Fear of the Lord — Winkie Pratney

The Fear of the Lord as God's First Requirement

What is the first thing that God requires of us, what would you say? To help you so you don't have to read the whole Bible, I'd like you to look at Deuteronomy chapter 10. How many of you would say that God wants us, first of all, to love Him?

Put your hands up. That is utterly true. How many would say God wants us to serve Him? Put your hands up. That is also true. How about to walk in all of God's ways? Those are all true. God wants us. How many would say to keep all of His commandments, do what He says?

Okay, that's good. All of those are true. But they are not the first thing that God asks us to do. He said it quietly, but it was true. In Deuteronomy chapter 10 and verse 12, the very first thing that God lists before all these other true and significant and important things is the thing that is most missing from the Western world, and that is the fear of the Lord.

God says, first of all, before anything else, before you understand what it means to love Me, before you understand what it means to walk in My ways, before you understand what it means to keep My commandments and to serve Me, you have to understand what it means to fear Me.

And in the Scriptures, many, many times, we will see this praise, the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 28, 14 says, happy is the man that feareth always. In Proverbs 1, chapter 7, it says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

And there are many, many Scriptures like this. When we come across this praise, to fear the Lord, very often new translations will translate it something like, to awesomely reverence God or to honor Him.

But the word fear is a good word, and I want to explore it with you briefly tonight, because I believe that when the fear of the Lord comes on an individual person, or on a group, or on a nation, we're very close to having a visitation from the He who is the fear.

Perfect Love and the Spirit God Does Not Give

There is, first of all, though, a couple of strange verses that I'd like you also to look up. And perhaps somebody would like to read this out. In 1 John, chapter 4, and verse 18. Somebody want to look that one up?

Have you got it? You're very fast. Yes, you got it. Okay, read it out nice and loud for us, please. There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out all fear. So then. Okay, that's the main bit we want.

No fear in love. Perfect love drives out all fear. And then 2 Timothy 1 .7. Somebody want to look that one up? 2 Timothy 1 .7. Somebody might have memorized this. What's that? Who's got it? Who got it?

A girl? Guy? Another guy? Come on, girls. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Oh, there's... What? What? There's thousands of them. Oh! You are so fast, do you see? Nice and loud, then.

Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. You can't? All right, say it loud. I'll go out there. All right.

Well, God did not give us a spirit of humility, but of a power of love.

A spirit of humility. Or? Fear. Now, here's a strange thing. God tells us, happy is the man who fears also, always. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We're constantly enjoying to fear the Lord, and then the Scripture comes right back, and it says there's no fear in love.

Perfect love casts out all fear. And God has not given us a spirit of fear. What on the fat is going on here? Well, of course, when you see something like this, your first recourse is to look it up in the original.

And that's what we usually do. We hope, then, that there'll be two different words for fear. There'll be the word for fear, which God doesn't give us, and the word for fear, which He enjoins on us. Unfortunately, there is no difference.

It is the same word. A bit embarrassing, is it not? The Hebrew word is the equivalent of the Greek word. Now, what I want to do, then, is to say this to you. Whatever the fear of the Lord is, it feels like, in many, many ways, the fear you're not supposed to have.

Ordinary Sources of Fear

So let me give you, very quickly, and if you'd like to write these down, what people are afraid of. And you write these really quickly. First of all, people are legitimately afraid of something ugly or monstrous.

You open the door, there's a being out there, his eyeballs are on stalks. This would tend to make you afraid. All horror movies are based on this. Meet somebody whose face looks like an explosion in a hamburger.

Halloween masks they have, and all this stuff. Ugly and monstrous. Secondly, you could be legitimately afraid of somebody who is a known evil character. Somebody who is just, when you're listening to the radio, and it says, the Daranaki Strangler has escaped.

He is out there somewhere in Auckland. And then his friend, the Papakura Chainsaw Murderer, is also out there roaming the streets. So lock your doors. So you rush across, you lock your doors, and then you hear footsteps coming up your path.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, and then you hear, vroom, vroom. This would tend to make you afraid. Somebody or something that expresses a hostile attitude towards you. Scripture speaks about meeting a lion or bear that has been robbed of their cubs.

That would tend to be a being that expresses a hostile attitude towards you. You ran into a bear and somebody stole her cubs. You better have your running shoes on, Jack. And then number four, somebody who has declared their intent to harm you.

