In this sermon, the preacher discusses the destructive power of sin and how it enslaves and destroys the lives of young and innocent individuals. He shares the story of a seventeen-year-old boy named Carlos, who had been abandoned by his mother and forced to live in a basement. Carlos had never ventured outside of his small neighborhood and had never even seen the Brooklyn Bridge. The preacher also mentions encountering a man who suggests that he needs to take a year off to understand the power of God. Initially resistant, the preacher later realizes the importance of providing comfort and security to those in need, as exemplified by his encounter with Carlos.

Power over sin. I have an unusual kind of respect for the word sin. The same kind of respect I have for a rattlesnake coiled for an attack. For over eight years now I've ministered to the very gates of hell and I've seen every variety of sin there is and I've wept my way through human graveyards of depravity and hopelessness. My congregation has already been to hell and back. Those that I minister to walk only at night and their only consolation is that there are so many others just like them. Sunshine to them is painful. Life is a dreaded ordeal. Pleasure is only another form of pain. Death is a desired haven, a way out of bondage and total demon possession. My parish, of course, is the gutter. The big people here are the drug addicts, the burglars, the muggers, the alcoholics, the gangs, the devs and dolls, and the con artists. None of them very old in years, but all of them old in misery and pain. This is a world where the little people are born old. Children are conceived in the hates and shames and sins of their parents. Their tender little bodies become their enemies, used only to feed them drugs, disease, and liquor. They cry when they're born without any hope of being heard by men. They are born wishing they were dead. They are born to sin-cursed parents who spend every nickel on fifths of whiskey instead of quarts of milk. They land in the street jungle because it's better there than in their home. Hell to them is home. Satan rules supreme in the world that we minister to, the other half. He entices the young and the innocent. He enslaves them with appetites and habits that break down their morals, their health, and their integrity. Waste their energies and dissipate their strength and power, leaving them nothing but the pitiful wages of sin. Dead. Little skinny Carlos is a point in case, case in point. 17-year-old boy that I met in the basement, 110th Street in Harlem. He had never in his 17 years seen the Brooklyn Bridge, though he lived in Brooklyn, in Harlem. He'd never been down to see the Brooklyn Bridge. Never been out of a 20-some block area in all of his life. His mother had left him when he was 14 years of age and he moved into a basement. He was allowed to stay in that basement by firing, stoking the furnace. And I went down to look at his little room. I was shocked and I've seen plenty. He had an old urine-stink mattress on, right on the dirty floor. There were no doors or windows in that basement and the cold came rushing through there in the winter. Rats. He had a little calendar, three years old, hanging on the wall. A little picture of his candle. A few rags that he used for blankets. The boy ate only what he could steal. A bag of oranges, a loaf of bread. He had a little needle, a set of works underneath, a little stone. He sat there day after day, shooting narcotics into his vein and living his little world. The boy hadn't bathed in months and I don't suppose he'd changed his clothes in at least three months. I was so shocked, I forced him to come to the center. We made him take a shower, we cleaned him up, gave him good clothes. Talked to him about the Lord, but he was so stunned he couldn't understand. When I went down to the office later by one o'clock in the morning to finish some work, I felt rather warm inside that I could provide clean sheets, a nice bed, good clothes, and comfort for a boy who'd been sleeping in a basement. Two o'clock in the morning, a blood-curdling scream and Carlos ran screaming down our halls and outside the door. He hadn't even had his shirt on yet. He was naked from the waist up and carrying his shoes. Ran screaming down the street and disappeared. The next day I went over to find him. I saw him in a little candy store. I said, Carlos, what's the matter? He said, Pastor, you took my only security. This is the only life I've known. He said, you took it away from me. I had to come back. I can't stand it anywhere else. Skinny Carlos died two months later of hepatitis in the Queens Hospital. I haven't forgotten that boy because Satan stripped him and left him nothing. Daisy, young lady I talked about last night, a prostitute, a narcotic addict, 32 years of age, came to live with us at Teen Challenge Center, walked out against advice. Because of constant drilling in her veins, her surface veins collapse. When it happens, they shoot in the legs and then when those surface veins collapse, they shoot in the jugular vein and in the breast. Daisy had walked out against advice, warned that I would bury her if she didn't obey the Holy Spirit. Daisy was prostituting two months later on a