In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the concept of sowing and reaping, using biblical examples such as David's sins and their consequences. He highlights the idea that what we sow, we will reap, and that rejecting Christ leads to the arrival of anti-Christ. The preacher also addresses the issue of backsliding and offers a solution for those who have strayed from their faith. He concludes by emphasizing the need for sacrifice and the lack of understanding of true sacrifice in today's society.

Reading from verse 1 into verse 13. Have mercy upon me, O God. According to thy lovingkindness, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgression before, before thee, my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned. And done this evil in my sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, thou desirest truth in inward parts, and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto thee. D.L. Moody said on one occasion, he was the evangelist to the singer you heard about, Sankey, and he said on one occasion, if God would give a man the ability to take a photograph of our hearts, none of us would sit for a picture, and if we got it, we wouldn't show it to anybody. Is that true in your heart and mine? The Bible contains 70 books. If you went to Bible school, they told you 66, but they don't know much of Bible schools anyhow. You see, the book of Psalms is the Hebrew hymn book, and it is divided into five books, so if you add four to 66 books, you have 70. If you take the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the fifth book is a recap of the other four. If you go into the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then you come to the Acts of the Apostles. What is the Acts of the Apostles? It's the church doing everything Jesus did. Isn't it? The church, the living church. My, that always kind of tingles my flesh, because you see, one morning in England, one of our sleeply clergymen had had a pretty bad weekend, and Monday isn't a good day for preachers usually, and he turned around in his swivel chair and he reached just blindly for a book, and he got his New Testament, and it opened up the Acts of the Apostles, and he read it, and suddenly it exploded. And from that, J.B. Phillips began to give his great exposition, his translation of the New Testament. It is a translation, it's not a transliteration, it's not this dirty thing down here, living Bible, a paraphrase, a bit of guesswork that a man had when he was sick, I think. Phillips is a scholarly translation, it's got teeth in it, and when he read the first few chapters of the New Testament church, this is what he said. This is the church of Jesus Christ before it became fat and short of breath by prosperity. This is the church before it became muscle-bound by over-organization. This is the church where they did not say prayers, they prayed in the Holy Ghost. This is the church where they did not gather together a group of people to study psychosomatic medicine, they healed the sick. My prayer is for this church. I pray for this church every day of my life, and never come back again. I'll still go on praying that God will make it a New Testament church. And if it does, maybe the preacher gets thrown out. But anyhow, the thing is a lot of you get thrown out. You know, everybody wants revival. Do you know why they want revival? To fill up the vacant pews. Many revivals empty the church before they fill them. God empties before he fills, he strips before he clothes, he casts us down before he lifts us up, he wounds us before he heals us. Well, that's free, it won't cost anything, but it's not in the message. The book of Psalms has 150 psalms, roughly 75 of them are written by David. Many of the psalms are prophetic, some are historic, and some are biographical. Out of the 75 he wrote, 18 of them are autobiographical psalms. Out of the 18, eight of them are penitential psalms. Out of the 18, out of the eight, one is the greatest psalm. This is the greatest psalm ever written as far as I'm concerned. It's an amazing psalm in its construction, though we don't have time to deal with it all. But in the first two verses, you have two different words, pardon me, you have three different words for sin in the first two verses. You have three different words for cleansing in the first two verses. Three times in this psalm, brokenness is mentioned. Three times in this psalm, the Spirit is mentioned, twice of the Holy Spirit and once of the human spirit. Three times in this psalm, sacrifice is mentioned. Three times in this psalm, burnt offerings are mentioned. Did you notice that I tried to put an emphasis in reading it? The unique thing amongst others about this psalm is this, that it's a monologue. In the life of David, one hand is stained with adultery and the other hand is stained with murder. And he doesn't go looking at the woman that nakedly sported herself. He doesn't obliquely refer to Bathsheba, not directly. He says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Brought out my transgression. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. Acknowledge my transgression. My sin is ever before me. Now if you want to put into practice the commitment you made a little while ago, maybe the thing is to draw a circle and stand in the middle of it and say, Lord start revival right inside this circle. You know what's wrong with the deacons in your church, the pastor, somebody else. Do you know what's wrong with yourself? It's easy to go out looking for scapegoats, but David is not doing that. David here says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Brought out my transgression. Oh David, don't get too worried about this. The man that wrote this psalm was a monarch. But do you know what he says? He had one of the most blessed experiences in the world, and the blessedness was he was miserable about his sin. We try to get people saved and don't even believe they're lost. We try to get people to come to Christ as though Jesus is in heaven, wringing his hands, hoping you'll give him a vote. Forget it. You can go to hell as far as he's concerned, and I mean that. Because when he hung between two thieves on the cross, he never said a word to them. You say to people, Jesus is living in heaven to make intercession for you. No, he's not. I don't believe he is for sinners, it's for saints he's doing that. He's made an offering for sin. Once in the end of the age, he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. Now David here has a thousand things tearing his spirit. It's worse than a cancer in his breast. It's worse than a fire in his bones. It's worse than the weight that's crushing him. My sin is ever before me. You see when he looked out of his palace window, there was a guard. And he remembered that the captain of that guard he'd put to death because he'd stolen the wife of that captain. And he heard a baby cry somewhere there, a certain girl's baby cried, and he remembered the sin that he'd fathered a child of Bathsheba. And so his sin was ever before him. His sin came in his ears. His sin came before his eyes. His sin burned in his conscience like a living flame. That's just about norm for revival. We want an all the night sweeping in. Now I'm not saying God can't do that, but every revival I've discovered is this, that there's been a gradual approach to that, and something like a disease has spread amongst people, and they've had to say eventually, fowl I to that fountain fly, wash me Savior or I die. Have mercy upon me O God. According to the multitude of thy tender mercies. You know I'm very slow on the uptake. I guess you've already discovered that. Anyhow I've not been too humble about that. But you know as I read that psalm again, I felt something kind of turning inside of me tonight. When David says, take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Do you know I never discovered that until fairly recently, two or three years ago. Why does he say take not thy Holy Spirit from me? Now notice will you that he mentions the Holy Spirit at least twice. The Holy Spirit is exactly that. He's the spirit of holiness, and he convicts of unholiness. He's a spirit of life, he convicts of death. He's a spirit of power, he convicts of weakness. He's a spirit of fire, he convicts of coldness. He's a spirit of purity, he convicts of impurity. Now David says, take not my Holy Spirit from me. Why? Well just before David there had been a king by the name of Saul. You see in America we love to think we don't have a monarch, we don't have a king. But I'll tell you what at the coronation of a British king there are more Americans looking on than anybody anyhow. You like to see the pomp and the circumstance and the Queen's chariot come drawn with her six horses and all the rest of it. But oh when they anointed a king in Israel, it was far more than a social thing, it wasn't something that somebody was at the top of the pyramid. It was God's selection and he had selected a man who in the poet's language was tall and dark and handsome, apart from Goliath, maybe the biggest man in the world. Tall, handsome Saul, the king of Israel. And