Toward Maturity — Manley Beasley

Greetings, friends. It's certainly a joy and a privilege to be with you again this month. I trust that all is going well with you. The last time I spoke to you by tape, we were just headed out to Europe.

In fact, about the time you got the tape, we were in the middle of our conference in Europe. And I just want to say that it was one of the richest experiences of my life. You know, the last experience is always the richest.

But for many years I had dreamed that the Lord would do a great and mighty work in Europe. And I'm still dreaming, but it's after this last conference. I can certainly say that we saw a touch of the glory of God.

And the dreaming is much more realistic. God really met with us. When I talk about the glory of God, I'm talking about God literally manifesting himself in such a way that the whole man is affected by his presence.

Now, you know, and I know, that when God is present, there is glory. But there is a way in which he's present, and you do not see that glory manifested. And so, what I'm talking about now is that we saw the manifestation of his presence in this particular meeting.

Last year we saw a great deal of glory, but this year it was just one service after another. Amazing thing about it, too. People sat right there, did not have eyes to see or ears to hear, but many did hear and see.

I suppose one of the richest things to the American people from America over there was the testimonies, reports from behind the Iron Curtain, a revolutionary time for all of us in our thinking. I guess the most important time for the Americans in Europe was a time of preaching and singing.

And then to the people behind the Iron Curtain, I'm not certain which phase of the service was so significant to them, but it was certainly a rich hour for the whole crowd. I thank you so much for praying.

I thank you so much for praying. I trust that you will continue to pray for what we're up to. I want to share with you a little bit of a burden that's on my heart, and this may be a little confusing to you.

I'm not sure how much you keep up with what's going on in my own personal life, and so I'm sure what I'm about to say will affect some one way and some another way, but I definitely feel that it's very important that you and I really pray together over what I'm faced with.

For about the last seven months now, I have been going through a real, I'm going to say trial, in relationship to my health, and God has really given me some promises. And for the last, well, since Christmas, I have been on a particular type of test in relationship to this sickness.

My kidneys are doing things that are just so irregular. It seems like a great deal of confusion there, and the doctors and myself are very confused. And I'm standing on the promises, but it's making it very difficult for me to make decisions.

The door is so open to me, and throughout the world, it's just incredible. I could almost stop here in America tomorrow and spend the rest of my life all over the world. The opportunities are so available, and the world is in such need.

In America here, we have possibly as many lost people here as we do anywhere in the world, but we do have a church in almost every town in America, and we do have a lot of gospel preachers in America.

And you can turn on television and get a gospel preacher on any Sunday you want. And I mean someone who's really preaching the Word of God in most cities in America. But in these countries throughout the world, this is not the case.

And I'm finding a little struggle in my heart because I would really like to be poured out on the world. And now I find myself coming up with some limitations. It's very difficult for me to make some decisions.

And I really need your prayers. By the day I'm making this introduction, tomorrow, and of course I will have gone through tomorrow's experience, by the time you get this tape, it'll be about two weeks after this before you get this tape.

But I will be tested again tomorrow, and I believe the Lord is going to show the doctor something tomorrow. And I'll share it with you next month. But you just continue to pray for me that I will have the wisdom from above at this point.

I need it so bad. This particular message that I'm sending this month is a message that I preached at a soul winning conference. It's a type of message that people say they never have heard me preach along this line before.

I don't know that. I feel that I preached in this area a great deal. But a lot of people that hear me at these conferences do not hear me on a regular basis. I very seldom ever say anything new. I do emphasize different things.

And so I trust this message this month will be a unique blessing with you. I am deeply concerned that the Lord raises up some intercessors for the ministry that I'm involved in. I trust that God will put on some of you or your hearts, at least your hearts, that God will raise you up as an intercessor.

Now, I'm not talking about a prayer warrior. And I want your prayers. I need your prayers. I'm not talking about a supporter. I need that. But I'm talking about intercessors. And I have become keenly aware that the strategy of Satan against my life is going to be different now than ever before.

And I need definitely some intercessors. And somehow, someway, I feel like that I need to start addressing the subject and need to find some people that will deeply get involved. Some time ago, the Lord said he was going to raise up 70.

