In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of realizing the sinful nature of humanity and the need to surrender to the Lord's control. The speaker describes a powerful spiritual encounter where they felt overwhelmed with joy and laughter, as if the Lord was filling their soul with waves of liquid joy. The sermon also mentions a gathering of evangelistic bands in the church, where they went out to share the message of sin and the Savior. The speaker later reveals that this spiritual preparation was necessary for facing the Japanese invasion in China, where they stood alongside women and girls in the face of danger.

Sold it by weight. Well, we had, we went on with a wonderful school. Well, the convoys had to go on furlough when their time came in, in thirty-six. They were due to go back in thirty-seven, and I was left there alone with all that work. And the nearest other Baptist missionary was nine hours by train from where I was. Well, after six, we had a, and to cap the climax, we had a very unsuitable Chinese pastor at the city church. He'd been a language teacher for Frank Conner. Frank went out the year before they started, opened a language school in Peking, and missionaries began to go to Peking to a language school, and he had a private teacher. Well, when a man sits with you and is patient enough, yeah, two or three years to work with you, he had to study, he had to study with a teacher all the time for two years. And then after that, he's supposed to study two, three hours a day in between time with that teacher. And, of course, Frank Conner just loved him and saw a lot in him that nobody else did, and had him made pastor of the city church. Well, he wouldn't have a, he wouldn't be paid by the people, the church members, because he didn't want to be responsible to them. He'd been a language teacher for so long and working a few hours a day and just sitting around and doing nothing the rest of the time, and he didn't want to work. But he wanted the name of being pastor, but he didn't want to work. And so he wouldn't, he didn't want to receive salary. Well, we didn't use foreign mission board to pay pastors of organized churches unless there's a very poor group and we'd pay part of it, and then lead them to pay more every year. But that was a city church when the people could support it. And they had four or five hundred members at that time. And still he wouldn't be paid by them. He wanted to be paid by money from the foreign mission board, but we couldn't do that, so of course there was trouble. Well, it's easy to get one in than it was to get out, and it just made Frank sick that he couldn't get him out before he left. Didn't think he could because he was his language teacher. And you always have to respect the teacher and do the pleasing, be a faithful pupil. Once a teacher, a teacher for a lifetime. And so Frank was just sick over coming home and meeting him there at the church. Well, we put up with him for six months. And we just started praying the Lord would take him out. And Frank was paying his salary, his money that people were sending him individually, Christmas presents Frank got, that kind of thing. Well, after Frank left, we weren't getting him, Frank didn't have any more money to send, and he just had to be paid by the church. But he sure didn't like it. So we just prayed him back home to his farm out in East Shandong where he could live on this land, and left us without a pastor for six months. There was no pastor to get. You know, the Chinese thinks it would be perfectly awful to rob another church of their pastor by calling him. And they have to wait until somebody finishes at the seminary, or somebody, some teacher like he did without seminary, I feels called to preach, he thinks. Well, anyway, we didn't have ordained deacons, but we called it a deacon's committee every year. And they insisted that I must lead the morning meetings, Sunday morning, because they thought I ought to be teaching the Bible at that time, and I could do that better than they could. But they knew enough Bible to take turns leading Sunday night services. But all the teaching time they asked me to do. And every morning they had a Bible class that I had to lead before breakfast. They went through the Bible as I have spoken of here before. Well, after about six months, I just got so hungry to hear some preaching I couldn't understand it. Did you ever go six months without hearing a sermon preached? And I knew the church needed a meeting, so I suggested to that committee, we invite somebody to come lead us in a week's meeting. And I knew anybody in North China we invited would come, missionary or Chinese, because everybody so appreciated the fact that I was way over there, nine hours by train from John Abernathy and his wife, who were in the capital of Shandong province. With that big field, they didn't know all the problems I was having. And I knew anybody would come. So we just invited the finest young Chinese in all of North China. We had a church over in Huangshan where I guess we called that the center of our work. Our seminary was there. Our college was there. And we had a normal school to train teachers and a business school and a hospital. And we had more missionaries than at any other place. And so we just invited the pastor of that young church, that young pastor to come and give us a week's meeting. We asked him to come to go Sunday through Sunday. Well, his old father lived in