millions of people gathered and he was anointed. They took the horn of an animal and cut the end off it and filled it with oil and the priest took it there and he dropped the oil on the head of the king who was also the priest in this instance, at least at the moment. He had the anointing. Oil is a type, a permanent type of the Holy Spirit. And Saul the king of Israel is anointed and it says the Spirit of the Lord rested upon him and he had gifts of the Spirit because he prophesied, but he died a suicide. You wonder the scripture says, how the mighty fallen. You know the road of Christian living is strewn with the wreckage of has-beens, men who want might in God. My wife and I were in a certain place, I think it was California, we were when I received a call from the president of a famous school in this country and he asked me to go and teach for a month and then he asked me to join the staff. After they'd heard me preach a month, they didn't renew the invitation, but that's all right. I said to him, but my accent on the Holy Spirit is not on gifts, it's on character. He said, that's what we want. And he went down the list, he said, remember so-and-so? That man used to get ten, twelve thousand people in his tent. You know how he died? You know so-and-so? That man would have a great healing meeting and phone for a call girl on the way home. You know so-and-so? And he went down the list and he said, we need more than just terms and phrases and gifts, we need holy living, holy character. And holiness is not a luxury, it's a necessity. If you're not holy you'll never make it to heaven. God says nothing but the Father shall enter into heaven. David saw that King, the man who stood and prophesied in the name of God, the man with great authority, the people got so thrilled they wrote songs about him, Saul had slain his thousands. They saw him cringing at the feet of a miserable spiritist, saying, bring up Saul. And when Saul came up, you remember he said, the Lord, no he said, call upon my God. Not my God, not our God, thy God. He said, listen, the Lord has forsaken me. And the prophet didn't say, now of course he won't do that with you, particularly you being a king. You being the anointed one, he never does that. He never forsakes his own. Ah, you can use scriptures and distort them, can't you? When the man said, the King said, the Lord hath departed from me, do you remember the answer of the prophet? He said, the Lord hath departed from me. You know the most miserable, you know the man who needs to be pitied most in America tonight or anywhere in the world, he's not the man feeling his way down the road in total blindness. He's not those poor forgotten heroes in our VA hospitals that have been there from World War II, minus legs, minus eyes, minus arms, and they get nothing for it but misery. He's not the man who lost his all on the stock market the other week, no sirree. The man who is the most pitiable object in America tonight is the man who once had the anointing of God and he lost it. There is no money will bring it back. There is no way you can manipulate it for him. I often pray and thank God that the Holy Ghost is incorruptible. Some of you, if the pastor said tonight, I have a special privilege, I want you to be filled with the Holy Ghost, it'll cost you a thousand dollars, you'd have whipped the check out and signed a thousand dollars but he still says your money perish with you. David had seen the misery of this man that God had left and he says, take not thy Holy Spirit from me. This is the young man that sat on the hills of Bethlehem playing, playing a harp, wrote maybe the most beautiful psalm of all, the 23rd psalm, the Lord's nice shepherd I'll not want. You want to hear it sung, you'd have to go to Scotland, it's their national anthem, boy they can sing it. Like nobody on earth. The Lord's nice shepherd I'll not want and he gets so brave he says, even the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil. You remember what he did in Psalm 139, he takes his heart out and he says, search me O God and know my heart, try me and know my thought. I dare you to say that right now to a holy God, not to me, throw it up to heaven right where you're sitting. Search me as you search Jerusalem with a candle, search me, search all my thoughts, the secret springs, the motives that control, the chambers where polluted things hold empire all the soul. Search till thy fiery glance hath cast its holy light through all and I thy grace and brought at last before thy face to fall. All right he says there in that psalm he's brave, he's living as near to God as he ever lived. He was living in the fullness of blessing and therefore he says, search me O God and know my heart, try me and know my thought and see if there be any wicked way in me. He doesn't say that to God here, he says hide thy face from my sins. Don't come near to me I'm already tormented. What a tragic situation that this man is found like this. He wrote this 23rd Psalm with its balm, its healing. He wrote the 139th Psalm with its boldness. He writes Psalm 51 with his brokenness. This Psalm isn't written on paper, it isn't written with ink, it's written with blood and tears. It isn't punctuated with periods and commas, it's punctuated with grief and psalms and groans. And I believe that the groans of penitent men and women make more music in heaven than all the singing Gally Gertrude ever offered and all the music handle ever put together. When a man loathes himself, woe is me, I'm undone, I'm unclean. God says that man's getting some place. I think one of the great tragedies of present Christianity is that we're, well we've such a shallow conception of sin. We tell people to get rid of sin because it'll get rid of you but the first point is you should get rid of sin because it hurts God. Not that it hurts you and hurts the folk you sin with, it hurts God first of all. And after all what's this book about from beginning to end? It only has one subject, the subject of sin, the subject of redemption, the fall of man, the recovery of man. It's simplified very easily, there are two ways, the broad way and the narrow way. There are two gates, there are two masters, there are two kingdoms, not three, two. You're in one, you're in the other. That's a broad way that leads us to destruction. Dear pastor was saying tonight about sacrifice, my God, I'm honest before God, we don't know a thing about it. You've got some ungodly neighbors, you say we've got some drunken filthy folk around us, we've got some adulterers and liars and cheats and thieves and they fight and they swear and they shoot and all the rest of it. Okay. Did you ever think to ask them if they tithe? To who? To the devil. Do you think an ungodly man says, well of course I take out my billfold, I only give the devil a tenth of what I've got on gambling and smokes and drink and nightclubs and all the rest. I never give more than a tenth. Do you think he says, well of course I'd like to go out for the night but I'm always in bed by half past ten so. Oh no. Go through Las Vegas and see if they ever go to sleep. Kentucky Derby this week I noticed, man people go from the ends of the earth to watch a bit of horse flesh run for about three minutes or less than that and it'll cost them thousands of dollars. You remember the Apostle Paul going down the, that fantastic man. Oh I don't know how you read him brother Peter but I, I always finish up on my face when I read about Paul. He began in the ancient capital of the world, Tarsus. He ended up in the military capital of the world, Rome. In between he went to the religious capital of the world, Jerusalem. He went to the intellectual capital of the world, Athens. He went to the rotten capital of the world, capital of sin, Corinth. But do you remember in Athens he argued with the intellectuals there, he knew their poetry, history, philosophy, so forth and so on. But when he went down the street he said, I saw altars to unknown gods. And in the sleepy Elizabethan English, which is still the best translation, the King James by the way is still the purest of all the translations. And in the King James version it says that when he went down that street his spirit was stirred within him. I like the amplified where it agrees with me. And it agrees with me in that 17th chapter because it says he was angry in his spirit. Why? You go down the street, oh I see there's a new kingdom hall there. Isn't it pretty? You ought to hold your nose and vomit. Beautiful Catholic Church. So what? Tells me that the Virgin is equal with Jesus, co-redemptory. Forget it, blasphemy. You go down another street and you see something else, it doesn't move us. You go to Washington for the bicentenary, most likely you'll go to the thirty million dollar Roman Church and look around it and some other thing. But when he saw these rivalries, you see he was so madly in love with Jesus he hated the devil's possession of every man and every woman, every thought, every desire they had. It'll take that brother Peter to get men on fire for God. You say that's pretty intolerant, sure it is. Now it's going to get worse, better I