And I have found a few people that want to do this, but I'm not sure, you know, how many will go on through with me on this level. So do pray to the extent that God will mightily, mightily raise up some intercessors.

Now, you need to make mention of it to us if God is dealing with your heart in any way about it. Of course, we welcome any level of commitment that the Lord would put in your heart. We do not want you to neglect any kind of responsibility you have to your church and your family to get involved with us.

I think that would violate what we believe. And so not anything that I'm asking you to do, I trust, would violate your responsibilities as a parent, a friend, a Christian in your local church and so on.

Paul as a Model Soul Winner

So I trust that God will give you a real heart for this message. Thank you so much, and I trust it will bless you. This is a soul winning conference, a conference on soul winning. And I want to talk to you about a soul winner in the Bible.

I want to talk to you about soul winning. And this particular man, I think, was one of the greatest soul winners of all times. Now, it's amazing about soul winning. Men have to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to be on the cutting edge and be a person that does the work by addition, or if they're going to be behind the scenes and do the work by multiplication.

Now, folks, it's wonderful. Now, I'm not downing one or the other because they both are necessary. But the person that wins souls by addition will never win the world. But the person that wins souls by multiplication can in 20 years win this world.

Yes, sir. It's quite interesting. You probably would be shocked to know this. Maybe you do know it. But for every 22 lost people in the world, there is one person who has identified themselves as a friend to Christianity.

That's shocking, isn't it? Now, that does not mean that for every 22 lost people there's a saved person. But I'm talking about people like Catholics, people that identify themselves with Christendom, really.

For every 22 lost people, there is a person in the world that identifies themselves. But if you cut that in half, you're still talking about one person to about every 44 people. That's interesting. But it's very easy to figure out.

We have less than 500 billion people. And we have about 300 million people who identify themselves with Christianity. And it's amazing, folk. The reason I just dropped that on you is to show you that if we really meant business with God and got down to this business of walking with God and winning people to Jesus, there's no telling what we could save in the next 10 years.

There's just no telling. But it's going to take a particular type of person to do that. And I want to talk to you about a man. Now, do you have any problem believing that Paul was a soul winner? Oh, you don't?

Okay, well, one of the things you need to realize is this. In the Bible, I want to take just three men and look at them for just a minute. You have Peter, Paul, and John. Now, in the life of Peter, before he was called to walk with Jesus, he was catching fish.

In the life of John, he was mending nets. And in the life of Paul, he obviously was building tents. That was his secular job, livelihood. Now, when each one of these men were called and started following Jesus, the great ministry of Peter, he was winning souls and catching fish.

And there's no other. One of the apostles had 3 ,000 people saved at one time, like Peter. I mean, man, he was sweeping the men. But you never see John doing that. But you really see when you study the life of John and see him at the height of his ministry, you know what he's doing?

He's mending the nets. He's getting all those people that's been saved back to the basic foundation of walking with the Lord. And Paul, you never see Paul, yet he went from door to door witnessing, but you never see him having 3 ,000 people saved in one message, one sermon.

But you do see him putting structure to the Church. When you want to see the structure of the Church, the work of the Church, you go to the Paulinian epistles. Now, what I'm bringing this out for is this, that all of us have different ministries.

But every ministry is supposed to give way and bring about the result of winning people to Jesus Christ. Every one of us. And I just make a statement. I've made it for years and I still believe it. If a man is walking with God, that man will have to backslide to keep from winning souls to Jesus.

It's a normal thing for a person to win souls. You do not have to be called to win souls. There's no such thing as a called soul winner. Every person that's saved by the grace of God or every person that's saved has something to say, that person is a soul winner.

And he's basically a soul winner because he's got something to say. And the cloud that's not saying something very likely is the cloud that doesn't have anything to say. And a lot of times we're trying to get them out soul winning when we need to win them so they'll have something to say.

Now, folk, when I've got something to say, I usually talk about what I've got to say. And when a man hasn't got anything to say, he's not going to say anything. That's right. And, you know, we really talk about how to win souls, and I believe in gaining all the wisdom you can, but the greatest soul winner I'm going to deal with here this morning was a man when he got ready to win souls, he gave a testimony.

