Joel's Prophecy — Leonard Ravenhill

Joel’s Prophecy and the Promise of the Spirit

I want to read just a few verses of scripture that are very familiar, I'm sure, from the prophecy of Joel. The prophecy of Joel, the second chapter. And reading from verse twenty-three. Can I just say this, like the Irishman said before I speak, I want to say a few words.

And on the table, where the books are, you'll find a list that I brought in this morning, containing a list of taped sermons that are not of mine, they're all good ones. And they range from one of the most distinguished of modern preachers, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones of London, J .I. Packer, who was the librarian at the University of Oxford, a very distinguished theologian.

And I think there are sixty-one tapes there, recorded, that means there are actually a hundred and twenty, because of course you've got both sides. And the address is on the paper, I hope you'll use it, but leave it there, so someone else can use it.

And in case you should take it away, or can't find it there, the brother James Robertson has a copy, and the brother who's monitoring the tapes, also. But these are very, very wonderful sermons, in my judgment, I have a number of them, and I'm sure that they'll do you good.

Joel’s Promise of Rain and Restoration

And some night when you're dry, you could play them over to your church. Joel, chapter 2, verse 23. Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.

And the floor shall be full of wheat, and fats shall overflow with wine and oil. And I will restore to you the years that the locusts hath eaten, and the canker-worm, and the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm, my great army which I sent among you.

And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that he dealt wondrously with you, and my people shall never be ashamed. And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else, and my people shall never be ashamed.

The Cross Requires Personal Surrender

And it shall come up to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men dream dreams, and your young men see visions. Some years ago, when I finished my short period of Bible training in Cliff College, England, I discovered with a friend of mine that we had five days to spare before we went to London.

And London isn't far away, it's only 150 miles, and so we decided to walk it. And we walked it, and we enjoyed it. We even got to London quite early, and so we did like many other visitors, we went into the famous St. Paul's Cathedral.

We climbed up the 350 steps onto the different balconies, and finally to the very last place, which is a ladder. I suppose it's about eight feet high, and this iron ladder reaches to the very base of the cross.

The cross, of course, is visible from many areas in London. A great big gilded cross. Now we'd walked together the whole of the journey for 150 miles, and when we got to the cross, we both started to climb the ladder together, and the guide said, No, you've got to go by yourself to the cross.

I thought that was a pretty good start, because after all, that's what everybody has to do, you have to go by yourself to the cross. And then he told us about another visitor who'd been there, and he got the treatment that everybody gets.

He was shown through the slats in the building, the various churches, many of them, and perhaps most of the distinguished churches, designed by the great British architect, Sir Christopher Wren. This particular visitor came downstairs and looked around, and then he said, I've seen various buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

I think he designed actually a part of Westminster Abbey and a part of the Houses of Parliament. But he said, Where is the monument to Christopher Wren himself? And the guide said, Well, look around you.

Everywhere you look in St. Paul's, you're looking at a monument erected because this is actually his masterpiece. And everywhere you look, you see his genius. Whenever you look in London, whenever you look in this building, you see the overall emphasis of the genius of this, what we think is the prince of all architects in British history.

The Majesty of the Holy Spirit in Creation

Whenever I think of that illustration, it came to my mind just while sitting over here this morning, I thought about the work of the Holy Spirit. I believe the Holy Spirit of God is totally incapable of doing anything that is normal or small.

The work of the Spirit of God is full of majesty. All you have to do is look in the world round about you and the world in which we live, that where men's brain is just beginning to wake up. One of the gripes of the old red-headed Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, was that at 80 years of age, his brain was just beginning to wake up.

Personally, I didn't think it ever woke up, but that's his opinion. And he said everybody should live till they're at least 300 years of age. But you see, we're just beginning to discover something about the world in which we live.

You know, just over 100 years ago, the American office, the Patents Office in America, was almost closed down by an act of Congress because they said 100 years ago. Well now we've got the, I think they've just got the telephone and the trains removing and they said there's nothing else to conquer.

There's nothing else to explore. Now you wonder what they'd think if they came back now. We put a man in the moon, on the moon. Of course we were standing up to our knees in modern garbage watching him get there.

But apart from that, the fact is that science is giving us an expanding universe and a shrinking world. We're discovering there's enough energy in a cube of sugar to drive a big ship across the Atlantic if we knew how to use that energy.