hope. Jesus is intolerant, didn't kiss the Pharisees as far as I know, did he? Didn't put his arms around the neck of the high priest. I preached at the great Carrizal convention for missionaries in Japan a few years ago. And afterwards, maybe two years after, I saw a man's name mentioned and I said to Martha Sweety, the director of that great conference is in town, let's go see him. So we went along. And after the meeting I said to him, well how are you going? And he said, fine. I said, where were you yesterday? He said, well these marvelous days, I was in Japan. Did you have a good trip? Yeah, yeah, I wasn't feeling too good. Oh, what upset you, body, stomach, time lack? No, no, no, no. I thought, hmm, Japan things are a bit cheaper, I'll get a haircut. So he said, I got my haircut and the man said, you know, snipping away, are you a Yankee? No, yeah, no, I'm not really Yankee, I'm American. Oh, oh, oh, I see, I see. Businessman? No. Tourist? No. Well what are you? I'm a missionary. Oh good, he said, I am a missionary too. Oh, I thought you were a barber. Oh yeah, I'm a barber from eight in the morning till five. Then I go home for supper and I bathe. And then at seven o'clock I go out and I have a little attachment and I have some material and I have some phonograph records and I go from house to house. You know this new philosophy they have, Sagagaki, which is a combination of religion and politics. And I go from door to door and I go in the house and I sit down there and I play my records and I give them instruction and I move on and I move on and I move on from seven at night until two in the morning. Oh, how many nights a week? Seven. You don't go to bed till two in the morning. I didn't say that. You said that you were out from seven at night till two in the morning. I don't go to bed there. I go home and for two hours I go in a little shrine and I kneel down and I renew my strength. It sounds a bit like Isaiah 41, they that wait upon the Lord. And I spend two o'clock till four o'clock every morning. And the said, I began to feel pretty mad about this. Here's a heathen propagating a devilish doctrine and he starts at seven o'clock at night till two in the morning then he needs two hours to recover and he gets into bed at four and he's out of bed by seven and he's at business by eight and I said, well how long have you done this? He said, for seven years. Does that make you feel bad or sad or mad or glad or what? You don't have a deacon in your church as fiery as that do you? Some of you pastors can't remember the last night you stayed out of bed. You know I'm convinced of this, if the church has anything she better say it right now because nobody else is saying anything. If she's got anything she better stand up, speak up or shut up. And when you've tried to find fault with this, that and the other and where the weakness is, the whole problem in the church of the living God tonight as well as the world is the problem of sin. The one thing that God desires of his people is that they be pure in heart, blessed are the pure in heart, not that they shall see God, they do see God, they see him now. They see him in his majesty, they see him working. God made his ways known unto Israel, his way, his acts known unto Israel and his ways unto Moses. All right there are many threes in this chapter I've already quoted, let's say there are three prayers in it. The first prayer is the prayer of a sinner. I don't like David's sin, I'm sure you don't, adultery and murder, but I like his confession. He begins in this first verse by saying what, have mercy upon me. That's a great, great word, mercy isn't it. Oh go to Scotland and hear them sing the 23rd time, go to Wales and hear them sing Cumbramba and stay there until they sing the deep, deep love of Jesus. And then when you're just about saturated, wait until they sing another beautiful hymn. Great God of wonders, all thy ways display thy attributes divine, but countless acts of pardoning grace above all other wonders shine. Who is a pardoning God like thee? Oh who has grace so rich and free? I said last night, wouldn't it be awesome to have been that wonderful man John Baptist when he was the only man in the world with the truth of God? Well I want to put it on you tonight, you know it's equally as responsible that you're a Christian with the only true message of salvation in the whole world. Every other thing's a fake. There is none other name given on the heaven whereby men can be saved. If you say, you know, I'm looking for Jesus coming, he may come tonight. You forget it, he won't come tonight. Why won't he? Because the gospel must first be preached to all nations, and we're not even pushing the gospel. There are more heathen people at this given point of time tonight than in all the periods of history, and this generation of Christians is, IS, is responsible for this generation of heathens. David here says, have mercy upon me, oh God. Oh we think of sin, we classify it so many ways, but let me just leap over and say this. Do you remember that the Apostle Paul used this very word? No, no, no, no, he wasn't an adulterer, he was a man of impeccable morality. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, of the seed of Abraham, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He belonged to the greatest holy club in the world, and they guarded it day and night that nobody unclean would get in. And with all that pedigree, yet he writes one day to a young friend and he says, but God who is rich in mercy, for maybe God needs more grace with Pharisees than he does with adulterers and unclean people. They're going to get there on their own merits, on their own righteousness, on their own goodness. As we were singing tonight, I was thinking of one night I, one afternoon I preached at a Catholic convention in London, England, in a church called Orange Grove. It's a beautiful old Gothic church with stained glass windows, the pulpits all magnificently carved. And I got hold of that pulpit like this, and I rubbed my feet there, and I gripped there and said to myself, you know, this is, this is nice to stand here. Because the pastor of the church was a man by the name of Toplady, many years back. And he wrote that lovely hymn, Rock of Ages, Cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. And he had such a conception of sin, because this is what sin does. You either get rid of it, or it gets rid of you. And when he saw what it was, he says, Thou lie to that fountain, fly, wash me, Savior, or I die. Now if you die with sin in your heart, you won't go to a third-class heaven, because there isn't one. You'll go right back to hell itself. You don't hear much hellfire preaching over your pretty Sunday morning groups, do you? Those pretty boys that want your money, and have nice little girls swinging their hips, and clapping their hands, and saying to a world that's doomed and damned, something good is going to happen to you. The biggest lie ever told, but they tell it every week. We're heading for judgment. We've had more light than any people in history. Oh yes sir, I spent two years in the subculture of New York with David Wilkinson, amongst prostitutes, and jailbirds, and yuck. Thought that I had sex relation with animals, every devilish thing. But I'll tell you one thing, you never had to get them to, you never had to prove to them they were sinners. And I remember going in the chapel one morning, usually I just had the privilege of talking to the staff twice a week, and they said, Would you take the chapel this morning? And I went in, and this side of the room was filled with girls, and this side with young men. Some of those girls were the prettiest girls you'll find in New York, and the most expensive prostitutes. There's a little Puerto Rican fellow there. I remember he stood up that morning, his face radiant, and you know, he talked very, very quickly, and he said, Well praise the Lord, here we are this morning, Brother Radian is going to talk to us, isn't it wonderful to be here, and let's stand up and sing our song. What do you think they sang? Oh my, they sang, they sang, they sang, better than any cry you ever heard in your life. You know they sang, and they sang with tears running down their faces, and they sang it with their hands up. They sang, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. And you know what, every one of them believed it. I was lost, now I'm found, I was blind, now I see. We sang the last stanza. Man, we've been there ten thousand years. A little fellow said, Mr. Rennie, could we sing another stanza? I said, Go ahead, sing all you like. And you know, I looked round, and those girls' blouses were all soaked with tears. And those boys who told me they used to pull out the switchblades and cut a man's belly open if he wouldn't give them his pocketbook. And they'd raped women, and they'd done every devilish thing, and there they were standing with tears running down their faces, and I'll never forget it as long as I live. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. You see, the man that wrote it used to raid the coast of Africa and steal slaves. And then he got so bad they made him a slave. And when he'd been to hell and back, Jesus rescued him. And the trouble with that, some of us, we've been so good all our lives, that after all, we should have made heaven even without redemption. I mean, after all, when your uncle's been a deacon, and your grandmother bought the stained glass window in the church, what much, you can't do much more, can you? Amazing Grace. Oh, then I went to a church, and it wasn't about it. Sunday morning, a few months after, there's a little doll down here, she was very beautiful. The Avon lady had worked on her about three days before she came to church. She'd as much paint on her as the Queen Mary may be, and boy, I don't know whether she'd hair or a wig or what, but one of the hairs kept straying, and she was singing, Amazing Grace, how, how, that saved a wretch like me, I once. Well, she, she was three streets behind by the time we'd finished the hymn, she hadn't got through the second verse hardly. And I felt, saying, you dumb doll, what are you singing? You're, you're not a wretch. If I told you you're a wretch, you'd get mad. If your husband told you, you'd get a divorce, I suppose. But you're not a wretch. You're singing something that doesn't mean a thing to you. The Banner of Truth book group have, have recently published a, or republished a book by Brownlow North. He was a grandson of Lord North, and he went to the devil, and eventually ended up in the gutter in Paris. He got so bad, even wicked women didn't want him, and wicked men left him. And one night he went down to the River Seine there, and he stood on the edge of it, and he said, there's, this is the only way out, there's no other way, here I go. Years afterwards, in Scotland, there was a banner across Main Street, come and hear Brownlow North, Brownlow North. The man went in the meeting, he scribbled a note and said, would you pass this to Brownlow North quickly, please? And Brownlow North was just going to come on the pulpit when they handed him a note, and it said, hey Brownlow, this is your old buddy, so and so. You stand up there tonight, and I'll stand up and expose your immorality, your perversion, your lying, your depravity. Boy, will I have a time! And the man with him said he went as pale as death, and he stood for a minute. Are you all right, sir? Yeah, I'm all right. He went up in the pulpit, and he said, somewhere in this great crowd, there's a friend of mine just sent me a note. He's going to tell you about my life story. Would you kindly stand up? I don't know where you are, I haven't seen you for years. Stand up, stand up, tell them, will you tell them? The fellow said, standing up, he was shrinking down, down, down, down like this, you know, he didn't, he didn't want to get up at all, he didn't want to say anything. And Brownlow North says, let me tell you what he says. He says, I was with the vilest women in, in Paris, I went with the most rotten of the prostitutes, I drank, I spent money, I cheated, I lied, I stole, I did everything. He's right, he's right. But I want to tell you something else, that when that man pulled out on me, and when I had to sleep under the arches, and when I had no food or anything else, and when I stood one night, a black midnight, I stood there on the edge of the river, just going to jump in there, and he said, all right, all right, I guess it's true, there must be a hell, and if any man on earth deserves it, I do. Here I am with all my sin, and I just leaned forward, and he said, I did. In loving kindness Jesus came, my soul in mercy to reclaim, and from the depths of sin and shame in love he lifted me. From sinking sands he lifted me, with tender hands he lifted me, from shades of night to planes of light. Yes, he said, I had all the sin he mentioned, and a lot he didn't know anything about, but I came to Jesus. You know, we sing in all our conferences, meetings rather, Billy Graham popularized it a great deal, that lovely old hymn, Just As I Am, without one plea. But mostly we sing the first stanza, I like the other stanza that says, Just as I am and waiting not, to rid my soul of one dark blot, to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot, O Lamb of God I come. And brother, if you're going to the hell holes of America, and there are plenty of them, if you're going to the savages in South America, and God knows how many they are, nobody else does. When I go around the world, and I remember in Australia not a while ago, I took a plane one night, in the dark obviously, and as we came up from that magnificent city of Sydney, we flew inland, we were going up to Port Darwin. My son Paul, who's a missionary now, was sitting with me, and I said, Paul, you see all those lights on the ground, those fires, uh-huh, you know what they are? He said, yes daddy, I know what they are. You see, those people don't even wear a g-string. Those people don't even have houses. Those people are the lowest known in the world. They don't have cooking utensils. I've been to tribes, I've been to places where there were cannibals, but they have some utensils, but those people in the northern parts of Australia don't. And the thing that always burned me up was this, that I could go to a hotel in the city, and it's like a New York hotel. It's got hot and cold water, lovely bathroom, TV, all the modern conveniences, and you take a jet plane for an hour and a half, and instead of being 1976, I know Domini, it's 1976 BC. I went into a home in Papua New Guinea. The door was about 30 inches high, 30 inches wide, so I had to crawl on my hands and knees. Very nice, they got wall-to-wall dirt. They got big beautiful women naked. And there's a dog there with six pups, and one of them can't get to feed, and so she picks it up and puts it on her breast. She lays the baby down, puts it on her breast, and she suckles the dog. And she puts it on the floor when it's quiet, and picks the baby up and feeds it. You go in the next place, there's a woman feeding a pig. They feed everything. The children come in and grab the mother's breast. They feed on the mother till they're about six or seven years of age. Some ignoramus with a PhD tells you, leave the heathen alone, they're happy. I'll tell you what, they're about as happy as they are in hell. They're terrified of the dark. They wail and they gnash their teeth and they scream when they bury people. They've no hope. Oh here in America or England, the so-called civilization, we've got drugged. Creature comforts have anesthetized us. The gospel, we've become choosy about it. We spend our days arguing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, theologically, and the world goes to hell fire. See that's why, as the pastor was saying tonight, it'll cost you all you have if you're mean. After all, it cost Jesus all he had, didn't it? The exceeding sinfulness of sin needs to come back. I know some of the problems the pastor was talking about. I have fellows call me all over the nation. I have people come to my home hundreds and hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands, to talk about problems. And suddenly they've discovered now their sons and daughters have got to 14 and 15 years of age and they didn't correct them. And the girl comes home to tell you that last night she met a nice guy and she experimented in sex. Well I may as well tell you, last week I smoked a little marijuana. And she gradually breaks down and he says, you know, I think my daughter's in serious condition, serious condition. If you want it in plain theology, she's damned. Have you stayed out of bed? Have you wept for her? Have you looked in her eyes and said, listen darling, I'm going to fast and weep and pray and I'll die on the spot rather than see you perish? Or did you send a request for prayer to the church and write a little note, pastor, pray for my daughter, she's coming in late. As Dave Wilkerson used to say, most of you daddies helped your daughter. The first bedroom she was ever in was the backseat of that automobile you loaned her, when she got mad that she couldn't have it like other girls. Man, I've listened to stories in my office in New York that turn my hair nearly blue. I realize it again, as the pastor said, we're living in the most dangerous situation. Our threat is not communism. Our threat is not otherism. No sirree, our threat, our problem, as I said, that was it last night, that God's problem in America is not communism or otherism, God's problem in America is dead fundamentalism. We know the phrases, we know the terms. But sin breaks the heart of God and sin breaks the heart of everybody that indulges in it. And David thought he could get away with it, but it's as a good book says, it's sweet to the taste but it makes your belly bitter. He prayed with fire and now he finds that though he got rid of the man and the baby was his and so forth and so now he's stayed, now he's guilty, now here he feels what a leper he is. There's nowhere to turn and so he comes to a merciful God. I think the second time Billy Graham came to England, they sang that big Methodist hymn, I don't know, you perhaps don't have it in your book and