Doctors Who Just Showed Up

Doctors Who Just Showed Up

by Dr. Roger Youmans

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I get carried away sometimes talking about the Christian Healing Center. It’s a concept and a leading that the Lord began to lay on my heart when I was in Africa as a missionary, and gave us visions actually as to what it would actually be manifested as when we came back. And the process of it evolving has not been without error and shortcoming, since God had to use us as instruments. We contributed the weakness and He contributes the power. He gives His grace and it shows up in weak people. Basically the Christian Healing Center is… Originally it was called the Christian Holistic Healing Center. That was my first concept of it. But I found that I was explaining to half the people who had never heard of holistic medicine what I was talking about. And the other half of the people who had heard of holistic medicine, I was trying to explain to them that that’s not what I meant.

So I just dropped the holistic part. We call it the Christian Healing Center because it’s to treat the whole person, but it’s to deal with spiritual reality based on what the Bible says about it. Taking that as faith, that Jesus Christ is the revealer of truth. This is the spiritual reality we want to deal with. We’ll say that right out in the beginning. We don’t want to confuse anybody. We’re not trying to attract people who are looking for mystical experiences or so on. We’re very straightforward. It’s biblical Christianity we’re talking about. That’s the spiritual reality we’re dealing with. And the scientific medicine and health, that’s the way I’m trained. And we believe that there is truth of one piece, that it’s not all divided. And if we are really open, we receive the truth in a total being. And what we really need is not so much an intellectual understanding of it, but an experience of the relationship. Relationship between each other, between ourselves and Jesus Christ, and through Him to God. This involves… If I just draw a circle, it doesn’t originate with me. I think Narramore uses it a great deal.

Man is composed of a body. And scientifically, with physical parameters, the five senses, the sight, touch, smell, hearing, and feeling, we perceive physical reality. And we have a body. We also have a soul, which I include, and I think it’s compatible, the mind, the intellect, and the feelings. That they… I put them together. Now, I know that the feelings are closely related to the body, because as the thyroid level goes down, a person’s mental ability, their feelings change markedly. Or as the thyroid level goes up, the same goes with the estrogen level or the testosterone. And the hormones are part of the body. We can analyze them. And yet, they affect the soul very definitely. In a like manner, the soul, that is the mind and the emotions, can affect the body. That when a person gets depressed, or is discouraged, it can affect the body by slowing down all the motor activity and so on. And we also have a spirit.

And the spirit affects the soul and affects the body. Most commonly, the spirit is seen to affect the body through the soul, but not necessarily always. It can be direct. And by the spirit, I don’t know a good way to define that in an intellectual way, since the intellect’s over here, not in the spirit. Nor in a physical way, since it’s out here also. But it, from a practical standpoint, and I’m somewhat of a pragmatist, the spirit is the decision maker. That’s the you that really decides what you’re going to do. You’re influenced by the body. You’re influenced by the soul. And you can choose to be controlled almost exclusively by the physical body, by the desires. But you still choose it out in the spirit, and you choose to do that. Or you can choose to be governed by the intellect. But again, you’ve chosen it out here, and then put the intellect in control. But it’s the spirit that is the decision maker. That’s the real you that controls the whole entity. That’s probably not an adequate explanation of it. So the Christian Healing Center was to deal with these three areas from a biblical perspective. We right now have two suites of offices on College Avenue. They’re in a professional building.

We have a common waiting room, which is about a third the size of this. And ten rooms off one side, which has the Cross Medical Group, which is a professional corporation of licensed physicians and one psychologist that practice medicine on a fee-for-service basis, much like your family doctor does also. On the other side of the waiting room, there’s ten rooms that are part of the Christian Healing Center, which is entirely free. It’s a non-profit research and education corporation in the laws of California. And all the services there are free. The physicians cross over and see patients in the Healing Center, and the people in the Healing Center cross over and work in the Cross Medical Group too. But by having a distinction that clarifies for the patient what they’re expected to pay for and what they’re not. And it keeps us from having to pay salaries to doctors out of charity gifts that are given from people who really don’t have much of anything at all. And so it’s a sort of organizational division. In the Christian Healing Center, we emphasize a number of things. Let’s see if I can remember all of them. One is we have a noon prayer and praise service in the waiting room. That’s why it has such a big waiting room.

We do this after we’ve cleared out the patients for the Cross Medical Group and before they come in the afternoon. We emphasize doctors and those medical profession one day, another day the clergy or those that are involved in ministry, another day college students. They go right near the San Diego State College with 30,000 students. Another day we emphasize businessmen, another day we emphasize healing, a healing service. We have counseling, nouthetic counseling we call it, after Jay Adams, which basically means we train people how to listen to what somebody else’s problem is and then tell them, share with them, what the Bible says about that kind of a problem. That’s as far as they go. Let the Holy Spirit minister the truth and work the healing. That’s our nouthetic counseling, and we have volunteers, laymen and women, who do this both in person, the people who come in, and on the telephone counseling. How do you spell that word, Roger? I spell nouthetic, Winky. I’m a terrible speller. N-O-U-T-H-E-T-I-C. Nouthetic. Then we also have, in its infancy, scripture therapy, where if a person comes in, for example, with a lot of resentments, we may prescribe for them four weeks of scripture therapy and the therapist then will arrange for them to come in 30 minutes every day for four weeks.

