to write, be taught all the doctrines of the faith, but they'd also learn a trade because it was realized by the Moravians that coming to Christ was the most detribalizing thing that could happen, and since the religion of the people was under the control of Satan, anyone who renounced Satan to receive Christ was going to be disenfranchised, and so the Moravians anticipated that and provided a means by which the believers could care for themselves. Well, that was the method of missions up until the time Hudson Taylor came along. He went that way to China. The China Inland Mission was a group of people that were going to go in to engage in agriculture and agribusiness of one sort or another while they supported themselves in their witness for Christ. George Mueller had been terribly impressed with Hudson Taylor, invited him to come back to China and to Bristol, where George Mueller spent several months in praying in of a hundred thousand pounds. Now, a hundred thousand pounds in 1850 or thereabouts was a lot of money. I think you'd have to have about five million dollars of our present value to equal that, and this amount of money was turned over to Hudson Taylor for the purpose of evangelism in China, and that meant the mark, the change from self-support missions to being supported through one's entire career by the family that sent them and the church family that sent them. So we've had a rather recent return to the task of getting the gospel out to the ends of the earth. I would suggest to you, therefore, that in more recent years, just in the last thirty or four or more, there's been a recovery of the gifts of the Spirit and the enablings of the Spirit. We've called it, I think, a charismatic movement. Now, when I came into the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in 1953, there wasn't any movement at that time. It was just one person with a ministering in the fundamental evangelical churches who committed a great act of heresy by opening his heart to receive the fullness of Christ, but that was all right. I've never been sorry about that at all. I've been very grateful. But during that period of time, there's been the recovery of the gifts of the Spirit, and there's also been what we've called, as I said, the charismatic movement. When I saw that happening, everything I wanted from God was that I might be more effective as a witness for Christ as a missionary. You see, once you're a that you can't pay any other way. You've just got to continue to be a missionary as long as you live and breathe. And we have been recovering principles. I've sometimes likened it to a great eruption like that at Vesuvius over Pompeii, when all of the truths of the early church were sort of buried. Think of an airplane that had been in certain monuments and inscriptions, and the people that followed that great eruption were in the process of recovering these remnants. One person digs around, scratches around, comes up with a wheel. He said, boy, I got the airplane. Somebody else picks up a propeller, says, I got an airplane. And they get a wheel to steer it, and so he thinks that's the airplane. And each group has been sort of recovering some piece, some truth. Well, I believe the Spirit of God wants us to recognize that there's no such thing as the most important New Testament truth. Everything is. I was flying with Bill Sample out of Charlotte, North Carolina, years ago, who represented ESSO at that time in North Carolina, selling their fuel products at the airports throughout North Carolina. And as we were waiting to take off, I said, Bill, what's the most important part on this airplane? And he said, it's the one that isn't working. That be makes it important. And I said, what's the most important? We were in the air then. I said, Bill, what's the important principle about flying? And he looked at me, he said, the one you just forgot to obey. All of a sudden, that's the most important principle of flying. What's the most important truth in the Word of God for a spiritual believer? What's the most important provision of God's grace? Well, that we've been recovering for 40 years. And I'm suggesting to you, not that I have the final answer, but that this may help you. Number 11 in my outline is the thumb. I use the picture of a hand. You see, the thumb gives strength to each finger. So I'm going to, in the next few minutes, name each of these. It's the thumb that gives strength to the hand, the thumb and the little finger. A doctor once told me that the thumb is the thenar and the little finger is the hypothenar. I don't know what that means, but he thought it was important enough to tell me. He said, the hypothenar, or the little finger, controls that bundle of muscles down the side of the hand. So that makes it the second most strong, strongest digit in the hand. Well, I've named these, and we're going to do it. If you want to trace in the back of your outline your hand and then do it, you can. Or just do like I've done. Put 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and that'll cover it, as long as you recognize that number one is the thumb. I call this the ministry of the fruit of the Spirit. Ministry of the fruit of the Spirit. Now, we're referring to Galatians, chapter 