between, about halfway, and he was still not saved, and he wanted to visit him. So he had to take two weeks off, and he had 36 hours travel coming and 36 hours going back, which was 72 hours in travel. But he came, and I just had never heard such preaching in all my life. You know the book is an oriental book. And those orientals that are educated get filled up with the Holy Spirit. They just make this book live. And he preached me to the altar three times. A missionary would have to be the first one to come down to the altar. Well, one day I went in, and my eardrums were going in at that time, and I insisted that he take his meals with me. He roomed outside because the Chinese would be just inviting guests all the time and stepping in all the time, three meals, and I knew I could just give him what he needed to eat. And when he had no company, I knew he'd want to pray. When he first got there, I told him about my heirs. And I knew the Lord had used him to pray for people that were healed. And I asked him if he'd pray that the Lord would heal my heirs. They had been examined by the specialist up at Peking at the Rockefeller Hospital. He'd come visit in hospitals, and he'd come to a hospital near me, and I'd gone to see him. And he was one of the leading air specialists in the world. And he said, Miss Smith, your eardrums are going in, and there's absolutely nothing that medical science could do for them. You see, your eardrum is like that, like a drum. And my eardrums are going that way. And he said, you'll gradually lose your hearing. Nothing can be done about it. Well, you know, we can think we've been so dedicated to the Lord. We think we're so dedicated to the Lord we'd be ready for anything. Well, I went on back and told the Chinese that I was going to lose my hearing. And I just accepted it. Well, if the Lord wants me to hear, wants me to be deaf, I'll be deaf. That's the way I was taking it, you know, and I guess I was rather proud of myself that I was accepting it in that way. I don't remember there was, but anyway, that was my attitude. Well, the saintly mother of a missionary came out, and I was telling her that I was going to lose my hearing. Well, I was going to the country then, and she thought going out and living in the villages a month at a time and being out there even the month of December without seeing any fire except what the people took the food with. It's cold in North China. I had to wear 30 pounds of clothes to keep warm. I took it off and weighed it one time. No, I weighed it. Put it all on the scales and weighed it and took it off. It's actually 30 pounds it took to keep me warm. I had Chinese clothes. American clothes never would have kept me warm. Well, anyway, she thought I was just doing the greatest work in the world, going to the country, and she said, if I were doing the mission work that you were doing, I wouldn't accept deafness like that. I'd bring my ears to my Lord and ask him to heal them. I thought, well, that would be a good idea, and I started praying every night, and I'd say, Lord, if it be your will, heal my ears, and I'd go on. I didn't make it deaf. And every time I'd go to church, Pastor Phan would preach better than he did before. And he told us in the beginning, his first sermon, he preached on the Feast of the Old Testament, the Passover, Pentecost, and Pentecost, and I think he just took that too. I don't think he got to the Great Day of Atonement. But he preached two, three days on the Passover when they took all the leaven out of the bread. Well, of course, he made leaven sin, and he said, now, you've got to get all the leaven out of your heart and mind. If you want a new Pentecost, and you want a new filling of the Holy Spirit, you've got to get all the leaven out of your heart and mind. Well, he preached sin, and I'd go down to the altar so convicted, and I'd go home and search my heart. Now, you know I wouldn't have been there, but any sin I knew about in my heart, I wasn't guilty of any sins I knew about. And I didn't know how black sin in me was. I came in one day just crying at the table. I just burst out crying at the table. I'd just been so moved by his sermon. I said, I've been said I was willing to go deaf if the Lord wanted me to go deaf. I can't go deaf. I can't live deaf. Now, I don't have to adhere anything belongs to this life, but if I can't go to the house of God and hear his word preached, I can't live. I just can't live deaf. Well, you know, when he got there, and I asked him to pray for my ears before that, he just wouldn't do it. He just said, well, just wait. Why, he knew if he'd have prayed for my ears to be healed, I couldn't have kept it to myself. I'd have told it everywhere, and he'd have spent, or everybody in the community would have brought their sick folks there, and he couldn't have done any spiritual work. He had something more to do there than physical healings, and he knew it, and he just put me off. Well, then I just cried and said, I can't live if I can't hear. He just said, oh, leave your ears with the Lord, and he went off. He was putting first things first. He was wanting to get a new spiritual uplift from me. That's what he'd come there for, as well as a new spiritual uplift with the Chinese. Well, he said, now, take out 11, take out 11. I was saying every day, Lord, show me 11. Lord, show me 11. He showed me a few little things. I'd forgotten what they were. I remember what one was. You women would be