The first two weeks, they may alternate by sitting in a little room by themselves with a tape recorder listening to scripture. It may start with just the Gospel of Luke. And just for 30 minutes, they just sit there. They can fall asleep. They can relax, whatever they want, and just listen to scripture for 30 minutes. The next day, it would be more like a responsive reading, only they don’t have to respond. But you string together scriptures that deal with resentments and forgiveness and grace. And they just listen to this for 30 minutes. I mean, they come in first, you know, I have a cup of coffee, they visit with folks, they go back, sit down, listen to scripture, get up, tell them goodbye, shake hands, or give them a hug, or whatever, and go home. They do this alternate days for two weeks. And then the third and fourth week, they have about 15 minutes after this of scripture memory, where a counselor sits down with them to help them memorize one or two verses that deal specifically with resentments, forgiveness, and grace. And then after a couple weeks of this, hopefully we have made arrangements during that month to where there are Bible studies in their own community, in their own church, where we then can channel them back into a fellowship group in their own community, in their own church, where they’ll get a continuation of this.

Things still come in from time to time to listen to the scripture, but it’s basically to be a channel to get these people who have a lot of problems, deep problems, back into fellowship in their own church. We have music therapy, which is, again, in its infancy. I don’t know very much about which harmonies, which chords, which rhythms minister to what kind of spiritual needs. I am sure there’s a great deal that can be learned about this, that strong rhythms, strong beats can really be demonic in certain cases. Certain harmonies, certain minor keys can really lead to a mysticism. And I don’t know the details of this and I’m not much of a musician. I’m more inclined to think of the words. When I hear the tune, I think of the words and that’s what ministers to me, but I’m intellectually off on the edge, I think, and that’s one of my problems and you’ve got yours. About music therapy, by having a person come in every day for half an hour and listen to pre-selected music. Don’t have to just be passive. Then they come back in after a few weeks and become more active where they sing along certain parts of this music with the tape recorder. And then after a few weeks of that, they join our daily groups in the noontime to join in and participate and become more and more actively involved and then back into their own church.

So we have that. We also have videotapes. I have a television program I mentioned that I’ve been doing for several years, once a week for 30 minutes, called Call the Doctor. So we’ve recorded these. They deal with the mental disease, epilepsy, obesity, lifestyles, history of medicine, all kinds of things. And we have a videotaped player so we can have people come in and they sit down and they watch a 30-minute television program dealing with hypertension and the medical problems. Although about half of them get into a little more evangelical calls for repentance and acceptance of Jesus because this is a part of health and wholeness as I see it in the scripture. We have teaching tapes where they can go in a room and listen to Derek Prince or any other teacher teach about a specific subject, whether it be depression or anxiety or whatever else.

What else is there, Winky, on that Christian Healing Center? I think the volunteers are truly beautiful and people that love Jesus and they’ll listen to the experience to the people and they’ll listen to people. Yes. We have had the Saturday seminar as I mentioned the other day. We’ve discontinued that temporarily largely because we seem to be attracting primarily the laymen and laywomen and very little attraction for the physicians and the health professionals. And I like having the laymen come and respond, but I don’t want to lose the opportunity of speaking to the other health professionals. I want the doctors to be able to come and let down their hair and talk without being afraid that the patient’s going to corner them later on and ask them lots of embarrassing questions about why they did that or why they didn’t do the other or whatever else. Because doctors do tend to be afraid of patients just like patients are afraid of doctors. Doctors do not have… We do speaking in various churches about the wholeness, the integration of the body and all. We have… Let me just… If I can take you just another minute. As we were setting this up a few months ago, we’ve been trying for a long time and we’ve been in three different locations and we’ve tried a number of different means, but about four months ago I got a phone call, or a letter rather, from a doctor up in Oregon who said that he had heard me speak down at Bill Reed’s in Florida a couple years ago and he wanted to know if I could use an assistant or somebody in my practice of surgery.

He was a board certified surgeon as I am. He and his wife came down the very next day from Oregon, stayed with us several days, we prayed together, and he’s now my associate in the office. Medicine and surgery is a very demanding, time-wise, kind of a practice and you can’t hardly do it just with your little toe in it. You either are there and available when they call or you’re out of it. It’s awfully hard to do anything in between. So we are… we have one practice but we have two doctors to cover it. And he thinks and feels and reacts very much like I do and I feel extremely comfortable with him taking care of any of my patients and he feels comfortable with me taking care of any of his patients. That gives a lot more free time and still enables us to make a living and support ourselves in this way and to make contributions in other areas too. So that was an answer to prayer to me. That in my desperation, overwhelmed by the work, the problems, the limitations, from an entirely unexpected quarter over which I had no control, God brings a brother who really sticks. That’s a tremendous answer to prayer. Then not very long after that there’s another Christian doctor who I met when he was at the university, and they had some marriage problems and other things and they worked with a healing center for a while, then they went out of the state to practice.

