In this sermon, the preacher highlights the busyness and lack of focus in the religious world today. He emphasizes that being constantly busy does not necessarily mean pleasing God. He references the moment when Jesus told Peter and the disciples to go and preach the gospel to every creature, and how they eagerly responded. The preacher then discusses the period of preparation and the promise leading up to Pentecost, where the disciples were called, commissioned, and taught by Jesus. He concludes by suggesting that if today's congregations were as spiritual as the disciples before Pentecost, it would be considered a very spiritual church.

The text we found in the 24th chapter of Luke, and in Acts 1, familiar passages. Our Lord says, Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you, that tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high. In Acts 1, he says, He showed himself alive after his passion, and being assembled together with the disciples, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye shall ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. Now, last Sunday I attempted to show who the Holy Spirit is, and reverently and imperfectly what he is. I tried to show that he is a real being and not an abstraction, that he is a person and not a thing, that he is very God, having all the powers and attributes of the Deity, and that he is in one essence, of one essence, with the Father and the Son. Now, granted that this is true, what has this to do with you and me? I never like to preach in a vacuum. I never like to have anybody hear a sermon and then go home and say, So what? I might as well be somewhere else, and so might you, unless there is some moral imperative, some obligation lying upon us as a result of what we know, some privilege which is ours as a result of what we can find out. So now, what's the practical effect of the person of the Holy Spirit? What are we to expect and what are we to do? I can't answer this all tonight, but over the next weeks. And how does it, or how should it, affect my outlook as a Christian? And how should it affect the outlook of this Church? Because I expect this Church to go along with this preaching. Now, the Father promised the Spirit as a gift to his children. And I don't know whether this is right or not, but I think maybe God had in mind the love people have for their children. He did say, If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? And in making the Spirit the promise of the Father, I wonder if he didn't want to show that you don't have to be afraid of the Holy Spirit. This is one thing that it's very difficult to get an audience over, to get a Christian over, the fear of the Holy Spirit. By that I don't mean reverence for him. You cannot reverence the Holy Spirit too much, but you can be afraid of him. And I am sure that a lot of people are afraid of the Holy Spirit. But if you could remember that he is the Father's promise, that he is given to us as the Father's promised gift, just as a man offers or promises his son a bicycle for Christmas, or whatever the boy wants. And the boy remembers, I know they remember. And they come back and remind you, sometimes in an embarrassing time, that you have promised. And nobody is ever afraid of a promise made by a Father who loves him. Now, the members of the Redeemed Church should be bound in the bundle of love with the Holy Spirit. The truth is that God never thought of his Church apart from the Holy Spirit. We were born of the Spirit, we are baptized into the body of Christ by the Spirit, we should be anointed with the Spirit, we are led of the Spirit, or should be, we are taught of the Spirit. And the Spirit, then, is the, what should I say, the medium, the divine solution in which God holds his Church and has his Church. The Holy Spirit is the essence of the Godhead uncreated, I think the poet, the hymnist, said. Now, God never dreamed of his people, I say, apart from the Holy Spirit. And he made a lot of promises to them. Let's note some of the promises that he made. He said, for instance, this, "...until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest, then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever. Then further on in Isaiah, he says, I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring." Then there is that famous passage in Joah, "...it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions also upon my servants, or upon the servants, and upon the handmaids in those days, will I pour out my Spirit." Now, those are the words of the Father, and Jesus interpreted these words and called them the promise of the Father. And whenever you have Jesus, our Lord, interpreting the Old Testament, you stay close by his interpretation. Don't depend too much or lean too hard on the interpretations of man, because we can be wrong, but our Lord, the man Christ Jesus, never was. And he called this the promise of the Father. That is, the Father through the Old Testament, through the years, had promised, and now Jesus sums it up and calls it the promise of the Father. And he says that then in the text which I read tonight, "...tarry ye until ye be endued with power, and I will send the promise of the Father upon you." Now, I say Jesus interpreted this, and I'm not going to read it tonight, because it takes too long and you are too familiar with it. But in John 14 and 16, 14, 15, and 16, you will find our Lord talking about the Holy Spirit and his coming to the Church. And now I notice that in the Church, in the Gospels and Acts, and over into the Epistles, there are three periods that are discernible. Do you want to jot them down, or at least in your memory? With respect to the Holy Spirit and his work in Church, there are