Or the same goes for a glass of water. This age is going to be written down unquestionably as an age of the most amazing progress in science that the world has ever known. And this irritates me quite a bit, because you see, we're still giving kids on a Saturday night some junk in our youth rallies.

We can't teach them the profound things. It's too, it's beyond, you can't stretch their intelligence. And some of those kids have to graduate at school knowing more science than some scientists knew 100 years ago.

But they're not clever enough to understand the mysteries of the Bible. Any silly stuff, somebody dressed up, take them for hay rides or sleigh rides or something. And all we've got is a spiritual nursery around the church.

We're not producing the type of preachers that we used to produce for the simple reason in Scotland 100 years ago, most of the prospective preachers already had one degree by the time they were 15 years of age, and would be sitting for their B .D. by the time they were 17 or 18 years of age, and were conversant with Hebrew and Greek and many languages by the time they graduated at 20 years of age.

And that was considered normal. This doesn't go over anymore in even our Bible schools, even in our fundamental Bible schools. Now the Holy Spirit, going back to what I said before, the Holy Spirit is totally incapable of anything which is small.

His works are full of majesty. The world in which we live, we're just waking up to the greatness of the world in which we live. And remember it was a piece of dead clay in the womb of the universe until the Spirit of God breathed on it in the beginning, and the world began to take shape, and then it was clothed according, of course, to the will of God.

Scripture, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection

And the world in which I live, the vast universe, until Bud Hunter's church a few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking there for about ten days, and one day we went out to dinner in the home of a scientist who a few days before had been taking lunch with the astronauts.

And I questioned him about the possibility. He said that it was just prior to a man getting on the moon, and he said, sure, the man will get there all right, that's no problem. Not even getting him off, and of course his prediction was right.

Then I said, what about the planets? He said, well, that's quite reasonable. We get a man on a planet, we stay very long. What about the stars? Well, he said, we might get a man to a star if we can develop a ship that can just go at half of the speed that light travels, which is what, 186 ,000 miles a second.

He's got the ticket for going that speed. 186 ,000 miles a second, and if we can get a ship that can go half of that speed and keep it going for eight years, we can get him on a star. He could run out of tang, of course, but that wouldn't be too serious.

The problem isn't getting full, the problem is to wash the atmosphere so he can re-breathe that atmosphere and he can come back in another eight years. A 16-year round trip to the nearest star, not the farthest, the nearest.

And I often wonder what David would think if he came back in our day and he were to say again, when I consider thy heaven, that here is the world, this vast universe that was created by the Holy Spirit of God.

And then another wonderful thing the Spirit of God created is this book, that men are born and blamed and banned and banished, but like Tennyson's stream it says men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

Here is the imperishable word of God, that even if the stars fall out of their sockets, God says they'll heaven and earth pass away, that his word will never pass away. And then you have the sublime mystery of mysteries, that there in the little womb of the Virgin Mary, the same Holy Spirit who made the universe, who made this book, he did his master's work, because the masterpiece of God from the divine side surely is the mystery of the Incarnation, the thing that baffles the scientists, the thing that you can't analyze with a test tube, you can't find the answer with a slide rule, the thing that makes many of the theologians back down and say if you'd only moderate a little on the mystery of the virgin birth, it doesn't matter whether you were born of a virgin or not.

It surely does. Because if the Bible lies in one issue, you can't depend on it on any other anyhow. Now I don't have any Bible problem with the virgin birth, because I'm not an intellectual. Years ago I discovered this, that if God could make the first man that walked on the world, if he could make the first man in the world without a mother, or the first Adam without a mother, he could make the last Adam without a father.

Where's the problem? And yet the Holy Spirit there in the womb of the Virgin Mary conceived Jesus Christ. And then when Jesus Christ was being crucified and put to death, then he rose again according to the scriptures.

How did he rise? Well, the 8th chapter in Romans gives the answer very clearly, I think. It says, the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead. So I say all the works of the Spirit of God are full of majesty, creating the world, creating this indestructible boat.

After all, if the President of the United States were to say tomorrow that every one of the 50 governors of the different states had to bring a piece of stone from this state, just go grab a piece of stone and present it at the White House, and you put all those stones together and they form the perfect pyramid, wouldn't you kind of think there'd be some collusion that after all 50 pieces of stone of different types from 50 nations could never be fitted together and make a symmetrically beautiful pyramid?

