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Awake to Righteousness and Sin Not
Paris Reidhead

Paris Reidhead (1919 - 1992). American missionary, pastor, and author born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Raised in a Christian home, he graduated from the University of Minnesota and studied at World Gospel Mission’s Bible Institute. In 1945, he and his wife, Marjorie, served as missionaries in Sudan with the Sudan Interior Mission, working among the Dinka people for five years, facing tribal conflicts and malaria. Returning to the U.S., he pastored in New York and led the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s Gospel Tabernacle in Manhattan from 1958 to 1966. Reidhead founded Bethany Fellowship in Minneapolis, a missionary training center, and authored books like Getting Evangelicals Saved. His 1960 sermon Ten Shekels and a Shirt, a critique of pragmatic Christianity, remains widely circulated, with millions of downloads. Known for his call to radical discipleship, he spoke at conferences across North America and Europe. Married to Marjorie since 1943, they had five children. His teachings, preserved online, emphasize God-centered faith over humanism, influencing evangelical thought globally.
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the speaker recounts the powerful preaching of Jimmy Stewart, accompanied by William Fetler as his interpreter. They traveled through Eastern Europe, spreading the word of God and witnessing great gatherings. The speaker also shares a personal encounter with Jimmy Stewart, who had previously held a successful meeting in Budapest, Hungary. The sermon emphasizes the importance of living according to one's beliefs and the work of the Spirit of God in guiding believers to think and live righteously. The speaker also mentions Jimmy Stewart's boldness in preaching Christ at a soccer stadium, despite the initial confusion and opposition. The sermon concludes with a reminder to cast off the works of darkness and walk in the light, as stated in Romans 13:12.
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Pleased to Isaiah chapter 22 verses 1 through 14. I'm not going to read all of the verses but that's the portion that I'd like to have you acquainted with. Isaiah chapter 22. Perhaps if I begin reading verse 12 it will suffice. And in that day did the Lord God of hosts call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth. That's what God called to. And this is what happened. And behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen, killing sheep, eating flesh, drinking wine. Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die. This is the portion that was quoted by Paul in this that we've been read for us. Verse 32. If after the manner of man I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage it me if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. Let us bow in prayer. Father, as we come to thy word, we're asking that the Holy Spirit will open the eyes of our understanding and instruct us. We want to do thy will. We want to please thee. We want to glorify thee. And so we're willing to find out the worst about ourselves while there's still time enough to do something about it. We're asking therefore, Father, that we'll sense thy presence. Let this be not a meeting in which we've met together about thee, but we've met with thee. Speak to our hearts where we are and as we have need. We ask with thanksgiving in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, in verse 12, Paul says, Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, I'll say some among you that there's no resurrection of the dead. We will have to gather that many of the problems that happened in the church in Corinth happened because of certain heresies that began to creep in. They had been saying how there's no resurrection. And Paul imitates the language of the scoffer and the skeptic, both to reprove their theory and their practice. South, one of the great preachers of yesteryear, once wrote, If men but persuade themselves that they die like beasts, they soon will live like beasts. Paul's purpose seems to have been to cause the Corinthians to realize that if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain and your faith is vain. And then it would be, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. Now, these words would often have been seen by Paul, for they were inscribed as an epitaph on the statue of Sardinopolis at Ancholi near Tarsus. There represented the infamous king, the base king, snapping his fingers and saying, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. When they uncovered Pompeii, after it had been covered with the eruption of Vesuvius, over one of the merchant's houses they found this inscription, gain and a good time. Well, he had his gain, he had his good time, and now the memorial of it remains as that house has been covered with the lava for all these centuries, proving again the folly of the wisdom of this world. Paul said, if it is true that death ends all, life has little more to offer than eating and drinking and creature comforts like those of the brute. You are what you believe, you live what you believe, what you truly believe you do. You are exactly what you have believed up until the present. You're just as holy as you want to be, we're just as spiritual as we want to be, we're just as righteous as we want to be, we are the sum of all of our desires and of all of our beliefs. And it's the work of the Spirit of God, by the Word of God, to cause us to think rightly and properly so that we will live rightly, properly. Now you have to distinguish between what one says that he believes and what he truly believes. For instance, if everyone who says that there's a hell