three periods discernible. There is what we call the period of the promise. That is, from John the Baptist to the resurrection of Christ. Now, the marks of this period, this three-year period, the disciples were called and they were commissioned and they were taught. Do you know, my dear friends, that if we could get together a congregation that was as spiritual as the disciples were before Pentecost, we would consider that we had a very spiritual Church. We'd make bishops out of those boys. We would. We'd elect them to the boards and we'd write their lives and name churches after them. If we could find somebody just as spiritual as they were before the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost, just even that spiritual, well, they were getting ready, you see. The disciples were called, there is no question, they were called and they were commissioned and they were taught of the Lord. We talk about these ignorant disciples. Do you know that these disciples had three years in the best Bible school in the world? There isn't a seminary on earth that can equal the seminary with Jesus as the whole faculty. He was teaching them and instructing them and sitting with them. You know, they used to say a university consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a boy on the other. Put a young fellow on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other, if the log wasn't too long, you had a university. And a Bible school, a seminary, consists of our Lord Jesus Christ and a willing student. And they went to the best Bible school in the world. Now, they didn't get a degree which they could frame and put on their study wall, but they had a degree inside of them. And they loved Christ our Lord, these disciples did. They loved him living, they loved him dead, and they loved him living again. That was the period of the promise, you see. When they hadn't received anything yet, they had only been promised something. And all this time until his death and even after, Jesus was creating expectation in them. He was telling them that there was a new kind of life coming to them. That it wasn't to be a poetic life, it wasn't to be psychic, it wasn't to be physical, it was to be an athletics from above. It was to be something that was to come to them out of the world, beyond them, over the threshold of their beings, into the sanctum sanctorum, into the penetralia, into the deep of their spirit, and live there and teach them and instruct them and lead them and make them holy and give them power. Jesus taught that all the way through. Wherever he could find time and people were about him, the circumstances were good, he would tell them these things. And as they came nearer to the end of his life, that is, the end of his earthly life, he intensified this teaching, as is indicated in John 14, 15, and 16. He told them that there was a new and superior kind of life coming. And he told them it was to be an effusion, an outpouring of spiritual energy. And then he left them. Then there was a second period, and put that down. That's the period of the preparation. Now, of course, in some measure they were being prepared while he walked with them. But after he had gone, then they began to prepare. They stopped their activities. And you know what's the matter with us in our day? We're the busiest bunch of eager beavers that I have ever known, or have ever been, probably, in the religious world. The idea is that if you're not running in a circle, if you're not breathing down the back of your own neck, you're not pleasing God. When the fact is, the Lord said, don't go yet, you're not ready to go. You know, Peter leaped to his feet when the Lord said, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Peter leaped to his feet, and a dog grabbed, scooped up his hat on the way out. He was going to go right now, and maybe found something, you know, and start something. But the Lord said, Peter, he came back, he said, tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high. I think one of the biggest mistakes we make with our young people is to get them born again and then start them out right away. My brethren, we're not prepared to do the work of the Lord when we're just born again. The priests were born priests, but they had to be anointed priests before they could serve. They were born priests. They had to be born of the tribe of Levi, of the family of Aaron, and Kohath, Mererai, and what was the other fellow's name? They had to be of those lines. They had to be born into the priesthood, or they couldn't be priests. But they didn't serve even though they were born priests. They didn't serve as priests until they had been anointed. Blood was put on their ears, on their thumbs, on their toes, and then on the blood was put oil, fragrant sweet oil, the type of the Holy Ghost. Then after they had been anointed for the priesthood, they went and served in the Old Testament priesthood. But you and I, just as soon as we get a fellow born into the tribe of Levi, we give him a bunch of tracts and say, Now bud, get going. And the result is Christianity has taken on amateurism. I heard the former president of Wheaton College at one time say that we are suffering from a rash of amateurism in Christian circles, and we surely are. Christianity has leveled down and down and down, and the high quality and the specific gravity, the weight of it has gone. We're light as butterflies, and we flip, flip, flip around in the sunshine and imagine that we're eagles flapping our broad wings above the rocks of God. But instead of that, we're butterflies. We're trying to work when we're not prepared to work. And so there needs to be some preparation, some getting ready. They stop their activities. I