5, 22 and 23, when we speak thus. The fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, faith, self-control. Now, unless you have the fruit of the Spirit, I don't care what gifts of the Spirit you have, what other ministries of the Holy Spirit you may have, but you must have the fruit of the Spirit. This must be there. It's that that gives strength to everything else that God may give us. And it's so important, therefore, for us to realize that the fruit of the Spirit is that which validates everything that we would say or do. If we do not have that, then the rest of it is just words. The world says what you are thunders so loudly, I can't hear what you say. Years ago in Sudan, when we were there, we had a dear missionary family. We went to Africa with them on the grips home in 1945. Peg Phillips, John Phillips' wife, Peg, was having great difficulty learning the Dinka language. Now, the Dinka is a difficult language. It has something like 44 phonemic vowels. And just for starters, it's a very hard language, with two methods of articulation and seven tones just to complicate things. So, no wonder we all had problems in learning Dinka. I talked to one of the Dinka boys. I said, did you have any problem learning English? He said, no, that was easy. Did you have any problem learning Arabic? No, that was easy. Well, what was your problem? He said, learning the Dinka that the missionaries speak. I never could learn that. That was hard. Well, Peg had trouble. Now, her teacher was a dear woman, Ann McMillan, from Australia. And Ann had a denture that didn't fit very well. And when she would say one vowel, she'd get a whistle. And poor Peg had a nervous breakdown trying to imitate Ann's denture whistle. Because Peg didn't have a such trouble to add that little quality. There's something about the way Ann says it that's different. I said, yes, there is. She does her denture whistles. No, no, it's Dinka. No, I said. At any rate, there came a time when the pressure was too much, and Peg had to leave the field. Went to the boat, the post boat up the Nile River to Khartoum. And that morning, some Dinka women from one of the nearby villages, not too far away, came in. They saw my wife, and they said, Sadasit, the neighbor lady of the house, we understand that Mrs. John has been taken sick. She's gone back to her country. Yes, my wife said, do you think she'll ever come back here? My wife said, I don't know, perhaps not. And this woman stood there, tears gathered in her ash-covered face. She was almost white with the ashes she'd slept in. And the tears ran down her cheeks. And my wife looked at her, and she said, Mrs. John couldn't speak our language very well. With her lips, she spoke with her heart. We knew she loved us. She had a much richer ministry than many people who could pronounce the words without any difficulty. If Peg had just known that the women of the villages didn't care how she talked Dinka, because she was talking with the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, and peace, and long-suffering, gentleness, and meekness, and faith, and self-control, I don't care. The Scripture says, you talk with the tongue of men and of angels, and you don't have love. You're just a banging gong and a clanging cymbal, just noise. That's this ministry. And it gives strength to everyone else. The first finger, and this is arbitrary, I call the ministry of witness. Ye shall be witnesses unto me, the Lord Jesus declared. After that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you. Ye shall be witnesses unto me. In Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the earth. I'd like to take an entire service to talk to you about being heirs of the promise made to Abraham. You know, everyone that's born into the family of God through faith in Christ is indeed an heir to that promise. When God said to Abraham, In thee and in thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed, it was a promise that he intended to keep, and every born-again, spirit-baptized believer has a worldwide ministry for Christ. That's what he said. After that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you, you shall receive power, and then the promise made to Abraham shall be fulfilled through you, and you're going to have a worldwide witness. What do we mean as a witness for Christ? A witness is a person who tells what he's seen and known and experienced. If he goes beyond that, it's hearsay, it's inadmissible as evidence, and it's not effective. And if you've heard God speak to your heart, tell you about his holiness and your sinfulness, and what he did to redeem you, and what you must do in repentance and faith to be born again, then you are the world's greatest expert on you, and you can tell what you have heard and you have seen and you have experienced, and that's what it means to be a witness. He didn't say you'll be my philosophers, he didn't say you'd be metaphysicians, he said you'll be witnesses. You'll tell what you've seen, what you've heard, what you've experienced. In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 17 to 20, and you might like to turn to it, it's a tremendously important scripture, and one that you really need to accept for yourself. We read these words, Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, a new creature. All things are passed away, behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who has reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation, to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and has committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ. As though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ dead, be ye reconciled to God. Now that's the ministry of witness, of ambassadorship. Because God the Holy Ghost is upon us, then he is beseeching men through us to be reconciled to God. And thus you become a representative, if you please, of the court of heaven, and yours is a ministry of witness. Now every spirit-filled believer is expected to be a witness. And if you're not, there's either something wrong with your mind or your heart, something is amiss. Because he said, after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you, you shall be witnesses. And therefore, it's imperative for us to realize that every spirit-filled believer will have that first finger of ministry, of the ministry of witness and ambassadorship. Now the second finger, we want to look at that. This is number 13 on your outline. The ministry of authority. I want you to turn to Ephesians, the first chapter. I want you to notice in verse 19, Paul, praying for this church and writing to this church at Ephesus, declares that God wants the eyes of our understanding opened by the Holy Spirit, that we can realize the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heavenlies, far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named. Our union with Christ, crucified with him to have victory over ourselves, buried with him to have victory over the world, quickened, raised, seated with him in the heavenlies to enforce his victory over principalities and powers. We must understand that this is part of our ministry, that when we are witnessing or when we are preparing to enter an area that has not had a witness, it's our responsibility as the body of Christ to enforce that victory of Christ over all the powers of darkness that have been holding these people in darkness. The ministry of authority, how imperative it is, how necessary it is that you understand that this is part of the ministry of the Spirit-filled believer, to learn how to exercise authority in your home, of course, over your children, over your business, over the church, over all the interests of your heart and your life. Many times people have been brought, why do you think the scripture says, give no place to the devil? Don't you realize that the reason he said that is that if you give place to the devil, he's going to take it? And therefore, it's our responsibility to give no place in our personal lives and to exercise that authority that he has turned over to his body to enforce his victory over his defeated foe. I recall going into a church some years ago, and there was just, we're having a Bible and missionary conference. They wanted to support, the pastor wanted missions to be part of their church life, never done anything for it. And this was down in Dalton, Georgia. And it became tighter and tighter as the days of the week wore on. And finally, I said to the people that were in the morning service, tomorrow we're going to spend from the 10 o'clock time when we meet for the meeting, I'm going to explain to you what I understand of the authority of the body of Christ over Christ's defeated foe. And we're going to have a day of intercession. Don't plan to go home for noon, or if you have to go for children, come right back. We're going to have the day until we break through on this thing. Well, that's what we did. And you know, long about two or two to thirty in the afternoon, the great sense of the Lord's presence that we had indeed broken through in that church. And everyone began to praise the Lord and to rejoice that the victory of Calvary had been extended to that little church, and that that church was going to respond, that the deacons that had been in opposition were going to change their attitude, that the church would take on the support of a missionary. And that's exactly what happened. They supported a missionary for many, many years with the Sudan Interior Mission. And I believe that if I had not known this truth and had shared it with them and we'd exercised it together, that that church would have been locked up just as tight from that time on as it had been in the years before. And so the secret for missions and the release of people and the release of money has to be in the ministry of authority. Then I am going to name the third finger, the fourth digit, and that is the ministry of intercession. The ministry of intercession. An intercessor is the sinner's legal representative. Unto him who loved us, we read in Revelation, who washed us in his blood and made us to be kings and priests unto God. And therefore we're to understand that part of our ministry, once we've been filled with the Spirit of God, is the ministry of intercession. And because you've been experienced the baptism of the Spirit and are walking in the fullness of the Spirit, you will realize that you can't intercede in this effective way for everyone. But