Will You Follow the Lamb, or Quit the Field Like Gideon's Thousands? — Hans R. Waldvogel

Authority of Jesus Christ, ministered to his church, glory to God, and flowing from his church, like he said, rivers of living water shall flow from within him who receives the Holy Ghost. But what did God intend to do?

Apostolic Lives and the Purpose of the Pentecostal Movement

All along the way, there have been apostolic people like Terce Tegan, like Francis of Assisi, like Savannah Rowland, like John G. Peyton, like Madame Guillaume, like many, many others whose lives transformed the whole world.

They just, well, the Apostle Paul is today molding the history of the world. There isn't a church in the world that hasn't received blessing from that line. And these men were filled with the Holy Ghost, and they had something that God is striving to introduce in the Pentecostal movement.

But do you know that every one of us is called to be a king and a priest unto God and our Father? Jesus says, he that believeth in me, as the scripture has said. All of the Old Testament testifies of the fact that God is going to send a Savior who would save to the uttermost.

And he would send a baptizer who would baptize this church and build a new city, a city of God that has foundations, would build a city that would blaze with the light of Almighty God. And why hasn't it come?

And then again, the Old Testament tells that in the days of those kings, God shall set up a kingdom that shall last forever and forever. And the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom, the kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.

And why is it that that kingdom hasn't come? Beloved, God's given us a wonderful taste of a heavenly life, but we got stuck. That's what's the matter. Jesus Christ said, because I live, ye shall live also.

Forsaking All to Follow Christ

God wants us to live by the Son of God. God wants me to know him and the power of his resurrection. And beloved, the reason we don't is because we don't do what Jesus says. He that will not forsake all that he hath cannot be my disciple.

There, we're eliminated. Just like in Gideon's campaign, when 10 ,000 came out to fight with him and no 22 ,000 or 32 ,000, excuse me, I'll have to brush up on Old Testament history. 32 ,000. Why, you know, when, when the brass band blared forth a double-eagle march, why, it got into their legs and into their bones and oh, everybody wanted to march.

Thank you, doodle, keep it up. You know, that inspires anybody. I've been in Pentecostal meetings where everybody starts dancing when you sing a ditty. Something that inspires enthusiasm. Or you clap your hands or you get the people up to have some entertainment.

Why, they're all Pentecostal. And here were 32 ,000 soldiers ready to march. But as soon as they heard somebody fire off a gun, they got to trembling and they got to crying for mama. And Gideon said, go home.

Anybody that's scared, go home. President Eisenhower would say that today to all the boys in the army. Anybody that wants to go home to mama, go home. Well, that's what's the matter with us. We're mama boys.

We like to take it easy. And so Gideon says, go home. You can go home. You're a volunteer. You don't have to follow the lamb with us wherever he goes. You don't have to take his cross upon yourself and be obedient.

You don't have to forsake everything and follow the Lord. You can be Pentecostal and still be like the world. You can be Pentecostal. You can come to church and even speak in tongues and you don't have to tarry and wait for the baptism.

No, you can be in Pentecost for many, many years and you'll get along all right. You'll even be elected to a job. That's why some of the folks aren't here anymore because some other church gave them a job.

They go around with the hat now and take the collection with the buckle. Wonderful, wonderful Jesus is to me. But beloved, go home. Go home. You're good for nothing. And there were 10 ,000, God says still too many.

Still too many. They'll boast against me. They'll say the Lord didn't save you. So you take them down to the brook and see what they'll do when they drink water. Watch them. See whether they take it easy or whether they're alert and whether they're really intending to go to war and whether they really realize that the warfare, our warfare is not carnal but mighty through God and that we wrestle not with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers in the heavenly places and that unless I have on the whole armor of God, I'm going to be licked unless I'm found watching and praying and sober.

If I live like the others, I will be eliminated. Take them down to the brook and see how they tarry for the baptism. See how they look at the clock and wonder if this ice cream parlor isn't open. And oh heavens, what beloved, what soldiers is Jesus Christ got today?

The Call to Reign and Overcome

But the call is just as real and just as true as it ever has been. The call to reign with Christ forever and forever. And beloved, unless we be dead with him, we shall not live with him. Unless we suffer, we shall not reign with him.

