(Spiritual Gifts): Gifts of the Spirit 3 — A.W. Tozer

The Gifts of the Spirit and the Unity of the Church

This will be, tonight, the third and last in a series of three talks which I have been giving on the gifts of the Spirit. And I want to read some from the scriptures, and if you will be so kind as to allow me to read the same scriptures again, because I want to keep refreshing your minds with the scriptures.

You can turn to chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, where the man of God says,. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but the same God, which worketh all in all.

The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge, to the same Spirit, to another faith, to the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing, to the same Spirit, to another the workings of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of Spirit, to another diverse kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.

But all these worketh that one in this self, the same Spirit, dividing to every man several as he will. For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body being, many are one body, so also is Christ.

Now I think I'll read another passage, Ephesians 4. There is one body and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, Father of all, who is above all and through all in you all, and unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.

Therefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. And he shows that it's Jesus in verses 9 and 10, and he says, He gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints to the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, and to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine, but a slight of man and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive, but speak the truth in love, and grow up into him in all things, who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplies, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.

Pursuing Spiritual Gifts and the More Excellent Way of Love

Then I want to read this also, just two verses, 1 Corinthians 12, 31 and 14, verse 1, says, But covet earnestly the best gifts, and get you on to a more excellent way. I realize that verse 31 has been a hiding place for a lot of current Christians.

They say, gifts, gifts, talk about gifts, love is better, but they don't have love either. And then 41 .1, Follow after love and desire spiritual gifts. Now, my method of dealing with any subject has been, tear right into it and say what has to be said.

And so, I have been talking about the great need of the gifts of the Spirit back in the church. And what I have been saying is being echoed, not my voice, but it's being echoed and re-echoed all over the world.

I don't mean that they're hearing me, but I mean that God is saying the same thing to many thousands of people around the world, every denomination. So that it seems to be that when God wants to do a thing, he doesn't start only in one local place, but he says the same thing to various people in various parts of the world.

And they finally know each other and harmonize. When I was in Canada with the EISES, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is part of InterVarsity, I there met a man that I had known of and corresponded with for some time, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is the pastor of the great cathedral, or chapel, they call it, I think, Westminster Chapel.

It's a vast church right under the shadow of Westminster Abbey. They have there a very large church, and I'd heard of this man. And when I heard him preach, and he heard me preach, it was an astonishing thing how we harmonized.

He has been a great reader, has been down the years, of the Puritan divine. Now, of course, he is, first of all, a great Bible student. He couldn't be anything else and be in the church that Campbell Morgan founded.

But he had been a great reader of the Puritan divine, and he had arrived at certain conclusions regarding the Holy Spirit as a result of his reading the Puritan divine. Well, he's in London, and I'm in Chicago, and we had never met before.

And I had not read the Puritan divine. I know who they are, Bunyan and Owen and the rest. But I had never taken to them very much. But I had taken very strongly to the mystical divine, the mystical theologian, Augustine and Julian and Eckhart and the great number that have come from Spain, Scopoli and Molinas and Penelon and Towler and many others, and the great Scotch divine, who is the only mystical Calvinist that I know about, Samuel Rutherford.

And I had read those books, and he had read over on the other side, but we had arrived from two different paths at exactly the same conclusion, so that when I heard him, I thought I was listening to myself preach, only he did it better.

And when he heard me, he felt he was listening to himself preach. Now, this is unusual, but it is God saying the same thing to men who have their hearts open. And so what I have said about the gift of the Spirit, and which I'll say tonight, is not a private view of a little man who doesn't know his way home after midnight.

But it is the conviction arrived at by vast numbers of persons of the evangelical persuasion in many parts of the world in many denominations. I had said also, and want to say very carefully, that what I am saying to you is not a result of any contact that I have had with those good people who are called the tongue people.

I have told you at great length why I could not go in with that group of people. There are many, many of them, the Church of God this and the Church of God that and the country. And they are losing their testimony.

The holiness people have long ago lost theirs, and the tongue people have lost theirs because they are keeping quiet on the one thing that made them stand out. And the fundamentalists are losing theirs and are looking around for something better.