amazed if he'd show me that, maybe. My hair is just so fine and straight, and when it's not curled, I'm the ugliest woman you ever saw. And all my life since I got grown, I've rolled my hair on kid curlers. Well, a little just before that, at that time of that meeting, a few years before, some men in Shanghai had gone to Paris and learned to give Chinese women permanent raves, and they'd gone back to Shanghai and set up their shop, and rich women in Shanghai were having permanent raves, and military men from the north would go to Shanghai and take their young wife down there and get her a permanent rave and come back up to Shandong, to that province. Well, the governor just heard about it, and he just passed a law forbidding anybody having permanent raves in Shandong province, where he is governor. Now, he said the women have always had beautiful hair, Chinese women, and they've always combed it beautifully, and this is a foreign custom that's not suitable for Chinese. There's no need for them to learn to spend money copying foreigners like that. And I gloried in what he'd done. But, of course, I went on rolling my hair. That hadn't been but a few weeks, maybe a month or two, before the meeting. And, oh, those days when I was searching the heart, I'm sure it was the Lord said, what about rolling your hair? What if the Chinese think you've got a permanent? Then it's against the law. Well, I wasn't under the Chinese law. Americans were afraid that missionaries and American business people would be tortured, as they used to be. So, they had American consuls out there, and they would have been sent to American consul to be tried. But, you see, if eating meat causes your brother to offend, you mustn't eat meat as long as you live. And I said, Lord, if somebody's going to think this is a permanent, I won't roll my hair anymore. And I'll tell you, I just had to become that ugly woman. And I didn't roll up my hair anymore. Not until it came on furlough, and then it got a permanent. No law against it over here. But I don't think I'd have gone any further with the Lord if I hadn't obeyed in that. But I did obey. Well, another thing that he showed me, I'll never forget, during those days, with all the sincerity of my soul, I was saying, Lord, show me left. We'd go back to church again and think surely every sin was forgiven up to date, and here he'd preach again. Take out left. Take out left. The other one was that I had always thought, up until that time, that nine-tenths of all my income was my own, and I could spend it like I wanted to. And I wanted to give all I could of that nine-tenths to the Lord, but I thought I was giving him something. I thought I was making offerings. Of course, my tithe wasn't mine. I knew that. When we first went to China, our support was $50 a month, and we just counted on having four to five for ourselves. And the saintly missionary that I lived with and I would just live just as frugally as we could to save everything we could from that $45 so we could give the Lord something. And there was just so much, such a use all the time for more money in the work that the Lord couldn't send us. And I just thought, of course, that was mine. Do you know that week? The Lord showed me that that nine-tenths was just as much his as that one-tenth. Now, I wasn't taking that to the house of God, all of it. But I didn't have a right to spend a dime out of that nine-tenths that I thought was my own in any way that wouldn't please the Lord. Now, that didn't mean that when I... and I've never gotten over that. Now, that didn't mean that when I came on furlough, I bought the cheapest dress on the rack. That means when I went to buy a dress, I took the Lord along with me. And I go to rich churches and poor churches. I'd never wear a coat with a fur collar. I'd never buy one, because that looks rich if you get a good fur. It looks rich when you go in poor churches. A missionary's got no business looking rich when they go into a poor church. And if I got a cheap fur collar, that'd look too cheap, and the women would look down on me when I went to a rich church. So I just, I just buy always a cloth coat with a cloth collar. I never wore beads or anything expensive that were given to me by the Chinese even. I just tried to dress someone and nobody would ever think about what I had on. But I took the Lord with me when I went shopping. And I tried to buy what I was supposed to have that would make me a representative of the Lord there, a woman in whom the Lord was living and a personality for Him to live in, express Himself through other people all the time. And that was a good lesson to learn, that nine, that nine-tenths was all the Lord's. And I could never give the Lord anything. I have no business to go buy something to eat that other people can't afford just because it tastes good to me. I'm to buy food that'll, that'll, that'll properly nourish this body that belongs to the Lord, that's for Him to live in. And that'll make a good deal of changes in you when you come to that. You don't have to send the money of your own to any other kind of property. And when He saved you, and you handed yourself over to Him, that meant everything that, that, that you possessed was to be His. You made Him the Lord of your life or He didn't come into your heart. He doesn't come into our hearts till He gets complete possession of us. Well, we went on. And friends, the more I, I, I kept saying, Lord, show me left, Lord, show me left. Now, it's kind of dangerous to ask the Lord to do something for you if you aren't ready for Him to do it. One day, the Lord just began to bring to my mind every wrong thing I'd ever thought of or done all as far back as I could remember. Now, that wouldn't have sent me to hell. The Lord was just showing me this awful black self, this, this black nature. I'll tell you, I nearly died. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I actually had the physical backache, friends, from seeing myself a little bit as the Lord looks at me. I went through about three days. I couldn't do a thing but rain tears. Oh, this devil nature. How black in the sight of Holy God. How does the Lord ever put up with us? Well, He does until He puts us to death. Now, I'd already been put to death, but I still live. With this black devil nature. And the Lord counts it dead because it charges the death of His Son to me, but I have to still live with it. And I have to know how to let the Lord control it. But I'll tell you, from that day to this, I've had no confidence in the flesh, no confidence in the flesh of any Baptist preacher I know or any other preacher, or anybody else. We're always an unclean thing. And but for the grace of the Lord be it, they'd be expressing this devil nature all the time. We're not fit to live. We've got the nature of the devil in us. I said, take out leaven. Take out leaven. I'm nothing but leaven. I can't take out myself. And I'll tell you, from that day to this, I know everybody's sinful nature is just as black as mine. And I wish everybody could see a little bit of what their black nature is so they'd learn how they've got to let the Lord control it. They've got to go all out for the Lord and themselves, put themselves completely in the hands of the Lord all the time. And this big guy's got to come down. We've got to accept our place on the desk as Christ in order for Him to control us. Of course, we're not actually dead, but the Lord has us in the position of death by charging the death of His Son to us. You want to hear the rest of the story? Well, we came down to Sunday, the last day of the meeting. And we had 24 evangelistic bands in our church. Each band had a captain. I think I spoke of this once before, maybe. And each had a banner with a name. And we met at the church at 2 o'clock and then we all went out every afternoon. I mean, every Sunday afternoon. We spent the whole afternoon out. And we went out to a place and one prepared a message on sin and the Savior, which was our subject. And there were all kinds of places. They don't have to have parking places, you know, in China. So you could get in front of a building that was back something from the street or in a park or in a temple yard or just a lot of places where the 24 of us were accustomed to going. But we'd change every Sunday and go to a different place. So we'd all get to the church and decide where everybody was going and get our tracts that we were going to give out. For that Sunday, we gave out different tracts. And as long as it lasted, then we'd go back and start over with another subject, showing people there's something of their sin and the holiness of God and how to be saved. Well, there'd been so many express a desire to be lifted up on a higher plane and so many under conviction. I suggested that Sunday we not go out. We just asked the pastor to meet with us over in the economy home. You can't go to the church without unsaved people coming in. You can never have a meeting, any kind of meetings, without unsaved people coming. And that didn't concern anybody unsaved. It didn't concern church members who just went to sit and listen and weren't ready to go all the way with the Lord. Well, we went over there, a roomful of us, and got on our knees. I guess the whole 24 of us who were going out, instead of going out, went over there and got on our knees with Pastor Pam. And we prayed a while. And if heaven didn't come down, literally, it would just be impossible to describe it to anyone. It was... I can only describe myself, you know. I can't describe how the others felt. But it was just like the Lord was just salving me with buckets full of liquid joy just flowing into my soul as if he's just filling my soul and here'd come another flood. And here'd come another flood. As if the Lord would say, now does that satisfy you? And here would come another wave, now does that satisfy you? And I couldn't do anything but just kneel there by the chair and just cackle. And I just laughed and laughed and laughed and here'd come another wave and I couldn't do anything but laugh. And I don't know how long I just laughed there. And others were laughing, too. Well, when we'd just about laughed and we couldn't laugh anymore, we got up and Pastor Pam looked over at me and said, Miss Smith, would you like for us to pray for your ears? So there he is. Now, you see, he'd gotten what he wanted. He'd gotten the most important thing. He'd gotten me on a new spiritual uplift. And that is what he was there for. And he knew it. Well, we always have olive oil, as I think I've said, in our pantries for music when you have company to make mayonnaise. Well, he took a little olive oil and put it on my head. And before he'd done that, he just started calling out passages of Scripture and having me turn in my Chinese Bible and read them to the group. One was, Who made mine ears? Who made thine ears? Who makes the deaf to hear? And