ISN’T IT
WONDERFUL to get into trouble, into disappointment, into a tight place? You never would know God’s power if you
didn’t.
Always
remember the battle is the Lord’s and the victory His, also.
If you
practice the presence of God, God will take over.
The gifts
are nothing more or less than a greater manifestation of Jesus.
More
people would have gifts of interpretation, prophecy, and the word of wisdom if
they would look for Jesus.
When you
let Him reign, you see the King all the time.
The worst
thing any minister can do is to lose his personal touch and walk with
God – to be always walking in His presence.
Don’t
ever be satisfied with anything but just Jesus.
Don’t try
to be like others. Be like Christ.
My sole
business is to be united to Him.
A person
who truly obeys is truly holy.
Your
keeping the Sermon on the Mount determines your being in the Kingdom.
Have you
learned to rejoice in all manner of temptation?
If you haven’t, you are a pretty shallow Christian.
It’s
wonderful to get into a trial where your own strength is gone, where you can’t
rely on an arm of flesh. The three in
the fiery furnace would never have seen the Son of God unless they had been there.
All
prophecy has to flow out of the Bible. A
person cannot prophesy safely who doesn’t live in the Bible.
Prayer
cannot be effective without the Bible.
Very few
people study the Bible to do it.
Lots of
people fail in the crises time in their lives because they are not stored with
the Word.
When you
are confused and cannot find any way out, see if there is not a way down. The way down is always the way out.
The
failure of Pentecost came because people didn’t care as much about His
commandments as His powers. He that is
wise will make Christ his aim, not gifts, powers, or blessings.
If you
allow yourself to be overcome in the little things, you will not stand in the
great trials.
Don’t
push the Lord. Let the Lord push you.
Power to
want Jesus, power to love Jesus, power to seek Jesus is greater than power to
raise the dead.
The rein
of the Holy Ghost is the
Unless
your life is snow white, you’re going to fail.
There are
so many who want to be saved from hell – but not from sin.
The book
of Proverbs is a kingdom book, not primarily for the Old Testament but for the
New Testament saints, that we might know how to let Jesus Christ reign.
Idle talk
drives away the Holy Ghost.
The
tongue is the devil’s playground.
If God
who made the universe wrote you a personal letter, would you believe Him? He has!
When I
let my heart be troubled, I take myself out of His hands. This almighty God wants to take over the
whole responsibility of my life.
We need
the Bible in our hearts – this substance that creates faith. In the face of all hell, God gives you His
life, and it comes through His Word.
The
church has left the tree of life, and has gone to the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. They want to “know,” and
they should know nothing.
“All seek
their own” – that is what is wrong with our ministry. Until we seek those things that are Christ’s,
we will fail. God doesn’t want us to
choose. God gives us His mind. Every thought should be aimed at blessing the
You won’t
have to ask for gifts if you seek first the
The world
is decaying, not because of Communism but because of the sons of God who will
not walk in the Spirit.
This Book
is God Almighty addressing you personally, and He says: “I will dwell with those who humble at My
Word. He takes into captivity every
thought. This doesn’t come all at once
but comes as we practice the presence of Christ.
The
praises of our hearts to God keep the anointing of God upon us.
“Blessed
are the poor in spirit.” That is the ABC
in this Christian walk.
We are an
epistle. How do you write an
epistle? The paper must lie still.
God has
shown us the way to walk – to keep our bodies pure for Him!
If God
doesn’t rule all of your thoughts, words, and actions, He is not Lord at all.
The
moment I am not in love with Him and am not occupied with Him and turn to other
things, I become an idolater.
“Rejoice
evermore” is a fundamental law of the Kingdom!
When you don’t rejoice always, God is not on the throne of your heart.
My first
job is to rejoice evermore and to pray without ceasing. Your service begins in your prayer closet,
and every service for Him must grow out of your prayer closet.
A real
servant of Jesus needs a much deeper education than one can receive in the
schools. It must be given at the feet of
Jesus.
When I
follow Jesus, others will follow me.
God
doesn’t want you to think well or ill of yourself. He doesn’t want you to have a superiority or inferiority
complex. He doesn’t want you to have any
complexes. He just wants you to have
Jesus!
God knows
the Enochs who walk with Him – not only in the meetings, but always.
We have
nothing to do in the world but to do God’s will. And we will do His will just by taking His
simple words of instruction.
