Worship - Preoccupation With God — Leonard Ravenhill

We were in a shopping mall a few months ago, and two boys came and stood by the side of me. I don't know why. I guess they were about fifteen years of age, and one said to the other, have you seen a certain film?

And he said, yes. The young man that asked the question said, I've seen it three times, and the other young fellow said eagerly, I've seen it thirteen times. I just wondered in my mind, if you went to church or wherever you fellowship, and the preacher preached the same sermon thirteen Sundays, what you would do?

There was a great preacher in America once by the name of Henry Morehouse, and he was conducting a series of meetings, and the first night he preached on You Must Be Born Again. He did the same, used the same text the second night, the third night, the fourth night, the fifth night, and when he left the platform, a bunch of deacons were there, and they grabbed hold of him and said, listen, we're getting complaints, you preach on the same text every night.

Will you give us a promise that you change the text for tomorrow night? He said yes. So they spread the rumor all over the small town, he's going to preach on another text tomorrow night. And some of them got a bit tired of hearing the first text, you know, they crowded in the next night.

And now he said, I've got a different text for you, and they all were breathless. I preached for five nights on You Must Be Born Again, and now I've got another text. Have you been born again? Well, I'm saying that not for an excuse or a reason, but I've covered some of this area before, but I want to cover it again because I'm sure you didn't grasp it all, and I'm sure it's very vital in our lives in these critical days in which we're living.

When God wanted to explain to us how he made the world, he took only one chapter in the Bible with thirty-one verses. And when he wanted to explain how the tabernacle in the wilderness was built, he took seven chapters and two hundred and forty-three verses.

Now this proves again to me that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and our thoughts are not his thoughts. I would much rather God had taken two hundred and seventy-three verses to tell us how he made the world, and I'm not that interested or fascinated with the tabernacle so much.

But he turned it round. One chapter for the whole of creation. Seven chapters for that rough-looking thing in the wilderness. But it's called again, the tabernacle in the wilderness. I want to start tonight because I want to talk about this great subject again of worship.

In the Church of Jesus Christ today, we have taught people to work, and we have taught them to witness. We have not taught them to worship. Prayer, speaking generally, is preoccupation with our needs.

Praise is preoccupation with our blessings. Worship is preoccupation with God himself. That's when Himmler said, my goal is God himself. Not joy, not peace, not even blessing. As I said last night, the Pentecost of the New Testament is married to what?

It's married to poverty, persecution, prisons, and privation. Pentecost today, at least, we're trying to marry to prosperity, personalities, and any other thing that lifts our senses and stirs our emotions.

You see, the Pentecost of the New Testament dealt with character. Character. And you seldom hear anybody interpret purity. Today we have lost the anointing of Pentecost because we have lost purity. And we've lost purity because we've lost piety.

And you can't have piety without purity, and you can't have purity without Pentecost. In Acts chapter 15 and verses 8 and 9, Peter is reporting what happened there in the house of Cornelius. And he says, God, who bear them witness in the house of Cornelius, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us, and people grab that and say, well, they must have got the gift of tongues, and maybe they did, I'm not arguing.

But that's not what he stresses. I remind you again that when they went up into the temple at the hour of prayer, Peter and John had been in the most amazing manifestation of God in history. The descent of the Holy Spirit on men.

It wasn't the first time the Spirit of God had invaded personalities in the Old Testament, but not generally. And again, I remind you, the first martyr in the Church of Jesus Christ was not an apostle.

He was just a deacon. The great revival that they had down in Ephesus there, it was not through one of the twelve apostles. It was by an ordinary deacon by the name of Philip. You see, no longer was the anointing tied up to the hierarchy, the great high priest.

All the old system had been abolished. And yet Peter says the remarkable thing there in the upper room is this, that God who knows their hearts, purified their hearts by faith. You don't find Peter backsliding after Pentecost.

You don't find him going up and down, he doesn't vacillate. I said the Old Testament and the New Testament had an urgency. Their urgency was like Paul, he said, I press toward the mark. The attitude of the Church today is relax and be raptured.

Eat drink and be married, Jesus is coming, and the world goes to hell fire. And the whole thing is due to one thing, which is a part again of this wonderful mystery if you like, of worship, it's due to lack of L-O-V-E.

Look at the twenty-fourth chapter in the book of Exodus. I won't exhaust this tonight, don't worry, I might exhaust you, but I won't exhaust the message. If I preach it all it'll take about three hours and ten minutes, at least you'll be home by midnight, or midday tomorrow, one of the two.