you will realize that the Spirit of God will lay upon your heart that mission society for which you should intercede, those missionaries for whom you should intercede, those unconverted individuals, or maybe just one for whom you should intercede. Now what does it mean? Intercede means to go between. Moses was a priest. Moses went from the presence of the people of Israel who had sinned into the presence of God and legally represented them before God. He's made us who've been washed in his blood to be kings and priests unto him. Being king relates to the ministry of authority we've just talked about. Being priest relates to the ministry of intercession. To intercede, therefore, is to go from the presence of the sinner into the presence of God, if we're talking about an unconverted person, and legally represent that sinner before God. Acknowledge his guilt, acknowledge the justice of his condemnation, that he deserves God's wrath, but then to ask God to work in his heart to effect awakening and conviction and repentance and to bring him to faith. You see, God gives the sinner the right to go to hell, and he won't interrupt that right until either the sinner asks for it or the sinner's legal representative asks for it. And that's you as an intercessor. Do you have an effective ministry of intercession? Have you learned what it is to intercede, to go between in behalf of your missionaries out on the field or behalf of the unsaved that are near you, or for the release of people to train for missions, or the release of money for the Lord's work? Have you understood the necessity of intercession? That's part of the ministry of the Spirit-filled believer. Now, all of these have a great deal more. I'm giving you just an overview, and not exhaustive in any sense, but I want you to realize how extremely important they are. There's another area, and I'm just beginning to get interested in it. You know, I've spent a lot of years in studying the Word, but I've never spent much time in studying the ministry of angels. But I'm beginning to see that intercession is the way by which angels are activated into warfare in behalf of God and for the glory of Christ. You remember when Peter was put in prison by Herod, and he was there, and the church made intercession for him without ceasing. What happened? An angel of the Lord went down and took Peter out and released him and brought him back to the people that had been praying for him. Now, we're told in Daniel that there's a million angels that serve God, and there's a hundred million that stand before him. And I have a feeling that a lot of that hundred million may be unemployed, and if intercession is going to give them jobs to do for the glory of God, I'm going to learn how to do it, because I would hate to think there are any unemployed angels that might be working to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and help us finish this task. Well, I don't know much about it, but I do know enough so that I can go to the Word and find out what it says. By the way, I found a very good book here while I was here by someone from Moody Bible Institute. Now, that has to be kosher, doesn't it? Moody Bible Institute had written a book on this, and he goes around having various seminars on angelology. I won't even try to say that again. The study of angels, that's the way we get it out. But it's intercession that releases God to work, and therefore we'd better find out about it. Now, that leaves the little finger, and I suppose you've been saying, well, where in the world are the gifts of the Spirit? Well, that's where they are, right down there. The ministry of the gifts of the Spirit, here at the little finger. The ministry. I find that there are nine specific gifts given by the Spirit of God to the believer, not all of them. He divides to every man several as he wills. And it's important for you to understand what gift ministry you have. I knew of a little lady from down in Asheville, North Carolina, that had a most unusual ministry from the Lord. She would be worshiping the Lord alone in her room, a little widow woman, lived alone. Her husband had been a minister, and she just loved God with all her heart. She'd wake up in the morning, and God would have burdened her about someone somewhere. Then she was to go to that person. So she would walk down to the bus depot and buy a ticket and get on the bus, go to the town that the Lord had told her about, and then walk or take a taxi up to the house of the person that she was to see. And she'd knock on the door, and she'd say, hello, this is Sister so-and-so. And they'd say, oh, I've just been praying, and the Lord would send you. And she had a most remarkable ministry of healing. And she was, she was, oh, she was a boy, oh, she was a sore point to the pastor, because she was always telling him how he could improve his ministry. And I don't think he appreciated it very much. But, you know, the Lord was pleased with her, because she just was available to him. A strange little ministry that nobody, she said, don't tell anybody, Brother Eden. I can tell you, so I'm not telling, just us know about it now. She's with the Lord, so she wouldn't mind. At any rate, the point was, she knew what her ministry