Oh, I love the call of my King. I love the call that comes out of eternity to me, a poor worm of the dust. And God Almighty says, he that overcometh shall inherit all these things. Glory to God. Not the Milky Way, not the constellations, Orion and Pleiades, not these great, these things shall all pass away.

But beloved, he that doeth the will of God. Abideth forever. That's what God is after. Never mind. Let the ten thousand go. Let the twenty-two thousand go. Let, let the ten thousand go. There are only three hundred left.

God didn't need very many to take that promised land. All he needed was Caleb and Joshua. And all the mama boys perished in the wilderness. Every time the Arctic came and they threatened us, we are today.

What complainers we are. And God Almighty puts it in his book, as it ever has been. Oh, the rabbi Apugiae Capolodiele Feigolon Saga. And that's why I wonder, why did God launch the Pentecostal movement?

Oh, beloved, there are people that are drinking and they're putting on the whole armor of God and they're taking no chance at all. They're going to go through with God. They follow the lamb where they have looked into those blazing eyes that light up the universe and they've heard that voice that sounds like thunder and they've made him their treasure and they've made him their choice and they follow the lamb in the wake of his precious blood-bought army.

Only an armor bearing, proudly I stand, waiting to follow the king's command. Oh, the command of the king. Wherefore seeing also, we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Who are they?

They subdued kingdoms. They wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, and in every instance they were a few and far between. When all Israel had backs lit so hot that God had cast them into battle.

He said, okay, go and serve these strange gods. And all the Jews defiled themselves with the meat that the king did eat. There were four, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And they stood out among these thousands of eunuchs that had been chosen to be the servants of the king.

To wear royal, to be educated in all, but these four banded together. They prayed together. They sought the Lord. They prayed all night, the Bible tells us. They waited upon their God, but more than that, they purposed in their hearts.

New Life in Christ and the New Man

Reminds you when all the people of God were backs lit. Here were boys that had a vision, all for a vision of the king tonight. He lived. The whole world today sings, he lived. But beloved, what good is that to me if I don't live?

If ye then be risen with Christ. That's the question. That's the doctrine that you have put on concerning the former conversation, the old man, which is corrupt. Have you found out that your old man is corrupt?

Or did you think only my old man was corrupt? Your old man and my old man are twins. I know exactly what yours is like. And put on the new man, which after God, oh, who is this new man? Who is he? It isn't a new man that I've created.

No man has created him. He's come down from heaven. Oh, this man, Christ Jesus, who is God Almighty at the same time, who said, Father, you've given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou has given him.

And this is life eternal. I live and ye shall live also. Beloved, the trouble is we're not interested enough. We're not serious enough. Our tarry meetings would look different. Our prayer meetings would look different.

Meetings would be different. But my hope is this. Like God stirred my soul one time when we had no tarry meeting. I did my own tarry. God will make you do your own tarry. You will hear the voice of Jesus Christ saying, come out from among them and be ye separate and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you.

Oh, God, God, I seek thee. So my soul panteth after the living God. And by Jeh Coraja, La Vaganoia L 'Imposchera, Paul could say, I have not received it from man, but by revelation of Jesus Christ. And beloved, I know that that revelation lives among us.

I know. I don't know who responds. No, thank God. By the way, God uses me that it lives. I can feel it. And follow these guided missiles, you know, even through the clouds and bang, they hit the spot someplace, somewhere.

Yidda bui kereja lahe, yala mabuye le pocheko, ro le pocha by palazala, among the dry bones, and oh, how dry they are. God Almighty find me one that wakes up and you have been quaken. That's necessary, beloved, to be awakened to the wonder of Jesus so that you will forsake your own life also.

Nothing else will do. Nothing else, beloved. You'll feel like an awful poor piker getting into heaven if you hadn't forsaken all and followed Jesus. Today he lives. He said, because I live, he does live.

But he is life. There is no life outside of him. Everything is dead. The world says it lives and the maggots walk away with it. Full of rottenness, full of dead men's bones, boulders of death, white as sand.

Oh, beloved, if we saw ourselves like God sees us, we would cry. We would cry to be delivered from this corruption. But we love it and we heap upon ourselves. Pipe wash. When you wash pipe, you don't need to be pipe washed.

Oh, but God said it before us, the revelation. And he says, one thing I do, forgetting the things that are behind, I press toward the mark. What is that mark? The prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Pressing Toward the High Calling

All of the New Testament speaks of it. Let us therefore fear. Let us fear. Oh, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. As long as the fear of God doesn't grip you sufficiently to forsake all and to follow him, to forsake your friends, to forsake yourself and to run after Jesus, to count everything but refuse for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.