rooftop, 110th Street and Madison Avenue. She got $2 for her trick, as we call it. A drug addict later found she had that $2, chased her back up on the roof and demanded the money. She wouldn't surrender to him and he pushed her off the roof and she fell on the pavement, cracked her skull, died instantly. He went down and took the $2 from the corpse because Satan wouldn't even let her go into eternity with $2 in her purse. Fernandez was paid in full on the rooftop in the Bronx and I told about this to the young people last night. Five teenage boys shooting narcotics, 16-year-old Fernandez died from an overdose. They tried to stick salt water needles in his veins to shock him, beat him over the head with wet towels. He still passed away. The next day, they're walking the street trying to work an angle. They had no money for a deck of heroin, remembered the corpse laying up on the rooftop, stretched up against the stairwell. They went and stripped him of his clothes, stripped the corpse, took it to a pawn shop and got $6 for his clothes and left him naked because Satan wouldn't let Fernandez go into eternity even with the clothes on his back. This is the world that we work in, a world of sexual deviation, overrun with homosexuals and lesbians, thousands of sad, lonely people who live normal lives most of the week. But suddenly at the weekend, they're overwhelmed by a power from another world that sets them apart from all other creation. They are marked with a sin and a corrupt streak that drives them to depths of sin and filth that our decent minds cannot even comprehend. They're driven to alcoholism, to mental institutions, and so often to suicide. I receive the most indecent mail of any minister in the world. My own mother has had to answer my personal mail because we cannot even trust anyone else to open the mail that come to me. From men and women all over the world who detail their obsessions and their deviant lives and life patterns, these pitiful letters break hearts at our center. My mother has blushed many times. Tragic stories of bondage, demon possession, satanic attacks, obsessive habits. Stories from laymen and ministers from many nations around the world who begged for our prayers and deliverance. Prostitutes who wet their tears where their letters were their tears. Homosexually bound ministers who threaten suicide unless they can be set free once and all from their sins. Drug addicts who write jail epistles about the physical torture of cold turkey, who make sad and pitiful appeals for one last chance before they commit suicide. In fact, the sin cult that I'm talking about even now plagues the Church of Jesus Christ. Our religious and secular campuses, colleges, Bible schools, and almost every Christian stronghold today. Satan has come down having great wrath because he knows he has but a short time. I've been lecturing in some of our Christian campuses around the country and this year has been one of the worst disciplinary problems in the history of our schools. Old schools, Pentecostal, Methodist, and I can name some of the outstanding schools, Christian schools of our nation, for the first time in their history are having problems that can't even begin to control. Now, I've expected drinking, cursing, sexual promiscuousness, and deviation of every kind in the gutter where I preach, but now it appears that these same problems are causing many Christians to lose their first love. While the Church has slept, the enemy has crept into soul tears. There is now a winking at sin, no more concept of the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Now, I expect things to get much worse in the parish that I called on to minister to. They'll get worse and worse through time because God's Word predicts it. Second Timothy 3.13, but evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse deceiving and being deceived. The government with all of its millions in medical knowledge will not stop drug addiction. I predict that thousands of more will become addicts each passing year. I was just telling the young people last night that one of our major problems in New York City right now are the numbers of teenagers who are going through the high school corridors unscrewing little caps from the fire extinguishers and getting high on its chemicals. Liquorice now they find is addicting, habit-forming, and they're going to have to outlaw licorice because kids are discovering that if you take enough of it, you can get a high. More prostitutes will sell their body and soul. Skid rows will become overcrowded. Teen gangs will continue to terrorize and rumble from city to city. Civil disobedience is going to spread. Disrespect for law and order will be rampant. Drill murders are going to increase. Sexual deviants will plow more and more streets, raping, abusing more and more helpless women. Crime is going to go out of control completely. College campuses will not be peaceful and calm again. They will boil over with a new kind of liberalism, extensualism, extens... Oh, anyhow. Extensualist. Existentialist. I remember preaching at, uh, just pardon me a minute here. Where is it? Berkeley campus. Out on Sproul Hall during the riot. They said they all stole you. The communists and all their followers