It's impossible. And how do you get men spending 2 ,000 years making the pyramid, the indestructible pyramid of the Word of God, and all of it is so marvelously symmetrical that no parts of it conflict?

Surely a sign of the genius of God himself. And then last but not least, because these miracles I don't know how to evaluate them, but there's that marvelous, marvelous visitation of God there into those men there in the upper rooms when God poured out his Spirit upon them.

The Church Born in Weakness and Opposition

You know, we have taken so much for granted about the Word of God. I remember years ago picking up that wonderful Life of Christ by Giovanni Papini. It won for about 30 publications, I think, in about five or six years, and I still have a copy of it.

He had been an atheist and was converted. And he gets an entirely different glance on the life of the Lord Jesus, and he begins by reminding us of the stable in which Jesus was born. And he says, it isn't the stable on your Christmas card.

So neat and sweet. So nicely groomed and cleaned, and well, it's been whitewashed, and oh, it's so pretty. And the Virgin Mary looks as though she's had a hairstyle and everything, so sweet, and a lovely little baby like.

Remember, he says, it was a stable reeking with urine and full of dung and cobwebs and filth and mops and dirt. It was there the Prince of Peace was born. By the same token, I think often we forget even the situation in which the Church of Jesus Christ was born.

Do you think a newborn babe could get out of the Grand Canyon if you left it there alone? Is it straining the analogy to say the Church of Jesus Christ was born in a canyon, flanked on one side by solid granite a mile high, in the form of the monolith of the Jewish religion that had the preponderance in that day?

That it was wedged in on this side by the mighty Roman Empire, the mightiest war machine in history? That it was blocked in front by the intellectual strength of the Greeks? And here are a bunch of unlettered ignorant men, not a Ph .D. or anybody else of distinction amongst them.

All chodded there in uproar. What chance are they against the Roman Empire? How are they going to bore a hole through the might of the Greek Empire? How in the world are they going to shift this monolith of thousands of years of Hebrew monopoly of religion?

Jesus was despised and born in a stable. What about those men in the upper room? Pentecost didn't change the color of their hair. Didn't put a bomb in their pocket. People going down the street would say to a Jew, Isaac, you mean you've joined the Christians?

You're an idiot. Look at the temple. There's the high priest going in. Think of all the privileges that there are. Why immediately a man became a Christian in those days? He was despised. He was rejected.

He was ostracized. He was victimized. He was penalized. And yet those men came out of the upper room. They didn't go around begging donations. They didn't go asking to be accepted. They didn't say to the Sanhedrin, would you mind sitting on our platform and giving us a little dignity?

They didn't go to the high priest and say, could you spend Wednesday and Friday night and give the opening prayer for us in our citywide crusade, which has cost a million dollars. The triumph of early Christianity was its distinction.

It wasn't a human system. It wasn't organized. It was a result of agonizing, not organizing. Now I read all kinds of things. I read things that I like, and I read things that provoke me. And I've read quite a bit of the modern writings of the Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood, and agree with all his philosophy, but a man, if he tells the truth, truth's the same whoever tells it.

Even Lenin told the truth. At least once he said facts are stubborn things. And I'm not suggesting that Elton Trueblood's like Lenin, but by the same token, he says some very sharp things. One thing that he said a while ago was this, when he was asked, what do you think about the Church of Jesus Christ by the year 2000?

He gave an answer that I swallowed hook, line, and sinker. He said by the year 2000, Christianity will be a company of people. It will be a selected minority, surrounded by an arrogant, militant paganism.

The Christians will be a selected minority, surrounded by an arrogant, militant paganism. But then I began to do a bit of thinking. And instead of saying at the end of the year 2000, true Christianity will be just a small select group, surrounded by an arrogant, militant paganism, I have to admit the day in which I live, Christianity is like that.

And I have to admit it was like that when it was born. When hasn't Christianity been a small minority, surrounded by an arrogant, militant paganism? Christianity doesn't make progress when everything's going its way, it makes its progress when everything's against it.

The Need for Pentecostal Power and Revival

The last great invasion of the Spirit of God in the British Empire, anyhow, was a hundred years ago, when the Salvation Army was born. Born of a man that got kicked out of the Methodist Church because he wanted to go God's way, and not theirs particularly.

His only assets were a wife, very strong-willed, as most wives are, and a bunch of children. And he stood on the streets of Leicestershire, put his hand into the hand of his little wife who had a curvature of the spine, and said, we raise an army for God.