have said, you know, I say lots of radical things, but I don't want to apologize because I wouldn't have time. But among the things that I have said, and I think I'll stand for it, is that I believe the Church would be better off if we'd call a moratorium on activity for about six weeks and just wait on God to see what he would do for us. Just wait on God. They did that very thing. They cleaned up the loose ends and they got united. We pray, O God, send thy Holy Spirit upon us so we'll be united. We might just as well repeat the three blind mice, because God doesn't hear that kind of prayer because it's got no sense in it. The Holy Ghost did not come upon the disciples to unite them. The Holy Spirit came upon the disciples because they were already united, being of one accord in one place. Now, the scholars tell me, I was just a boy that picked up a little as I went along, but those who are supposed to know tell me that it's a musical term, that being in one accord, it's a musical term, in harmony. And they already were one. They were in harmony with each other, and then when they were all together in one place. You know if you could get God's people all together in one place. The trouble is with some of you, you're here, but you're not here at all. Your mind is wandering around all over Ontario, but you're here in your body. But they were all together in one place. Somebody said that we have yet to see what God can do with a man if he can get him all together in one place. If he can just get him together and get him in one place and get him focused and get him together, and now they were there. And then came the third period, the period of the realization. The Holy Ghost came upon them suddenly. It wasn't until just lately, just this last week, that I saw a word here in the book of Acts, and I found that word occurring quite often through the scriptures. And that is the word suddenly. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And I rather smile to myself because that word suddenly there. God's people are so afraid of suddenly. They always want things to slip up on them a little bit at a time, slowly. Everybody is willing to be filled with the Holy Spirit, provided God does it very gingerly and very slowly, and doesn't take away their face or embarrass them any, and doesn't frighten them. But the scripture says suddenly they were filled with the Holy Ghost. It even says suddenly there was with the angel the multitude of the heavenly host. Now I think I'm going to look it up, but I think you'll find that word suddenly occurring pretty near whenever God did a wonderful thing, he did it suddenly. But we're afraid of that. We want to grow in grace. We want to grow, because you know you can grow and you're not embarrassed if an altar call is given and you go to the prayer room, get down on your knees and seek Almighty God, and God comes and fills you, and you get up and get your handkerchief out and rub your eyes and say, Thank God the Comforter has come. It's embarrassing, you know. And it takes a little bit away from your reputation. You've got a feeling, well, look at me. I used to be the chairman of the board, and I taught an adult Sunday school class in my home church. And now for me to suddenly be filled with the Spirit and maybe even break down and cry or say praise the Lord would be awful. And the result, of course, is we go on year after year and learn to live with death. We learn to live with a spiritual corpse. We learn to live, our breath is frosty and our cheeks are pale and our toes are frostbitten, and we haven't spirituality, yet we learn to live with that. And we imagine that's normal, and we write books to prove that that's normal. It's not normal at all. It's subnormal, it's abnormal, it's below normal. Holy Ghost isn't on us, and that's our trouble. But the period of the realization came suddenly, and the Father fulfilled his promise, and the expectations were fully met and more. Always remember this, that God is always bigger than anything God can say, because words are inadequate to express God and what God can do. Any promise that God ever made, God has to overfulfill it. The reason being that God is so great and his heart is so kind and his desire is so intense and tremendous that language doesn't express it. Not the Greek, not the Greek, not the English. No language expresses God, it can't. If language could contain God, then language would be equal to God. So everything God says in the Bible must be understood to be a little greater than what he says, even as God is greater than language. So when God promised them that they should receive power, that that power should be an effetus from heaven above, which should come upon them, should cross the threshold of their spirits and enter into the deeps of their soul and dwell there forever, and should work within them to lead them, purify them, instruct them, and teach them, we've got to believe that the fulfillment will be greater than the promise, because the fulfillment of God and the promise is words. God is always greater than words. Don't forget that. I was at a convention one time over in New York State, and there was a beautiful little Italian woman, married woman, and I didn't talk about this. What did I talk about that night? I talked about this. Maybe I'll preach it here sometime. It was that text from the Old Testament that says, Every man shall know the plague of his own heart. And I preached on the plague of a man's heart, and she heard it. And then I told them that there was deliverance. There was a balm in Gilead, and there was a fountain opened in the house of David to deliver us from the plague of our own heart. Well, she, along with some others, came down to the