And God, I want you to say, is not leading in any direction. And I have not changed my mind, and this is not a fine way of saying it was nice to know you. I'm going among the tongue people. I couldn't possibly do it for the five reasons I gave you two weeks ago, or maybe it was only a week ago, two weeks ago, I guess.

Why the Church Needs the Gifts of the Spirit

Now, having said that, I want to tell you why the gifts of the Spirit in the Church of Christ are not only desirable, but they are absolutely imperative. Let me, in my usual fashion, begin a way back and move up.

Now, let me show you why it is absolutely necessary that we should have the gifts of the Spirit in the Church and in this Church. Because one of the results of the fall is a twofold blight, which we call temporality and mortality.

Now, man, however brilliant he may be and however wise, all men everywhere have written across their hearts these two sentences, you must go and you must die. Now, those two sentences are written by the great God Almighty, temporality and mortality.

Temporality says, you must go, you can't stay. And mortality says, you must die, you can't live. Now, because this is true, then all the works that man does partakes of what man is. And the same blight that rests upon sinful, fallen man, namely temporality and mortality, rests upon every work that he does.

All the work of a man's hand, however noble it may be, however inspired by genius, however beautiful, however wonderful and however useful and however inspiring, all the work of fallen man has these two sentences written across it, you can't stay and you can't live.

You came to go and you came to die. So that everything from a sonnet, to an oratorio, to a great bridge, to a great canal, to a great painting, to a great poem, to a great novel, everything has on it this, temporality and mortality.

It's got to die and it's got to go. Perpetuity and eternity are not in man, and they cannot impart it to what they do. But God is bringing into being a new order. God is bringing into being a new order, and a new order which shall have exactly the opposite of temporality and mortality.

That new order is to be of eternal duration and to be infused with eternal life. And this new order, it will finally show itself in the new heaven and the new earth. It shall show itself in the city that comes down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband.

And all this has in it eternal duration. It does not come to go, it comes to stay. It does not come to die, it comes to live. Now, my brethren, of this new creation Christ, Jesus is the head and the Church is the body.

And individual believers are the body members. Now, there's a simple picture, anybody can see it, but there it is. The old Adam fell down and all of which he was the head fell down with him and God wrote across it, mortality and temporality, you must die and you must go.

But the new man came and died and went and rose and lives in order that he might be the head of the new creation which has not upon it temporality but perpetuity, which has not upon it the mark of death but the mark of life forevermore.

The Unredeemed Body and the Spirit's Eternal Work

Now, these believers are yet in their unredeemed body. I want you to hear me. Every believer, I don't care whether it be the sweetest saint that kneels in prayer tonight, redolent of sweet perfume and incense, or whether it be the newest convert that blundered into some mission somewhere tonight and was saved, every believer has an unredeemed body.

Now, it's potentially redeemed, but it's not actually redeemed. And in case any of you might worry about my orthodoxy, let me read it to you. It says, For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to wit, what?

The redemption of our body, so that the saints of God live in an unredeemed temple. They live in an old body, and upon their brain is written two words, It came to die and it came to go. And upon their mind, the mind of the saints, is written, It came to die and it came to go.

And upon their nerves and faculties and powers, even redeemed men and women, they have within them the seed of God and eternal life, but they dwell and express themselves through this unredeemed fallen body, and the result is that upon their brain and mind and nerves and faculties and powers and talents and gifts, there God is saying, It's got to die and it's got to go.

Therefore God can't use them to do a permanent and eternal work. God can't use a man who is impermanent to do a permanent work, and he can't use a man who's got to die to do a deathless work. The eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work.

I wish you could write this across your heart. The eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work. Now let's look at the illustration for just a little bit. You know, we think our eyes do a work. The artist thinks his hand and his eyes do the work.

And the musician thinks his fingers do the work. And the singer thinks his throat does the work. And the gifted people everywhere think that their feet do the work, or their hands or their ears or their tongue or their nose.

They think that the members do the work. Well, there never could be a greater mistake made anywhere than to think that your hands ever did any work, my brother. Your brain does the work through your hands.

And if the brain should suddenly be cut off or die, your hands would lie helpless. It is the brain of a man that does the work. It is the brain of a man that plays that piano, and the brain of a man that paints a picture.