He created a flag, they still have it, it has blood and fire on it. He wrote the battle song of the Salvation Army, Thou Christ of burning cleansing flames send the fire. It goes on to say, look down and see this waiting host, give us the promised Holy Ghost we want, another Pentecost.

Now I'm not sure whether we want it in our day, but I'm quite sure we need it. So he had his flag and he had his marvellous battle song. And then they designed a picture, you might find one in an old junk shop in England.

It was a picture of the church as a lifeboat. The Salvation Army lasses and lads were there in the lifeboat, the sea is tossing, the prow of the boat's pointing to heaven, the stern looks as though it's underwater, and they're rescuing the perishing and caring for the dying and throwing out the life jackets and pulling people in with a rope and lifting them by the hair out of the stormy waters.

And they used to sing a song in those days, except I am moved with compassion, out dwelleth the spirit in me. In thought, word and deed, burning love is my need and I know I shall find it in thee. They put this placard up in Holmes, they put it in the Salvation Army churches.

This great graphic picture of lost men and women. And the church as a lifeboat rescuing the perishing. Well I think the church has lost that concept of a job. Seems to me now the church is more like a cruise ship and everybody's happy.

It's no longer faith and fighting, but faith and fun and fellowship, with emphasis on the fun. It seems to me that a good old gospel ship, you can't think the old ship of Zion is sailing along, she's either stuck on a mud bank or she's sinking pretty rapidly.

And the only way to get her going again, according to some people, it isn't too serious. All we have to do is repaint the ship. And that'll get her started, it'll be attractive. So all we need is a more liturgical service.

Your preacher should wear a Geneva gown, he must be preceded to the pulpit by a man with a golden cross, and you must have beautiful windows and winking candles on the altar, and you must up your church service and build an altar, and have a pulpit on the left to read the scripture from, and a pulpit on the right to preach from, and make it a little more ornate.

And this is going to solve the problem. Other people suggest the only way to get the boat going again is change the crew. Throw out all the fundamentalists and the evangelicals and let the ecumenical boys take over and the ship will go.

She will, she'll go down twice as quick. And some people think the only way to plug the hole so she won't sink is pour more money into the hole and let's get on more TV stations and do more other things.

I enjoyed Leighton Forbes' book with Christian Persuader, but I disagree with his arguments very much. He thinks that the hope for the day is that we have more mass evangelism. We've had twenty years of it and we've got nowhere anyhow.

I'm not saying America is lower in the mire this morning because of it, I'm saying in spite of it. According to the leader of Campus Crusade, Billy Graham reaches twenty million people every Sunday. And if you leave the dial set, after he's preached to the twenty million, C .M. Ward will preach to the same twenty.

And after that, Showers of Blessing will come on from the Nazarenes. And after that, Light and Life will come on from the Free Methodists. And after that you'll get the old-fashioned Revival Art. And after that you'll get Radio Bible Class of America.

And after that you'll get somebody else, but the trouble is they're all reaching the same million. It's a saturation program. We are not evangelizing the world, and you and I know it well enough if we face up to the reality of the situation in which we live.

It's comfort, it's ease, it's the same people receiving the same message with just a different voice, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. And in spite of twenty years of reaching millions and millions of people, in spite of twenty years of the slick, sick evangelism of the day, which is very obvious anywhere you go.

Read Bill Fisher. I heard Bill Fisher preach not too long ago, a very wonderful sermon. He's a Nazarene. And he has a book on the Revival we need. And he quotes from his own denomination, the Nazarenes, and he says, in two of our churches recently, we had true faith.

Three churches joined together in one city, and night after night by test, there wasn't a non-Nazarene in the assembly, and there wasn't an unsaved person in the assembly. And the two weeks of meetings cost five thousand dollars, and not a single person was born again, and they all gravitated to their own churches.

In another church they had a distinguished preacher who preached for more than a week, and the cost was over two thousand dollars. And he said, the same thing has happened again. We have just scores and scores of our own people.

But we're not piercing that almost impenetrable wall of unbelief outside. Now the amazing thing, of course, about this church, I want to preach about it tonight, about the church that we call the Church at Pentecost, was that it went out and it turned the world upside down.

There's no question in the minds of most intelligent evangelicals that there's only one answer to the problem in the day in which we live. And that is a great and a very wonderful outpouring of the Spirit of God.