He came to Full Gospel Businessmen’s Meeting and while he was there the Lord really spoke to him and he told me that he was going to quit his practice in this out-of-state town, talking about giving up well over a hundred thousand dollars a year, I’ll quit it, come back down and work full time with us in the Cross Medical Group in the Christian Healing Center. Praise God, what a blessing. Here’s another man completely out of my control who volunteers to come down and identify with us. I was really excited about this. Thirdly, another Christian doctor there who was retired, who owned this suite of eight professional offices, came to me and wanted me to manage. And he wanted to modify these two suites to make it useful for the Cross Medical Group and the Christian Healing Center. And so we are able to do this with the Christian Healing Center and Cross Medical Group, both only paying half the usual rent until Cross Medical Group can get started. And then they’ll go back up to normal and perhaps drop the Christian Healing Center to nothing. And a very nice location, ideal setting. Just right out of the blue, we want to do this. Well, thank God. I began to see things coming together. I’m slow, but I’m not stupid. I began to get the idea.

Then shortly after that, there was another doctor that we knew we needed to have involved with us, who had been with us once before, and we had lost track of him. Didn’t know where to find him. I inquired a couple places. He was no longer working where he had been before. And then one day I got a phone call saying he was over in Hawaii. A few days later, I got a phone call saying he was looking for a position and would like to talk with me. So I talked with him. He was available the first of January. He’s there full-time now. Loves the Lord. He received the Holy Spirit down in Tampa, Florida, at one of our meetings several years ago down there. Just like God said, “Roger, you’ve done your best and it wasn’t enough. Let Me show you how.” And he’s pulling together. A short time after that, there was a doctor who had been an alcoholic and had been dry. He found the Lord and his life was just radiant with the power of the Holy Spirit. He’d been dry now for ten years. But while he was an alcoholic, he had his license suspended and then he was put on probation. And he’d been trying to get off probation for ten years. He couldn’t get off.

Every year the committee would meet and they’d say this and that and the other and leave him on probation. Now that is not only an economically devastating thing to a doctor. It is intellectually and emotionally devastating year after year after year after year in the eyes of his children. They want to know how come so-and-so’s dad does such and such and why can’t he do that? And he has to keep telling them that he’s on probation and he can only work in an institution in certain conditions and so on and so forth. And he had another hearing then in November and I got a chance to go down to give a word on his behalf along with some others. You guessed it. He got off probation. And I had an assurance in my heart that it would happen before the end of the year, even though it hadn’t happened in the previous ten years. And just like the Lord said, that’s the way it happened. So He brought this together. I can’t think of the other miracles, but just brought in a whole host of things in just the last few months. Basically, they being people. Because God deals primarily with people. The organizations and the institutions are alright, but that’s not the essence of it.

It’s people. People ministering to and people healing each other. The most beautiful thing about the Christian Healing Center is not the people that we minister to and the healings we see among them, which are very striking. But it’s what happens to the ministers. That’s the beautiful thing. To see what’s happened to these doctors as they’ve gotten involved. The Approaches to Healing is just one example. That’s a certified postgraduate medical course approved by the university, although I don’t think they have the foggiest idea, really, of what it is we’re talking about. Their concept of spiritual reality, I think, is nowhere. But a lot of people came. They paid a lot of money. And it must be good. So, we keep our eyes on the Lord. We keep depending upon daily miracles to occur, not only to make things happen for us, but to make things happen to and with the people, and at the same time to and with and in us. That’s sort of a brief rundown on what we’re doing now. Right now, I’m still in the practice of surgery down in Chula Vista, and this is up in San Diego, the Christian Healing Center. But the expectation is within a matter of I don’t know how many months, I will be up in San Diego almost all the time, and Doug will be the one handling the practice in Chula Vista.

And I’m not sure just where all it will go eventually. We will eventually, I think, need some inpatient care, hospitalized patients. There are probably 50 doctors in the San Diego area who have shown a real deep interest in what we’re doing, and a sympathy and commitment to us. Although we only have about seven or eight doctors that are really committed in a full-time way to us.

Do you have a question? Yes. Are your videotapes available for people? Sure. Sure. They’re only three-quarter inch though. We have been in a great deal of prayer about whether we ought to increase this ministry by making them higher quality in terms of my presentation, taking a little more preparation and making them better tapes, and also by making them technically higher quality, by putting them one-inch tapes to where they really would be of a quality good for syndication on a larger scale. And maybe you could join us in prayer for that. That we’re willing to do whatever the Lord wants, but we want it to really be Him that’s doing it. And I don’t know much about television. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and the things we’ve seen happen to the camera crew, and it’s been beautiful that way, but the things I’ve seen happen to other people who’ve been in television ministry is sobering, and I don’t want to get caught up in a bunch of stuff. Unless the Lord says do it, and then I’ll take His hand, and we’ll do whatever He says. Your other tapes that you mentioned on the teaching regarding anxiety, do you use cassette tapes? Yes, they’re a cassette, three-quarter inch videotapes. We used them on our station in San Diego.

Their video also. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We’d be happy to pray about it so that we’re doing what the Lord wants, and not another human project. I’ve had a belly full of those. Yes. And the AMA recognize your work?

No, I don’t think so. I don’t believe they know or care. I am chairman of the Medicine and Religion Committee for the San Diego County Medical Society. And in that regard, it’s rather interesting that when I went into the television ministry about three years ago, I thought, that’s the end of my practice. I’m a surgeon. I take only from referrals of other doctors. And I thought, they’re going to say this is way out in left field. It’s kooky. It’s advertising. Forget him. And there’s more surgeons in the San Diego area for population than anywhere in the world. More than in New York even. There’s surgeons all over the place. Because it’s a nice place to live.