It's the brain of a man that smells a rose. It's the brain of a man that hears musical sounds. It's the brain of a man or woman. It's the brain that does the work, not the hands. They are simply the instruments through which the brain works.

Now that's common physiology. You'll learn that in high school. Any doctor knows it. Any common person knows it. You and I know that it is not the man's members that do the work. Nothing originates with your hand.

You crochet or you paint or you cut or trim or glue up or fasten your work. Nothing originates with your hand. It originates with your brain. And your hand is the organ through which it works. Nothing that the eye doesn't see anything.

The brain sees through the eye. You might as well say when you put a pair of binoculars through your eyes and look across on the other side of the hill, you might as well say the binoculars are seeing.

No, they're not seeing. You're seeing through the binoculars. Your intelligence is using the binoculars as an organ through which you can see. And so your eyes never originate anything. It originates in your brain.

Your ears never originate anything. It originates in your brain. And your ears bring the sound in mechanically, and your brain says, that's flat, that's sharp, that's beautiful, that's raucous, that's sweet.

Your ears, your brain tells you that. Now that's the illustration Paul gave. I didn't give it. I'm only expatiating a little, as the brother would say, on what Paul said. That the brain works through the organs.

And that if the brain is not there, or if it stops functioning, then all the organs stop functioning too. And the Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work because the Holy Spirit must do the work through the members.

He must himself do it. There is a sense in which you and I can't do work at all. There is a sense in which we are unable to do any spiritual work of any kind. The Bible says, it is God that worketh in you to will and to do.

So that instead of my doing it, God is doing it and using me as the organ. Instead of my eye doing the scene, my brain is doing the scene through two binoculars called eyes. And so the Holy Spirit takes men and uses them as organs through which he can express himself in the body of Christ.

It is Jesus that does it through the Holy Ghost, operating through the members. Now, my brother, he can't operate through ungifted members. For instance, here I have a pair of hands. They are about average and a little large for my size.

I figure I got that working on a farm when I was a kid. But there is something about these hands that I must tell you. I can't play a violin. They are ungifted hands. I can't paint a picture. They are ungifted hands.

I can't play that organ. They are ungifted hands. I can barely hold a screwdriver, and I'm getting worse as I get older if I have to screw a screw in somewhere at home to keep the place from falling apart.

So I have not any gifted hands. And no matter how much genius might lie in that brain, there are dozens, but supposing just a wild shot in the dark that there did, these two ungifted hands lie helpless.

They can't do anything. The brain can't call them up, can't call them up. The brain says, Tozer, go down and play something on the organ. I say, Brain, I'd love to do it, but I have ungifted hands. I can't do it.

I can't do it. The brain says, Tozer, go paint a picture. And I say, I'd love to do it, but I haven't a gift. There is nothing in me that responds. Color, I don't quite get it. Form, and outline, and perspective, and all the artist talk, I can't do it.

I have a pair of ungifted hands. All right, my brethren. Now, if we allow that in the body of Christ there is such a thing as living members who are yet ungifted members, then you can see how we slow God down in his working for to bring into being this everlasting new thing that must stay and that must live.

There must be the gifts of the Spirit present. They are the organs through which the Holy Ghost works to do his work. Now, religious work can be done by ungifted man. Religious work, I repeat, can be done by ungifted man.

But it is only the human mind doing a human work. It is only a mortal mind doing a mortal work. And every work that a man does, whether he builds a church or writes a hymn or a book or promotes a movement or plays or sings or prays or organizes, no matter what he does, how early in the morning he may be or how late he may be up at night, working on religious subjects, doing religious things, it is only a mortal brain doing a mortal job.

And across all of it, God will write, it came to die and it came to go. Mortality and temporality are written all over the Church of Christ today because men are trying to do in the power of the flesh, that is, the power of their own genes, what only the Holy Ghost can do.

Genius cannot do an immortal work. Genius can only do a mortal work. And don't be fooled by the loose use of the word immortal. We say Michelangelo painted his immortal paintings. That's only a careless use of the word.