to shun and a heaven to gain actually believed it, the world would probably be evangelized in as little as 12 months. But because this is a cliché, held but not truly believed, then things happen as they do and go on as they have with very little change. There's a certain moral gravitation. I've always been interested in that word that is ascribed to Judas. It says that he left and went out to his own place. There's a moral gravitation. We go to those who are like us. Our children go to those that they enjoy. People do. We do. All of us do. There is a certain moral gravitation that all of us have, a moral pull downward, because we know the human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And Satan retains his role as a deceiver. We're told in Revelation chapter 12 and verse 9, and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. And he's clearly working on the deceivableness in the human heart, in my heart, in your heart. All temptation is an appeal to our intellects, our minds, to rationalize a way to do an irrational thing. That is to satisfy a good appetite in a bad way, contrary to the will of God. That's what temptation is. Proposition presented to the mind to satisfy a good appetite in a hidden way. And we try to, everyone does what's rational. I think if you were to go to anyone who's committed any crime against God or man, and go back into the circumstances and get a true unfolding of what transpired, you would discover that it was something like this. In my case, in my situation, with my problems and my justification, what would be wrong for everybody else is right for me now in this particular thing. In other words, human beings don't like to do irrational things, so what we do is get a rational explanation for an irrational deed. And I have a feeling that if you were to go to anyone who has been brought to shame, that somewhere back in that thinking process, in these circumstances, with these pressures, and with my problems, it's going to be all right just this one time. That's the deceivableness of the human heart, and that's the great strategy of our ancient enemy, and that's what happened at the church in Corinth. Is the resurrection passed? Has it already? And so the consequence was sin occurred in the church. Now, we're told in the text that all of this deception is accomplished by words, by communication. All temptation is through words, either heard by the ear or formed in the mind. Did you know that? We have a record of it in Genesis, those early chapters where the enemy came and said, yea, hath God said? Words, and the same is true with us. We think with words, we communicate with words. All of our actions are word ideas that describe them. And so here we have in our text evil communications, corrupt good manners. If we understand this, that society, all societies, ours included, is composed of groups, within groups, within groups, and these groups are formed by mutual interests, making true, correct, and understandable that old adage, birds of a feather flock together. Now, some of these groups are formed by the sharing of evil ideas, evil purposes, and evil practices, and evil pleasures. And we have to understand that whereas misery loves company, so does sin. Most people don't want to disobey all alone. Now, the instinct of members of such groups is always to justify their presence by persuading others to participate. There's an instinct to corrupt. That's what our children are facing when they go to school. It's such a difficult thing for us to realize the kind of pressures that our children face at such a very, very early age. But there are groups that are created because of mutuality of interest, and the only way they can justify their presence in the group is to try to persuade others to become part of that group. And usually those that are opposed to people getting into those such groups, those who disagree with them, are described as narrow and bigoted and square, the same thing Satan said to Mother Eve, wasn't it? Yay, as God said, reflecting on his character and what he was doing, usually the groups always promise this great pleasure, this high moment of delight that's going to come. Sin always promises infinitely more than it's able to produce. And ultimately, those that are part of the group are destroyed, the group destroys, the actions destroy. Once the sin is committed, the divinely given warning of conscience and rebellion of spirit is subdued, seared, and now those that are part of them go on. So in a very, very real sense, error in belief is responsible for error in conduct. Man does what he believes, not what he says he believes, but what he believes. Now, Satan's malicious, vicious misrepresentation of God was basic to Eve's decision to sin. The first step was to doubt God's word, yay, as God said. And the next step was to doubt God's motive. You think he loves you and he wants you to be happy? No, he doesn't love you. He doesn't want you to be happy. He's taking all joy from you. He's keeping you from the best. His purpose is not to make you fulfilled and complete and happy and joyful. If you want to be fulfilled and complete and happy and joyful, you've got to make the decisions. This is your business, you've got to do it. You can't trust him. He knows that when you eat, you're going to be like him and he's jealous and he doesn't want you like him. There's the deceitfulness and the misrepresentation. And so she listens to words, to word ideas and what they represent, and evil communications again succeed in corrupting good manners. Now, Noah's generation did exactly what they believed. They had wicked imaginations and consequently their actions they considered to be normal. Some recently I had occasion to say about the church at Ephesus that