So thank you. So maybe just Don and I will be here at seven o 'clock in the morning, bring us some lunch, breakfast. Matthew, pardon me Matthew, Exodus chapter twenty-four, and the first verse, he said unto Moses, come up unto the Lord, thou Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and the seventy of the elders of Israel, and what?

Worship. He doesn't say build an altar, he doesn't say bring a gift, he doesn't say have a choir. Now look, if he's going to go up with the seventy and about four others, they had left behind, oh well, they juggled with the figure, some people say there were a million people came out of Egypt into, across Jordan, and some people say there were five million.

But there had been a process of elimination, I want you to watch this. If the seventy-four leave all the millions that are there, then there are seventy and four of them, and gradually there's another process of elimination.

Now look at this staggering verse, I've never preached on it, I hope I dare to do it one day. Maybe you have, if you have, tell me after the meeting. Verse nine, Then went up Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel.

Now they're all together, Moses, and Aaron, and Nadab, and Abihu, that's four of them, and the seventy elders of Israel. Now look at this. And they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet, as it were, a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were, the body of heaven in its clearness, and upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand, also they saw God and did eat and drink.

There's nothing comparable to that till you get to the book of the Revelation. He's on a throne in majesty, he has a pavement under him like a sapphire stone. Now notice verse twelve, pardon me, go back to verse two.

We finished the first verse by saying, the seventy elders of Israel, they took him up and worshipped, but notice what it says, what does it say, afar off, worshipped afar off. And the next verse says, Moses alone shall come near unto the Lord.

Now you know in that old, that tabernacle there that's mentioned again in the twenty-fifth chapter there, it tells you in the twenty-fifth chapter the Lord spake unto Moses saying, and he told him what to do, this is the offering, verse three, that ye shall take of them, gold and silver and brass, purple and blue and scarlet and fine linen and goat's hair and ramskins dyed red and badgerskins and acacia wood, well heavens, what's attractive about that?

It's about the most unattractive thing you could ever see. If you'd seen that big building in the wilderness with badgerskins, you'd have said some old sheikh lives there. And yet in this place is the place where God is going to come in his glory.

There was an altar court, there was a holy place, and there was a holy of holies. In the altar court there was daylight, in the holy place there was candlelight, in the holy of holies there was no light.

Now in the economy of Israel a man could be a soldier when he was twenty years of age, because then and now you don't need brains to kill anybody, you can be an idiot and kill people. A man had to be twenty years before he could fight, he had to be twenty-five years of age before he could be a priest, and he had to be thirty years of age before he could be a high priest.

Again, outside there's daylight, here there's candlelight, inside there's no light. But a man could not go into the holy of holies until he was thirty years of age. Jesus didn't minister one moment until he was thirty.

John Baptist didn't minister one word until he was thirty. The Apostle Paul didn't minister until he was more than thirty, Moses was more than thirty. As a matter of fact he was eighty. The Apostle Paul was more than thirty.

You say, do I have to wait until I'm thirty? No, no, no, no. I don't believe in this economy you have to do that. The only thing that I can work out of that figure of thirty is this, that when the ark was built that Moses, pardon me, that Noah built, the walls had to be thirty feet high.

And the house that Solomon built, the walls had to be thirty feet high. It seems to me it's symbolic of perfection. In other words, it's symbolic of maturity. The priest must be an ordinary man, and then a priest, and then a high priest, and then when he's a high priest he goes into the holy of holies where there is no window, where there is no light, and when that curtain goes over it's pitch black.

But there happens to be something there. Look in the twenty-fifth chapter and verse seventeen, Thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half shall be the breadth thereof, skip over to verse twenty-two, and there will I meet with thee and will commune with thee above the mercy seat from between the two cherubims that are upon the ark of testimony.

Can you imagine the glory that must have been there? There's no light, no light at all. There's a lampstand in the holy place. There's no light in the holy of holies, except the presence of God comes.

After all, God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. Suddenly the blazing light of God comes and flashes. Can you imagine how that light reflected? You know when sometimes you say, I wish you'd dip your headlights as you come up the road you're blinding me.

Do you think the man could hardly stand the presence and glory of God when the light came and descended and suddenly the glory of God flashed back from those wings, those golden wings? The scripture calls it the Shekinah glory.

You know, we don't see much of that glory anymore, do we? When did you last tiptoe out of the sanctuary breathless? You couldn't say a word. There'd been such an impact of divine life, such an impact of the majesty and glory of God.