altar, and she was there, and suddenly she leaped to her feet. There was no wildness, no wild and woolly stuff. It was God. And that lovely dark face of hers literally shone, and she walked around saying like somebody, oh, that she'd heard her family had been killed, and then suddenly she'd heard it was a mistake. They were all well and happy. She just couldn't believe it, and she kept saying, oh, I didn't know it could happen to me. I didn't know it could happen to me. And there was an older, a man, considerably older than she, and she made a dash for him, threw her arms around him, and hugged him hard, and had a little, had a little word together, and then she turned away, all tears and smiles. And I learned afterwards it was her father-in-law, and they'd had a little row, and she was just hugging the old man, making up with him, which was perfectly normal and right. She'd made up in her heart, but she got to him afterward. Well, now, that, that's the fulfillment. Now, she said, I didn't know this could be. Now, she had read it in the text, and she'd heard it preached, but what happened to her was so much greater than anything she had dreamed of, that she couldn't believe it was happening. But it happened all right. Now, there's a great modern error abroad, and you'll find out if you listen to me for any length of time, that I am not one of these positive preachers. And now, they say that you're supposed to be positive. You're to, you're to accent the positive and underplay the negative. But everybody that knows how to screw in a light bulb knows there's two holes in an electric circuit, the positive and the negative, and you can't have a light burning on one, it takes both. Everybody knows there's two sides to a Canadian half dollar. On one side, it says, oh, I can't read this, it's Latin. And the other side, it says something else, but you split that down the middle, and there isn't a store in Toronto that would take it. Both sides have to be there, the positive and the negative. In the newer coins, they have the Queen's lovely outline on there. And then something on the other side takes both, one won't do. And so there's got to be the negative. You've got to get rid of some things. I never had any time for these soft-handed, cake-eating pastors who look more and more normal with a T balanced on their knee than they do on their knees in the study. I never could see it, but they walk around smooth and sweet, hoping never to make any enemies as long as they live. Brother, a man is known by the enemies he makes. Yes, he is. And he's known by the friends he makes. And I want God's friends to be my friends, and I'm not so particular about God's enemies, whether they're my friends or not. I don't want to be friends of those that are enemies of God. So I will sometimes have to tear into things that I don't believe are right. I wouldn't do it except that it hinders the people of God, that's all. It hinders them. And anything that hinders God's people, that's my business. So don't say that's none of my business. That is my business. I've been anointed of God to make it my business. So there's an error abroad, and I want to state it now. I heard all my life, you know, all my life. All my life I've fought it, and I think I'm coming out on top. Well, the state is like this, that the individual Christian is not affected by this promise of the Father, that this happened to the Church once and is not to be repeated, just as the birth of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated, the death of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated, the resurrection of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated, so Pentecost happened once, and that's it now. The Church no longer is concerned. That has taken place, that was a historic fact, the same as the birth of Jesus, the same as the death of Jesus. And so they try to brush us off. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to ask you some questions now and let you do your own preaching. Then when you go out, you won't have had it rammed down your throat, you will have made your own decision about it. I've got about nine questions I want to ask you, and you answer them, and then when we're through, we'll be through. First question is, was the Father's promise for the first century Christians only? This promise of the Father that was to come, was that for the first century Christians only? Or did that carry over to the second century and the third century and the fourth century? Now, my theological education came out of the Schofield Bible. And do you know what the Schofield Bible says? The Schofield Bible says that the period that Joel had in mind when he says, it shall come to pass in the last days that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Schofield says that that period, the last days, began with the Pentecost and continues until Christ returns. We are living in the period of the last days when that text of Joel's is active and efficacious and applicable to you and me. Now, I quote Dr. Schofield, because often he is quoted as not being on the side of the spirit-filled life, but he was an honest man, and he stated that, that we are now living in those latter days when God will pour out his spirit upon all flesh. That's what he believed. Dr. Torrey said that when Peter said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and receive the gift of the spirit which is promised is unto you and your children and as many as are far off. Wasn't that first generation crowd only? You and your children and as many as are far off. How far off is Toronto from Palestine? I would say I'd guess 6,000 miles. I may be wrong there. I'm a better theologian than I am a geographer, but I'd