the blind to see? He read several passages like that. And friends? No, he didn't read them. He called them out to me and had me read them. And while I was reading those passages, the Lord touched my ears. And I knew it. I knew it. He touched both of my ears at the same time. And there was a sensation all around my ears, just like tight tendons loosening up. And, of course, it was tight tendons. It was pulling those eardrums in. Well, I knew the Lord had touched them. And the next morning, I thought, Well, Pastor Phan was leaving for his meeting Sunday night, leaving next morning. And I thought, Well, he also has a sinful nature. I'd better drive a few nails into him and get him nailed a little bit closer to the cross and death. So I thought I'd better tell him. I said, Pastor Phan, if the Lord healed my ears Sunday, He healed them before you ever prayed. He said, Well, you know, the next week my ears began to ache. They never had ache. They buzzed. But they never had ache. And one started aching and the other one buzzing. And one started buzzing and the other one aching. They both ached and both buzzed and both ached and both buzzed. Well, I thought it was the devil trying to keep me from thinking that believing my ears were healed. And I wasn't, I was going to believe they were healed. I just knew the Lord had touched them. And I wasn't about to give in to the devil. And, well, they went on that way. And after some days, they just ached so I could harvest them. And I remember one day when they were aching, so I said, Now, Lord, these ears are not mine. You have no idea how much sin the Lord showed me in the aching of those ears those days. All my life, I had just delighted in compliments. And oh, how I'd study to be first in the class and for the teachers to brag on me. And I just ate it up. Ate it up. My mother used to say to me, I'm glad you were not either the oldest child or the youngest. You'd have been spoiled from attention if you'd have been the oldest. And you'd have been spoiled from attention from all the others if you'd been the youngest. And you got right in the middle where you don't get much attention. You couldn't take it. There were lots of other advantages from being in the middle that she didn't know about. Well, anyway, I'll tell you, the Lord made me so sick of my sin, I just thought I'd die. I just thought I just couldn't stand it. And the big thing that He showed me was the sin of my ears. Love and praise and love and compliments, just eating it up. Well, after that, it just made me sick when somebody complimented me. It just made me sick. Well, anyway, I said to Him, and during those days, I just gave my ears to the Lord. Well, I said, Now, Lord, I've already given these ears to You. Now, of course, I knew all about way back down to giving Your hands in the head and every member of Your body to the Lord. But I gave my ears to Him all over in a new way. And then when they got to hurting after He'd prayed, I couldn't understand it. I said, Lord, you know, these ears are not mine. They're Yours. And if they're Yours, they can't hurt unless You let them hurt. If You let them hurt, let them hurt. You'll give me grace to stand it. Well, after a while, they hurt Him gradually, tapered off, and they didn't hurt anymore after about a month, and they didn't buzz anymore. And a little two years later, I came on the furlough, and the Japanese had invaded China. The Japanese had invaded China the next week after that meeting. And the Lord sent Pastor Pan down there to get me on the highest spiritual level to take what was going to come during the Japanese invasion. And I'd be there alone to stand by our women and girls and face the Japanese soldiers. And I didn't know about that, but that's why He put it into our hearts and made it possible for Pastor Pan to come. Well, I'd gone through that war, and our city was on the battlefront for two months. After the Japanese got it, the Chinese tried to retake it. And they fought back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then I was under the Japanese nine months before the Chinese got back. And they were the first missionaries to be given permit to come in interior after the Japanese had taken over because they told them there's an American missionary there, and they just had to get back to her. And they got back and looked at me. Well, they said, You don't look tired. You don't look tired. Well, I was going in the strength of the Lord. I wasn't using my little bit of strength. I was just saving it and drawing on the Lord's, and His never gives up. Well, when I came home, just a few weeks after the Communists got there, my furlough was due, so I came home. And the Foreign Mission Board in those days didn't have money to pay medical bills of missionaries. Of course, the mission hospitals didn't charge us. But if we went in with any other hospital, we had to pay. Well, Dr. Madger was our Foreign Mission Board secretary, and he knew that I'd been there alone in the seeds of the city all that time. And he said, Now you go down to Columbia, to the Baptist Hospital, and you stay just as long as necessary and have them do everything for you that they think you need, and send the bill to us. Well, I knew there wasn't anything needed to be done. But I went on down to Columbia, and they put me in bed just like a sick patient, and those sweet, darling nurses waited on me. And every little while, they'd come and wheel me out to one of the