were over here screaming and hollering through the microphones. I stood up to speak and young people took their hats off. There's some twelve to fifteen hundred young people standing around with their hands folded and I've never seen anyone so respectful all my life. And I wondered what it was and I turned around. So happened the Teen Challenge Center there had brought along about five or six great big husky converted drug addicts who stood behind me with their hands on their shoulders. I would have listened too. I was in Buffalo, New York, uh, for crusade in downtown in the city square. I saw a group of kids, you know, these shaggy kids who iron their hair and wrinkle their clothes. Marching around the city square. Banned a bomb. One sign read, Johnson's a liar. Get out of Vietnam. Right in the middle of a little kid had a for sale sign. And to me that described what was happening to our young people today. Just anything to try to show some spirit of rebellion. This will increase and mark it down and you're going to hear it this morning from this pulpit. You mark it down well. If it doesn't happen this summer, it'll happen next summer. And I believe it will happen this summer. We're going to have the greatest revolution, the most vile, violent race revolution the world has ever witnessed. It will start this time in Washington, Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland. These are the cities that are going to get hit the hardest, including New York. Los Angeles will have other outbreaks, perhaps not as serious, but this will spread throughout the United States and we're going to see. It hasn't even begun, my friends, because this is the sword of the Lord in the land. God has allowed it. This is the doing of the Lord. When a nation sins grievously against me, the Lord said, I will move against it with the sword of my hand. Bishop Pike and Bishop Robinson Incorporated and all these pipsqueak bishops will lead their herd of agnostic ministers deeper and deeper into the pits of confusion, sin and rantings and ravings against the cherished truths of the Orthodox Church. Liberals will be making pilgrimages to Rome to bend their knee to the power of the Pope. Backslidden Pentecostals and Evangelicals will be busy working more and more angles. Getting involved in more and more red tape, trying more and more Orthodox procedures that have already proven unworkable, send out more and more slogans, dream up more and more paper evangelism, and stay further and further away from the simple, uncomplicated dreams of the fathers who founded their movements. God's word predicts it. Movies will get dirtier and more descriptive. TV shows will compete for vileness and freedom to satisfy the sex-satiated generation of the United States. Newsstands will brazenly peddle smut written by demons and devils. Divorce laws will be eased, and the home life as we have known it will be ridiculed until it becomes acceptable to maintain mistresses and to indulge in extramarital relationships. It will become almost normal for college students to maintain sexual affairs while in school to keep up with the crowd. Moral standards are decaying, and now dishonesty, cheating, lying, and stealing has become a way of life, and God's word predicts it will get worse. More and more of our church kids will get pregnant. Others will lose the fire and backslide. Others will live phony lives and hide behind double standards. But in the midst of it, persecution will get hotter and hotter. It will become more and more difficult to live a really overcoming life. Intellectuals will scoff and cry, come on over and set yourself free from your Puritan attachments and background. Intelligent Christian youth will seek to become relevant rather than repentant. They will become involved but instead become entangled. God's word predicts it. All I hear today is about a church that needs to be relevant. God's word said it needs to be repentant. We talk about being involved and instead we get entangled. I have never yet once seen a preacher who heads a civil rights demonstration stop the crowd and preach the gospel. And I just don't care what they think of me. Pastor, if you're going to march in a civil rights demonstration, stop the crowd, go ahead and march, but preach Jesus first. Then march. Never have we needed, and I have painted this picture, and I believe it's true, I have not overstated it, and all you have to do if you think I've overstated is to take a little tour with me through our major cities and see that I have understated it, if anything. But we have never so desperately needed a definition of power over sin as we need it now. In the past few months I have literally been driven to my Bible for a definition of power over sin. I have to have answers. The people that I work with have to have an immediate answer. They have to have help and deliverance right now. Never have people fought such great inner battles as they fight today. The question I'm asked most in the gutter and in crusades, must I give in to this thing that has me in its grip? Is there no power over sin in my life? Do I have to go through the rest of my life as a cripple obeying the impulses of my lower nature? A husband sat in my office with his face in his