guess at it and say that's about it. All right, as many as are far off. Now, that's the first problem. Now, you settle it, brother. If I try to make you believe something, you'll go away. And if you meet a man that's a better arguer than I am, he'll make you believe the opposite. That is always the reason I believe in the witness of the spirit. If you can argue a man into believing he's filled, he'll meet another man that'll argue him out of believing he's filled. If you can argue a young fella into thinking he's born again, he'll meet some fella that'll argue him out of it. So I don't ever argue with anybody. I point to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, and after that, God and the man are on his own. And if I drop dead or get hit by a Volkswagen, he'll have the promise of the Father, and he won't have to go back to me to find out whether it's so or not. Now, that's question number one, was the Father's promise for the first-century Christians only. Question number two is, does the new birth of the first-century Christians make my new birth unnecessary? Now, the Lord said that we would have to be born again, and he said we were to be filled with the Spirit. And they come along and tell us that that meant they were to be filled with the Spirit. Back there, all right, Grant, they were filled with the Spirit. But I happened to be born 1897. That's a few hundred years too late for that first century. And here I am, high and dry, hanging on a wire. And if I didn't live back there, then I'm finished. I don't have any hope at all. I won't listen to that kind of teaching, brethren. I won't. Because you can't reason it this way. If Peter was born again, does Peter being born again do for me? If Peter was filled with the Spirit, then does Peter being filled with the Spirit do for me? I want to ask you this question. Would a breakfast of eggs that Peter ate in 33 A.D. nourish me living in 1960 A.D.? No. Peter ate his eggs and drank his milk and ate his brown bread, and he was nourished in 33 A.D. I'm living in 1960, and I have to have my ham and eggs. I'm not a Jew, and therefore I eat ham. And I excuse Peter on that, because I figured that being a Jew he wouldn't want the stuff. But Peter's breakfast in 33 A.D. won't do me one bit of good now. I have to eat now if I'm going to be nourished now. Peter's being born again won't help me in 1960. I must be born again now as he was born again then. Peter's being filled in that day won't help me now. I must be filled now as he was filled then. Well, is there any difference between that and the outpouring of the Spirit? What value, another question I want to ask, is it to the Church in Toronto that the Church in Jerusalem was filled with the Holy Ghost? You know, sometimes it seems to me the Lord's people need to have somebody gently rub their heads. They get such weird ideas. They need something, I don't know what, maybe shake their head and get it working. Because this idea that the Church being filled with the Spirit back there in the first century made it unnecessary for the Church to be filled with the Spirit now. How silly can you get? None of you people were living in the first century, were you? I wasn't. Nobody I know around here was. We weren't even in the minds of our great grandfathers yet at that time. We were great, great grandfathers. Some of you that are so proud of your ancestry, as the brother said in the House of Lords in London, you were eating acorns in the forests of Brittany back there at that time, you know. And I don't know where my ancestors were in the black forests of Germany somewhere, I guess, digging acorns, roots. But way back to that is the hour when the Holy Ghost came upon the Church, and the Church went out in a blaze of fire to preach the gospel to the known world in the first hundred years. Then the long Latuna, the long Gap. Now here we are in 1960, and we have teachers that are so infinitely silly as to come and tell us that all we have to do is just go quietly along until the Lord comes and makes us ruler over many cities. They had the Spirit back there, and all we have is the echo and the memory and the hope. Now they tell us another thing. They say that at conversion we receive what they received back there at Pentecost. Now I want to ask you, have you ever seen anybody that received at his conversion what Peter received in the upper chamber? Have you ever met anybody like that? Do you know anybody like that? And I want to ask you this question. When you were converted, did you have the power Peter had when these brethren, oh, even leveled down below Peter, down to the common folk that were around him, just the plain people whose names were not even known except a few of them, didn't they have something that we apparently don't have in this day in which we live? I think they did. Now I want to ask you another thing. Is modern fundamentalism, fundamental believers, is that a satisfactory fulfillment of expectation raised by the Christ? Our Heavenly Father promised the gift of the Holy Ghost to come upon his children. Jesus promised that we should have the Spirit. He should come. He should take the things of Christ and make them known unto us. He should bring all things to our memory. We should have power when the Spirit came. He promised all this. And then I look around at cold, dead, dried-up fundamentalism, textualism, hanging out to dry. And they want me to believe that what they have now is what they had back there then. I just can't do it. I just can't do it. We Christians now are a scrub lot compared with those Christians back there. We're scrubbed. When I was a boy on the farm in Pennsylvania, we had scrubbed chickens. Occasionally my mother would go out and bring