You have not yet been made wise. Not to defile myself with the things that the king needs. No matter how. Let him bring his sacrifice and his sufferings and his agony pipes and all his violence and all this stuff.

And let them make their music. And here's that golden image. Hallelujah. Humbled himself and became man and is risen from the dead and is today resurrection and life. My resurrection, my life because I receive abundance of grace and of the gift of Christ in the shell.

Reign. Oh, that's where you reign. That's what defeats death. When Jesus life begins to live within you. But beloved, I've got to make that choice. And isn't that what's the matter? We don't pray through.

We don't seek through. Paul says, let as many as think they're perfect, be thus minded, forgetting the things that are behind, present toward tomorrow. Hebrews 12. Let us lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset us and let us run the race that is set before us.

Looking unto Jesus. Oh, that will give you the impetus to run. Looking unto Jesus. You'd be surprised what would happen to you if you would begin to forget the things that are behind and to press toward tomorrow.

For the pride of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. I always think of Peter when I read that third chapter of Philippians. Peter sleeping between two soldiers, the sentence of death upon him. And isn't it interesting that he was apprehended on Good Friday and he was locked up and the king didn't dare take him out until Easter, when the holidays were over and he was going to execute him on Easter morning.

And instead of that, God raised him out of that prison. Hallelujah. And here was Peter, like you and I, bound with chains, the sentence of death upon us. But God heard the prayer and sent his angel and awakened him in prison.

And Peter woke up and his chains fell from his hands. We've all had that experience. Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it. Do you remember the hour when Jesus set you free? When he saved you and you knew you were on the way to heaven.

But that wasn't all. The angel said, get up, Peter, put on your garment. Why didn't the angel do it? Like John, when I go out, he gets my coat to slip into it. But the angel then, he says, put it on yourself and come and follow me.

And if Peter had done like we do, oh, Jesus says, he that followeth me, they that follow the lamb, glory to God. And he goes before and day by day. And you know, meetings will not mean to you what they ought to.

They will not bring the blessing to you. If you don't come to meet Jesus and to hear from heaven and then to go and do homework and act upon what you've heard, God worketh in us to will. How many times he does that in meeting.

But during the week, he will work in you to do. That's God's system. Praise God. Because I live, ye shall live also. And come that they might have life and have it more abundantly. And what kind of a life is that?

It's your daily life lived in the Holy Ghost. He that loveth me keepeth my words. All these words of Jesus, how precious they are. And yet, how simple they are. Have you learned to live the Sermon on the Mount?

Living the Bible and Mortifying Sin

How simple. For the moral, almost everybody does and forgets God. God says, let me take thoughts. He says, you can't serve two masters. You cannot let the peace of God reign in your heart and then have a lot of worry.

There too, those are thistles and thorns. Nor can you let the pleasures of this life rob you of the presence of God. Oh beloved, to live the Bible is to have Christ reign. Reign in the third chapter of Colossians where it says, if ye then be risen with Christ.

Are you risen? Have you risen? Or are you still dead? Have you been raised together with him? That's God. In every church, except those who have been dead and have been raised together with Christ and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Now he says, mortify your members which are upon the earth. What? Mortify them? Why are they theologians and the psychologists and the psychiatrists and the philosophers? They teach us that progressive education is to find out how rotten a person is and then to build on that misconduct.

That's what they do. Lifting the beggar from the dunghill and set him among princes and make him inherit the throne of glory. Pray to God. Mortify your members which are upon the earth. Fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence or covetousness which is idolatry for which they seek the wrath of God cometh upon the children of disobedience.

Beloved, the conditions in the world today are due to sin and they can wriggle all they want and they can have their nuclear tests and all they want and they won't eliminate the wrath of God. Cometh upon them as travail upon a woman with child and they shall not escape but yea brethren are not in darkness.

The day and the children of the light and God has not appointed us to wrath but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation. Beloved, salvation. Salvation is something to be obtained, something to be fought for, something to be striven for.

Entering God's Rest Through Faithful Perseverance

Let us therefore here let the promise being left us of entering into his rest. Any of you should seem to come short of it. Now let me take a pencil and paper and mark down and jot down everybody's name.