His name was Paul, you know. He just gave his testimony right in front of Agrippa, a whole bunch. I mean, he just thought obviously that was a good method. The Holy Spirit must have thought it was a good method also.

Spiritual Growth Through Romans

Now, what I want you to do with me is I want to walk through nine chapters of the Book of Romans. Now, I'm not going to preach out of every chapter. In fact, I'm just going to hit just some thoughts out of each chapter.

But when you look at the Book of Romans, you find a real rare book, especially in the first nine chapters. If the Bible was not written by the Spirit of God through men, but just simply written by men, you would say that in the first nine chapters of the Book of Romans is an autobiography.

But since the Holy Spirit is the writer, writing through Paul, it's not an autobiography, it's a biography in a sense, that the Holy Spirit is writing through Paul. And the amazing thing about it, they're using Paul as the example and writing through him.

And this gives an unbelievable insight into a man's life, an unbelievable insight into a man's life. It gives actually the progression of God's work in a man's life. Now, if I had a title for this message, I would title it, He That Is Spiritual, because there's so much superficial spirituality going on in the world today that I believe that we need to see what real genuine spirituality really is.

Now, it could be summed up in one statement. Being spiritual is knowing God and cooperating with him. That's right. That's being spiritual. And a lot of babies are fairly spiritual. Right? In fact, some babies follow him better than the older folk.

In fact, I go to a church where over 50 of the crowd is over 45 years of age, and I say, well, this will be history next week, and I'll be glad of it. Very few people ever make a decision after they're 45.

You don't ever change them, they're sought in a ways. You might stare at them emotionally and a little intellectually, but they're never morally changed. Now, that's really serious business with me. I think it's right.

Now, I don't think it's right that they do that, but I think they do it. But here in this man's life, Paul, we see him change morally. I mean, we see steps in his life that change. Now, a child of God does not grow on a chart like this.

A child of God does not grow that way. A child of God does not grow here this way and then up another step and another step that way. A child of God does not grow that way. A child of God grows by a sparrow this way.

And it starts with a crises, and then they come to a revelation, and then they come to a preparation, then they come to a manifestation, then they come to a crises, and right on up, and they just keep growing that way.

They do not grow this way. And we can see that in this man's life. Now, Paul was a man that definitely was a man that believed in salvation by grace. He believed, according to the first five chapters of the Book of Romans, that a man is saved by grace through faith, and that not of himself, it's a gift of God.

He believed that a man, according to these first five chapters, had to repent of his sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, this soul winner, this man of God, believed in a repentance, faith, salvation.

He tells us very plainly in these passages that a man has to see himself as a sinner, and that a man has to have a change of mind about himself and about God. And then a man has to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

I'm going to tell you something, folk, there's something tragically wrong in this world today with what's going on in evangelism. I have been saved since 1948, and I got in on the tail end of some of the great old-timers that were dying off in their salvation preaching.

And in those days, you never thought of having a revival less than two weeks long. And their objective for that was this. Their objective was to preach the truth to the Christians until the Christians got right with God and an atmosphere was created at the church house and the souls were so set on fire that, my dear friends, they went everywhere praying and weeping to bring the lost sinners into that environment so they could get birth into the kingdom of God.

And in those days, it only took about five Baptists to win one soul to Jesus Christ. And the percentage of our people that stood was over 50 percent. But today, in Texas, it takes over 40-something Baptists to get one person down the aisle and out of all the people that come down the aisle, less than 2 percent of them stay in the church.

And that's amazing. And the problem, the situation is, is this. We have, in some instances, changed our message. And in some ways, we have changed our method. We do not preach repentance and faith anymore as a way of salvation.

My dear friends, we do not believe that the Holy Spirit of God takes the word of God, uses people of God, and brings people to a true knowledge of themselves. But Paul believed in that kind of preaching.

He believed in that kind of conversion. You see, the word repentance has three facets to it. Conviction, contrition, conversion. It's well illustrated in the Prodigal Son. And some say, well, I believe he was a backslider.