in some buff coachins and Plymouth rocks and some others and try to improve the strain a little bit. But if you just let a hen go a while, just let them go for five or six years, and they'll revert back to type. And they'll go back to scrub. And you can't figure out what they are. And they're just little, old, dried-up, clucking biddies that lay little eggs, not too many of them, and don't provide much meat. And we Christians, we just reverted back to old Adamic type. There were thoroughbreds in those early days, thoroughbreds. They had come from God, or something from God had come to them. And they blazed with light and power and life. And look at us, look at us. And then we try to say we have the same thing that they have. Now you think it over and answer the question yourself. And then I want to ask you one more. Does your heart personally witness that what you now enjoy is what our Lord promised to his people? Does your heart now bear witness that what you now have is all God meant when he painted that wonderful picture of the fullness of the Spirit? Or is there something more for the Church? Somebody wants to ask the question now. They say, we don't know this Mentosha. What is it? Is this Pentecostalism that he's preaching? No, absolutely not. It's only what the Christian Missionary Alliance has always believed, always believed. It's only what Dr. Torrey believed. It's what Billy Sunday believed, and Billy Graham believes. Though Billy was gifted of God to preach to sinners, and he doesn't enter this too much because his gift is a bit different, and he preaches straight to sinners and wins them. But it's what Torrey, I insist, believed. It's what Moody believed. Down in the city of Chicago, out on the south side, there was a little home, and in the home lived a little nice old lady, full of the Holy Ghost, named Mother Cook. And a young fellow got converted into the city, and he would have made a good salesman, you know. He was a very busy fellow. He loved to run in circles, and he did. He went everywhere running in circles, and his name was Dwight Lyman Moody. And one day the little old lady, Mother Cook, saw Dwight, and she said, Son, I'd like to have you come over to my house sometime. I want to talk to you. So Moody went over to her house, and she sat him down on a chair, and she said something to this general effect, Now, Dwight, wonderful to see you saved so beautifully. It's wonderful to see you so zealous. But you know what you need? You need to be anointed with the Holy Ghost. Well, he said, Mother Cook, I want whatever God has for me. All right, she said, get down here. And she got him down on the linoleum, and they prayed a while, and she prayed, Oh God, fill this young fellow. Well, he died out there, and opened his heart, and brought his vessel, his empty vessel to the Lord, and took the promise by faith, but nothing happened. So a few days afterward, he was in the East. I've forgotten whether New York or Philadelphia, I think New York. And he said, As I was walking down the street, suddenly, now there's his word again, suddenly God fulfilled the promise he'd made to me in that kitchen. And down unto him came a horn of oil, and the Holy Ghost came on him. He said he crawled up an alley and raised his hand and said, Oh God, stay your power or I'll die. Then he said, I went out from there preaching the same sermons with the same text. But oh, the difference now. The Holy Ghost had come. Now the Holy Ghost had been there, he had caused him to be born again. If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. It's quite a different thing to have the Spirit as my regenerator, and have the horn of oil poured out on my head. Quite a different thing. The reason I can talk about it with a good deal of authority is, I went through it and I know what I'm preaching about. I didn't learn this at Nyack, brother. The Holy Ghost did this, God did this, so I'm giving it to you. You'll learn this at Nyack, too, but that wasn't where I learned it. You'll ponder these things, will you? There isn't any use to try to push into anything. We try to push God's poor children around, pick them out of this shell, and the result is we get a lot of weird monstrosities instead of Saints. I don't want to do that. I want you to do this. I want you to set aside some time, and I want you to search the scriptures and see whether these things be so. Some people say they're not so. Some people say that all I'm doing is confusing people. I wrote a series of articles for a magazine on the Holy Spirit, and there's a fellow who's never let me go. He's after me still, and he publishes things about me, showing that I'm confusing the Saints. I wrote him a letter and I said to him, My dear brother, if the Lord's people were as eager to be filled with the Spirit as they are to prove you can't be, the Church would be quite a different Church. He published that, too. But it's true, isn't it? It's true I am not preaching a thing our Baptist brethren don't believe when you press them. I am not preaching a thing that the Methodist brethren don't believe. I am not preaching a thing the Salvation Army doesn't teach. I am not preaching a thing that our Puritan fathers didn't believe. So I don't apologize. It's here. Set aside time and search the scriptures. And if the scriptures don't convince you that the Church and the individuals in the Church ought to be living a happy, spirit-filled life, then don't listen to me. Don't listen to me. Because if I preach for five hours straight, and I don't preach according to the truth found in the Bible, I am wrong no matter how eloquent I try to be. Pray and yield and believe and obey, and see what God will do for you over the next weeks. Now let's pray.