So I thought that if I do this, Lord, I’m finished as a surgeon. But He was telling me to do it, so I did it. And my referrals didn’t fall off. But doctors watch it. And every week, one, two, three, four doctors that hadn’t mentioned to me before tell me they saw the tape. Last week, it was on Naaman in the Old Testament who had leprosy. And I remember that one of the emphases was that Naaman, I mean the servant of Elijah, went back to get some money afterwards. After Naaman had been cured, Elijah wouldn’t take it. The servant went back to get the money, you know, and ended up getting the leprosy too. And I use this as an emphasis of being careful of those who pray for you and minister help to you for a fee.

I’m not sure whether all of my Christian friends and ministers and so on in the San Diego area appreciated that. But I tell you, the patients did. Beware of the greed and avarice in me and the Christian Healing Center too. I mean, we’re just people. You keep your eyes on the Lord. That’s where it’s really at. How did I get on to that? What did you ask me? That’s not right, the AMA. About the AMA, oh yes.

The Lord in His gentle wisdom tries to reassure our frightened, scared hearts. And as an example of that was, after two and a half years, almost three years of this tape ministry, I was just named the chief of surgery at the community hospital there at Chula Vista. Well, we must have 70, 80, 100 surgeons. And that’s the chief of surgeries, was it? That’s what I was named, the chief of surgery. And of course, I’m chairman of several other committees on other hospitals. But it shows, really, that while not recognized as such by the AMA or other official organization, they recognize that I’ve been through the union, you know, I’ve got my credit card, I do the right things, I operate the way I’m supposed to, I’m honest and all of this. And that’s what they really care about. And I may be a little kooky in some of these ways, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with my patient care. And I believe that we need to be wise in our dealing with the world, but not trying to please them. And there will come a time when I won’t be accepted this way by the AMA or some other group or whatever else, and I need to be prepared constantly and daily. That when that time comes, there’s no question about where I stand.

I’m with the Lord. I want to be in His corner. Thank you. I pronounce it Youmans. You-mans. There are other people that I know who spell it exactly the same, and they call it Yeomans. And I’m not particular, I call it any way you like. Just call me for dinner. Thank you. Thank you for taking me off the floor.

Anything but light for dinner. Yeah. Gospel of John, chapter 4, verse 21 and following, and you have heard this before at this conference. I’m reading Ken Taylor’s translation. Jesus replied, “The time is coming, ma’am, when we will no longer be concerned about whether to worship the Father here or in Jerusalem. For it is not where we worship that counts, but how we worship. Is our worship spiritual and real? Do we have the Holy Spirit’s help? For God is spirit, and we must have His help to worship as we should. The Father wants this kind of worship from us.”

Our Heavenly Father, we want to give You the spiritual worship that is real and honest. And we don’t know how to do this of ourselves. And we ask for and insist upon and receive the Holy Spirit to intercede for us right now. Fall on us, Holy Spirit. Amen. Anoint us, Lord Jesus, with Your truth. Your power.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. There’s a book by Dr. Glasser called Reality Therapy, that I was much impressed with because it approaches primarily psychological diseases, not from the Freudian standpoint of going back into your childhood and the id and the ego and the superego, but more from the standpoint of where you are and dealing with reality as it is. In fact, psychiatrists maintain that their purpose is, as they taught me in medical school, their purpose is to help people cope and deal with reality. That’s what they’re for. They counsel with people, they talk with people to help them better deal with the reality around them. Now, I mentioned that in this conference, I wanted to talk about how He can display His power through us. Do you want to see God’s power revealed right here among us? And I used the three letters, His power revealed. And the first was His, I used the H for humble yourself.

That no spiritual pride, no chest beating or saying what a great Christian I am and so on and so forth. If you want to see God’s power, you can forget all that garbage and humble yourself. He can do it without you, He can raise up the stones to praise Him. He doesn’t have to have us. But if you don’t want to be left out, then humble yourself. Get in on it before it’s too late. And then the P for His power, the P was for prayer. Persistent prayer. Where you just pray for eternity, that’s all. If you persist for an eternity, you’ll be alright. Persistent prayer. And then revealed is what I want to talk about today. And the R stands for reality. Let’s get out of a lot of murky spiritual clouds. Let’s get away from all kinds of confusion and just call a spade a spade and talk about reality. In all of my psychiatric training during medical school, and their talk about helping patients cope with reality, there’s not one psychiatrist that ever gave a hint as to what is real. That how you can perceive what is real. How do you know what reality is? You’re trying to get somebody to deal with it. And how do you decide what it is?

They never dealt with that. Because, you see, that’s not a medical question. That’s a philosophic question, or a Christian, or a religious question. And that’s a hard one. But if you don’t define it outwardly and openly, I can guarantee you will define it intuitively. And in practice, you will make a definition of what reality is. And most of us, and the scientists included, define reality in terms of these five senses. Whether you can see it, whether you can hear it, whether you can smell it or taste it, and whether you can touch it. And I have had professors tell me that if you can’t reduce the information or the data to these five senses, then forget it. And I’ve had others tell me that if you can’t reduce this data to a numerical value that can fit in the computer, then the information is irrelevant. It may be true, but it’s irrelevant, and you keep working on that data and that theory and so on until you can reduce it to where I’m putting a computer, and at that point, it’ll become relevant and I’ll consider it. Now, that’s pretty narrow. But there are physical scientists who take this kind of a view, and this is their reality. They may not admit it quite that blatantly in a discussion, although some of them will.