You just felt, please, please don't say a word to me, you'll spoil this whole thing. You see, the priest is having communion alone with God. If you go back into this 24th chapter, it says in the 16th verse, the glory of the Lord appeared upon Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it six days and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud and the sight of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the Lord of Israel.

And Moses went into the cloud. Now look, he had left the millions of people, he had come out with the seventy, and now he's left the seventy, he's with the four, and then he leaves the four and he's by himself up there in a cloud.

And the scripture says that God did not speak to him until the sixth day. People have tried to label this generation. Some say it's the most scientific age in history, some call it the atomic age. I would suggest it's the most impatient age.

We want everything doing immediately, instant coffee, instant this, instant something else. Here's a man that leaves everything, he's leading a nation, and he goes with seventy and then he leaves the seventy, and there are four, then he leaves the four, and he's by himself in a cloud, and he struggles up the mountain, there was no elevator to get him there.

And you'd imagine, we would think the trumpets would be there, we'd expect the red carpet to be there, we'd expect Gabriel to be welcoming us and say, you did a great job leaving Israel and struggling up the hill, oh how marvellous, and God kept him waiting for six days before he spoke to him.

And yet we expect to rush into the place of prayer and immediately say, Lord are you listening to us, because we're very busy and we suddenly don't have all day, let's listen. How much time do we take to worship him, in spirit and in truth, and in the very beauty of holiness?

He says a little further down here, let me find the chapter for you. In the thirtieth chapter of Exodus, he tells us in the twenty-third verse that thou shalt make unto thee principal spices, and it gives you a catalogue of the ingredients of the anointing oil, that the anointing oil here is for inanimate things mainly.

And then verse twenty-six says thou shalt anoint the tabernacle of the congregation therewith and the ark of testimony, verse thirty says thou shalt anoint Aaron and his sons and consecrate them that they may be ministers unto me in the priest's office.

You notice that? The junior priest is in the outer court, what is he doing? He's ministering to people, they bring their sacrifices, and he's ministering to people, but it says here that there is one man who is to minister to God alone.

Now how can I minister to God? I can't make him rich, he owns the whole world. I can't make him wise, he's a source of all wisdom. There is only one way that I can minister to God, and that is to worship him in spirit and in truth, and in the very beauty of holiness.

I can't make God's heart glad in any other way, but the priest shall minister unto the Lord, and he shall minister this way, it says in the thirty-first verse, thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying this shall be a holy anointing, oil unto me throughout your generations.

Now there's one anointing that goes on the testimony, the people in the congregation. There's an oil that goes on the inanimate things that have to be used in the process of sacrifice, but here is an oil which is poured upon the head of the one who is going to minister.

You know the most indefinable thing about a meeting often is this, you go to a meeting and there's a mysterious anointing there. Or you go to a meeting and when you come out you say, you know, I didn't get much out of that meeting.

Well that's not the criterion of a meeting, what you got out of it, you may have been too sleepy, you may have been preoccupied, you may still be shopping yesterday, you're trying to get that bargain tomorrow on a sales list.

The criteria of any meeting is not what I get out of it, it's what God gets out of it. Have we satisfied the heart of God? Oh, you get clappy and your feet go and you stamp your feet and have a great time, but that's soul-ish.

And not many people can define between what's soul-ish and what's spiritual. We say I had a good meeting, why? Because it made me glad. I went to the meeting heavy and I came out full of joy. I've heard people say that about a movie.

I went in a movie, oh, I was so depressed, I was so happy, and you know those guys made me laugh when I came out, I felt, boy, I was on top of the world. Because it was merely emotional and soul-ish.

But this, again, has to do with our character in God. This second anointment is an amazing thing. I could spend all night on it, I won't. But not as it says in the thirty-first verse, Thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, This shall be a holy anointing oil through all generations upon man's flesh.

It shall not be poured, neither shall ye make any like it. Verse thirty-three, Whosoever compoundeth any or maketh anything like it, whosoever putteth anything upon a stranger, he shall be cut off from the people.

And then the Lord gives the ingredients of this, that he says in verse thirty-five, Thou shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy. Verse thirty-seven, Ye shall not make to yourselves according to the composition thereof, it shall be unto thee holy.

Now, notice, let's go back a minute. It says in verse thirty-two, Upon man's flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall ye make any like it. There is to be no substitute for the holy anointing oil, and we try and substitute it.