can it be that I should gain an interest in it. And they sang it in the Victoria Station and it was reported all over England. Hundreds of people greeted Billy Graham and can it be that I should gain, and somebody, some old soul there that wasn't there just for the feeling and the trimming, he struck up the second stanza. Reminds me of a big fat man that was in our church. It's an important man, he gathered the garbage. And man he'd been a fighter, drunkard, he'd done every devilish thing he could do and Jesus saved him. And you know what, they never muzzled him after that. The respectable ladies didn't like him because, you know, I knew when he was gonna blow his top. Because he sat across the aisle from us and I could hear him go hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. And I thought, all right, all right, hold it, hold it in his way. Hallelujah! Oh, on the lips goes. And when the preacher, a visiting preacher, our preacher cut the hymn out, he was pretty slick and smart. But a visiting preacher would say, before I give the message, we shall sing Charles Wesley's lovely hymn and can it be that I should gain an interest. We'll omit verse three. I thought, will you? Well, you see if you will. So they sang verses one and two and four and they sat down and the big fat man who always rested his belly on the pew in front, it was too big to hold up anyhow. And he put his hand up and the tears rolled down his face and he'd sing, oh with a voice like a bullfrog. But I'll tell you what, I get heaven got excited about it. Do you know why? He'd strike up like this, long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night, thine eye diffused a quickening ray. I woke, the dungeon frayed with light, my chains fell off, my heart was free. I was a little guy, I didn't understand it. But I knew when they said don't omit verse three, I thought, you wait till that boy gets cracking. And the girls in the crowd, I thought, you, you stinkers, you've never been to hell like. God rescued him, he was just about in the last stages any man could be, and he was so full of gratitude. He didn't care if he sang ten degrees off the center. But I'll tell you what, he changed the atmosphere of that church every time he stood. You see, you were never far down in the pit, were you? No, I've had a good upbringing. Well I'll tell you what, if you don't get saved you'll end up in the pit anyhow. We need a lot of guitars, and I'm not against music, but I'll tell you what, once you've tasted the mercy of God, and something happens deep down there, whether it's in the pit of your belly or in your heart or where it is, and you see what redemption really is, and you say he loved me, because Paul believed that God so loved the world. And he wrote that Christ loved the church, but he said, greater than loving the world and greater than loving the church, he loved me and gave himself for me. The prayer of a sinner. There's joy in the presence of the angels of God, when? When we have a parade? No. When 25,000 or 50,000 people gather for a gospel convent? No. When everybody meets at a Bill Gotham meeting? I don't think so. I think the Lord likes it, but I don't believe it makes heaven excited. I'll tell you when heaven gets excited. When a man staggers up to the cross. I like the hymns about the cross. There was an old American preacher 50 years back who said he'd never had one meeting without, that there was a hymn about the blood in it. I never leave the blood out of any service. And if some old drunken reprobate came down this aisle tonight and found mercy, there'd be more excitement in heaven than if you published ten new books on the work of Jesus Christ. When I was at Teen Challenge, I used to come over the bridge from Brooklyn onto Canal Street, and I always looked sideways if I had time before the light changed, and there was a sign, Water Street. Oh, I wish they hadn't changed it. It was that place where a man walked in one night on his rubber legs, you know, and he staggered in and they said, do you want to be saved? And he said, yeah, I want anything you got. He didn't want saved. I think he thought they meant shame. He was scruffy and dirty and he knelt down and somebody said, say the sinner's prayer, God be merciful. He said, are you saved now? We'll baptize you Wednesday night. This is true. Do you know how many times they baptized him? Nineteen. He holds a record except for Mormons. He got saved and backslid and re-baptized. And one night he went to the front and somebody said, John, pray with the old man. Forget it. Prayed with him three times. You pray with him. He said, I prayed with him twice. Tell Jack Bear to pray with him. Jack, go pray with that old Redford Bench. Man, I prayed with him three or four times. One man went up to the side of him and he said, listen, I want to tell you something. I can't explain it to you, but it goes something like this. Jesus says, Jesus said, if you come to him, he will no wise cast you out. If he doesn't cast you out, what does he do? He said, he takes me in. Oh, I see, he takes me in. He takes me in, he said. He got in that night. Some years after there was a funeral. It looked as though they were burying the mayor of the city. They were burying that old drunk, Jerry McCauley. And his casket was there, it wasn't worth much, and his eyes were sunken, his teeth, he was old. And the place was jammed up. And they opened the door and a bunch of rough-looking women came in. Every one of them had a white carnation in. Every one of them had a jail sentence or had been a prostitute, and every one of them had been led by the old corpse lying there. And after they'd bent over and kissed that old man till his eyes were just full of water, their tears had flown into the socket. They opened another door and a hundred men came, all wearing a red carnation, symbolic of the blood that redeemed them. And they went and they, they touched him, and some of the old rascals even knelt there and they kissed him. And they stood round and they said something like that, he loved us, he loved us. You know why I love them? Because he'd been one of them. Because he'd been one. Some of you people say, you know, my, if I'd been saved earlier, I'll tell you what I'd have done, I'd have been on the mission field. All right, start a mission field, fill the back seat of your car up every Sunday for the next year, and show God you mean business. Much easier to give a dollar for gas for the church to run buses, isn't it? Then you'll get some people that might leave fleas in your car. You can't, you can't impress God with words, he's smarter than that. He knows you too well anyhow. You see, we'd all like to be Billy Graham's and address the crowd. We'd all like to be heroes on a mission field, somebody write a book about it. Get down to business, get down to the hellhole. My daddy was rescued out of sin. A Saturday night he put old clothes on, his elbows sticking out, and a beaten up cap, and he stood outside of the taverns. And when a guy came up on his rubber legs, my daddy put his arm in his, and he took him to the basement of our church. And they gave him hot coffee, and got them sobered up, and led them to Jesus. And Sunday he'd say, Lucy to my mother, she's a lovely lady, Lucy, I love Lucy. And he'd say, Lucy, I'll see you in church. Where's daddy going? Oh, oh daddy, daddy last night, he didn't come in. Did you hear him come in at one o'clock this morning? He, he, he, he was able to take a man he found outside of a tavern, a man who'd, well then he'd been a naughty man, a bad man, he'd been to jail, he'd been a wicked man. And daddy took him home, and, and do you know, the man didn't even have a bed to lay on, he had some rags in the corner. And I'd see that man come to church, and my old dad with one or two others would buy him a suit and a shirt, and the next week he'd come all cleaned up, and before long we'd a whole string of people like that in church. You know, I kind of think my dad was a missionary. I think he spelled out his love, not, not in a communion service, or the whole realm of nature mind. Forget it, you won't even give him a prayer meeting. You won't give him a night out of bed. Who are you fooling? You may fool your pastor, you may fool yourself, you won't fool God. There is no other way for America to be saved unless we have a Holy Ghost revival that makes men hate sin, and loathe sin, and turn from sin, and repent of sin. All right, the second prayer, he prayed the prayer of a sinner there, he prayed the prayer of a backslider. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. Hmm? Yeah, we sing Culper's hymn, Amazing Grace. Do you remember some of the other hymns he wrote? Where is the blessedness I knew when first I sought the Lord? Where is the soul-refreshing dew of Jesus and his word? And he thinks of those days, when, when, when, like you used to have, days when this, this book was sweeter than the honey in the honeycomb, and now you have a bother, you hardly ever bother with it. Hmm? Days when prayer was so real that you hardly knew whether you were in the body or out of the body. Now he doesn't faze you much. You pray at night, Lord bless me and the kids, amen, and get into bed. Do you know what he says? Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, that the bones which thou hast broken. Did you ever break a bone? I jumped out of a burning hotel, it was higher than this, and I jumped on the sidewalk. I didn't want to, I had to. I brought my back in three places, my leg was hanging in three places, my feet were broken, and I was lying in the street at 3 o'clock in the morning. That's not a good example for a preacher, but anyhow, there I was. And a man came around the corner, he says, what are you doing here? I almost said, playing tennis, can't you see? But anyhow, here I was, crippled, and he said, let me put you on the side, because something might come around the corner and you'll get hurt. I said, listen, I'm hurt enough. Don't touch me. Do you know what he did? He put his hand under my back, and he put his hand under my broken legs, and he lifted me up. I actually bit a piece out of my lip there. I'd always been taught you should be a British bulldog and not squeal, you know. I didn't want to let the side down, so I bit a piece out of it. But you know, when he lifted me up and those bones touched together, it was like two live electric cords that sparked, and agony went through my body. And he laid me down in the snow. And do you know what? David says, when you're out of relationship with God, it's like a broken bone. The bones which thou hast broken, he hadn't a broken bone in his body, the broken relationship with God. The song had gone out of his heart, the joy had gone out of his spirit, and you can give all you like to missions, and you can do all the things you like. It will never bring the joy back until you repent and ask God to bring the glory back into your life. It happened so easy. I was preaching at a church in Ohio a few years ago. A beautiful girl came to the altar with a bunch of other people. She had long braids, and I stayed at the altar more than an hour, praying with men. And I was going home, and I, to cross to the hotel, I got with my arm in the sleeve of my coat, and was getting, and somebody said, Brother Ranger, would you take a little time with this girl? And I went to the front, and I said, Hi, how are you? And she was sobbing. I said, You've been crying an hour, quit. There's a time to weep, and a time not to weep. Let's get to business. What's your trouble? I'm a bag slider. Oh, well, that's great. You know the problem. Most people don't even know that. You're a bag slider. Well, I can tell you the way back. I'll tell you what God says. He'll heal your back slidings, and He'll love you freely, and so forth and so on. Now, are you prepared to tell God about it? She said, Yes. You see, Mr. Rameau, I like to swim. And that big shop next door had some swimsuits, and I saw one on a model. You know the old story. He saw it, and he looked at it, and coveted it. I went in another day, and it was there. I went another day, it wasn't there. It was on the edge of the counter, and there's nobody looking, and I slipped it under my coat and walked out. I told my mother, I found it in the street. And she said, In the middle of the meeting tonight, your voice dimmed away, and I heard a voice saying, Swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit. I must have said, Swimsuit a thousand times. I never mentioned swimsuit. But when he is coming and convinced, and the only way to get to that girl was to say, Swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit, swimsuit. She just wished I'd shut up, she said, because that's common, everybody does, but apart from that. Swimsuit, swimsuit. I said, Okay, are you prepared to go back to the shop and tell them what you've done, bring forth fruit meat for repentance? I don't have enough money. Well, I'll give you some of mine. I'll get the pastor to give you a little. Hoped he would, but anyhow I said that. Now I said, Let's, and by the way, you said you told your mother you stole it. You'll tell your mother that you, Oh, I couldn't tell my mother. I said, Oh, good night. Off I went. Mr. Abraham, don't leave me. Why not? I want God to forgive me. Tell your mother what you've done. All right. Is your mother here? Yes, she's right at the back of the church, the very stylish lady with a big cartwheel hat. So I said to one of the stewards, Friend, get the lady with the cartwheel hat. Bring her down here, will you? And she came down, you know. My daughter here? Well, I think so. Oh, she's the finest girl in the church. She sings in the choir. She collected more permissions last year. She teaches this. I said, Lady, listen, your daughter's a thief. Oh, what? My daughter's no thief. I said, Well, she said she is. And the girl said, Mother, I never found that swimsuit. I stole it. You stole it. I said, Mother, you've done wrong as well as her. Listen, you get down here at the side of your daughter, at the other side, and I'm here and we're going to pray and get this girl straightened out. And the mother got down like this, you know, as though she cracked before she got there. And you know what God did? As sure as God is God, as soon as she said, I'm sorry and I'll never do it anymore, and I apologize for deceit and hypocrisy, and suddenly the bells broke in her heart. And she jumped up, and she ran down the aisle leaping, and she said, Pastor, Pastor, I've been a hypocrite. I've cheated on you. Do you know what? I stole something years ago, and Jesus forgave me of that, and my joy has come back. I feel marvelous. Started putting my coat on, and the fellow said, There's a lady at the altar. Yeah, there is, plus a cartwheel hat. I said, Say, could I help you? Maybe you could. But she trembled. She wasn't there when her daughter told me what happened. She said, In the middle of the meeting tonight, the Holy Spirit said, Sewing machine, sewing machine, sewing machine, sewing machine, sewing machine, sewing machine. He must have said it a thousand times. Oh, what happened? She said, Did you notice my daughter said that she cheated on me for 15 months? I, yeah, I remember that. I've been cheating on my mother who's at home, 80 years of age. I've been cheating on her for 15 years about a sewing machine. I told a lie about it. You better watch some of you parents. What's the trouble with your children? It's something you sewed in them, and you're going to reap it through them. Do you know why? Because this girl cheated, another had cheated, and another reaped what she'd sown. What did David do? He committed adultery. What happened? One of his sons took his daughter, one of the sons took his sister, which was David's daughter of course, and committed adultery or fornication. David came in one night, What's that? A body, turn it over. It's my son who killed him. And the other son says, Oh, he killed him because he fouled my sister's life up. What did he do? He sold murder. And in a scientific day like this, with all the wizardry you have across the canal there, men still do not gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. What you sow, you reap. You see, this country and my country in the last five years have been rejecting Christ more than ever. Do you know what God says? That when you reject Christ, he'll send you Antichrist. You know there are 2,000 gurus in America at this moment, dirty, lousy people that have come from India and elsewhere, one of the dirtiest countries I've ever been in. They won't have Christ, they have Antichrist. They've asked for a room in the Pentagon for transcendental meditation, which is the devil's take after of being still and know that I'm God. He fakes everything that comes up. If the church goes quiet about the Holy Spirit, you have a revival of spiritism. If the church goes quiet on regeneration, you have a revival of reincarnation. If the church goes quiet on divine healing, you have a revival of the Christian side. Every time the church goes quiet on the thing, the devil's big enough to get in a vacuum and reap a harvest. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. Let me say one thing about this and hurry and finish. Do you remember that old song that says, oh, we don't sing it now, we're too stylish, but they used to sing, when I was a boy, rescue the perishing and care for the dying and snatch them in pity. And there's a part of that hymn that says, down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, feelings lie buried that grace can restore. Touched by a loving hand, wakened by kindness, chords that were broken will vibrate once more. And some of you have tried to make up the deficiency by buying nicer furniture and a better system to play your records and a few other things. And deep in your heart, there's a broken chord. There's a relationship that's been severed by your sin, by your laziness, by your unbelief. You managed to save your life and you lost it. You managed to keep up your church attendance and you lost your passion for Jesus himself. You managed to stash something in the bank that made you feel rich and you're a pauper in the sight of God tonight. The first prayer, he prayed the prayer of a sinner. The second prayer, restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. The third, he touches the high peak of the whole psalm. But after all, this is the answer to all the problem. He says, creating me a clean heart, O God. All for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free, a heart that always feels the blood so freely shed for me. A heart in every thought renewed and full of love divine, perfect and right and pure and good, a copy, Lord, of thine. Thy nature gracious, Lord, impart. Come quickly from above. Write thy new name upon my heart, thy new best name of love. And it was Fulks Jackson, the Methodist, that taught us to sing, I want, dear Lord, a heart that's true and clean. A sunlit heart with not a cloud between. A heart like thine, a heart divine. Hmm? Is that your desire? You know, I'm convinced of this, we do not preach salvation in the day in which we live. We preach forgiveness. Do you want to be forgiven? Shed a few tears? Get your name in the book of life? Get your name on the waiting list for a crown? You get a ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb? Rule over five cities? And a few other benefits. It's my conviction, dear pastor, that we live in a day of spiritual ignorance. Do you know what would do good if, and I'm not, I'll suggest it, you don't have to do it. But you know, if you ask somebody, are you saved? You say yes. If you say to them, are you regenerated? They say, well, I, let me check with the pastor. Are you adopted? Are you reconciled? Are you forgiven? Are you pardoned? Are you justified? They're all areas, they're all spokes in the same wheel, but they all mean something different. Redemption is a magnificent thing. George Whitfield said, you may think me superstitious, but when I go to Oxford, I find the very crack in the floor and I stand on it, where, where Charles Wesley handed me a little book that's been republished in America, was written here. The life of God in the soul of man. Let me tell you this, listen, with all the power I have, Jesus did not come into the world to make bad men good. He came into the world to make dead men live. Not to make bad men good, to make dead men live. Christianity is the only religion in the world, whether you're the thousand or two thousand, it is the only religion in the world where a man's God comes and lives inside of him. You can give up your lousy smoking and rotten women and drinking and not be regenerate. You see, we're awfully easy on the sin problem. You see, you're one of God's little children and, and if you commit adultery, it doesn't matter too, too much, but if your neighbor does, he'll go to hell fire because he didn't have to be a member of a church and say he was saved. We need to change our tone about sin. You read one John and see what John says about it. He says that he, the man that is born of God, doth, M-O-T, he doth not commit sin. And I remember when Nara Brown said to me, been talking with a woman, and she said, my favorite scripture is when we sin, we have an advocate. He said, would, would you find it for me? And she said, it's in John. Oh, I see. Well, could you find it for me? Yeah, it's in the first epistle of John. Read it. If we sin, we have what? Oh, I thought it said when we sin. No, no, it doesn't say when we sin. It says if we sin. Sinning is not normal in the Christian life. It's abnormal. It's abnormal. You see, Jesus didn't say if you fast, he said when you fast. But the scripture here doesn't say if we, when we sin, it says if, if by some reason you, you slip. What's the difference between a man committing an adultery if he's a Christian, or stealing if he's a Christian, or lying if he's a to the sin and adultery and lying of a man in the street. There is no difference. There is a difference. Not in the deed, not how diabolical it is. The difference is this, that when a Christian does it, when he's being caught in temptation and does it, he flees to Christ for mercy. He goes with a broken heart. You see, the thing that got to the heart of God with David was this. He says, I've got a broken and a contrite heart. Did you ever have a broken heart? It's worse than a broken limb. It's worse than a broken business deal. It's worse than a broken friendship, a broken heart. My sin, my sin, my sin put him on the tree. And I hate it. I loathe it. He says, created me a clean heart. He says, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. You know that every, every flake of snow has one little black spot of dirt in it. And this man must have been a scientist. He says, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness of the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. The sacrifices of God are what? Oh, I'll tell you, I'm awfully glad that God doesn't let you rich folk get in any better more than the lousy man that's been to hell and back through the gutter. You may have never said a bad word in your life, you may be the best moral people and that's very nice. But I want to tell you something, it doesn't merit anything when it comes to salvation. You've got to come with a broken and a contrite heart. And David doesn't say, well after all I'm a king, I believe in, you know, the divine right of kings. He comes crawling and he says, God in heaven I've messed it up. I've broken lives, I've hurt my nation, but most of all I've hurt you and my heart is broken over this sin. And a broken and a contrite heart. Thou desirest not sacrifice. He would have filled the whole valley with sacrifices, but all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could not give one guilty conscience, peace or wash away one's stain. But Christ the heavenly Lamb takes all our sins away. A sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they. Is it amazing that if you sin for 60 years and you've broken every law in the Decalogue and committed every sin a man could commit, that one drop of the precious blood of Jesus Christ will purge you whiter than snow. You may have a record as foul as any man that ever lived, but such is the gospel of redeeming grace. That if you come with humility and you come with brokenness and contrition, you can be cleansed. And then he says, give me thy Holy Spirit. Isn't that lovely? You know a lot of us have been wanting the Holy Spirit without God cleaning the mess up. There's a little cancer down in one area, a grudge you had for years. And you thought like you could kind of rub it over and then the Holy Ghost would come in because you said you were sorry. Well I'm telling you he won't. You may have got a lift in a meeting and two days after you were flat on your face or on your back, you were stumped. And if you couldn't get to a meeting every night, you can't live in victory, well you'd never make it in a concentration camp. David says, give me thy Holy Spirit. This is what you can do with the Holy Spirit. You can obey him, you can disobey him, you can resist the Spirit, hmm, you can grieve the Spirit, you can quench the Spirit. Do you think I enjoy preaching? Sure I do in one sense because I feel I'm an ambassador for Christ. But I didn't sleep much last night or the night before. I lay awake for hours thinking about some of you that are holding on to something that's worth about as much as you could find in a diner store. No your problem isn't adultery, your problem is you're too proud to admit that you're proud. Too proud to admit you've a grudge. You cannot be a Christian and have a grudge. You can be a backslider and have a grudge. Thou desirest truth, he says, in the inward parts. I like that, I like that. Right deep, deep, deep down in the recesses of your nature the Holy Ghost can bear witness that you're not covering anything up, you're not hiding anything, you've no secret grudges, you've no laziness, you've no unwillingness, you've no rebelliousness against God. I say respectfully the pastor led you into a trap tonight. He led you into a trap. He asked you to stand up tonight if you're willing to let God have your life or even your wife or your bank account. If you're willing to let him put a fast of ten days on you. If you're willing to let him break up and shatter the plans of your life. If you're willing to lose everything, and I didn't open my eyes but I understand a lot stood up, maybe a hundred or more. Hmm? Have you got what it takes to see it through? The Holy Spirit of God, not a person. The Holy Spirit that comes and touches that thing in you, that conscience, that thing you're hiding. That sin you commit. I preached one night, a young man came to me, he said, Raven, do you mean what you said tonight? I said, I certainly do. That God has a record of my life, he certainly has. That I have to repent of all sin, yes, I have to put things right as far as you can. Well he said, I'm going to tell you something, I'm going to be quite honest with you. When I was in the army a number of years, I went over to France and England and he said, I'll tell you this, that I'm possibly the father of 30 children. Every woman I went with, he said, I spent the night with them and he said, felt, you know, I hired a woman like you hire a car. And if anything went wrong, well I'd