the inscriptions we have and the records that have survived of the common practices of Ephesus as other Asia Minor cities was so vicious, so immoral, so degraded, so corrupted, we wouldn't be able to read it in an open meeting. And more than that, the city fathers in Ephesus passed a law on their books that any stranger that came into Ephesus who did not wholeheartedly participate in all of the social practices of Ephesus was to be considered an enemy and driven from the city. In other words, if you went there, you had to do what the Ephesians did or else they'd push you out of town. They not only loved their wickedness, but they weren't going to have anybody around that objected to their wickedness. That's the way it was with Noah's generation. They looked upon Noah as a religious fanatic. His words of warning were regarded as the desire to rob others of a good time. The ark was looked upon for 120 years during the building as a big joke tourist attraction, I assume. They brought all their visitors from out there to come. Hey, come on out and see what this crazy little Noah's building up here on a mountain. He's building a boat. And what a boat he's building. And he says there's going to be a flood. It's going to rain. We don't know what rain is. Oh, we have moisture coming up from the ground. We just don't know. What are you going to come out of the sky? I've never heard anything so ridiculous and so foolish. And so it was they continued in their sin, rejected God's messenger until the flood came. And because they didn't believe they wouldn't come when they might have. And when they finally did believe, it was too late. For centuries, the more viciously and totally in the last 150 years, Satan's attempt has been to destroy from the minds of men the fact of the existence of God. Voltaire boasted that he would live to see the Bible lose all of its influence over society and would become merely an artifact in a museum of what people in less enlightened days had subscribed to. Well, that didn't happen. The Bible has survived and Voltaire hasn't. But if they'd succeeded, suppose they had succeeded, they had succeeded in convincing people that God didn't exist, then there would be the destruction of all absolute morality, all right or wrong, wouldn't exist, wouldn't be a factor. And furthermore, it would remove all moral responsibility. And then it would make the pursuit of happiness, moral anarchy. But there was a failure to destroy belief in God's existence. And so there's been a great effort to destroy belief in the resurrection of Christ. And how many there have been that are behind pulpits and in churches that once proclaimed the truth of God, but now stand up and say that Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin, God come in the flesh, that he didn't live a sinless life or die an atoning death, nor was he raised from the dead. And they're still trying to work on that old, old saw that they found his grave somewhere in India. Anything that they possibly can to prove that Jesus Christ did not arise from the dead. Why? Because if there's no resurrection, all standards of good and evil are dwarfed and their consequences shortened. By destroying the thought of immortality, there's lost the sense of the infinite of evil and the eternal nature of good. We're living in a day when we're seeing a rise of juvenile delinquency. I was asking a preacher friend the other day, what in the world did we do before we had so many ministries dedicated to the survival of the family? It seems like across my desk almost every week comes a package of letters from different ministries dedicated to the family, seminars on the family, books on the family, pictures of the family, and I'm sure they're all very good. The only question I ask, what in the world did we ever do before all this was available to us? Now, I wouldn't want to suggest that there's any relationship, but it seems the more we talk about the family, the more problems we see in the family, and the more juvenile delinquency increases. And I'm of the opinion that trying to solve the problem doesn't solve the problem. Our children in our schools are taught the theory of evolution that says that as a fact of science, when it's not, when I was a student at the University of Minnesota, I got a professor that loved to say, now according to the fact of evolution, and I'd raise my hand, oh I know, I know he did, according to the theory of evolution, and then a little later he said, according to the fact of, my hand would go up and he'd say, all right, all, finally before the semester was over I got the old boy convinced that he shouldn't say the fact of evolution, he should say the theory of evolution. Because it isn't a fact, it's a theory, still it's purported to be a fact, and our children are being told that they have animal ancestry, which makes the church nonsense, morality unnecessary, and family standards archaic with no value to the enlightened youth that are coming up with the benefits of this. These children see no way of surviving except to form packs like wolves, and to take what they want. Because if they're animals, why not learn from animals? And if it's good for the wolves, why isn't it good for people that have the same common ancestry, and are not responsible to anyone else? The same public which pays to have the foundation of morality destroyed in children's minds is asked to pay enormous taxes to combat juvenile delinquency, the purchased product of godless education. Now all of that brings us to the text. All of that, by the way, background. And the text is awake, moral restoration. Now it's a commandment that implies that Paul's generation had been asleep. I don't think it's much more kind to us than it was to Paul's