The
revelation that is coming to this earth is coming when the people take the Word
of God, obey it, and live the life.
The
children of Israel were destroyed because of murmuring, because of unbelief. “Neither murmur ye.” God wants us to learn never to think, never
to speak unbelief. Murmuring is
unbelief.
The more
we walk in God’s ways and keep His commandments, the more we realize that this
is the main purpose He has in giving us His word – to reveal His will to us and
give us grace to keep His word. Both
physical and spiritual health are directly dependent upon our obedience to the
Word of God. All blessings promised us
by our loving Father are connected directly or indirectly with the keeping of
his commandments.
The Word
of God is given for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness
(1 Tim. 3:16). If this Word is allowed
to work in us and accomplish that whereunto it is sent, then all exceeding
great and precious promises we find in the Scriptures will also be fulfilled,
and His blessings will flow far as the curse is found.
How much
time do you spend just loving Jesus? How
does Jesus feel about me today?
With many, it isn’t Jesus Christ alone.
If the
blessings God gives you don’t humble you, there’s danger. That’s why God gave the Apostle Paul a thorn
in the flesh. God, in order to help that
apostle, in order to keep the word of God clean, had to send a messenger of
Satan to buffet him. That messenger was
a great big devil.
It is out
of silence that God brings the word by one or another.
Every
command in the Bible is an offer of His divine nature. How do we treat it? Take, for example, the command, “In
everything give thanks.” Try it once,
and see how far you get without the Holy Ghost.
Do you
know we are appointed to suffering? It
is by the appointment of God you are going through the test you are going
through now.
A person
should never interpret tongues because people want it or because it seems to be
the right time in the meeting.
As we get
older, we have to resist laziness.
If you
are going to have Pentecost, you have to be willing for some noise.
A cup
filled with sweetness cannot spill bitter drops no matter how badly it is shaken.
Following
the Lamb brings the wisdom of God into you.
Contrary to the common belief that it deprives you, it gives you the
power and authority of God.
If you
don’t have rest, you are living after the flesh. And if you live after the flesh, you shall
die. If you don’t have rest, you do not
let Jesus reign.
God wants
to put His gifts and power and faith and authority in you, but He can’t because
you don’t keep His commandments.
Jesus
wants lovers. “Let Him kiss me with the
kisses of His mouth.” Has He kissed you
with His holy lips and purified you? If
you have a touch of His love, then nothing can keep you from the prayer
closet. You will shun the companionship
of those who do not magnify your Lover.
Beside His love, all else will fade into insignificance.
The call
of Jesus must be strong, stronger than our ministry, home life, business. It is a precious call and should not be
treated lightly.
We ought
to examine ourselves, our motive. Do we
want Jesus, or do we want to be fruitful, to be useful? It must be just Jesus.
It will
make a difference in eternity how much we have entered into the overcoming life
down here.
If you
walk as if you belong to yourself, you will fail; but if you walk as if you
belong to Me, you will win.
You will
never get humility until you love to be told your faults, until you want it and
ask for it. Instead of that, we want
people to praise us and pat us on the shoulder and say, “That was a good
testimony.”
A look of
faith for souls, instead of long prayers, will keep them. I always say, “Jesus, You saved them, and You
will keep them.”
Excerpts
from a Sermon, Jan. 1, 1965
"Ye
are enriched by Him in every utterance" -- in every gift -- "so that
ye come behind in no gift, waiting for the manifestation of Jesus Christ. Some people relegate that to the far future,
but God teaches me in the Bible that I must expect Him every day, that I must
be watching morning , noon, and night.
What will happen to me if He doesn't find me watching? What will happen to me when He finds me
watching -- watching for what? Watching for Him.
Wherever
Jesus Christ is wanted He will manifest Himself, but we must learn that lesson
-- to watch for Him, not for a program that man has made, but to watch for
Him. God has called us into
fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
This is our call. It is God's
call that Jesus Christ should look through my eyes, speak over my lips, and
possess my hands and feet, my head. My
whole being is to come under His control so that my life shall be a
manifestation of Jesus.
There is
another word that Jesus tells us about His manifestation: "Verily, I say unto you, Blessed are
those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find so doing." Doing what?
Waiting for the knock at the door so that they may open the door
immediately. i must be ready today
to let Jesus Christ come in and be all and in all. He says, He will come forth and will serve
them. That will be a very, very
wonderful event when Jesus Christ comes forth.