Otherwise we're sunk. We're not evangelizing the world, and you know that well enough. In the evangel, in the conference for evangelism, about three years ago in Berlin, immediately the conference began.

They set a clock ticking in the foyer of the Congress Hall there, and by the time they had finished the Congress, they listed how many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people had been born, just in the lifetime of that short weekly conference.

It's estimated now that we have 76 million babies born every year. And we do not reach seven, we do not reach six million people, apart from saturating with TV and radio evangelism. We do not reach six million new people a year for God, out of 76 million that are born.

So in 10 years, we're going to be 700 million behind. 20 years, 1 ,400 million. And if I were God, I think I want to put the blinds down and blow the lights out and say that's the end of this world in which we live.

Revival Requires Repentance and Prayer

I see no point in the world carrying on for people to fill hell. Do you? Now I believe that this scripture that we read this morning, this very wonderful scripture, I wish it was known as well or quoted as often as Romans 8, 28, Joel 2, 28, where it says it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.

I've heard people say this almost grinding their teeth sometimes, as though they were trying to twist the arm of an unwilling God. Lord, you said you'd pour out your Spirit. Oh, do it, do it, do it. You can't lie.

Well, that's all truth. But if ever we put pressure on God, God puts pressure on us. I'm quite convinced in my own mind we could have revival if we want, as our good friend Steve Norford said at the last conference in evangelism there in Minneapolis, though I wasn't there, I saw it quoted in the paper.

In which he said again, we can have revival if we want it, if we'll pay the price. But the price is too high. I'm absolutely convinced that we could suspend all our evangelism in every church in America for a year and have an investigation about our own spiritual bankruptcy.

We can get as many offerings. We might get down to the truth of the Word of God as it's revealed here in Joel, because if God is going to pour out his Spirit, then you've got problems. You see, we live in a day of news media and, oh boy, how they control it and give us what they want to give us.

But you know, it's not right to say that we're living in days on paralleled iniquity. You can take a book like Wesley Breedie's book, England Before and After Wesley, or a one that's maybe more stirring still.

That's the life of Wesley by Dr. Fitchett, who was the president of the Methodist church in Australia some years ago. Wesleyan is century. Do you know that sexual immorality was committed in the streets as a sport in the day of John Wesley?

Do you know of 2 ,000 houses in London, 1 ,200 of them were gin houses, where you could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for two pennies and straw provided free till you became sober again? Do you know the illegitimate rate of that day was just about equal to the day in which we live?

There's nothing new under the sun. When the prophet Joel says here that God will pour out his spirit upon all flesh, when he says that we shall have the rain and the latter rain, then of course you have the million echo in my judgment of what God said there in his writing to the, in the previous, I was going to say epistle, previous prophecy in Hosea chapter 6 and verse 2.

After two days he will revive us, in the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know if we follow on to know the Lord, his going forth is prepared of the morning and he shall come up unto us as the rain, as the latter rain and the former rain, exactly what Joel says.

But go back a little further in the same prophecy and in the fourth chapter it sounds like this morning's newspaper. Listen, it says hear the word of the Lord ye children of Israel, for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because, listen, this was four thousand years ago, it sounds like today's newspaper, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God, by swearing and lying and killing and stealing and committed adultery, they break out and blood toucheth blood, therefore shall the land mourn and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish with the beasts of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fishes of the sea, they shall be taken away.

And verse six, my people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge, because thou hast rejected knowledge I will also reject thee and thou shalt be no priest to me, seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Doesn't that sound contemporary? Lying, stealing, adultery, no knowledge of God. I see now we're getting a little concerned because even in this God-favored land, church attendance has been dropping during the last year, and it's almost difficult to find a healthy prayer meeting anymore in a church.

My wife and I attended a church just two or three years ago in the middle of the country. The Sunday school was running nearly five hundred. The church professed to be fundamental in every aspect of the New Testament.

The midweek service was Wednesday night, and we went along because it was announced that the Bible reading and prayer meeting, but there was no prayer, just another evangelistic message. And then they said we have a prayer meeting on a Friday night, it's called Mountain Movers.

Well I thought that's a pretty ambitious title for a prayer meeting, but it's biblical anyhow, the Mountain Movers. I went along to the Mountain Movers prayer meeting, there were fifteen people there.

I went along another Friday night, there were twelve people there, in a church with a congregation of four hundred and fifty people. And there is no church on earth, I don't care what denominational label it is, no church is stronger than its prayer meeting.