Somebody who said, I am going to get you for that. You will pay for this. A contract killer, a little call, hello, is your name so and so, sorry, hangs up. Jezebel, who said to Elijah after the confrontation with the prophets, by tomorrow about this time, your life is going to be like one of my dead prophets.

And poor Elijah headed out into the hills. He was afraid. And then, finally, something utterly alien. You could actually stun them. You could do a series of movies and call them alien. And it would really be scary.

Something utterly unlike us. Something terrifyingly different. Now, these are what you could call legitimate fears. They are things that ought to cause some kind of fear. But God is none of these things.

God's Beauty, Goodness, and Relation to Humanity

God is the most beautiful being in the universe. He is not ugly. He is not monstrous. God has perfect moral character. He is absolutely wonderful. He has never expressed hostility towards man. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite.

He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Nobody was ever able to find fault with Jesus. Not even his enemies. Not even Pilate. When he examined him, he said, I find no fault in this man.

And not only has God not declared intent to harm us. He has, in the contrary, declared his intent to help us. In that beautiful scripture, God, soul of the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

The only thing close to that which the Bible speaks about when it says the fear of the Lord is this thing alien. But actually, God is not alien. He is not so other as to be unnatural. Because you see, God made us in his moral image.

And we are related to God by his creator. We are his creation and he made us as persons. So though God is utterly greater than man, he doesn't say my thoughts are alien to your thoughts. He says my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.

And my ways are higher than your ways. Francis Schaeffer mentioned once a movie. It was one of those dumb Christian movies. I just pray we have a revival and we get some people like Spielberg saved in some serious movies.

It's one of these dumb Christian movies. And it was even in another language. And it was about a man and his son who accidentally stepped on an anthill. And they wanted to apologize to the ants. And so they meant no harm to the ants.

And so the son, through some magical, mystical means, became an ant and went to visit the ants. And he was a different color ant from all the other ants. And they didn't like him and they killed him. That was the movie.

I think this was supposed to be a parable of the incarnation and the crucifixion. Well, some poor atheist was dragged to see this would-be Christian movie. And he came out of it disgusted. And this is what he said to Dr. Schaeffer.

What sense does it make for man to die for ants to win the ants? Francis Schaeffer said no sense at all. Because man is not related to the ant. But God is related to us because he made us in his image.

And he gave, his own son became man. Understand, some people ask this question. Will there be life on other planets? Well, there is other kinds of life in the universe. Angels, and they don't look like little babies with nappies on that shoot you in St. Valentine's Day.

They're heavy-duty beings. There's seraphs and there's all kinds of other beings out there. I'll tell this, if there is other life other than angels that was God created on some other worlds. Remember this, God only had one son.

And he became man. So man as he was designed to be, we'll put it like this. You as you were designed to be are the utterly, the utter pinnacle of God's creation. And C .S. Lewis said if you met an ordinary, dull, boring Christian 2000 years from now in the presence of God.

You'd be very strongly tempted to fall on your knees and worship him. When God restores what his original dream for man is. And that final accounting when all the dead, small and great stand before God.

And God finally demonstrates the family that he's had in his heart to put together since before he made the universe. You will see that the greatest of all of God's creation was mankind. He only had one son.

At the right hand of the father there is glorified, exalted, risen God-man, the man Christ Jesus. Remember that. These are not the reasons then why we are to fear the Lord. Let me give you now some other reasons why people have the sense of fear or respect or awe, which is translated fear.

Size and Power as Sources of Awe

And I'll give you four of these. First of all, fear is related to size. I don't know if you've ever run into something utterly massive. I've been a few times to the U .S. and one time, many times I've seen in movies, of course, the Grand Canyon.

But the Grand Canyon is an awesome crack in the ground. It's not just your basic small crack. Stand at the end of the Grand Canyon and your first overwhelming impression is like this. Now, this is true.

Size, it's true whether you're talking about height, whether you're talking about depth, or you're talking about width. Anything that is great in size creates the sense of awe, which is actually a form of fear.

When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and you look down and it is that deep, you don't go, oh yeah, Grand Canyon. You go, oh baby, Grand Canyon. A second thing that creates a sense of awe or fear, legitimate fear, is power.

Now, if you take a little flashlight battery, the Energizer, one that keeps driving the bunny around. If you take one of those little batteries, you've got, say, 1 .5 volts. And you could put that on your tongue and it wouldn't do very much.