Is there anybody here who seems seems to come short of it? Let me watch you during the week to see what how you do your homework, how you study the Bible, how you wait upon your God, how you call upon him, how you open your soul to receive blessing from him, how you walk by faith and not by sight, how you put on the whole armor of God and how you fear, fear lest you miss it.

Do you know what it will be when the day of harvest comes? The tares will be bound in bundles to be burned and the wheat shall be gathered into his garden. Jesus Christ will send forth his angels into the four corners of the earth to gather his elect and they shall shine forth like the sun in the kingdom of their father.

There will be the foolish virgins who knock at the door and hear him say, I know you not. And others will come and say, have we not in thy age done many wonderful things? And I will profess unto them, I never knew it.

Beloved, there's something to fear, something to labor for. We're in it now. We're not at the goal. There's a fight to be fought. There's an enemy that is more cunning than Hitler, more powerful than Genghis Khan.

It is Satan, it's the dragon that accuses the brethren before our God day and night. And here's an army that's called of Almighty God to follow the Lamb to overcome this dragon and the victory will not be fought once and salvation will not come to this earth until that enemy is overcome and you and I are in the fight.

The Promise of Entering God's Rest

Let us therefore fear. Listen, some must enter therein. All the Jews can enter in. Forty years God bore with them in the wilderness and showed them his wonders. Forty years he led them by the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of clouds by day and he gave them bread from heaven day by day for forty years and yet they were cast aside and they did not enter in.

And now it's just a day if you hear his voice. That's Pentecost. God has spoken once more in this last century from high heaven. He says go you forth to meet the bright crew. He's coming. Glory to God.

The day of God is at hand. When you see these things begin to come to pass then lift up your head for your redemption. Draw a knife. That's what we're fighting for. That's what we're living for. That's the thing we hold meetings for.

That's what God sent the Pentecostals movement for. You think God's satisfied with a lot of people that do nothing but warm the church benches and go through or the foundation of the world before Adam and Eve came forth from the hand of the creator.

God already had names engraven in the palms of his hand. He had already set apart his son to die on the cross to make possible the greatest work that has ever been done throughout the ages of eternity before and ahead of us.

The Church Made Holy and Ready for Christ

Stand together at this tremendous miracle that God so loved the world and that Christ so loved the church that he gave himself for it. That he might sanctify it. Present it to himself. A glorious church not having a spot no wrinkle no rain is such a thing.

And do you know that the time on earth is so short and yet God who has begun a good work will finish it if with fear and trembling we cooperate. He works in us to will. He puts that cry and that call.

Beloved tonight in this meeting I have seen God perform a latter-day miracle. I never talk. I didn't see that. I quit preaching right now. I wouldn't dare open my mouth again and that's why I know that God's in earnest and I know that out of this crowd he's going to have a select company.

Who are they? Very very simple people but they take God at his word. Shooting the moon. Do you know what they're going to do with those hundreds of dollars that you send in? Oh that's a drop in the bucket that wouldn't feed a mosquito.

No when they shoot off these missiles and destroy them in a few seconds that thing costs two million dollars. But you fail to pay your income tax and you're going to jump. Devil is on this earth. Satan has blinded the minds of them which believe not.

They talk about God. They put on the dollar in God we trust. I'm glad they do that but they don't trust in the Lord. Why don't they talk about Jesus Christ? Why doesn't our congress get down on their face and call on God and repent of their sin?

Then we'd have something and it's going to happen and God's going to raise up witnesses in this world that are not afraid to die and they will die. They're not going to get any time on the radio. On television.

When the truth is preached in the power of the Holy Ghost people will shake and tremble and fear and oh that God might raise up sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked emperors generation.

Oh that God might wake us up. Father what are you going to do? We're so flabby. We're so lazy. We have sold ourselves for naught. We have forged our own chain and bound ourselves with chains of darkness and we can't rest ourselves.

Jesus Christ died to set us free. He spoke and it was done and today the Holy Ghost is here. What do we do with the Holy Ghost? Oh what am I doing with the Spirit of the Living God? What am I doing? What has he come to do?

He's come to bring me where Jesus is in the bosom of the Father. He's come to unite me to Almighty God who lives in a light that no man can approach unto. He has come to sanctify me through and through.

Praise God. He's come to reveal in me the rest. Some must, must enter in and we trifle and we play.