was, and she did it. And I believe everyone that's been baptized with the Holy Ghost is going to have some gift ministry, some ministry, they're going to be able to perform. But it's all going to relate to this unfinished task. It all relates to witnesses, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the uttermost part of the earth. I close—it's going to take me a little while to do it, so don't, don't get up yet—by telling you about a man that I had the joy of knowing and loving, who was with the Sudan Interior Mission. His name was Tommy Titcombe. Anybody ever heard of Tommy Titcombe? Thank you. God bless you, brother. It was a delight. Did you know him? Did you know? You didn't know him. Well, he was, he was a great man. He was from Toronto. He went to one, one semester, I think, at Bible School at NIAC. He was with Dr. Simpson there. His heart was filled. He was filled with the Spirit. He wanted to go as missionary, but he couldn't. He had a widowed mother to take care of, and he went back. But he prayed through until he found a way, but he, he wasn't, didn't have time to finish his training. But he'd gotten a hold of the fact that God answers prayer and, and that, that he was at a ministry as a spiritual Christian. And he decided to go, and the mission wouldn't accept him. Well, they were not very much of a position to. When, when Tommy Titcombe finally got into Nigeria and walked up where the whole missionary staff of the S.I.M. was, that, by the way, was Dr. Andrew P. Stewart. He was the other missionary. When Tommy arrived, he increased the missionary staff by a hundred percent. There were now two of them. And they had a staff meeting, and it was unanimously agreed that one tribe couldn't have two, when there was a big tribe just a little way off that didn't have any. So because Dr. Stewart knew the language where he was, Tommy went over, and they'd start out together. He didn't know anything about missions, and they didn't, and he didn't know the language, so that's where he went. He took, picked up his outfit, whole, his whole outfit for all the time he's going to be in Africa, he carried in a knapsack on his back. And he started out. And when he came to the edge of Yoruba country, there was a, well, a kind of an effective sign. There was a vine with human skulls, some of them kind of new and some of them pretty old, hanging across the path, saying, we would just assume you didn't come. If you come, be prepared to go to dinner. You will be the main course, and your skull will be here on the vine. And he said, as he went under that, the top of his knapsack hit those, and he had this ominous sound of these skulls rattling together. He found the main village, and the paramount chief walked in, came in somehow. God had protected him from being waylaid on the path. He walked in, walked up where the chief was sitting there. He could tell because he was on the little stool, and everybody else was on the ground. And he threw his pack down. He said, I've come to live with you. Where am I going to sleep? He took him so by surprise that the old chief pointed to, said, well, there's a place over there, that widow, her husband's dead. So he slept on the grave of her husband. She was buried right in the house, and there was a mound of dirt. They said, but you can't preach. We don't want to hear any other gods. We've got enough of our own. You can't preach here in the village. So at night, he'd get up and go out up on the hills. The village was in a little clevity among the stones. He'd get up there, and Tommy Tidcombe had a high-pitched voice, really squeaky. And he knew that he couldn't make himself heard from up there down through the thatch on those huts. So he said, Lord, you've got to give me a voice. So when Tommy Tidcombe, this little man about five-four, would start to speak in the missionary conference, his voice was way down. Because, you see, he had leaned over those rocks, and God had given him a great voice. And he'd go down through the thatch, and the people listened. They never said they heard anything. They never said anything, but that they were listening to the Word of God. And he was telling them about Christ, and telling them about repentance, and telling them about receiving Christ, about God's love. And finally he had twelve believers in that village. He had by this time built a little hut out on the edge of the village, and they'd meet every morning about five o'clock for a couple of hours of prayer and Bible study. One morning when they were there, they heard the people of the village coming, chanting war cries, and the chant was, we're going to kill the little Ian. His name was Tidcombe, but they called him Ian Boegbe. In Yoruba, Ian Boegbe means the little peeled man of Egbe. You see, he was white, so they figured they'd just peel him off in strips to get down there. So all through his years, he was Ian Boegbe. We're going to kill Ian Boegbe and all the people that believe with him. And they said, what are we going to do? He said, we're going to stay here and study the Word and pray and praise the Lord. And they stayed there for thirteen days. And there was never a time when there wasn't somebody shouting, screaming, parading around. And then at the