You'd feel a small tingle. On the other hand, you could take a 9-volt battery and do the same and you would probably feel a little bit more of a tingle. Then you could run a couple of wires from your car battery, try that on your tongue, and you will have a smoky feeling and not be able to taste anything for a couple of days.

Then you could conceivably plug a pair of scissors into a power socket and you would have a 240, 250-volt tingle. But if you get hit by a bolt of lightning, you will get anything from 150 ,000 to a 500 ,000-volt tingle.

And very few people go, oh, when somebody switches a flashlight on. But if lightning comes down very close to where you are, you go, whoa, like that. And it is legitimate fear. Remember we said St. Augustine almost got hit by lightning and it drove him straight into a monastery.

He said, if I survive this storm, Sir Dan, I'm going to become a monk. And he did survive and he did become a monk. The next, I went to, I actually visited Niagara Falls. We got some little, we got some neat little streams here and some pretty good waterfalls.

But Niagara Falls is a serious waterfall. And you can actually sort of stand, not really underneath it, but there's sort of an overhang place where you can watch it. You've got to put on these big heavy sort of raincoats and stand there and you watch this water.

It's just like, it's like half the ocean falling every quarter of a second. It's just like, wham, like that. And there's actually a little boat that goes near that. Can you imagine being on that boat, going around with half the ocean falling just a little while?

Beauty, Majesty, and Purity

I don't care if you are Superman. If you fall over that, you're going to drown. And then something else creates a sense of awe or fear, and that is beauty. Now that sounds a strange one, but beauty can actually make people afraid.

Something utterly beautiful can utterly stop people's, literally stop people's breath. For instance, fireworks. Why do we turn out 5th of November every year and watch a bunch of stuff? You know, everybody's standing.

This is what it's like. Must be having a stroke, I see flashes. Maybe just one brief scene in a ballet or maybe a song or something. There's something so utterly beautiful that just for a second, you just can't breathe.

It utterly stops you. It is a fear, but it's a wonderful kind of fear. Sometimes I stood at a sunset. We've got some neat sunsets in New Zealand. Just stand there. Just for, my God, every day he just paints all kinds of different stuff.

Never repeats himself twice. Just awesome. And then there's another thing. I don't know what to call it. Dignity, perhaps. If I said majesty, you'd understand that's one of the songs or one of the words we use in some of the choruses.

We sing about the Lord. Majesty, worship his, you know, that thing. Unfortunately, there is very few political figures that we can give this to. Now, the Queen used to be an example of dignity. But poor Queenie, her whole family needs to get saved.

They're just in terrible shape, and they're showing up in all of the bad rags, and it's just awful. But perhaps the closest we have today are either a movie star or a rock star, you know? Maybe movies or some MTV blowout.

Some Nirvana-looking dude looking like he's stoned out of his gourd. And yet, kids will meet him like, you know, that thing, see? Or movie stars. I've met a few movie stars. As a matter of fact, I accidentally got in a movie one time.

It was really quite wild. I was coming back about, I don't know, one or two in the morning in San Francisco, carrying my little bag. I got off the plane, one of these midnight special flights, and I walked along this long corridor, and there seemed to be a whole bunch of lights put up along the side, just like this big spot there.

And then there were all these people walking out, one or two in the morning in San Francisco. You do not have sort of these people. You know, there were sort of like couples walking, beautifully dressed, and a token black, a token brown, a token, you know, Asian.

It was just, I kept looking at all these people, and I wondered, what is there? And then I walked right onto a movie set. I mean, I didn't stop. I just kept walking, and then up came the star of the show.

It happened to be a Mannox episode. It was an ancient detective in the early days, and he walked right up. I didn't stop and go, oh, you're my cutters. You know, I just went straight on past, and then about a year later, a guy said, you know, I saw somebody who looked just like you.

And I said, yes, yes, I was on that set. I was. That's about the closest we have to that sense of fear that comes from dignity or glory or something. But there is one other, and this one, too, is exceedingly rare in our culture, and that is purity.

There's something utterly stunning, astonishing about purity. Mother Teresa has it. You know, when you meet that woman, you just, you stagger. She makes real cynical people that are just sort of like, you know, ah, yeah, another religious figure.