The preacher knows when he's having a hard time, he knows when the congregation's sleepy. The atmosphere's too warm. We blame the devil sometimes when it's the janitor. A meeting's much better cool than it is hot, for he will get sleepy.

I saw people struggling this morning to keep awake, God in mercy. I pour my heart out in prayer, I fast, I wait on God to preach to dumb people sleeping. Not on your life. Holy place should be so filled with God's glory, a man dare hardly blink, never mind go to sleep.

But the preacher knows when he's losing ground, he claps his hands and he does something dramatic like this, you know, and he gets your attention, it's purely soulish. There is a holy anointing oil. I thank God that God never bends to anybody's money.

You can't buy anointing. You can buy education, but you can't buy wisdom. You can learn the tricks of preaching, histrionics, get a very big vocabulary, learn to be dramatic, learn this, that, and the other, but there is something which is indefinable and it's God's prerogative to give it, and that is anointing.

And this holy anointing oil, he says, you shall not put it on anybody else on the penalty of death, and you shall not make a substitute. I was talking the other day, we were talking about laying on of hands.

I don't think there's anywhere in the scripture where it says you lay hands on people's heads. And if somebody comes in your house and wants to put their hands on the head of your children, well watch it.

I wouldn't let anybody touch the heads of my children. They may communicate something evil. But this oil was poured, it wasn't just sprinkled, it was poured upon the head of the ministering servant. And then that overflow of oil ran down his face.

No it didn't. The 133rd Psalm says how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. For there the Lord commanded the blessing, it is like the holy oil that was put upon the head of Aaron, listen carefully, it was put upon his head, it ran down his beard, it ran off his garments, it went down to the floor, it never touched the flesh.

God never sanctifies carnality, God never sanctifies the flesh. There is no substitute for this holy oil. And one needs that holy oil if he's going to worship. I told you before, many stories about Dr. Tozer, I spent so many hours with him and I remember one day going into his office and he said, Len, you see this rug here?

And I said, yes sir. I guess it was about three and a half feet long and about 30 inches wide. And he said, I come in my office some days and I take the phone off and I call my secretary in the other office and I say, Margaret, you go home.

Because today I can't dictate any letters. Today I can't interview any people. And I remember he pointed, he said, I get down on that rug, he used a good old Bible word, on my belly, at 8 o 'clock in the morning.

I'm still there at 11 o 'clock and 12 o 'clock. And I haven't said a word of prayer and I haven't said a word of praise. I've just been lost in adoration. A lady wrote me a letter last week and she said in 1976 I went to a service there in a certain city in Florida.

Now remember you preached on worship and it revolutionized my life. And she put it this way, you said that prayer is spoken communication with God. And prayer actually is spoken preoccupation with our needs.

And praise is spoken preoccupation with our blessings. And worship is total silent adoration before God. And she said I pondered it, I went home and thought about it and from that day my life was changed.

Can you imagine a man laying in the presence of God for four or five hours without going to sleep and isn't quoting hymns necessarily or at least isn't using praise in the accepted sense of the word and isn't praying, he's so lost in a majesty of God as you were saying tonight and the wonder of God and the holiness of God and the character of God and the faithfulness of God and the immutability of God and the omniscience of God and the omnipresence of God.

He says my God how wonderful thou art, thy majesty so bright. He says oh Jesus, Jesus dearest Lord, forgive me if I say for very love thy sacred name a thousand times a day. Burn, burn within me love of God, burn fiercely night and day till all the dross of earthly love is burned and burned away.

How beautiful, how beautiful the sight of thee must be. Thine endless wisdom, awesome power and glorious purity. The trouble with modern Christianity is we're too earthbound. We live too much in time and not enough in eternity.

We're swayed by events, the headlines of the newspaper. We're more concerned with what Walter Cronkite says than the Holy Ghost says. We go up and down like the yo-yo because of circumstances and changing markets and depression and oppressions.

Worship, just the mature people know to worship. Just the priest who's gone through all the preliminaries is allowed to go into the holy of holies in the total darkness and then God comes or he's still in darkness.

But so often when there's a lagging in the meeting we get up and try to whip up a more bright hen, you know. I went in a service a few weeks ago, a place I'd never been before, may never go again, I don't know.

And as soon as I got in there was a fellow there and all he did from beginning to end till I was weary of it. He nearly shattered my nerves. Worship is speechless adoration. We stand to sing, at least in Europe all hymns, you have to stand to sing.

And we kneel to pray and we prostrate ourselves to worship. I'm not just sure if we can worship collectively. I think it's something very private, something very holy. Why if we learn to worship, if you got along with God an hour every morning, you'd never fall down during the day.