generation, because in many respects, perhaps we too have been asleep. Now it's in the aorist imperative that denotes an energetic decision to act now. The aorist imperative is something that demands immediate obedience. It can't be extended into the future. Nothing was going to do, said Paul, nothing will be sufficed unless the church shakes off the torpor with which some of its members have been seized. Awake implies seriousness with all determination. Our minds go back to God's word to Israel and Isaiah when we read, wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. And in Ephesians 5.14, wherefore he says, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. Awake. Awake. Isn't it strange how easy it is to get people to have a night of prayer, an all night of prayer, to pray that God will do for us what God has commanded us to do for ourselves. It always astonishes me how eager we are to lay the blame on God and to say, now Lord, if you'll just do something, we'll do what you've told us to do. But I wonder if we're going to be, I think it's going to take more than an all night prayer meeting to persuade God to change his mind. If God says awake, I have a feeling that he may hold us to that, he may hold our feet to that fire and say, don't ask me to awaken you. I told you to wake up. You do it. Don't ask somebody, don't ask me to do it. Awake to righteousness implies to return to the awareness of and obedience to absolute truth, eternal truth, God's standards. Awake to righteousness, God's standards. Romans 13, verses 10 to 14, Paul explains what this means. Love work is no ill to his neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. And that knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness. He didn't say have prolonged fasting and prayer that God will cast off the works. He said, cast off the works of darkness. Let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly and as the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. I want to speak about that for a moment. I mentioned it this morning. We all can understand how terrible is the rioting and the drunkenness, the chambering and the wantonness. And the whole world stands aghast at the discovery of where these things have been found and uncovered. But ah, when will we feel as deeply about that for which God reserved the most awesome description of sin in the entire word? Not for adultery and drunkenness and murder and thievery. These things certainly are sin. But he said, strife and bitterness in the heart is earthly, sensual and devilish. Hidden in the heart, never discovered. Here he speaks of it saying, not in strife and envying. That which is not seen, society doesn't condemn, but the Spirit of God sees. Put you on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof. Awake to righteousness. Awake to it. Your responsibility. Now, the next words, and sin not. Here, the present imperative is in contrast with the aorist imperative awake. The act of waking is unique, it's decisive. The state of sin, which would without fail follow the intoxication in which they were plundering, would, if persisted in, become permanent. This is what forms the danger of it, for such a life swayed by sin leads to total apostasy. This word, sin not, it's a strong word used for sin, and it means to miss the aim. Now, there was in the church at Corinth a knot of strong-headed members who more than once derided the apostle's direction and claimed to be far more clear-sighted than he was. Their actions and their influence were missing God's mark, and thus sin. Now, they must see their danger, repent of their stubbornness, return to the Lord, and sin not. That's the end of the apostle's entreaty. And to us, it's the same. Awake to anything, everything in our lives, anything and everything we can influence, and sin not, get our aims straight. What is it? The glory of God in Jesus Christ. To magnify his name, to uplift his name, to exalt his name. That's the aim, that he should be glorified, that he should be exalted. Remember what he said in his high priestly prayer, Father, glorify thy son with the glory he had with thee before the world was. Now, how is that done? Well, it's done as Paul is entreated here, awake to righteousness, and sin not. But there's a moral presumption in all of this, because we proceed to say, for some have not the knowledge of God, for some. Among their number at the church at Corinth, this implies various kinds and even a group of believers in that church. Now, undoubtedly, some had crept in unawares, who were not saved at all, and possibly knew it. But they were there for other motives, and actually functioned as a fifth column of Satan. Because in the second letter, chapter 13, in verse 5, Paul gives that most serious of all warnings, when he said, examine yourself, whether you be in the faith. Prove your own self. Know you not your own self. How did Christ be in you? Except you be reprobate. What does he say? There are some that have come into the church, that have not been born again, who know it. They had ulterior motives. Some have come into the church who didn't know it, who'd been led there, perhaps, as we've had in our recent decades by this thing we've referred to over and over again as easy believers. And also, there were some, though genuinely born again, who'd been led aside into a party spirit of derision, and the next step into carnality, and had even gone further into the mire of sin. There were those. And obviously, in that church, there were many genuine believers living in obedience to God, to whom the difficulties caused ceaseless grief, and whose heartbroken cry ascended to the throne of God day by day, to heal his church, to restore her to the dew of her youth, and blessing of the early