hands crying a few weeks ago, a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He'd been converted for five years, and he'd been seeking after God, but suddenly he turned to alcoholism. In fact, the night he reverted to alcoholism, he burned a bar down and hit the headlines. He came into my office. I said, why did you do it? Five years you were clean. He bowed his head and he wept. He said, Brother Dave, five years ago I had a secret sin. He named it. It's homosexuality. He said, I tried to overcome it. It laid dormant. Suddenly it overpowered me, and I was so depressed. I went out and got drunk, and I burned a bar down, told me the whole story. He looked up at me with tears streaming down his cheeks, and he said, Brother Dave, is there no victory? Is there no power over this thing? Do I have to be a slave the rest of my life? He said, if that's true, I want to end it all now. A much-used evangelist from Denmark came to my office, greatly used of God, reaching thousands of souls. He said, David, ten years ago I was an alcoholic, and I had the same problem that I mentioned to you just now. He said, God delivered me, filled me with the Holy Spirit, and I have won thousands of souls. He said, for ten years I've moved in God. He sat there trembling. He said, three weeks ago, a strange spirit came over me, and I found the old desire. It overwhelmed me, and I stood in the pulpit, and suddenly that craving, that desire hit me so hard. He said, I've come all the way from Denmark. I've read your book. You're the only man I think could help me. He said, Brother Dave, and he stood, though I've preached, though I've known all about the movings of the Holy Spirit. He said, I have no power over this. I'm driven like an animal, and unless I can get victory, I better quit preaching, and if I have to do that, suicide is next. I get letters from all over the world. I watch drug addicts as they leave us and revert to their old life, and I see them on the street. They cry and read their Bibles half the night. They say, I can't help it. I'm on a toboggan slide. I'm going down, and I can't stop it. You know, we have thousands of Christians around the world who fight a battle constantly. They've never had a definition of power over sin in their lives. They're buffeted, and they're tossed by every little wind and wave of temptation. I was told of burying Danny last night. Danny walked out, shot through the heart by a police officer. We buried him three weeks ago. I remember talking to Danny on the street before he was murdered. He said, Brother Dave, how can I get power over this craving for drugs? Why didn't God set me free when I got on my knees and prayed? Why didn't God take the desire away? He said, it's still there, and I can't help it. He said, I don't want it. I despise it. I hate it, but I can't stop it. Don't think for one moment that only drug addicts and homosexuals fight this horrible battle against sin in the soul. It's the battle of every great man of God. It's your battle, and it's mine. I know what it is to pray for a crucified life, and by the way, it's not scriptural to live a crucified life. Crucifixion is an act. You live the resurrected life, and I'm tired of people telling me they're living a crucified life. They've never even been able to say it is finished. The act of crucifixion is finished when you can say with Christ at the cross, it is finished, and then give up the ghost. I do not live the crucified life. I live the resurrected life, and the same quickening power that raised Jesus from the dead is in me, hallelujah, and I live the resurrected life. Why don't you join me? I can give you the day. I can give you the day. I screamed in my little prophet's chamber, it is finished, and I've been preaching the sermon ever since. God's not given anymore. He gave it all to Calvary. How can God give you something again he already gave you? He gave you. You know, friends, that there are not a handful of people in America that understand everything we need we already have in Jesus. All the righteousness, the power. I'm getting way ahead of myself here. Hold it. But I've spent eight long months. I'm going to just stop a minute and tell you how it happened. This is the end of side one. Please stop the machine at this point and turn the cassette over. Months ago, nine months ago, I was walking from one building to another. We've got five on the block. Six now. We're just about finished. A half million dollar center for the glory of God. A man stopped me on the street. Give me his name. He said, Brother Dave, God sent me to you. He said, your ministry is too shallow. First thing he said, he said, God sent me from behind the iron curtain to tell you this. He said, you need to take a year off and get into the Word and understand the power of God. There's so many things that you haven't learned yet. You've got to get Dave Wilson out of the way. And I got mad. I said, I'll tell you what you need, Brent. I said, I'm the soul winner and you come around here telling me. I said, that center is full of converts and God's moving. God's blessing my life. I'm preaching to six and seven thousand a week now. And you're telling me that I don't understand it. I said, I'll bet you just go around telling preachers