Well, I would not disagree, but I want you to know whether he was a backslider or a lost man, the principles are the same to each one. And the Bible says he came to himself. The Bible says when the Holy Ghost has come, he will reprove the world of sin.

Now, beloved, the Bible teaches that when the Holy Ghost has come, there will be conviction. And you know what conviction means? A true knowledge of yourself. It means that the Holy Ghost will bring such knowing in the spirit of a man that's dead in trespasses and sin that that man knows he or she is a sinner.

A person is not a sinner because they sin. They sin because they are sinners. And when the Holy Ghost convicts a person that they are sinners, they know they are sinners. Whether they're eight years old or ninety years old, they know they are sinners.

Paul preaches that in this message of the first five chapters of the book of Romans. And then once the person sees themself a sinner, then comes about contrition. That's a state of being that causes a change of mind about the Father and about themselves.

This prodigal son says, My father's servants in better shape than I am. He had a change of mind about his father. But he also had a change of mind about himself. He was willing to go home and be a servant.

My dear friends, here was a rebellious will submitting to a higher will. And salvation does not come, I want you to know, on the basis of a commitment. Salvation comes on the basis of a sinner, a sinner coming to the place that they have a change of mind about themselves and about God.

And on that basis, they make a surrender to God. For the continuation of this message, please turn the tape to side two. On the basis of a sinner, a sinner coming to the place that they have a change of mind about themselves and about God.

And on that basis, they make a surrender to God, to his will. The prodigal son went through one more step. He said, I will arise and go to my father. And I'm going to tell you, repentance means conviction, contrition, and conversion.

And conversion means, I will arise and go to my father. We have watered down the gospel. We have watered down our mythology. And no reflection on singing, but you can get you a band in that will draw the crowds and have more say without the gospel than you can with a Holy Ghost preacher preaching the gospel.

We have junked the way of the truth. And that is getting people lost so they can see themselves as sinners and repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. We have sold out, my dear friends, to numbers.

And you're wondering what's going on these days with all this confusion. You're reaping the harvest of a million more in 54. When you swap them into the Baptist churches without repentance and faith, and how in the name of heaven can they believe the Bible?

They don't know the God of the Bible. My dear friend, Paul was a man that believed in salvation by grace through faith. No repentance in faith. I'll be honest with you. I spent my whole life studying salvation.

And if I'd been saved in a Baptist church in the last 50 years, I would give it a serious consideration as to whether or not I was even born again. Amen? You say, Brother Manley, why would you make such a statement like that?

Because the Bible says the proof that God bears last. We got 13 million Baptists and you can't find half of them. And they tell us about 10 -15 of the 7 -8 million we can find are the ones that support the church.

I mean, in any, anybody that has an inquisitive mind and a sensible, objective outlook will know and figure out and find out why we're failing. It's an awfully dumb crowd that will not look at their own history and figure out what's wrong.

The only reason we will not look upon ourselves with somewhat of a wholesome introspection is because, my dear friends, we don't want to rock the boat because it might mess up the system. Paul was a man that believed in salvation by grace.

The first word of the gospel is repent. The last few months I've been home, some on Sunday or in the hospital, and I heard preachers on television, my dear friends, I wouldn't let my kids or my grandkids go in 30 miles of that church.

And there were Baptist churches right here in this town. Yes, sir. I couldn't believe it. And those people called themselves gospel preachers. I don't know where in the name of heaven they've been. They hadn't been in the Word of God.

And on the other side, the crowds who haven't denied the Word of God, you know what we've done? We've stood for the deity of Jesus, but, my dear friends, we have humanized the way to get to it. You say, how do you know that?

Because we don't pray anymore. See, when you know that God is the only one that can convert a sinner, you'll pay the price and pray. But when you think you can do it, then you do all you can do to get it done.

We don't pray anymore. One of the excitements of my 32 years in evangelism is I can go back, John, back when we first started out years ago and remember little old boys and girls coming to the altar praying for dads and mamas.

And it's a day when back in most of these Baptist churches you didn't have carpet. And when those little old 10-year, 8-year, 9-year-old kids would leave the altar, you know what you'd find? You'd find puddles of tears where those little old kids had wept over mamas and daddies.