morning of her love for the Lord Jesus Christ. There's a different relationship that delineates these three groups. Paul says some have non-knowledge of God. Very interesting construction. It's not merely a deficiency. It's not the lack of a good thing. It's the possession of real evil. It involves not only ignorance, but poison. This non-knowledge includes the denial of the resurrection, and the power of God to raise the dead. It goes further to an actual denial of God's character, and the substituting of a corrupt notion of his attributes. Why? So that they might give themselves up to their presumption and their profane frivolity, that they might indulge in moral libertinism. It was of such possessors of non-knowledge that John wrote in 1 John 1, 5, and 6, God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say, as some in Corinth were foolishly doing, and we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. In 1 John 2, 4, he that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. For some have not the knowledge of God. Some have non-knowledge of God. And then Paul says, I speak this to your shame. It's the church's responsibility to discipline itself whenever anything is discovered. For too long had Corinth thought itself superior to all the other churches, and now Paul presses them to face themselves as Christ, through John in Revelations, pressed the church at Pergamos. And to the angel, and I don't know what that means. Have any of you thought about that? Why? Why did John, inspired by the Holy Ghost, say, to the angel at the church at Pergamos? He didn't say to the elders, and he didn't say to the church, he said to the angel of the church. I don't know what it means. I'm thinking about it, and I'm studying, and I'm trying to find out what others think, but it's intrigued me. I know the angels are ministering spirits sent to minister to the heirs of salvation. Do churches have angels? Do churches have angels? Well, if churches have angels, do you think they could get a little bit slipshod in what they're doing? A little bit careless? That they could reflect the attitude of the people? I don't know. Oh, I've got a lot to learn. I thought 40 years ago, or 50 years when I finished Bible school, that I had all the answers. The longer I go, the more questions I find, and fewer answers I've got. And this is one of them. What about these angels? What does it mean? Well, I don't know. Only thing I know it says, and to the angel of the church in Pergamos write, These things saith he which hath a sharp sword with two edges, I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is. A church dwelling where Satan's seat is? Was Pergamos for Satan? I don't know. And thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. So thou hast also them which hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate. Nicolaitans. I wonder if that's where we get our word lady and clergy. Wouldn't be surprised. Doctrine I hate. We better look into that. Repent, or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth, saying, He that hath received it. Years ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting a Scotsman. A Scotsman by the name of James Stewart. One of the outstanding young football players of Scotland. Now football in Scotland doesn't mean what football means here. It's what we call soccer. Now Jimmy was, all of his school years, he was the outstanding athlete of all of Glasgow, and then of Scotland, and then he was going to go into one of the great professional teams that represent Scotland in the meet. Only problem was, God got a hold of Jimmy Stewart. When he was playing there at the stadium in Edinburgh, after he'd finish, he'd quickly run in and shower and dress, and he'd go out, and he'd stand out there at the main gate where the thousands were coming out, and he'd have a banner beside him, and a little prostrum, and a bullhorn, and Jimmy Stewart, the great soccer player, is there preaching Christ. It was disturbing. They didn't know what to do. The police would like to stop him, but a few minutes before on the field, they'd been cheering him to the skies, and now he's preaching Christ. Well, the Spirit of God said, Go to Riga. Go to Riga? Now that has to be, that has to be, where? That has to be in Latvia. What in the world would God send a Scotch boy to Riga for? But he believed God, and he obeyed God, and he got a train, and he crossed and went on the train right on through till he was going between Berlin and Riga, and a conductor came by, and he said, You've been with us all that time. I see from your ticket you've come all the way from Scotland, yeah? He said, Well, where are you going? I'm going to Riga. Can't you see on my ticket? Yeah, but what are you going to Riga for? What's a Scotch boy alone going to Riga for? Well, I'm going to Riga because God told me to go to Riga. Well, who are you going to see there? I don't know. Well, you must be going to see Pastor Fettler. That's right. That's who I'm going to see. He didn't know it till then, but the Spirit of God says, That's who I'm sending you to see. And just a few minutes later, the conductor came in from behind a big tall man going down the aisle of the train to the next car, and he stopped, and he said, Mr. Stewart, that man ahead of me going through the door now, that's Pastor Fettler. He's going to be in Riga. That's where he's going. So Jimmy went to see him in the car ahead, found him, and he said, Pastor Fettler, my name is Jimmy Stewart. God the Holy Ghost told me to come to Riga, and now I find out it's to see you, and I don't know what he wants me to see you for, but I'm here, and I want to go where you're going, and I want to spend time with you, because God's told me to come here to see you. And I