things like that. You need to get in the chapel and get on your knees and humble yourself. He just smiled. He was a little hurt. He walked away. I was mortified because the truth always hurts. Went to the office and the telephone rang. Some minister didn't, I don't even remember his name. He said, it's not important. He said, for three weeks I've said it my phone. I've been fighting against it, but I just have to do it. He said, I had a vision of you, Reverend Wilson. I don't know much about you, but God told me to call you and I've got to obey it. He said, you were standing before thousands of young people, one of your crusades, and they all walked out on you. And you went to the edge of the pulpit and you fell over dead and you fell in a hole. And I went and looked in the hole and everybody said, Dave Wilson is dead. He was in his old clothes. He said, I don't know what that means. And I tell you, I just about had it. I yelled at him. I said, I'll bet you're a homosexual or something. And you've just taken a vicarious throw at a humbling mate. He said, get off this phone and leave me alone. I went home, this double barrel attack, hanging heavy over me. And I went to prayer and God began to break through and said, I sent them both. I sent them both. Cancel all your crusades, cancel everything. And stay in this room until you begin to understand the kingdom of God within you. Until you begin to see the power there is in Jesus Christ, until you lengthen your cords, you go deeper in the Lord. And it was in this process, eight months, I prayed, Lord, show me the crucified life. I've got to have a power of definition over sin. And I prayed and I strove and I fasted. I studied the lives of the great missionaries who spread the gospel around the world. And I found that they were fighting the same battle that I was fighting, that God never used one of them until they suddenly had a revelation of the power over sin that a man can obtain, that a man can live in complete victory in his life, not subject to these things. I studied the life of Hudson Taylor. Hudson Taylor had been used of God to send some 200 missionaries to China, raised up China Inland Mission, one of the greatest missionaries in the world. In the midst of this, when God was using him, Hudson Taylor cried out. Suddenly I felt the ingratitude, the danger, the sin of not living to God. He said, I prayed, I agonized, I fasted, I strove, I made resolutions. I read the word more diligently. I sought more time for meditation, but all without avail. Every day, almost every hour, the consciousness of my inner sin oppressed me. Now this is a great missionary talking, was known around the world. I knew that if I could only abide in Christ, all would be well, but I could not. I would begin the day with prayer, determined never to take my eyes off Jesus throughout the day. But he said, at the end of the day, my catalog of sin would increase. My position became continually more and more responsible, my needs greater for special grace. And I continually mourned that I followed Jesus at such a far distance, and I learned so slowly to imitate him. He said, I can't begin to tell you how buffeted I am by temptations. I never knew how bad a heart I had. Who's talking? One of the world's greatest missionaries. Who suddenly saw revelation of himself, and his weakness, and his frailty. I never knew how wicked, how bad a heart I had. I knew that I loved God, and I loved his work, and I desired to serve him in all things. And I value and precious his lovely name. But often I'm tempted to think that one so full of sin as I cannot even be a child of God at all. He said, please, friends, pray that the Lord will keep me from my sin, will sanctify me wholly, and will use me largely in his service. I listened to the, to the pitiful heart cry of this missionary, and other missionaries, and I realized that they fought the same battle. Others who say, I've walked with God for so long, I'm too intelligent to have to face such immature kinds of temptation. I should have passed this plane long ago. You can walk with God for 25 years, and suddenly be cast down into a kind of temptation, and face a battle in your life that you thought you would never be called upon to fight. You thought you were too far along the road. Have you fully persuaded yourself that you want to sell out to God? That you want to resist all the pressures of this age? You want to become a true overcomer, yet in spite of your resolution, your determined will, your keen desire, your praying, your fasting, your seeking, you still must honestly admit that sin often overwhelms you. Things that you despise, you end up doing. You feel almost like it is an inevitable force that pushes you into moods, and actions, and indulgences of the mind and the body. Things that you hate, and then you wind up perplexed, your soul in turmoil, and you end up with an indescribable wretchedness and despair. Paul the Apostle knew something about this kind of wretchedness. Romans, what I hate that do I. I know that in me that is in my flesh dwelleth no good thing. For to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. Paul was seeking a definition of power over sin. Say what you will, I believe Paul faced the same battle that you and I face. He said, for the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am! Paul was a wretched man until God gave him the same spirit of revelation of power over sin in his life. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I don't want to get into a deep theological discussion about the two natures, and about the deep meanings to be found here. Suffice to say that I believe Paul the Apostle is speaking for himself about his own personal battle and his own quest for deliverance and power over sin. And from backsliders and from saints of all ages, from David Wilkerson, from Hudson Taylor, from the lips of every dying prophet of God, from Paul the Apostle included, this cry has gone out through every generation. Where is my power over sin? I have seen my sin and my bondage. Who shall deliver me from my wretchedness? Who will set me free from the body of this death? Now, my friend, if you have not yet fought this battle, you are still an immature Christian. This is a battle of prophets. This is a battle of those who seek the deeper things of God. This is the battle of those who want to go all the way with the Lord. And if you've been walking with God, this message already comes very, very close to describing the very battle you fight right now. I thank God that there is deliverance. Man does not have to be a slave to sin. You do not have to live your life in bondage to the habits of a sinful urge. There is a way out. There is deliverance. There is power over all sin. See, what Paul the Apostle said, so simple yet so majestic, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. It's not enough for me to tell you that all power over sin is in Christ Jesus. No definition of this power will work in your life and mine until we learn how to get this power out of Him into us. Listen to what Hudson Taylor said. He said, all the time I felt assured that there was in Jesus Christ all I needed. All power over sin, all victory in Him was the richness and fatness of heaven. But the practical question was this, how to get it out of Him. He was truly rich, but I was poor. He was strong, but I was weak. I knew full well that there was in the root, the stem, all the abundant fatness, but how to get it into my puny little branch was the question. Yes, my friend, Jesus Christ has all the power over sin. Now I want you to know something else, guidance, divine guidance is a person. It is Jesus. Guidance is a person. Victory over sin is a person. I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. But how do we tap that power for our own lives? When a man faces a battle and he wants a definition over sin, what does he do? Does he pray more, fast more often, make resolutions, try to be better? Do we try to work up feelings of righteousness and seek something of an outward holiness? Hudson Taylor did. He said, I prayed, I fasted, I strove, I made resolutions, I read the Bible more diligently, but with all, all without avail. Every day, almost hour, every hour, the consciousness of sin oppressed me. I knew that if I could just abide in Christ, all would be well, but I could not find out how. My friend's absolute power over all sin belongs only to Jesus Christ our Lord. It is he who has come to destroy the works of the devil. All our power over sin depends entirely on our faith in his promise to live his life through us. See, Paul said, I am crucified with Christ. He didn't say, I'm being crucified every day. I don't believe Paul died daily. I believe he died a thousand times a day. What he's trying to say is just get Paul the Apostle out of the way so Jesus can live his resurrected life through me. I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith, not of Paul the Apostle. Paul didn't have any faith. He didn't even try to find it. Paul never looked for faith. He never tried to strive for it. He said, the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God. You know, there wasn't going to have an ounce of faith. I haven't even been looking for it. And I've been trying to find faith because I've been letting Jesus exercise his faith through me. He knows the Father better than I. By the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Paul the Apostle found that his power over sin came by a full and complete faith that the life he lived in the flesh was actually Jesus Christ living through him and fighting off the enemy. This is what Hudson Taylor found. This is what I found. But how did he get my faith strengthened? Not by striving after faith, but by resting on the faithful one. Hudson Taylor went outside and looked at a tree. He saw the branch and he tried to figure out how that branch got the life out. He said the branch didn't move, never did it think. It just stayed on the branch. The very fact that it was thin, divine, just rested. There he remained as yet a rest to the children of God. He said, I will never leave thee. There is your rest. You can strive in vain to rest in him. You don't have to strive to rest for he's not promised to leave you or forsake you. So you accept that and appropriate it by faith. Now hear me before I close. The most damning sin of all is unbelief. We make God a liar when we will not take him at his word. We lack power over sin because