She meets them, and her utter, selfless, transparent love for God just shatters them. Matter of fact, they start tiptoeing around and whispering. St. Francis of Assisi had that kind of thing. In Salvation Army, lassies in William Booth's day faced some very terrifying opposition.

Matter of fact, Salvation Army, as they went into cities to try and recapture them for God, in one particular period of time, the opposition raised up what they call the Skeleton Army, over 5 ,000 real gang members there really were, specifically to stop the Salvation Army.

And when the Sallies came in to this thing marching, singing these songs and confronting these towns, they would run around them with ropes and throw burning sulfur on them and shoot ship's rockets at them and carry dead animals and throw them at them and rotten eggs and fruit and stuff and spit on them.

It was just, this whole army was mobilized to stop them. And William Booth sent out these, some of them, 16, 17, 18-year-old girls, right into the most vile, rotten, filthy dens of iniquity London ever had.

One particular time London had over 20 ,000 hookers in just a very short space, just a couple of miles of London, just utterly filled. And William Booth sent out into the middle of this these girls. Their utter love for God and their purity stopped some of these lecherous dudes in their tracks.

Matter of fact, Catherine Booth, mother of Salvation Army, was out one night. She was out witnessing and there was a guy there. She was a fairly attractive girl and a guy came up to her. And she didn't, I don't think she had a uniform on at that time.

And he thought maybe she was out looking for a good time or something. So he came up to her and he said, he said, you want an appointment? And she just looked at him and he took her silence as consent.

God's Greatness, Power, and the Storm on the Sea

And he reached into his pocket and he pulled out his little notebook and he said, where? And she said, at the judgment seat of God, sir. Now I want to suggest to you that the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, before which none of obedience to these commandments or anything make much sense to you, is intimately related to these things we have on the board.

First of all, God is immensely bigger than anything else or anybody you have ever heard of. And I mean utterly. I flew through a thunderstorm once in Houston. And it was right in the middle of a lightning storm and it was terrifying.

There was stuff just flashing all the way around. And then when you came out of that, and you were utterly helpless, you just had to get out of it. When you came down, underneath were the lights of Houston.

Houston was all ablaze with lights, but it was a little tame, safe light. The light up there wasn't safe at all. It was just utterly scary light. David said, when I consider the heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him?

And I suggest to you that when the Lord comes near, he is the most awesomely great being. I mean, you look out there and that was done in a day, just by a word. Think about that. Just decorations, as a matter of fact.

Not even a big deal. I had to speak in an astronomy class once. A secular class. The guy said, would you like to speak? So I said to the Lord, he asked me to speak in this astronomy class. I had a pair of binoculars once.

Do you want me to talk there? The Lord said, yes. So I took as my subject, is there life on other planets, including this one? I looked at the possibility of man actually being here, within a chemical presupposition.

When I started off, I looked around and all around, all these star charts that these poor fourth-year astronomy students had to memorize. And I couldn't help it. I just burst out laughing. The professor looked at me.

I said, I'm sorry. I said, how many of you have really spent a lot of time learning these charts? I said, the reason why it's so funny to me is, very soon, they're all going to be worthless. Because God is going to recycle the whole universe, and if you're still around, you're going to have to learn it again.

None of us have even an inkling of a clue what the word infinite means. Because everything we have has a beginning, and it's finite. But when God comes, the one who made the worlds, I always think, I can't help thinking again of Moses, the man with the big mouth, you know?

There in the crack in the rock, and saying, God, I want to see your glory. Okay, I want to see your glory. And I just, I know what God is thinking. Do you want to see my face? No man can look at my face and live.

I'll tell you what, I'll put you in a crack in a rock, and I'll cover you with my hand, and I'll pass by in front, and you won't see my face. You'll just see my afterglow, what I leave behind on the rocks when I'm gone.

And as Moses stood there in the crack, and the glory that made the worlds went in front of that crack in the rock, I know he thought, I am an utter idiot. I have no idea why I asked this, and I'm probably going to die right now.

Number two, God is awesomely more powerful. We don't really understand or appreciate that, because, see, God is also a very kind being. He is a disciplined being. He is a regulated being. He is a being who is not lawless.

And for us, power means usually vengeance type thing. You know, somebody punched me, I punched them back, and I hit them really bad and knocked all those teeth out of me. It was great. But God is so disciplined in his power.