specialists for examination. And then, of course, they didn't find one thing in the world wrong with me. When the air specialist came, and he got through with my ears, I said, My eardrums are going in, aren't they? He said, Why did you ever think that? And I said, Dr. Dillick from Peking Union Medical College diagnosed them a few years ago, and he said they were going in. Well, he knew Dr. Dillick. He knew his name, his reputation. And somebody asked for the best air specialist in America. They were told that the best air specialist in America had left for Peking, for the hospital there. He said, I don't see how Dr. Dillick could ever have made such a diagnosis. Your eardrums are in perfect condition. I said, Oh, something happened after that. And if they're all right now, it's because the Lord healed them. We prayed for them to be healed. He said, Faith will do a lot if you got it. Well, I didn't call it faith. I called it a touch of the living Lord. A touch of the living Lord. Well, you know, then I realized that what all that aching and guzzling was, was the Lord gradually bringing these airs back from this kind of position to this kind. He didn't jerk them back. Suddenly, all those weeks of aching, He was gradually bringing these airs back into position. And it hadn't been the devil at all. Why, it had been the Lord doing it the best way possible to gradually change it. And I can still go to the house of God and hear His Word preached when I have a chance when I'm not speaking to say it. I can go in here and I do praise Him. Friends, I'll never fail to praise Him for the big lesson I got through that experience. And that was He's showing me how black I am by nature. And you're just as black. We're all as an unclean thing. We're all chips off the old block Adam and Eve. And the dear living Lord came and took our dead. And you and I have the privilege of assigning this old black devil nature to the cross of Christ. He not only took to the cross what this nature produces, He took the root, the machine that causes all these sins that we know about that bother us so. He took what we are to the cross. He took us in His own body. And He counts us dead because He charges the death of His Son to us. He can't charge us dead and He can't unless we, I mean it won't do us any good unless we agree to our death. But when we agree to our death, He counts us dead. And then, lo, He takes charge of this old sinful nature. He fills us up with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit so controls this old sinful nature that He makes it ineffective over us until it's just as if we were dead in our daily living. Say, people don't have to be sinning and repenting and sinning and repenting and sinning and repenting to deal with that. The Lord has something better than that for us. He comes down to live inside of us. Well, now He's just living grieved that this big eye is still in control. But if this old devil nature will take its place in death and assent to our death, the position the Lord's been seeing us in ever since the day we were saved, it gives Him a chance to control this sinful nature. And when we live to enthrone Christ instead of this big eye and we assent to our death and agree that we're not fit to live and accept that death as a stance in which to live and to treat this old nature as if it didn't have any power over us and keep Christ enthroned in our hearts or keep all sin, everything this old sinful nature produces so forgiven and cleansed up to date that the Holy Spirit can just fill us up all the time and He magnifies Christ through our personalities instead of ourselves when He's enthroned and He controls this old devil nature and keeps us in that place of death. And that's victorious living. That is glorious living. That's living so you can always have the other person's soul uppermost in your mind. That's where you can always be in a spirit of prayer. And that's where the Lord can control your good temper and not allow it to rule over you. And that's living gloriously. It's not our living anymore. We're living in that position of death and Christ is living in us. Now, that's the glorious life that He has for every one of you. Now, how many of you, up to date, have your sin list? I told you it was at this group. I told one group yesterday how to list their sins. It was you. I failed to tell the ninth group, didn't I? Didn't I tell you yesterday how to get along with the Lord and put those sins over on the Lord? Huh? I told both groups. And there's some here that were not here. Well, I asked those people. I've been having them list their sins because I wanted to look at them and get a little vision of what this black devil nature produces. That was one reason I had you list your sins. Of course, your listing your sins has nothing to do with the Lord forgiving you. But it does have a lot to do with you knowing and having the assurance that your sins are forgiven and the devil can't bring this sin up and bring this sin up and up and up. And you put that sin by a definite act of your will and do it out loud, talking out loud. You know, the devil's not omniscient, as I've said before to some of you. He's a created being and no created beings are omniscient. He doesn't know everything. He knows a good deal. But he knows what he puts into our minds. But he may not know what you were doing when you were putting those sins silently over on the cross. If you get out somewhere where you can talk