This is the crux of the whole matter there, this is where you get the heartbeat of God. Now that brings us right down here to the philosophy if you like, or the interpretation that Joel gives us here, because he says in chapter one and verse fourteen, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God, and cry unto the Lord.

The previous verse says this, to the preachers, gird yourselves and lament ye priests, howl. Ye ministers of the altar, come lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God, for the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the house of your God.

Now before ever we start putting pressure on God that he'll pour out his spirit, you've got to meet the first condition. And the first condition is this, and I've said this to people often, if we were as spiritual as we think we are, you'd go to church on a Sunday morning, not with a smart dress and a lovely suit.

You and I would be going to church every Sunday morning with a sackcloth on our bodies and a handful of ashes, mourning the departed glory of God. Because if the church of Jesus Christ is not supernatural, it's superficial.

The Holy Spirit and the Supernatural Church

The New Testament breathes with the supernatural, that we have outlawed the Holy Ghost. We are in the lip service to him. You say to some good Baptist or Presbyterian or others, God's going to pour out his spirit, and your sons and your daughters are going to prophesy, and your young men see visions and your old men dream dreams, and somebody might break forth in tongues, they say, not in my church.

You see? You come Holy Ghost, but not on your terms, on my terms. And I believe the bottleneck in revival today is in fundamentalism, not in modernism, not in liberalism, not in Roman Catholicism, not in communism.

God Almighty's problem in America today is dead fundamentalism. He limited the Holy One of Israel. Thomas Binney in the hymn that he wrote, Eternal Light, Eternal Light, how pure the soul must be. He says in that hymn, a Holy Spirit's energies.

Oh, I love that phrase. Because one of the works of the Holy Spirit is to raise the dead. He raised the world out of a dead piece of clay, and he made this lovely world that blooms and blossoms. He created Jesus Christ in the dead womb of the Virgin Mary.

He raised Jesus from the dead. He took a bunch of men in the upper room who were dead. They were dead in their hearts. We trusted it had been healed and delivered to Israel, and he didn't do it. They thought he was going to snatch them from the oppression of the Roman Empire, and Jesus never said a word about the Roman Empire.

There were 60 million slaves in the day that Jesus preached. He never said a word about slavery. Did he condone it? No, he didn't. He knew that the message he had, as our brother said about the man giving up his beer parlor.

I used to preach about those things, too, until I got more sense. As dear old Shellhammer said, if you feed a bird, it'll do its own molting. It'll get rid, even a peacock gets rid of its feathers once it starts molting, if you feed it right.

If you start pulling all the feathers out, you'll kill the bird. And so the best thing is to preach right, and then people will get straightened out. There's no question about that at all. Oh, brother, when it comes down to the issue, we're afraid of the Holy Ghost.

We tell him to come 11 o 'clock Sunday morning, but he must go at 12. You know, there's not a thing in this Bible that tells you to go to church twice on Sunday. You couldn't find it if you tried. It isn't even in the Amplified.

You can't find in the New Testament where people went to church to get saved. The message was going to the wall, but now the church is so thick, we're going to the church to preach. You can't prove from the New Testament that people went to church to get saved.

They did not go to church to get saved. They went to church because they were saved, as a result of the effective witness of people who couldn't contain the joy and power of God, and they went everywhere preaching.

As a result, people came into the house of God, and the house of God was no sloppy thing. You didn't have to do what the modern evangelist does, condition the atmosphere with some stupid silly jokes. Oh no, sir.

Oh no, sir. Once you came in that door, if this room were filled with roses, I wouldn't need to send you to a blind man. You know this room is filled with roses. As soon as he came to the door, he'd say, oh, there's something beautiful.

I'd say, you can't see it. You're a blind man. But brother, this house is filled with roses. And you know, once the Holy Ghost is in the building, even a sinner can tell when the Holy Ghost is there. You can strive and sweat and do your gymnastics in the pulpit and show him how much exercising you've done and when you've done it.

He says, boy, I sweat like that too. And he couldn't tell you the text if he tried. I'm going out to some Pentecostal. I preach to everybody and anybody if they'll have me. I preach to the Pope if he'd let me go, but I've had no invitation yet.

Maybe his wife won't let me go. But anyhow, I was out in an assembly in the West Coast and they said, you come and talk to our quarterly meeting of preachers. And I said, I'd love to come. When I got there, I just waited.