He doesn't just do stuff. If he treated us the way we deserve to be treated, the way we treat other people, none of us would be here. In university, sometimes kids would stand up and they'd go, God's so powerful, why doesn't he just stop the war?

Why doesn't he just stop the war right now? Why doesn't he do it? Yeah, they do stuff like that. Ingersoll used to stand up with a watch, you know, and he'd go. He'd blaspheme God for about five minutes, shake his fist into heaven, and then he'd go, if there is a God, why doesn't he just kill me right now?

I'll give him three minutes. You know, and he'd just stand up there. Okay, I'm timing it, I'm timing it. And nobody would go. And then he'd wait one minute, two minutes, three minutes. Nothing there. Nothing.

That's what he'd do. Some old wise minister said, does the wheelady think he can exhaust the patience of God in three minutes? God has such a cool sense of humor. Voltaire, famous French rationalist and skeptic who made a career out of attacking God and Christians, held up a Bible one day and he said, I'll have this book in the morgue in a hundred years.

He did not drop dead of a heart attack. That lightning did not turn him into a potato chip. But a hundred years went past. And guess who was in the morgue? What is infinitely funny is that Voltaire's house had become the headquarters of the Geneva Bible Society.

God has a subtle, not malicious, sense of humor. In Mark 4, and you might like to quickly glance at that, Mark chapter 4, we have an account of this power. Verse 36, When they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship, and there were also with him other little ships.

And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so it was now full. And he was in the hind part of the ship, asleep on a pillow. And they woke him and said to him, Master, do you not care that we perish?

This isn't worried at all. He's fast asleep. And Jesus arose, and he rebuked the wind, and he said to the sea, Peace be still. Now this, King James, in whatever version you have, really can't do justice to this thing.

The phrase that is used there in these parallel passages is that Jesus stands up. Now remember, the disciples are terrified. They are really afraid because they see the power of the storm. They know we could all die here.

The ship is filling up with water, and there's Jesus. He's fast asleep. They can imagine all drowning and standing before God, and God saying, What did you do with my son? He drowned. He just shouldn't have taken him out.

Don't you care that we're dying? And Jesus just gets up, and he goes over to the side of the ship. And this is what he actually says. He says a single phrase. It is a very strange phrase, but loosely translated, it is the same thing he used.

I don't know if you've ever seen those dogs on Magnum P .I., the ones that chase Magnum, all of those big Doberman pinchers, like this, you know, those kind of dogs? They're always yapping and chasing him around.

You imagine one of those dogs, like this, and you get, it looks like an ice cream cone made out of wire, just like mesh ice cream cone, and it's called a muzzle. And the dog, and you go, and you stick this right over his mouth.

You know? That is the phrase that Jesus uses the storm. The muzzle, it's like, everybody really gets it. He goes, he doesn't go, Peace, be still. Don't do that. He goes, Quiet! Quiet!

And the storm goes, Oh! Sorry, we didn't know you were in the boat, and it just cools right out.

Now, what I want you to see is this. The wind ceased, and there was a great calm. It just stopped like that. Now, check this. And they feared exceedingly. Now, they were afraid before, but when Jesus said what he said, and the storm did what it did, they were utterly afraid.

That's the fear of the Lord. They were impressed with the violence and the power of the storm. But with a single word, Jesus cooled it just like that. And they thought, What kind of man is this? And that already hung around them.

Yeah, he's son of God. Yeah, sure, son of God. We know son of God. But this is son of God. You know what I mean? You understand how you can, yeah, I love God. Yeah, I love God. I do his word, and I serve him.

But you've never seen him talk to a storm yet. And when you think that he loves you, you think it's because you are pretty cool. I mean, he was lucky to get me. That fear of the Lord is a scary, scary thing.

Revival, Judgment, and the Beauty of God

Matter of fact, I know this guy in the U .S. He's still alive. He's almost blind. He's a man almost memorized. Huge. Just about the whole Bible, I think, he's memorized. There may be one or two names in numbers that he's forgotten, but this guy knows the whole Bible.

They used to call him the walking Bible. As just a young man, he memorized the Bible. He's a street preacher. His name is Holy Hubert. He's had most of his teeth knocked out by radicals. He has massive red hair.

He's quite old now. He's getting into his 70s, and he freckles. But he was just a radical, radical street preacher. And I don't know how many times he's had his teeth knocked out by various people for preaching in Berkeley, California, and radical places.