In our culture, by and large, we define what is real in terms of consensus, whatever most people think is real. And we see that in the movies, in the newspaper, in television, whatever most people consider to be real and important, whatever is newsworthy, and for most people, what they want to watch, that’s what they’ll get. And that defines it for us culturally.

I remind the story of some little kindergartners who went out for recess one day, and while they’re outside, one of them found the little kitten, little baby kitten. And children being what they are, when they came back in from recess, one of them brought the kitten with them up under the shirt, you know, and he wiggled around all furry and fuzzy, and they got in the classroom, and of course, teacher tried to get things settled down, and nothing was settled, because everybody was laughing and talking about the kitty. So the teacher, being progressive, wanted to make an object lesson out of it, and had the child bring the kitten up in the front. And before she could even start, though, somebody said, “Is that a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” And somebody else said, “How do you tell?” Somebody else says, “I know, I know.” Then there was silence.

And the teacher says, “How?” The little girl says, “Let’s vote on it.” That’s consensus. That’s majority rule. But I don’t have to tell you there’s some things that voting just won’t change. There’s some things that are just the way God made them, and that’s the way they are. And you can deny it until you see the litter of kittens. Some people deny it even then. But there is a reality that we cannot change by our decisions, that our opinions will not affect it. I believe that that is what we’re talking about in terms of spiritual reality. The Bible makes it very clear in this little passage I read that God is a spirit. That if we’re to worship Him, we worship Him in spirit and in truth. And Jesus says that He Himself is the way and the truth. Truth to the Greek mind and to most of our intellectual minds today is an abstraction that we take from our experience. Let us, whether it be the experience in a laboratory or wherever else, we abstract a principle or a formula from that. And we consider this abstraction to be the truth. The Hebrew mind never did that. The Hebrew mind always looks at the relationship. That’s the truth. And they call this abstraction, they call it an abstraction.

The truth is the relationship, it is the experience. Not the abstraction we make from it. That will get us in a lot of trouble in dealing with God if we keep dealing with our abstractions, our opinions, our thoughts about God, instead of depending upon God Himself and the Holy Spirit revealing to us what is God in reality, enabling us to worship Him.

We would do well, I believe, to realize that according to the Bible, we are in spiritual warfare. I’ll just read a few verses from Ephesians, which you’re already familiar with, but I’ll read them again because if you don’t get any other blessing, and I read the scripture to you, the Bible says you’ll be blessed from that. That’s what it says. So I’ll read it to you, and I’ll be blessed for having read it, and you’ll be blessed for having received it. And if I don’t do anything else, I’ll at least accomplish something worthwhile. Chapter 6 of Ephesians, verse 10 and following. “Last of all, I want to remind you that your strength must come from the Lord’s mighty power within you. Put on all of God’s armor so that you’ll be able to stand safe against the strategies and tricks of Satan. For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against persons without bodies, the evil rulers of the unseen world, those mighty satanic beings and great evil princes of darkness who rule this world, and against huge numbers of wicked spirits in the spirit world. So use every piece of God’s armor to resist the enemy whenever he attacks. And when it’s all over, you’ll be standing up.”

Time was when I didn’t believe in spiritual reality. Time was when I didn’t believe in a personal devil, a personal evil being out to destroy and undermine me. Time was when I didn’t believe in evil spirits. I didn’t believe that illnesses and so on were involved in any way with evil spirits. And I’m not going to belabor you with the various data that came into my life that required me to reexamine some of this. But I would like for us, for an analogy, to take a brief look at a particular episode from history. Now let’s go back in the Middle Ages, the little town of Avignon in France.

Francois was a barber-surgeon in this little town. I call him a barber-surgeon because he not only cut for stones, kidney stones and so on, and bladder stones, but he also cut hair. That, I mean, he was a specialist in cutting. Now that’s different than the physicians who were a little more intellectual. They were more thinkers instead of doers, but Francois was a doer. He was a cutter. And he was disturbed back here in 1347. Because a week ago he had seen two patients who had buboes, they call them, infected lymph glands, both under the arms and in the groin, big glands. And they were… they’d come to a head, they needed to be drained, they needed to be cut. So he’d cut them. That was not so unusual. He’d done that lots of times. The part that disturbed him was that the next day there were four new patients who came.

And they had the same thing. Now, he hadn’t seen this many so quickly before. And furthermore, one that he’d cut the day before died. And to make matters worse, on the third day, there were ten new patients who had these buboes, under their arms, in their groin, and four of his previous patients had died. Now, that’s enough to frighten even a surgeon.

But the worst was, as time went by, there were fifteen, twenty-five patients, and he was up all day and all night seeing these patients. Cutting the wounds, putting on dressings, the purulence poured out, and the patients kept dying.

Now, he knew that there were strange things going on. That that spring, there had been more rain than they had had in the memory of anybody in town. The water still stood several feet deep in many of the fields where they usually planted. There had even been earthquakes. A lot of earthquakes. And he was a religious and a superstitious man. And he was afraid something terrible, a pestilence of God, was falling upon this town. And he didn’t know why. But the people were dying. His patients were dying. There were literally hundreds of people in this little town of Avignon who had these swollen glands, big pustules, the size of a grapefruit. And he noticed that some of the people also began to cough. And in the terminal stage, they would cough up this black blood just before they died. A frightening thing. Utterly helpless before.