And before that week was over, mamas and daddies would be walking those aisles getting saved by the grace of God. But you don't see that anymore. You see, we think we can get them saved without all that.

That's right. You know what we need to do is make a study of what kind of gospel the preachers were preaching when, my dear friends, they changed the world and gave us a country like we've had. Get back to that kind of preaching.

The Filling of the Holy Spirit

There are some things that never change. One of them is the gospel. Well, Paul wasn't only a man that believed in salvation by grace, but, beloved, Paul was a man that believed in the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 6 is a classic chapter on the filling of the Holy Spirit. Out of all the Bible, Romans 6 is the most classic passage of all the Bible about the filling of the Spirit. I love it more than any other message about the filling of the Holy Spirit.

And the reason I love it is because in this day and time, the tragedy is that the gospel, the message has been so preached that they have related, people have related the filling of the Holy Spirit to some subjective experience apart from the divine order that God has laid down and thereby they are having subjective experiences and they are thinking it's God and they run well for a season and then they find out that that is a cloud without rain and a hole without water.

You say, what do you mean? There's an order to this whole business. There is desperation. There is revelation. There is appropriation. There is manifestation. And when that order is violated, my friends, you will get yourself in trouble.

You say, what do you mean? When a person is seeking the Lord Jesus Christ and they're seeking a manifestation of God in their life and they throw themselves open on the basis of what you and I might call surrender, looking for God and some kind of manifestation takes place in their body or in their being, a subjective experience and they turn and look upon that as an experience from God.

They put their faith in that experience and they end up in chaos. But it's real to them and they're afraid to deny it. My dear friends, in Romans 6, it doesn't put it that way. He says the old man is crucified with Christ.

That's revelation. He said, Reckon it so. That's appropriation. Reckon it so. Looking to him that's raised, been raised up from the dead to work in you, that life. Manifestation. And you see, when you're seeking the Lord and God leads you to the truth, revelation, and you put your faith in the truth because faith coming by hearing and hearing by the word of God, then you are yielding to the truth and you are protected from subjective experiences that are not of God.

And then comes a legitimate feeling, manifestation. That's right. And if it's not in that order, folk, it's not going to be right. Now, I'm saying some things. You may not be hearing me or you may not even be listening.

You may not even be in the ballpark, but one of these days, you're going to say, You know, that preacher's right. We had a fella at breakfast this morning. He's sitting here right now. He called me years ago when he was working on something and he said, What about this?

And I said, Nope, that's not right. This is it. And he told me this morning. He said, 12 years ago. 12 years have passed, but he said, You were right. And what I'm saying, my dear friends, you all are losing people by the thousands to the charismatic movement.

And you know why? Because you haven't taught them the Word of God. Every time God, ever since I've been on the scene, every time God has sent a mighty manifestation among Baptists, they have killed it within two years and it has gone into the charismatic movement.

You know why? Because we are absolutely so ignorant of what to do when God comes. An outstanding prayer warrior in the world called me a few weeks ago and I said, Why do you think God's not working yet?

In revival measures in this country, she said, We're still too ignorant to know what to do with Him when He comes. You see, some manifestation can come through and tickle your emotions and enlighten your mind and you say, Boy, this is God.

And you yield to that. Then you're gone. You'll end up in tragedy. But when the Holy Spirit takes the Word of God and reveals it to you and you exercise faith on that basis of that truth, my dear friend, then will come a legitimate experience that will follow the order and you won't be led astray because you've got the Word to stand on.

You see, Paul believed in the filling of the Holy Spirit. We Baptists, am I supposed to stop any time soon? I'm having to take it easy, you know, because I've got a crowd that looks sort of dense back there.

Maybe it sees light up here. Watch this. The Baptists say you get it all when you get saved. Do you know what? That's right and that's wrong. The Pentecostals say, Nope, you don't get it all when you get saved.

You've got to have more. Do you know what? That's wrong and it's right. You say, What do you mean? When you got saved by the grace of God, positionally, you got everything God had for you. But experientially, folks, you've got to grow in grace.