There are no immortal paintings. There are no immortal sonnets. There are no immortal musical compositions. There is nothing immortal but what is in God and what God is in. So, we can do work, and I would guess, if you were to ask me, this would be maybe a rash guess, but since I'm in the mood, I'll tell you that I think about 90 of the religious work in evangelical circles is done by ungifted men.

That is, men who know how to do things but have not the gift of the Spirit. And they're operating through the gifts of nature. And it is not grace operating, but nature operating. It is not the eternal workings of the eternal Spirit, but the mortal workings of man's mortal mind.

Now, we are thrown back upon psychology and aesthetics, and that's what we have. And this makes the gifts absolutely indispensable. In order that God might do his mighty and mysterious work with permanence and eternity in his heart.

Human Ability Versus the Work of the Holy Spirit

I would rather, I would rather do one little work and have it live forever than to be the Pope and have what I'm doing done. The Bible says, in a rather cynical smile, better a living dog than a dead lion.

And I'd rather work the littlest poodle that ever waddled along the sidewalk and have it alive than to have the biggest stuffed lion there is in the zoo. And I would rather do a tiny little bit of religious work and be unknown, and live and die unheralded and unsung, and yet have God Almighty write across my little bit of work this thing to live and last than to have some great big work going on and have God write across it this too shall pass.

And brethren, when the Holy Spirit working through a man does a work, as the brain working through an eye or a hand does a work, when the Holy Spirit working through a gifted member does a work, then God will say of that work what the psalmist said of God.

Thou remainest. Thou remainest. The heavens shall be folded up like a garment, and as a mantle thou shalt change them. Thou remainest, and thy years fail not. Now that man can't do anything is a great shock, comes a great shock to a lot of carnal Christians, to a lot of saints.

The saintlings, you know, the gosling and the young goose, I suppose a saintling is a young saint, and a very young saint. And so these saintlings that believe in Jesus Christ and have their New Testament with them, but have never discovered that you can't do God's work in man's sense, that have never found out that an eternal work can't be done by a mortal man, and that a lasting thing cannot be done by a man who can't last, that somebody else has to do it, and that somebody else is the Holy Ghost.

And when we get to this, it glorifies God and humbles man. We like to think we can do something, and there's many a mother-in-law who's praying that her handsome son-in-law might be called a priest because he has such a marvelous pulpit presence.

This, brother, the fact that the Holy Ghost has to do a work or it can't last, rules out all men's boasted gifts. For instance, charm. This is the day of charm, and there's a lot of charm in religion.

But I've been tough enough and cynical enough to see it and recognize it and had enough of the gift of the Holy Ghost to know this charm stuff, this Liberace business with its cantaloupes and its beautiful stage presents.

Dear friends, I love you all. And, brother, this charm stuff, and then this pulpit presence. They say, oh, he has such a charming pulpit presence. And the greatest man that ever lived, the man that God Almighty worked through, and I say he worked through it, had this said about him.

His letters are weighty and powerful, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech consensual. The learned Corinthians said, that man Paul, they said, well, you don't want to listen to him. He writes tremendous letters, all right.

They'd been reading 1 Corinthians, and they said, that got stuck. They said, he writes tremendous letters, but they said he's a disappointment. They said, when the people come in fact the place to see the man that wrote that letter, here's a man whose bodily presence is weak and whose speech is compensable.

And here was the Holy Ghost doing an everlasting work through a man that had no pulpit presence at all and had no golden qualities in his voice. He would have flunked out if he'd have tested out for a radio announcer.

Nobody would have had him because he didn't have the golden seductive and delectable qualities that could be in a voice to get the ladies to buy what he wants them to buy. Now, a personality is another quality.

They say, well, the man, the man's personality simply sparkles. Down the years, I have watched those sparklers. Do you ever notice what a sparkler does? How it excites every kid for four blocks around for one minute, and then you hold a hot stick in your hand that soon cools off and that's your sparkler.

And these fellas were the sparkling personalities that have come up and gone. Here I am, an old codger, and I have lived to see a positive, gorgeous George parade of lover boyniks who have come up and sparkled and gone down and sparkled and gone down.