out loud, the devil will hear you and know what you're doing. And you just thank the Lord that he took all the punishment necessary for that sin. And as I told you, that first sin is only against the Lord and doesn't involve anybody else. As soon as you put it on the cross, you've marked that sin off. As soon as it's marked off, God forgets you've ever been guilty. Now, sin number two may involve somebody. Now, it may have been all their fault, not yours at all. But maybe you didn't respond to their sin like a Christian should have, so you're guilty for the way you responded. And you've got to go see that person and tell that person you're sorry. You don't have to confess their sin. Leave them. You just go confess your own. Tell them you're sorry the way you acted that day. And then you mark that sin off. And every sin has to be confessed, if possible, if the person's still living or if you can get to them. And then the devil can't nag you and say, bring that sin up. You can mark that sin off your list and the Lord forgets about it when you get right with that other person because you can't be right with God and wrong with anybody in the world. And you begin to get right with people. How many of you have gotten your sins listed and you're right with people, everybody that you know? You've gotten right with people. Let's see your hands. Well, praise the Lord. You have a few. Well, now how many of you have listed your sins but you've still got people you haven't gotten right with? Let's see those hands. Well, there's a good many. Can you do that telephoning this afternoon? Some of you can't. You know, we sin most against the people that are closest to us. All we have to do is let some of them come home from work or come home from school. But we do sin against other people too. Now, you write a note to those people if you can't telephone them, if you can't see them. It's best to see them and tell them the Lord's working with you and you're sorry and ask Him to forgive you. A lot of it's attitudes. Well, now, I hope when you come back tonight you'll have the sins settled. Now, you won't have time to write all those letters. I may not have time to telephone all those people. But you write by that number of sin, the dates you're going to do that. You think through your schedule. What date can I do this? And the Lord will count it as done when He knows you're going to do it. We want to deal with this old self now. So you've got to deal with your sins first before you can deal with sin. Now, we were going to read John. Did we read all of it? I think I did. I didn't read all of it. I stopped to talk about some of the Pentecostal groups that think they do not have any sin. Well, everybody has that sinful nature. We'll have it until the breath leaves us. But the Holy Spirit through here, through the Apostle John said, if we say that we have no sin, this iron sin, if we declare that we do not have a sinful nature, we're just deceiving ourselves. Now, what comes next? If we confess what? Our sins. If we confess what this sinful nature produces, that's sins. If we confess our sins, He is just and faithful to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, confession doesn't just mean say I'm guilty. What do we confess? To whom do we confess? We confess to the one who died for us. We confess to the one who died for us. We have to take Scripture with other Scripture. Confess is to say the same thing about yourself that the Lord knows is true. Now, in Romans 10.10, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts, what? That God has raised Him from the dead. Well, how could Christ be raised from the dead if He hadn't died? Whom do you confess to? The one that died. You come to the cross of Christ and say the same thing about yourself that He knows is true. If we confess, not just confess to somebody else and just say with our mouths, Lord, I'm sorry. Or like a lot of people say, God, I'm sorry. Well, His Son had to die for that sin. And you've got to come to the cross of Christ and confess that sin and confess it, of course. That means count Him on His death for that sin. We're sorry that He had to die for that sin. And then the next verse says, if we say that we have not sinned, we make Him alive. This word is not in us. If we say that this old devil nature has never, never sinned, never expressed itself, of course, nobody can say that and say the truth. And friends, what was not sin for you last year is sin this year. If you're going on with the Lord, the Lord permits a lot because, see, He leads us on. And He prunes us as we're able to stand it. You just have one day after today. Now I hope when you come back tonight you can have a little time this afternoon to settle with other people if you need to. And if there's something that hasn't finished up your list, try to get it listed. If you don't, you'll have to stay up tonight and do it. You just have to finish up your sins today. Dear Lord, we lift our hearts to Thee in praise and gratitude for these dear people who love You. They wouldn't be coming here every day and sitting here this long except for the fact that they do love You. Now, Lord, they want to be lifted on a higher plane, and that's just what You have had this meeting for. Lord, You just restrengthen everyone to go and admit their sin to the people they've sinned against. And don't let them keep one thing in their hearts and lives that is unholy. We pray in Jesus' name and for His sake.