When He was here in the flesh, He said, "I am among you as one that
serveth." But He is that
today. He desires very greatly to be One
in the midst that serves us. He cannot
do that unless He has abandoned vessels, hearts, bodies, that are wholly given.
But there
are a thousand powers constantly at work to pull us out of such a call and such
a call and such a place. Wherever I have
traveled through the world I have found that I have traveled through the world
I have found that that has happened in Pentecost. Today, instead of it being Jesus the Lord and
Master and King, it is speaking in tongues, it is divine healing, it is gifts
and powers, it is the authority of man.
Oh, what the devil has been able to do to divert the attention of people
from just Jesus Christ, to draw them out of that "first-love"
experience where their hearts are set aflame with a fire that is hotter than
the fire of hell.
Everyone
of us hs a great responsibility to be what God wants us to be.
God must
have churches in every city and in every hamlet where Jesus Christ is
recognized as King, where His presence is acknowledged and His Kingship is
acknowledged.
Do you
know what a leverage the devil has found in television? A television set itself is no worse than a
microphone used for recording sermons, but it is what it spits out. The great television companies have now
decided to bring horror pictures, vile, licentious shows, into the home. They come into the homes of Pentecostal
saints and they are received. You go
into those homes and see how much time they spend in waiting upon the Lord and
praying and raising their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. They don't.
But the devil, Satan Himself, is a king in that home. He commands.
He rules.
I came
into the home of a Pentecostal saint and all the children sat around the
television set. I looked at the
dad. He said, "I know it's wrong,
but I don't have the heart to shut it off." Beloved, we are living in the day of which
the Bible speaks when it says, "Let him that is vile, be still more
vile." God has given them up to a
reprobate mind. Things that were once
shut out of our homes because God was a wall of fire round about the saint'
homes are now in because we have driven away the Holy Ghost and we have let all
hell come in and reign. It is the truth.
Talk
about the battle of Armageddon! Beloved,
here it is. Here is Gog and Magog amassed
against the city of God to crush out the very life of God. But God calls upon us to pray, to wait on
God. Prayer will tear down the powers of
the devil. That is what we are here for.
God is
going to have a people that ae so united to the Son of God that they will not
be two but one. Christ must be
manifested in His saints. That is
what the Holy Ghost is working on. Christ
is to be glorified in His saints. What
does tht mean? Christ is to be admired
in all them that believe. Tell me, is
Jesus admired in you? Is He really
admired in you? That is the call
of God.
God gives
us a wonderful description of the kingdom of heaven in John 14, 15, 16, and
17. "At that day ye shall know
--" Oh, the knowledge that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost unite
me to themselves, swallowing up my whole being.
The great
need of the church today is to make room for Jesus Christ to come and to be the
Head. Man has barred Him from the
throne. You don't have to go to Rome to
find the man of sin. Today you can find
him in Pentecost -- maybe in your own heart.
* * *
Other
excerpts from Sermons
Let your
whole life's pursuit be seeking Jesus.
If you pursue anything else, you are wasting your time, and you waste
God's time.
When you,
as a minister, have prayed yourself through into perfect peace always, then you
have prayed your whole assembly through.
Joy is
the flag which flies from the castle of the heart when the King is in residence
there.
It is
dangerous not to rejoice in the Lord always.
The moment I stop rejoicing, I push Jesus out, I don't let Him
reign. Some of us think "little
shadows" belong to old age or to the housewife or to dish-washing. Those shadows bring with them a battalion of
demons; they work in every conceivable way.
there are many shadings of dumps.
All of
God's people are divided into two camps: those who go from defeat to defeat and
those who go from triumph to truiumph.
Philippians 4:6 is God's way.
God's way is a way of praise, especially the first thing in the
morning. We refuse to praise and then
complain of defeats and darkness. We
ought to be frightened when we don't praise God continually. Make a covenant with God for one week to do I
Thessalonins 5:16-18, and you will want to do it forever.
If there
is one thing that is better than praising God when you feel good, it is to
praise God when you don't feel good. if
you don't praise, you will fail in the end, at the crucial moment you will
fail. Be an habitual praiser.