They actually loaded up these dead bodies on carts and hauled them out of town. There wasn’t hardly time to bury them individually. Well, worse came to worse, and Francois died too. With the same swollen buboes. And it didn’t stop just in Avignon. It appeared in other cities. And the people died by the score, by the hundreds.

People tried everything to try to correct this. Going to mass more often. Praying more. Reading the Bible. Whatever they could think of. Draining them. Not draining them. Dressing them. Leaving them open. Going out in the sun. Staying in the house. It didn’t seem to make any difference. And this plague swept from one town to another, to a third. And then came back to the first town. The terror of the whole area of France. Wondering what this new disease was. This visitation from God. What was it? What should they do? What were they doing wrong?

The flagellants developed in the ensuing years. These were priests. Who felt that penance was what was necessary. And they would beat themselves with whips. And go walking from village to village. Encouraging the people of the towns to repentance.

And still the plague came in wave after wave. Sweeping across France. And not just France, but other areas too. Somebody read the Bible once. And they found… That’s a good thing to do. They found that… In Leviticus, chapter 13. Something that they thought… Spoke to them. Verse 46. “All the days wherein the plague shall be in him, he shall be defiled. He is unclean, he shall dwell alone. Without the camp shall be his habitation.” Verse 50. “And the priest shall look upon the plague and shut it up. Shut up he that hath it for seven days.”

Well, they thought maybe we ought to just exclude these people who are sick for seven days. But that didn’t seem to work. So they expanded it to 40 days. And from that experience, we get the word quarantine. Of the dark ages. Martin Luther.

That God was sweeping away a whole culture. They couldn’t keep track of who owned the land. Somebody owned the land, he’d die. His heir would take it, he’d die. And his heir would take it, he’d… This is when the whole profession of lawyers arose. To help settle these disputes as to who owned what. And they died so fast in different places, they had a hard time keeping track of it. Doctors, priests, lawyers, anybody who could, would flee from the plague, trying to quarantine it and shut it off.

Now, we can be glad we didn’t live in that age. We have the records of St. Roche and St. Sebastian who became patron saints of the plague. We can… We can understand how the people would grasp at any kind of straw in this kind of a plague. And it wasn’t until the 1880s when Louis Pasteur discovered that the causative agent of this terrible plague was a little bacteria, Pasteurella pestis. A little bacteria.

Very sensitive to penicillin. But of course they didn’t have penicillin, they didn’t even know what it was. They couldn’t see the little bacteria. You have to have a microscope to see it. And if you told them about it, just like with Leeuwenhoek, they didn’t think you were imagining things. You had to have a special kind of microscope to even see that it existed. But they discovered that this little bacteria was the cause of the plague. But it didn’t explain everything else. How in the world did it get to people? And they found that the… The agent that carried this little bacteria to people was the flea. The little bitty flea that would bite people right in their homes where they thought they were safe. And then they would get the bacteria and die.

And how did the flea get in the home? The rats. Now rats had always lived with people. But when they had the floods and the earthquakes, and the rats were driven out of their normal habitat, they came in more to the cities. And then ships that came from China brought the plague, the first, and it got started, and it swept in wave after wave, keep coming back over the same territory, decade after decade, century after century, and nobody knew what caused it. Well, now it’s pretty simple. It’s the bacteria, and the flea, and the rats. And we can kill the fleas with DDT, we can kill the rats with the warfarin or dicumarol, and… we can relax.

What are the plagues that are wiping out the people of our country, of our civilization today? I can tell you the leading causes of death, that will give you a clue. Heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, accidents, we get into cirrhosis of the liver and its complications, bronchitis and pneumonias and their complications, and diabetes and its complications, these are the top… what is that, eight? Leading causes of death. And at least seven of these eight, we can trace right back to a lifestyle of overeating, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, drinking, cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes associated with sweets and obesity, the accidents, most accidents are caused by a combination of high speed and alcohol.

We can just listen right… But it’s natural. I mean, everybody’s got it. What we gotta do is try to move out into the desert farther and farther, where we don’t get contaminated by all of this. I mean, everybody’s got it, and it’s just a part of being alive. But even this doesn’t tell us where the real problem is.

Ten percent of the American people either have been in mental hospitals or have had serious continued psychiatric help. Ten percent. One out of ten. Mental illness is the prevailing disease of our time. And it grows right out of our alienation, our loneliness. It grows right out of our desire to do our own thing, and that alienates us from others and makes us be alone. Our competitiveness, our ambition, the very things that we think feed our whole culture are the very things that are producing the mental illness.

Obesity. Somebody told me that forty percent of the dogs in America are overweight. And the veterinarians have told me that dogs tend to be like their masters. Obesity and overeating. How much advertising do you see on the television, the newspapers, about things you can eat that will satisfy and gratify your taste, but won’t make you gain weight? Man, that’s a whole multi-billion dollar industry in our country of how to lose weight.

You can spend a lot of money on that real quickly. But we know that the obesity is associated with high blood pressure. We know that it’s associated with heart disease. For every pound of fat you’ve got, you’ve got some five miles of capillary blood vessels going through it trying to nourish you. Five miles of pipe your heart has to pump blood through for every pound of fat. And that’s a work. That’s a lot of work.