Do you know why we pray at the end of the day about sins we've committed or wrongs we've done? For the simple reason we didn't safeguard ourselves before we went out into the world, that's why. And if we fortified ourselves then we'd never have collapsed during the day.

We're asking God to do a repair job every week. I was preaching up in the snows of Canada among the Chippewa Indians and the Muslim and the, what do you call them, the Eskimos some years ago. Oh, it was a kind of a stately church and the preacher got up and we sang some one or two hymns and he got up and he said, let us all pray.

And then he said, we have erred and strayed like lost sheep today, we have left undone the things we should have done and done the things we shouldn't have done and we have transgressed and we've offended and done the whole, man, what a miserable thing.

A couple of nights after he said to me, hey, you're preaching something I don't know much about. You're preaching about having dominion over sin, about having the world, the flesh and the devil beneath your feet, of being more than conqueror through him that loved us.

Why, I said, friend, if I'd come in your meeting the first night, Saturday night, when all those Chippewa Indians were there and those other people, those Eskimos and others, I'd have walked out and said, you know, that poor preacher's in the same boat that I am.

He falls into sin every day. You see, immediately you say that you can have victory every day over sin, somebody sticks a label on you, sinless perfection. I preached in a certain university a while ago and there was a national speaker of one of the great groups there.

And he had it, you know, we're always falling down and getting up, we're always sinning and failing and this, this, that and the other. And at the end of the meeting I said to him, I understand in your church every Sunday you recite something like this, well, we've sinned today in thought and word and deed.

Well, the devil can't do more than that. And we've left undone and he went on and on and on and he said, yeah, we do say that. I said, well, didn't Jesus say one day to a woman, go and sin less? He said, what?

Didn't Jesus say to a woman, go and sin less? No, he didn't say that. What did he say? He said, go and sin no more. What? And she lived on the other side of the cross? And he says to a woman there, go and sin no more?

The preacher today said, you see, you're born with something that makes you sin. There's nothing inside of you or outside can make you sin until you bend your will to sin. We don't sin because we have to, we sin because we want to.

If we have to commit sins every day, why don't some preacher get honest and write out a list of sins and say, look, young people, you're the most confused young people in history and you see this side of the page are the sins you can commit and at the other side of the page sins you can't commit.

Would you dare do that? You see, we've got the idea that Jesus came into the world to make bad men good. No, he didn't come to make bad men good. That's a fringe benefit. I know lots of people I admire more than I admire Christians.

I know some Christian businessmen, I wouldn't buy sausage from them. I'd be afraid they'd put sawdust in it. And I know some men who are not Christians, but boy, they're a hundred percent in morality and ethics.

It's difficult for a well-educated man who's lived in a clean environment to come into a church and hear somebody thundering about adultery and all those kind of things, and he says, well, I don't need them, so what, I don't need saving.

Ah, but you missed it by a million miles. You see, as this young lady testified tonight, she wanted to praise and magnify the Lord. Why? Because I was made to do that. Now, God's argument with a man is not that he's bad first.

The argument of God is we're dead. Not just bad, dead in trespasses and in sin. There's no way that a sinful man can respond to God, except the Holy Ghost comes upon him and quickens his conscience. And then, amazingly enough, the Christian religion is the only religion in the world where a man's God comes and lives inside of him.

That's the most breathtaking thing ever. As I said today, the great rage around the country isn't Mormonism and Spiritism. The great rage around the country right now is born-againism. Everybody's born-again, from the White House to the Ale House and the Picture House, Movie House.

But there's no transformation of character. If any man be in Christ, any man, anywhere, anytime. I don't care how corrupt he is, I don't care how hell-bound he is. Well, I've been dealing with men lately that have had nothing but prison records for the last 15 to 20 years.

They've raped, they've murdered, they've done everything. They're still scarred. See, the devilish thing about sin is that when God has forgiven you, you can't forgive yourself for it very often. These fellas say, I wake up, I think of the time I put the pistol to that man's head and then I raped his wife and then I stole his money and then I did something, and it comes back to me.

And sometimes people throw it up at me. I say, well, let me tell you something, God never will. Have you ever thought about the fact that Moses was a murderer and God never once threw it up in his face?

That when he disobeyed God for 30 seconds, he got 40 years' punishment for it. You see, we think we're God's little darlings, and if we do wrong or something, it's not very serious. It is serious. Every time you disobey God, you retard your spiritual life.