thirteenth day, they had all gone up to the top of another hill. And Tommy said, now's the time. So they left the house and they went down into the village right under the sacrifice tree. And there they stood and waited. And the people with them said, we're going to get, we're going to, they're going to. Tommy said, no, the Lord's with us. The Lord's with us. And they started running back. Here they came. They went by the house. It was empty. Doors were open. And then they came running into the village, following the footprints. And they saw them under the spirit tree, where all the skulls and bones of sacrifice were tied. And they rushed. And Tommy waited till they were just about a spear-length away, where they could throw their spear and reach them. And he stood out and he raised his hand and he said, In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, stop! And it was as though a cable had been stretched across the road. They were leaning over it like this. But they were stopped in a row, a straight row. And there they were. And Tommy took up the chant they'd been making, and he gave it gospel words. And he started to chant the gospel. He said, Do you like that? Uh-huh. Do you like it? Open your mouth like crocodile. Open their mouth. And the witch doctor came up. He'd been a little behind. He didn't want to get hurt if there was a fight. The witch doctor came up. And he said, You go! And Tommy said, You go. You're finished here. You couldn't in thirteen days, you couldn't touch us. Now you go. Don't ever come back. And he went. And Tommy for about three hours preached the gospel to them. Now he said, If any of you'd like to receive Christ, tomorrow morning, when the sun comes up, you'll be at my house. Wait in the yard till I'm up, and I'll talk to you. And he thought maybe a few, he had twelve, he thought maybe a few more would come. Listen. When he awakened, not at sun-up, but about four-thirty, before the sun had come up, he heard voices. When the sun was up enough to see, there were over four hundred people in his yard. A little group of five, a little group of ten. There was one man alone, there was another. And all he did for the next several days, weeks in fact, was to talk to people, find out where they were, encourage them, lead them, help them, listen to their testimony, and the Church of Jesus Christ in the Europe land increased from twelve to fifteen hundred in six weeks. After that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you. You shall receive power. Tommy said to me about Paris, I'm going to go back. This will be my last visit. But the mission said I could go back. He went back, and he preached in all the churches. The last Sunday morning, service like this, he preached to the church, went over to a missionary's house to have dinner, and then, middle of the afternoon, he'd have to leave to catch his plane that night back to the States. After they'd finished dinner, they went out. Said, well, it's time to go. What Tommy didn't know was that the people had started walking, some of them in the distant areas on Friday, some on Saturday, some that morning, and they'd come into this village. And when he went out there, there were almost twenty thousand believers. So that he wouldn't know what was happening, they pushed a truck up against the porch of the mission house where he was. They put a chair down there. Tommy came out, strong men picked him up, set him in the chair. They wouldn't let the truck start. They started to push it. And twenty thousand voices took up the song, All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name. Let angels prostrate before, bring forth a royal tide, and crown him Lord of all. Why? Because a little boy, man, in Toronto, dared to believe that after that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you. You'll receive power, and you can be a witness for Jesus Christ where you are. Everything this book has to say about so great salvation focuses on witness until the gospel has been preached to the ends of the earth. So here we have it, so great salvation, including the ministry of the fruitful life, the ministry of witness, the ministry of authority, the ministry of intercession, and the ministry of the gifts of the Spirit. Did you hear how many gifts of the Spirit were in operation with Tommy when he went to Yerba Land? I'm sure you did. Heavenly Father, the potential in this room this morning, three, four times the number there were in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, is absolutely enough to totally change the world for thy dear son. If we dared to believe that the Lord Jesus meant what he said when he declared, after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you, you shall receive what went out of me to heal the woman with the issue of blood, and you shall be witnesses unto me, the uttermost part of the earth. So Father of Jesus, we ask you now that somehow this will all be brought into focus again for us, and we'll understand that so great salvation was never devised in thy heart and purchased by the life of thy dear son just for our comfort or our convenience, but that we might be to the praise of the glory of his grace. May that be realized in this company. For Jesus' sake, amen.