We know that diabetes is associated with dietary indiscretions, strokes with high blood pressure, and yet it’s an endemic disease and everybody has it. And of course another factor in our society is the prevailing philosophy, if it feels good, must be right. Do it. If you don’t want to do it, that’s okay with you. But if it feels good, go ahead and do it. Everybody do their own thing. Nothing wrong with that. And we find that in Southern California at least, there are more children that come from broken homes than there are children who come from one marriage homes. They outnumber us. Just like that. Divorce is a common thing, but wife swapping and infidelity is far more common. Adultery is almost a way of life. We laugh about it and joke about it. We see it in the movies and the television. We read about it. It’s a joke. It’s so common. We know that there are 1.2 million cases of gonorrhea reported every year. And it’s transmitted from promiscuity. 1.2 million every year. We know there’s over a million cases of syphilis. Transmitted sexually.

Well, we think, education, that’s the answer. Let’s teach these young people about sex and sex education and they’ll be alright. And so we’ve been doing that for 10 years. And the use of contraceptives so they know how to prevent pregnancies. The use of abortion, how to limit the size of the family. And we find that in the last 10 years since we have been applying education, the number of unwed mothers or unmarried pregnancies that occur in young girls, 15 to 17 years of age, hasn’t doubled. It’s gone up by 300%. All of our education seems somehow to have absolutely backfired. I can give you some hints as to why. I can introduce you to the young man who’s teaching our boys sex education in junior high school. You can listen to what he has to say and you can understand why it doesn’t work very well maybe. But it’s more than that. It’s not a matter of education. But we take that as a normal thing, so we live with the plague all around us.

I can talk about drugs too. Now we can talk about the street drugs, the angel dust. We can talk about the morphine, the heroin. We can talk about the uppers and downers that the street folks use. And that’s all bad and it’s widespread. I’m talking more about alcohol. How many millions and millions and millions and millions of Americans are addicted to this and are destroying their body day by day, week by week, and we laugh and joke about the drunk, the social drinker.

I’m talking also about nicotine. No question what it does to your lungs. No question what it does to your heart disease. And yet, we advertise it all across the country. People consume it. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m talking about the drugs that you use in your home. The tranquilizers, sleeping pills, the aspirin, the pills for this and the pills for that. We are a drugged culture. And we think it’s normal. What else are you going to do?

Let me read you what the Bible has to say in Galatians 5 about the bacteria that is destroying us. Now, it gets kind of specific about it because the bacteria that we are talking about up here is really sin.

And the sin of the flesh, the works of the flesh are very clear. If you can’t see them in the world around you, at least read it in the Bible. Then maybe you can read the newspapers and see it there also. Now, the works of the flesh, verse 19, “the works of the flesh are manifest. And these are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, and revelings.” Now, let me read that in the Living Translation because maybe some of these words aren’t too familiar to us.

“When you follow your own wrong inclinations, your lives will produce these evil results. Impure thoughts.” Have you problems with impure thoughts? Well, maybe your hormones have changed and you don’t have so much trouble with that anymore. “Eagerness for lustful pleasure.

“Idolatry. Spiritism.” You see that in the world? That is encouraging the activity of demons. “Hatred. Fighting. Jealousy. And anger. Constant effort to get the best for yourself.” Well, if your hormones have changed, you probably still can qualify for this. “Complaints. Criticisms. Feeling that everyone else is wrong, except those in your own little group. There will be wrong doctrine. Envy. Murder. Drunkenness. Wild parties and all that sort of thing.” Let me tell you again, as I’ve told you before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the kingdom of God. Now, you don’t have to be very sophisticated to see what the bacteria is that’s causing this epidemic in which we’re living. It’s the works of the flesh. It’s sin. It’s rebellion.

Now, you say, but we’ve lived with that all of our lives. And you can’t see that anyway. No, not unless you have the microscope of faith that enables you to look through faith into the Bible, and there you see them right down there wiggling in front of you. You can stain them with Gram stain and make them stand out. You can culture them. But you do have to have the microscope of faith to see it. Does that mean it’s not real?

Quite the contrary. What’s the flea? If this is the bacteria, the sin of the flesh, what’s the flea? You may not like this too well, but I believe it’s something that has been a part… I keep losing my chocolate. It’s been a part of our whole culture. I believe it’s humanism.

It brings the sins of the flesh right into us. Because humanism makes the basic fundamental error of saying that man and what pleases and satisfies and fulfills him is the center of the universe. That’s what humanism says. That man is the center. Now, we learned a long time ago that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe or the solar system. We learned that the Earth spins around something else. I can tell you that man’s not the center of the universe either. And I don’t care what kind of philosophy or how you disguise it or whatever else you put with humanism, whether it be enlightened self-interest or whatever else, if it’s humanism putting man at the center and letting man define what is his purpose and how he will achieve it, you’ve got humanism. And that’s the vehicle that will bring to us the sins of the flesh. Just think about it in terms of how it works in our society. It’s there. The lust, the pride, the promiscuity, the envy, self-righteousness, spiritual pride, all comes right in on this.