Pentecostals said, Nope, you didn't get it all when you got saved. You've got to have more. They're wrong and they're right because they do not understand the positional part but they do understand the experiential part maybe to their own hurt because they stop at the second one and you can go to the third and the fourth and the fifth.

Amen? Now, here's what I'm trying to say to you. In Christ Jesus, we have it all. But the Holy Spirit has to reveal that in Christ He is. Whatever. When you see that, you yield to that and you're protected.

And then comes a genuine manifestation of that filling and it's in order and it will set your soul on fire. If you start seeking for the second blessing, apart from revelation, you will be like a man that's in a building and he's looking for something and it's in the building with him but he thinks it's outside.

Now, what would a man do if what he needed and was looking for was within him in the building but he thought it was somewhere else? What would he do? He'd be trying to get out of where he is. No wonder this bunch is confused.

They've got what they need but they're trying to get out so they can get what they need when all they need is for the Holy Ghost to take the Word of God and reveal to them that in Christ Jesus they have it.

And if they'd believe that, then they would experientially have it and that will keep you out of error. Paul was a man saved, believed in repentance and faith and believed in the filling of the Holy Ghost.

Man’s Inability to Keep the Law

Not only that, but he also believed that man at his best was not good enough. Romans 7 deals with man trying to please God. A whole chapter deals, there are some parts of that may relate to a lost person and in principle it relates to both.

But in Romans, Paul tells us about how man tries to live up to the law, the law, the law, the law and the law keeps condemning him. And then one day he throws up his hands and says,.

Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?

And about the time he got so desperate, so absolutely desperate, his eyes obviously were opened by the Lord and he said, Thank God, it's in Jesus. Jesus is the answer to this business. And he obviously runs to Jesus just like when he got saved.

And so he said, The way to really to perform and fulfill the demands of God is pounding Jesus. Amen. Yes sir. But when he got through this state, he hit Romans 8 and I mean he's beginning to soar. And he hit Romans 8 and he said, There is therefore now no condemnation to those which are in Christ Jesus.

I mean man, he's moving on. He is beginning to fly. This great soul winner is beginning to fly. He has learned the secret of life. He has learned the secret of character. He has learned the secret of succeeding.

And brother, he's soaring in the glory. And he said, There is therefore now no condemnation to those which are in Christ Jesus. Man, he's moving. He said, Listen. He said, The law said do this. But he said, We make void the law.

I like what he says. Not by doing away with the law, but because the life, the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is setting us free from the law of sin and death. I dropped that handkerchief. The law of gravity takes it to this pulpit.

But that's the law of gravity. I take that handkerchief. I drop it. I catch it with this hand. There's a law superseding the law of gravity and keeping that law of gravity from working in that handkerchief.

And old Paul said, Listen. Brother, there's therefore now no condemnation, not because the law has been done away with like some of these hyper-graced people say. It's not because the law has been done away with.

It hasn't. But it's because life, the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is superseding the law of sin and death and holding you up and, my dear friends, giving you victory over sin so we can say, If a man sins, bless God, you don't have to sin at every corner.

He says, If we sin, we have an advocate. Boy, he's sorry. Amen. Eighteen things in the book of Romans, the eighth chapter, that you have been set free from. One is poverty. One is law. Amen. One is ignorance.

I listed eighteen things this morning as I just ran through there. I can't go into those eighteen. But he's a free man. He's a free man. Only a free man can do what Paul did. Let me show you something.

Paul’s Burden for the Lost

Now we come to the soul winner. Now we come to the soul winner. Now we come to the soul winner. I say the truth in Christ and I lie not. My conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart and I could wish myself a curse from Christ, from my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.

There's the soul winner. Folks, there is the spiritual man. There is a man that in a body of flesh just like yours and mine has become so much like Jesus by being born again, by learning how to have victory over the old man, by learning how to do the work of God, soaring in the victories of Romans 8.

Here is a man that's come so much like Jesus and I want you to know, my dear friends, that is the Word of God and the Holy Ghost can absolutely stand and say, I wrote it and it couldn't be a lie and when Paul said, I'm willing to go to hell for my kinsmen, my dear friend, there's no ifs and ands about it.