One time, Holy Hubert was in a church, and he was preaching a very, very serious message. And a man stood up in the back and pulled out a knife and said, Hubert, I'm going to kill you. And Hubert said, you stop right where you are.

And he said, no, I'm going to kill you. And he walked straight down the thing with this knife out, and Hubert said, you stop right where you are. And the guy said, no, I'm going to kill you. And Hubert said, no, God's going to kill you.

And the good guy took one more step, and he dropped dead. And they went, oh, the church went, oh, oh, oh, like this. And then somebody said, call an ambulance. And Hubert said, no, call an undertaker.

And he went on with his message. See? I remember hearing Murray Thompson long, long ago. Murray had been in a revival, and it sort of spoiled him for the rest of his life. He never could be satisfied with anything else.

Revivals can really shake you up, you know. You taste of that, and you're not content with anything else. Great meetings, tremendous souls, nothing. He saw it, spoiled him for the rest of his life. And I remember Murray coming back from that awakening.

He was just filled with fire. He wanted to see all of New Zealand burn from one end to the other. And he stood up, and he said, this was an Easter sermon. He said, you know, he said, we need revival. And there was some lady sitting in the front.

One of those ladies with a bun and hairy legs and tennis shoes and a Bible as large as a piano. Murray said, we need to see revival in New Zealand. She said, amen, brother. And then he said, and when revival comes, the book of Acts will live again.

Oh, amen, brother. It's getting louder and louder and louder. And then Murray said, you know what happened in the book of Acts? She's all ready for the biggest amen of all. And then he said, people died in church.

Silence there from the front row. When we speak about beauty, there is something utterly lovely in your life that you prize above everything else. You know, we look for beauty in different things. Some people find it in works of art.

And Lewis talked about, in the book The Weight of Glory, he spoke about this thing, glory. And he said, when we see something utterly lovely, it might be a person. You know, you might think there's one person above every other person you've ever met who is the epitome of someone utterly lovely and beautiful to you.

And for some people, it's just like a painting. Maybe it's a song. There is a Bruce Springsteen video, Dancing in the Dark, where one girl gets the ultimate dream come true. It's a black and white video.

Springsteen is doing his thing. He's quite good looking in this video. He hasn't left his wife. He is dancing in this thing, and there's a girl sitting right in the front row. She's right there with everybody else.

Right near the end of the video, the unbelievable happens. Springsteen, a great superstar, reaches into the audience and pulls her out from the crowd to finish off the song and the dance with him. That's the ultimate.

And I was like, Bruce Springsteen, that thing. But Lewis talks about how when we see something lovely, we don't just want to look at it. We want something we can hardly put into words. We want to be in it.

We want to be part of it. We want to have our lives merge with that thing. You see this sunset, and it's so utterly lovely, you wish you could just sort of be that sunset. But the sad thing is that when you get close to the really lovely things, you're never really there.

You get there, and you still haven't got it. You've got the painting, and you can light it, but you still don't own it. There's something deeper than that. He said, beauty smiles, but not to welcome us.

Face was turned in our direction, but she didn't see us. We haven't been welcomed into the dance. We're not part of the song. And the sun goes down, and we stand there cold and alone. We're all left out.

But he said, those midges are not the beauty. They're just a small little fragment of another beauty. They are just the temporary little messengers that bring down something on which all beauty is based.

And he said, if we cannot handle the dregs at the bottom of the stream, if they are too much for us, what is it like at the fountainhead where that beauty comes from? I want to read you something that took place just before Azusa.

Azusa Street and Experiencing Christ's Presence

Azusa, you will remember, some of you, was that tremendous outpouring that took place in 1906 as a consequence of the visitation of God in Azusa. A great chunk of world missions is presently driven. In other words, because of what God did in that little livery stable there in Los Angeles in 1906, with a black one-eyed preacher called Willie Seymour, millions and millions of people, that's really his name.

I can't help it, that's really his name. That was his name, I know. You can call him by his official name if you wish, William T. Seymour, but that's his name, Willie Seymour. And he did. Before Azusa broke out, one man of God, and this came, a number of different people had been impressed to pray around that time.

This is the man's record. One evening, July the 3rd, I felt strongly impressed to go to the Little Penile Hall in Pasadena to pray. There I found Brother Berkner ahead of me. He had been led of God to the hall.