we toy with our unbelief. He has promised a quickness in the moment of temptation, make a way of escape, and I've found what that way of escape is. When you really believe God's word, when you see the mighty power of Jesus Christ within you, when the moment of temptation comes, the way of escape is a quickening spirit sent by God to the Holy Spirit that will last as long as your temptation, so that you can bear it. And every time I see it coming and you can sense it, the enemy comes in, we're not ignorant of his devices, he begins to plague us, then suddenly I start perceiving Christ. And I believe the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a powerful section. Paul kept saying, oh that you might know, that your eyes may be opened, that you may perceive. And this is a powerful section that Christ is here in the same spirit that raised him from the dead. And I picture that the corpse laying there in the tomb, the mighty spirit of God coming down into that tomb, picking up that body, that corpse, breathing life, and I see him rise in new dimensions, walking out of that tomb, and I try to picture all that happened in that tomb, and I picture the same spirit that raised him from the dead, suddenly in my moment of temptation coming and picking me right up, right up, and suddenly in a new dimension, Satan cannot touch me. Satan comes and has nothing in me. Now that doesn't make me a bit better. I don't even try to be a bit better. And I don't fight anymore, I rest in his power, allowing Jesus Christ to live through us. And oh, how ignorant we are of this mighty power within us. Everybody talks about some storehouse somewhere. I've heard preachers say, oh if I could only tap that storehouse. Here it is, it is within us. You don't have to reach out. God has been pleased that in him should dwell all the fullness of the Godhead. When I stop to think of all the power he has given us, all power over sin belongs to him. You do not fight this battle anymore, my friends. Resign and commit it to the Lord and allow Jesus to quicken you. The same spirit that was in Christ shall be in you. The same spirit that raised him from the dead. You cannot say what will be, will be. You cannot indulge in unbelief and expect to get victory in your life. You've got to stand up and declare to be to your own soul, Christ has power over this sin. Christ lives in me. Christ in me will deliver me. Christ in me will set me free. I can't fight it, it's too big for me, but Jesus has the power, so I'll rest in him. And I found a simple but pure solution with this I close my life of power over sin. I've discovered the secret of personal, the power of a personal sin in my life. You hear it well. It's this simple. Stay close to Jesus, love him, trust him, believe in him, commune with him. Draw mine to him and he'll draw mine to you. The answer to all power over sin is to become possessed with Jesus. Oh, hallelujah. I'm a Jesus-possessed man. Possessed. Who are these that keep backsliding? Who are these who grow cold and indifferent? Who are these that revert to narcotics in their sinful ways? Who are these who, like dogs, return to their vomit to wallow? Who are these that moan and groan that they can't help themselves, that they're being forced to sin? They are those who have lost their first love. They are those who walk too far off. Those who dabble in the world and who pray only in a crisis. They are not lovers of Jesus. I tell you that lovers of Jesus have found their victory over all sin. Lovers of Jesus, learn just three promises. If a man will take just three promises, any three promises in the book, and stand on it and believe it, God said it, I believe it, that settles it, and rest on his words. Exercise the power of Jesus within him. You, too, will find your definition of power forsaken. I was told last night with this, I quote, anymore, when a drug addict comes to me and says he has no more power, when I walk the street, whether it be a prostitute, a drug addict, alcoholic, we round him up in the bar and God sets him free. I lay hands on him. It's as though Dave Wilkins stepped right out of his body and stands beside me, watching the Holy Spirit minister to Christ. Just yield my lips and pray that Christ will cause that living water. You know, the Bible said greater works than these you do. Who does the greater works? It's Christ himself who's come back. He's still doing the works, only he's doing greater works now than he did then because he comes back using our body. He has come back. All he wants is a body, and I pray that God sets him free, and then I step back into the body and rejoice and praise him for what he did to a yielded body. And God wants you to step aside in a moment of temptation. He wants you to step out of the body. He wants you to stand aside and see his glory, and then step back in when the victory comes and rejoice in his mighty delivering power. Heavenly Father, we thank you. There is all power over sin. Glory to God. The devil is a defeated foe. He cannot touch the child of God. Lord, give us that definition of power over sin this morning. For additional copies of this cassette, or for a listing of other tapes, contact Garden Valley Publishers, Post Office Box 951, Lindale, Texas 75771.