You slip back somewhat. And until a man is really born again and the Spirit of God indwells him, how can he in any shape or form worship God? And do you know how precious—I'll tell you how precious worship is.

Worship is so precious that one day a man called Jesus went through all the school of temptation and won it, won every round. And then Satan came and said, look, you see all the kingdoms of the world, I'll give them to you.

And Jesus didn't say, you're a dirty sinner, get back to hell, they don't belong to you. Because they do belong to him. He's the prince of the power of the air. For a little season he has a certain area of dominion in the world.

But you see, that amazing being that we call Satan had once been the chief of the archangels in heaven. Every precious stone was his covering. He was full of wisdom until deceit was found in him. And he had seen God worship with an angelic host.

As I said this morning, I'll come to it a bit later, if I could push the door of heaven open just an inch like John did in the fourth of Revelation, you'd never backslide, you'd never doubt, you'd never get under the weather.

You'd never let the devil oppress you and depress you and impress you. And say, I wonder sometimes if it's really worth it. Dear Lord, if you say that, you've never seen the glory of this to be. Worship is so great that Satan says, look, I'll tell you what I'll do.

You just fall down and worship me for five minutes. No one minute would have done it. Because immediately you bend the knee, you're in subjection, you're admitting somebody is superior, that somebody deserves your allegiance, that you feel your inferiority.

And Satan says, I'll surrender the whole world if you'll fall down and worship me. That's how precious worship is. You see, we've got mixed up with soul winning. Some people do soul winning like Indians collecting scalps.

I believe you could win a hundred people a day to Jesus Christ and still disappoint him. Why? Because you didn't worship him. You're more fascinated with work than worship. Jesus says, my Father is the Spirit, and may thou worship him in spirit and in truth.

You know, there's a beautiful story, I'll skip over it quickly, in the seventh chapter of Luke. The same story is told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke in different, with variations. It's the story of the woman that came with a box of alabaster ointment to the feet of Jesus.

Do you know it took me fifty years to find out what that story was about? I heard every interpretation that didn't satisfy me. Everybody majored on the fact she brought a very precious vessel with some very precious ointment to Jesus.

Well, she did. But do you know why she came? The main reason she came? She came to worship him. How do you know? Because she never said a word to him, because she fell at his feet, and because she brought the most costly thing that she had.

She shouldn't have gone there at all anyhow. It was a stag party. She's a woman of bad reputation. The man's so busy watching through the window to see the mayor coming, and the millionaire coming, and the important people, and the servants have to, oh I'm busy, just a minute, just a minute.

You know that certain woman inside? Yes, if she comes near, turn the dogs on her. She's already here. Where? In the kitchen. I suppose she's stealing food or something. No, no, she's at the feet of the miracle man that you got.

You see, this was going to be the greatest day in the life of this man. Everybody wanted to go to the party, and he didn't have enough room to get them all there. They'd have given $10 ,000 for a ticket to sit at the feet of the most amazing man that had ever been on the face of the earth.

You talk about stirring the hearts like that lady said with his name. They'd seen his dominion over everything. He cast out demons, he raised the dead, he did all the miraculous things. And he gave us the pattern for world peace.

And two years after, 2 ,000 years after, we're on the edge of the hellish war, most hellish war in history. The woman had no right to be there, she had no ticket she'd gone in. And she came to his feet.

This was going to be a day this man never wanted to forget, but it became a day he never wanted to remember. Everything went wrong. People are going to leave this banquet talking about my extravagance, but they didn't talk about his extravagance and his generosity, they talked about his stupidity.

He missed it by a million miles. He was busy engaged with somebody else, and the woman is there washing his feet. And oh, he turns around the corner and says, boy, I blew it this time. This man's no prophet.

If he were a prophet, he'd know what man or woman she is. She's a sinner. And Jesus says, listen, I know what's in your mind. I want to tell you something. There was a certain man who had two creditors.

One owed him 500 pence, the other owed him 50. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Which of them would love him most? The one that had the biggest debt, obviously. I remember going into the chapel when we worked for two years with Dave Wilkerson.

He's our neighbor now, but David at that time was struggling in New York with Teen Challenge. I went in one morning. There's a little Puerto Rican fellow, and as I went in he said, ah, he didn't speak too good English.

Brother Ravenhill here. Brother Ravenhill's going to speak this morning. Hey, hey, we stand and sing our national anthem. Stand and sing the national anthem before you preach? Good night. There's a place for everything.