Well, the Holy Ghost, my brother, is going to rule out all this sparkle and charm and pulpit presence and magnetism. That's another word, magnetism and dynamism. Those are lovely words and talent, but they don't mean anything because the man that God works through was the man who had a contemptible look and a weak, a contemptible speech and a weak look.

Now, I don't say that God couldn't take a handsome man and work through him, but he would not work through his handsomeness. I do not say that God could not take a man with a dynamic personality and work through him, but he'd never use his dynamic personality.

He would work through that, beneath that, and beyond that, but he'd never use that. The Holy Ghost doesn't mean it. What does the mighty, holy Ghost, whose breath brought the world into being, what does he need of your bright eyes and curly hair?

What does he need of your vibrant voice or mind? He doesn't need it. This is awful humbling, and we'd like to be able, we'd like when we retire, to have people come around and say, look at all this that this man did.

If he did it, it'll die. If he did it, it'll pass. But if he was a humble organ through which the Holy Ghost did it, it'll live and it'll last and hell can't burn it up nor time can wear it out because it'll have the qualities of deity in it.

Thou remainest, O God. Thou remainest. And you'll get a lot of religious people well fed and coffeed up and get them in a warm room with a lot of good-looking women and bald-headed men and a good musical instrument and you'll get them to going and, brother, they can move into the flesh fast.

You think to hear and look and see and behold and all the rest. But as a mouse eats his way into a cheese and thinks it's heaven, so a lot of us Christians are eating our way into the kingdom of God. Come and believe on Christ and let's go eat.

And so we're busy eating ourselves, eating ourselves into the work of God. My brother, we all have to eat. Some of us ought to eat more than we do, I suppose, and get a little flesh on, but the work of God is something else altogether.

The work of God doesn't depend on good social spirits. It's another thing. It is the eternal spirit working through gifts which he has imparted, which are also eternal, to do an eternal work. And anything that falls short of it is simply religion and nothing more.

So God gets all the honor in man and stands reverently with his head bowed. He says, Thine be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Now I repeat the critical need in the church is the church should have these gifts, these organs, through which the spirit can do his work.

The Continuity of Spiritual Gifts in the Church

And because the gifts are so rare, now don't think the gifts are not present in the church. They are. There's never been a time when there weren't a few of the gifts present somewhere in the church or the church could not have clung together.

The fact that there is a consecutive link upon link and link upon link in a chain of spiritual Christianity down the years shows that the spirit's gifts have always been present in the church, even sometimes among those who didn't understand or didn't believe.

Now, what does the scripture say? Scripture says, Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost is come upon you. And it says, Be filled with the Spirit. And it says, Covet earnestly the best gifts. And it says, Seek after love, but desire spiritual gifts.

Paul never meant to say to the Corinthians what a lot of fundamentalists have made him say. He never meant to say to the Corinthians that they were to choose between love and the gifts of the Spirit. He said, Follow after love, but desire spiritual gifts.

And then he said, In case you want to know what gift I think is the most important, why, rather, that you might prophesy. And by prophesy, he did not mean foretell events. He meant that God would put in the heart and the body and mind and throat and nerves of a man a strange, beautiful ability that would enable that man or perhaps that woman to speak with a strange quality of conviction that is more than an everlasting, maybe a housewife, maybe it's a man who sweets the street, maybe it's a bishop, maybe it's an evangelist, maybe it's a humble pastor in a country parish unknown.

Whoever it may be, he has a strange quality to speak with conviction and inspiration and lip that is not human but divine. And the results, while they may not be vast, for grace and size have a lot to do with it, they will be eternal and permanent.

So it is not an either-or. Either take thirteen, which is love, or twelve, which is gifts. But the man of God said, both, both, covet earnestly the best gift, and yet I show you a more excellent way, not another way to take in contradistinction to the way of gifts, but the way to make your gifts matter and mean something.

That is love. Now, somebody says, but what about, isn't everybody, doesn't everybody have the Spirit? Yes. And every Christian has, and in 1 Corinthians 12 we are told that. We're all baptized into one body, by one Spirit, and Paul says in Romans 8 that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his, and Christ dwells in you, except he be reprobate, so that every Christian does have a measure of the Spirit.