When you
don't live a life of prayer, your body gets packed with all kinds of works of
the flesh: envy, nervousness,
carelessness, talk-a-tiveness, etc. All
this becomes a high mountain between you and God when you pray. Taht's why it takes so long to get through to
God, but waiting on God melts this mountain all down.
Do you
keep filled with the Holy Spirit? It is
no sign you keep filled because you preached under the anointing. It is whether God is satisfied with you.
"I
need Thee every hour" -- this is poverty of spirit. When the soul has begun to have poverty of
spirit, it feels like prostrating itself before Him.
If you
can't escape the fiery furnace, rejoice in it, and the Son of God will walk with
you.
Worry is
like a rocking chair, it give you something to do, but it doesn't get you
anywhere.
* * *
Excerpts
from Morning Worship Talks
Throughout
the Acts of the Apostles we see that their great message was the ressurrected
Christ, not only that He was raised from the deat but that now He is the
ressurrection and the life. The whole
preaching of the gospel was a call of Almighty God to come out of death into His
life. "By the body of Christ ye
were made dead unto sin that ye might be married unto another, even to Him that
is raised from the dead, that ye might bring forth fruit unto God." That expresses it very sweetly that we have
been translated into the kingdom of the Son of His love. And what is that kingdom? It is the reign of Jesus Christ. It is the recognition of the Son of God. There is absolutely no other gospel. That is the place where we and many others
have failed. We don't preach and don't
believe the resurrected Christ. We don't
follow after, as the Apostle says, the prize of the high calling in Christ
Jesus, that I might know Him. This is
life eternal. Jesus is life
eternal. This life is in His Son.
The
kingdom of God is not going to be manifested on this earth as long as we talk
about the coming of Jesus Christ and we don't open our very gates to Him. When we do, when we present these bodies, God
is going to do a marvelous work in these bodies of ours. The Holy Ghost will take over this wonderful
job to prepare us for the rapture. He
says, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed." How? By the power of His ressurrection.
Faith is
the victory, but only faith in Jesus Christ.
And God calls upon me to be united to this resurrected Son of God by
resurrection power. We don't know enough
about this resurrection power because we don't put on the Lord Jesus Christ by
faith. We make provision for the flesh. When we get irritated, we are irritated. When we get tempted to speak ill, we talk
ill. And when we are tempted to think
thoughts that do not please God, we think them.
We let the devil and the world and the flesh rule us. And God says, "Sin shall not have
dominion over you, where Christ hs dominion." When by faith I put on the Lord Jesus Christ
and I insist that I am crucified with Christ, I will crucify my flesh with the
affection and lusts because then Jesus Christ will come forth like a mighty
river of resurrection power, and He will live out His own life within me.
No one
can overcome the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil and death but
the resurrected Son of God. And He is
among us and He is within us, and we ought to exercise that faith of which He
says that He will not find it when He comes again.
What did
He mean when He said to the disciples, "O fools and slow of heart to
believe all that the prophets spoke"?
How come that they didn't believe?
How is it that He found unbelief on every hand? And Jesus Christ would say that to us --
"Fools and slow of heart to believe all that the New Testament said should
come." These exceeding great and
precious promises are associated with the Son of God and the power of His
resurrection. That is what gave the
Apostle Paul that wonderful power so that when they all forsook him, when he
stood before the mouth of the lion, he could say, "The Lord stood with me,
and He will preserve me unto His heavenly kingdom."
The
princes of the church in Paul's day wanted to tear him to pieces, to kill
him. Why? Because he stuck to his test -- just one text
-- the resurrected Christ. That was what
caused the great fight. That was what
the devil hated with all his might. That
is why he roused the whole nation of Israel and the Gentiles against the gospel
of Jesus Christ. "They were grieved
because the apostles preached through Jesus the resurrection from the
dead." That is what we need to
preach -- the resurrection life of the Son of God. Everything else is a farce and will not stand
in these days of testing and trial.
The gospel
of Jesus Christ calls upon men to come out of darkness and out of the power of
Satan, to make room for the power of the Holy Ghost. The power of His resurrection is the only
kingdom of heaven that we know. And only
as we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ does that power of His resurrection
raise us from the dead. Unfortunately
much of the preaching of the gospel today is done with words which man's wisdom
teacheth and it doesn't have power to raise the dead. We need to get back to Jesus Christ. We need to get into the place where we
receive Him as King. He is raised from
the dead, and He raises everyone from the deat that really receives Him.