said, fine, young man, be with me when we get off the train. You go back to your car now, and then come up here just before we get to Riga. So when they got off the train, Mr. Fettler got off first. Fettler was known as the Moody of Russia, and Jimmy Stewart got off right behind him, and Robert Fettler, Brother William, was there, and he said, Robert, take Mr. Stewart with you into the guest house, and get the women to pray with him, and arrange a time for me to be with him sometime. So they took him to the guest house, and at Salvation Temple in Riga, they had a tower prayer meeting that went on 24 hours a day. And the Spirit of God brought a group of women there, 24 hours, men and women, to pray for revival, for the work of God in Eastern Europe. They saw that something was going to happen to close the door, and they were praying. That time, William Fettler was pastor of the Salvation Temple in Riga, First Baptist Church in Moscow, and Dome Evangelica in St. Petersburg. And he'd spend one week one place, another week, and then commuted from church to church. Well, during the week he was there, Jimmy Stewart met with these women day after day in prayer. God came upon Jimmy Stewart with a great anointing. Not that he hadn't been an effective witness. Robert came to him and said, I think, William, you'd better have Jimmy Stewart, God is on the young man. I'll give him a few minutes in the service on Sunday morning. And so on Sunday morning, William Fettler said, I'm very happy to have a young man, an athlete from Scotland, and he's going to give a testimony, and I'm going to interpret for him. And Jimmy Stewart came, and William Fettler, this great honored preacher that had great meetings throughout all of Eastern Europe, whose name was as well known there as Moody was here during his ministry. And Jimmy Stewart started to speak, and the spirit of God fell. And William Fettler said, go on, young man. And for an hour and twenty minutes, Jimmy Stewart preached, and William Fettler interpreted. And to show the greatness of Fettler, for the next four months, they went up and down through all the countries of Eastern Europe, and Jimmy Stewart preached, and William Fettler interpreted. God gave a great gathering. I want to show you some reason for the background. I met Jimmy Stewart just after, a few months after he'd been in Budapest, Hungary, where they'd had a great meeting. They had the first service in the largest auditorium at nine in the morning. It filled, it emptied. At one in the afternoon, or two in the afternoon, they had a second service. The auditorium filled, and it emptied. And at seven at night, they had a third service, and the auditorium filled, and it emptied. And in the middle of this, when it was going on, the spirit of God said to Stewart, go north. And he said to his wife, God is telling me to go north. I'm closing the meeting. Next Sunday will be our last day. Are they just north? Where's north? Well, north from Riga, north from Budapest, can be anywhere. But they kept going, and they got to Berlin, and then they got up to Denmark, and then they got to Sweden, and then they went to, you go only so far north in Sweden, and you're in Norway. And he got to Norway, and they thought they were up as far as they could go, and spirit of God said, go north. And they got away up at Trondheim, by the Arctic Circle. And they got off the train, he and his wife, bags on the side. They saw a man, and they said, by the way, my name is Jimmy Stewart. I'm here. Could you take to someplace where we could get inexpensive lodging? And the man said, well, I've been sent here, Brother Stewart, to receive you and meet you. We were told by the Lord you were coming today, and we've arranged for a meeting tonight. There will be just a small group of us that have believed that God was sending you for a great revival here in the north of Norway. And they went to the meeting. There weren't as many as there are here. That's why I'm telling you this. And he spoke on, awake the righteousness and sin not. Search your hearts in the light of the word of God. And for two weeks, they just dealt with the word, and went into the word, and they searched their hearts before the Lord. And then the house was filled. They had to move to a little larger one. And then they continued to preach, and they moved to a larger one. And finally, the city fathers took note of what was happening, and they got the largest auditorium in Trondheim, and they filled it at nine, and they filled it at two, and they filled it at six.
Awake to Righteousness and Sin Not
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Paris Reidhead (1919 - 1992). American missionary, pastor, and author born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Raised in a Christian home, he graduated from the University of Minnesota and studied at World Gospel Mission’s Bible Institute. In 1945, he and his wife, Marjorie, served as missionaries in Sudan with the Sudan Interior Mission, working among the Dinka people for five years, facing tribal conflicts and malaria. Returning to the U.S., he pastored in New York and led the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s Gospel Tabernacle in Manhattan from 1958 to 1966. Reidhead founded Bethany Fellowship in Minneapolis, a missionary training center, and authored books like Getting Evangelicals Saved. His 1960 sermon Ten Shekels and a Shirt, a critique of pragmatic Christianity, remains widely circulated, with millions of downloads. Known for his call to radical discipleship, he spoke at conferences across North America and Europe. Married to Marjorie since 1943, they had five children. His teachings, preserved online, emphasize God-centered faith over humanism, influencing evangelical thought globally.