paid her 30 bucks or something. And he said, maybe there are little children in France and England that call me daddy that I'll never see. What do I do about it? Nothing you can do about it, except repent in misery and ashes and confess it before God and flee to him. But you see Jesus says, oh you put a card on that man, say the dirty rotten leper. But Jesus says, I want to tell you something, if you look on a woman to lust. And listen sister, if you run about in your bikini and make a man lust, God Almighty will punish you when you get up there too. I preached at the Baptist Convention in California two years ago, and there's a notice in the newspaper, across the newspaper about that size, and it showed a sign. And it said on this certain beach, I won't tell you the name of it, but it said on the beach, notice this, and there's a big NO in the middle of the sign. And it said bathing's NOT, bathing suits not compulsory beyond this point. And a thousand people meet Sunday morning stark naked and take little children, boys and girls. And hundreds of men are on the bank there with cameras watching all these nude folk fool around. And the same thing happened in New England this past year. Man alive way far beyond Sodom and Gomorrah, so they never had any Bibles. Sodom didn't have a preacher, Sodom didn't have a church, Sodom didn't have a Bible, Sodom had nobody to pray, but it perished. How long do you think God's gonna put up with our sin as a nation? David says, I have a broken heart. David says, now clean me. And when you clean me, will you put something in? Do you know what Jesus says? If you have a room full of evil spirits and you chase them all out, and some bigger spirit doesn't go in, other spirits will go in worse than the ones that quit. But if the Holy Spirit of God comes, the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, and yet somehow he'll come in your personality. I'll tell you what, he won't play second string. If he comes in, he's gonna be boss. If he comes in, he's gonna take your appetite for food away sometimes. He's gonna take your appetite for your golf or something. He's gonna take your appetite maybe even for the Word itself, because you can lean on the Bible sometimes when you should be doing something else. What are you gonna do? Obey the Spirit? Grieve the Spirit? Resist the Spirit? Quench the Spirit? Which? I'm through with this thing. The Holy Spirit is likened to a dove. A dove is a unique bird. As I said the other night, it has two wings and it has nine feathers on each wing. Nine feathers for the fruits of the Spirit and nine for the gifts of the Spirit. A dove has no gallbladder, no bitterness. The dove only marries once in its life, and if its mate dies, it doesn't take a second partner. The dove is very easily offended. You know what Noah did when the waters were going down? I wish he'd have found another bird, but he took a raven. I don't like that. Took a raven and let it out of the window. Oh boy, he said, this is great. The Millennium's begun. More food here than I can eat in 10,000 years. And he swooped down and he took a bit of a carcass of an elephant. He took a carcass out of a piece of something else, and he took something else, and they had, oh, he had a great time. He had a great time. And he stayed out, because a raven is a carnivorous bird. It eats flesh. It won't steal out of your garden. It won't steal seed. It won't eat your plants. It loves flesh. It likes dead flesh. You see those big crows, they're part of the raven family, eating all the dirt on the road when folk run over old cats and dogs. That raven stayed out, had a great time. So a day or two after, he put a dove out, and the dove went out, and he was just going to settle down. Oh, that's a carcass. The raven will eat anything. The dove will not eat flesh. The dove will not touch blood. The dove will not touch anything dead. And he's going to sweep. No, that's the body of an elephant. I'll sweep. No, that's the body of a man. I knew what he did. He got tired and he went back, and so Noah opened the window and took him in. He wouldn't settle on flesh. He still won't. He won't settle on your flesh, your carnality, your pride, your envy, your jealousy, your unclean thinking. No sir, he won't. The last thing, a friend of mine, a pastor in Manchester, England. The houses there are all connected like they are up in New England, and on the roofs, they build little houses for the birds. And this man had some beautiful doves, and a friend went along one day, and he said, got any new doves? Yeah, I just got a beautiful. Oh, you must be. Want to see? Yeah. All right, wait a minute. He reached down, he got some grain, and he whistled, and the dove came. And it settled on his hand, and it was just going to peck the grain, and he shut his hand like that, and the dove went back on the roof. Oh, you shouldn't do that. Ah, come back again. It's a real pet. It's a lovely dove. You ought to see it. The dove came, and it was going to peck, shut his hand again. Don't do that. Nothing in it, he said. It's only a dove. It doesn't know any better. Come again, what? The dove came, he shut his hand. And the dove flew back on the roof. No, he didn't. The dove flew over the roof. He's never seen it from that day till this. He grieved its spirit. That's why I say I get sad when I go home at night. I can read a congregation like I can read a book. I know those of you who are hiding sin. I know those of you who are hiding in hypocrisy. I know those of you who are rebelling against the light. Do you think I go home happy that you dare to grieve a holy eternal God that can rub you out with less trouble than you kill a fly? That happens to have put inside of you something that will live a thousand billion billion years from tonight? You'll be an entity, you'll be a personality either in eternal glory with its embarrassing wonder and delight, or in a burning smoking hell with all the filthy people you wouldn't walk down the street with tonight. My little stint in New York taught me to hate sin, I'll tell you that. I wouldn't like to live in hell with all the unclean people, the Hollywood bunch, and the mafia, and all the dirty rascals that have ever lived, present, past, or future. But I'll tell you what, God said sin made such havoc of this world that he loved that he's not going to let one person get into heaven with one spot of sin. And he's not going to get rid of it in the grave, so you better get rid of it now. Because nothing, God said it, that defile and shall enter in. Thank God we're going to be in a place one day where there'll be no curse and no sorrow, where there'll be total obedience to the Son of God, and they're going to raise their voices in eternal hallelujahs. And you know what, they're going to sing unto him that has loved us and loosed us from our sins. We're going to remember it in eternity. I'll meet brother Peter on the street one day and say, and say what did you do Peter? And he says, the Lord showed me how much sin I had, it weighed 3,000 tons. All the sin of my life, and he forgave every bit of it. And I go to somebody else like Nikki Cruz and say, oh well what did the Lord say? And he said, your sin weighed, I'm putting figures on it, 3 million tons. And one day I crawled at the feet of Jesus. And he told me himself that he ripped men's bellies open. He told me one day he put his switchblade through the eye of a boy and cut it, and it spilled out like an egg. And he cut the other one, and then he said they all put their knives in him and cut him to pieces on the sidewalk in New York while women looked through the windows and didn't do a thing. Brother I don't want to go to a hellhole like that. But I don't want to be saved from sin just to make it safe into heaven. I want to be saved from sin, I want to be a God-directed man that in the life I have I may live to the glory of God. For the devil's got enough people bringing glory to his rotten name. He's got people that give him every beat of their heart, every bit of their money, every thought of their mind, every instinct they have, they're sold out to the devil. The pastor asked you tonight, would you sell out to Christ? Oh my. I'm just thinking if I could lift the lid off hell and just say, do some of you want to come out and get saved? There'll be a stampede out of hell tonight to get saved. But there's no mercy there. Are you saved tonight or just a nice moral person? Are you a hypocrite? Are you a professing Christian without any anointing of the Spirit of God? You've got eyes but you don't see. You think the pastor's a strange kind of a fellow these days. He sure is unusual, I love him very dearly. Why in God's name don't you stay at home? I've got a beautiful home, I've got a fine library, I've got lots of things. This year I'm ending my 70th year, I'm getting old. No I'm not getting old, I'm getting older, but anyhow. You know I wouldn't give this job up for all the world. No sir, I wouldn't. The biggest job in the world is getting men out of sin into salvation, into holiness and getting them there fixed up with God. I'll tell you how to get there, sing 92 will you, please.