But the same chapter in which Paul explained this, he said, I don't want you to be ignorant about spiritual gifts and covet earnestly the best gift. So it's the fact that we have a measure of the Spirit when we're converted was all Paul wanted us to know, he'd have said that and quit.

But he went on to explain at great length. And all this is the Christian's birthright. It's not alone for the great, it's the birthright of the humblest saints. 1 Corinthians 1, 18 -29 tells us that the people that were Christians in those early days were simple people.

He said, Where is the wise, where is the scribe, where is the disputer of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? But after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God.

It pleased God for the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe. For you see, O calling brethren, how that not many wise men, after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.

The Humble Vessel Used in Revival

We were talking, and when we were having a prayer yesterday, we pray three times a week here, we preachers, that is, our times of prayer, along with all the other prayer meetings that are here and there in the Church and on Sundays.

But we were discussing that little girl, that sixteen-year-old girl in Wales, during the revival with Evan Roberts. She would sing solos, and they weren't much for singing solos. They were more choral people as well, as you know.

And they sang the Metrical Psalter, which didn't lend itself to solo work very much. But this girl, and I've forgotten her name, she was sixteen at the time, she would rise and sing. And as she sang, it was not the lyrical beauty of her voice.

No doubt there are singers today, a little ponzer, a taboli, or whoever it might be, may be better singers. But she was a gifted soul. And the Holy Ghost was singing through that girl. And the result was that audience would melt, melt.

And Evan Roberts would rise to preach and there was not much to do but quote the scriptures and add a little. She had melted them. And wherever she would go, it was the same. Thank God they didn't know enough over there to put her on the radio and spoil her.

Thank God they didn't start writing her life history. Thank God she didn't write a track, My Life, from the nursery to the pulpit. She didn't know to do that. She was a simple spirit-possessed girl. And when she sang, the Welsh people were melted like snow before the rising sun.

And then it was an easy job for the preacher to preach. And not a music critic anywhere ever said she had a good voice. But she had something better than a good voice. God took the despised and weak things of the world to confound the mighty.

Desire, Determination, and Desperation

Now what shall we do about all this? Shall we freeze up and hide and say, I'm not going to go fanatical? Let me say to you, as far as I know you, brethren, you could move in the direction of fanaticism at sixty miles an hour for twenty-four hours and still be a hundred miles short of it.

You hear me? There's not much chance of anybody being fanatical around here. We're stone-cold. That's our problem. We're stone-cold. If it isn't fanaticism we need to be afraid of, it's frost! What shall we do then?

Now, if you were in danger, I'd warn you. If there was anybody around here that would start back there and do handsprings down the aisle, I'd warn you. And I'd say, watch that, that's not God. Danger of fanaticism.

But there is no danger of fanaticism here. I get a grunt now and then from McAfee, and nothing from the rest of you. So there's no danger of fanaticism around here. What shall we do? We sang it, bring your empty earthen vessels.

Now remember, you can't all rush up here and stand around and look embarrassed and sing bring your empty earthen vessels and go out and say it wasn't that wonderful. You might just as well as stay home.

To be filled with the Spirit is a most solemn and most searching and most sometimes at first painful experience to go through. The actual Holy Ghost is not painful. He's the gentle love of God. But getting ourselves ready, getting cleaned up, getting poured out, getting confessed out, getting forgiven out, getting straightened out with people, getting restitution made, that's going to be pretty painful.

So I'm going to give you three D's. I'm not a literative preacher, but I'm going to give you three D's. And I'm going to tell you the first two D's won't do you any good, except as the first two steps will take you to the third, so these two first steps will take you to the third.

They are desire, determination, and desperation. Now, you put those down back of your mind. Now, you slick, well-ordered, well-taught toters of big Bibles, you will never be filled with the Holy Ghost until you desire to be.

Second, you will never be filled with the Holy Ghost, even if you do desire to be, until you become determined to be. And though you should be determined that you are going to go through, you will not be filled until in desperation you throw yourself into the arms of God.

I wrote something and I preached something here a few weeks ago, in which I said, around the shining light which is God, there's a zone of obscurity, and we can't think our way into it. We have to close our eyes and make the leap of faith into the arms of Jesus.