And what’s the carrier for the flea? Who are the rats? It’s mass communication. It’s TV. It’s the newspaper. It’s books. Mass communication of all kinds. Mass communication of all kinds of things. It’s humanism to us. It brings it right into our home. And along with it, the lust, the pride. You don’t have to be very smart to see that, do you? It’s there. I mean, even I can see it. Just as plain as can be. And we can attack that on several different levels. We can say, let’s build a wall around us. Let’s go back to quarantine. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. We can give the TV away. We can stop taking newspapers and quit reading books. We can insulate ourselves and our family. Now, I’m not so much worried about me. I’m pretty strong. I can handle it. I got natural resistance and all that, you know. I’m thinking about you folks. I’m thinking about my kids. You see how we deceive ourselves? I want to protect my kids from this. So I’ll get rid of all of this newspaper TV stuff. Except that when I come home at night, I carry the dust with me. I come in and pollute my own home. But the humanism, the lust, and the pride, and the ambition, the excesses.

I guess if you’re going to do it by quarantine, you’re going to have to exclude me. And you. And each one of us. In a way, I guess… I guess we do have the penicillin, don’t we? We do have that erasing fluid. We do have the magic bullet that gets rid of sin. And it’s the blood. The blood of Jesus Christ. Scripture is very clear, consistent, and never equivocates from the very beginning. For 2,000 years, it’s been saying the same thing. The blood of Jesus Christ frees us from these sins.

And the holiness of His life, the Holy Spirit in us, frees us from the humanism. We are in the midst of an epidemic. There’s no question about that. And we can look at it and say, but it’s natural. It’s natural to have all these desires. It’s the normal thing. That’s reality. And we can counsel each other saying, well, you know, if you can’t get along with your wife, what you really need to do is try a trial separation. If that doesn’t work, then get a new wife. But you see, you’re the one that’s contaminated. You’re the one that’ll poison the next wife, too. It’s not going to change. You’re the problem. It’s you that’s sick.

Now, reality demands that we deal not only with the rats and with the fleas of our society, the humanism, it’s bad only when it really puts man at the center. And fundamentally, our society does it. My friends, I see God sweeping a whole culture away. A whole culture. The Western civilization has peaked out, and it’s going to be replaced. Maybe there won’t be a new culture except the kingdom of heaven. I don’t know what’s going to come next week or tomorrow. But the culture we’re a part of now is dying. It’s being swept away. And quarantines won’t do it. “Come out from among them and be ye separate.” That’s okay. But that’s not going to save us. That’ll lead to more self-righteousness. More loneliness. More everybody’s wrong except our own little group. No, you have to go back further than that. Get rid of the humans and put God back in the center. God back in the center means a worship, a purity of life. And you can’t do this without falling into legalism except by the grace of the power of the Holy Spirit within you. That’s why it’s essential to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You cannot live a holy life apart from that. Then the Holy Spirit not only gives you the purity, but He gives you joy at the same time.

He not only gives you freedom from these illnesses, but gives you a real power for them also. Now, this implies, and I mean for it to be more than just an implication. I mean for it to be a clear fact. That our world we live in, the reality of it is not to be measured simply by what we can see and hear and touch and taste and smell. Nor what we can simply measure in emotional responses or intellectual achievements. We are living in a spiritual reality and it is a spiritual epidemic that is a root cause of this, and it manifests itself in many kinds of sins, and this manifests itself in many kinds of philosophies, and this manifests itself in many different ways that we die and so on. That’s not the problem. Get right back to the root cause. And you cannot see this apart from the eyes of faith where you look at Jesus and you’re filled with the Holy Spirit and you recognize the spiritual activity. We’re not fighting against flesh and blood. People aren’t your enemies. They’re not the problem. You can elect somebody new, president or senator or governor. It’s not going to change anything. The people aren’t the problems. It’s the spiritual warfare. And the people don’t even know that they’ve been contaminated and they’re sick unto death. We know. Let me look in Titus. Chapter 2. Verse 12 and 14. 12 through 14. It’s talking about the grace of God.

“Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” A peculiar people. That’s us. We are peculiar. And there is no middle ground. There is no way to compromise, basically, between the humanism, the sin, the self-gratification, the lust of the world, and the kingdom of God. The middle ground is drying up. We have to choose.

When I was in Africa, I had an experience that amazed me. Well, I had a lot of experiences that amazed me. But this one particular time, I was asked to go speak to a little African church on a Bible study.

And I said I would do it. I had to be in French, and that’s a big job for me, because I learned my French in Belgium while I was studying tropical medicine. But I said I would do it, and I was going to talk on John 14, where it talks about love and obedience. And that Thursday afternoon, when I was getting ready to leave the hospital, the Lord spoke to me and said that I should take Dr. Mvouni with me. Dr. Mvouni had stayed with a Catholic priesthood for a while and become disillusioned with the church and the preparation he was going through. And he quit the Catholic church, went into medicine. And he was one of the few doctors who was at the Kinshasa General Hospital when we took over with Fomeco that we kept. And he wanted to be a surgeon, so he worked with me primarily. And I was with him quite closely for a number of years. And I talked to him about the gospel. I talked to him about the Lord. I talked to him about the Bible. He was not interested. Not in the least. We had some trouble with him when we had made him director of one of the hospitals just up the river a little ways from us.

We had to evacuate him by helicopter, as a matter of fact. He was able to alienate people so effectively. So when the Lord spoke to me and said, “Take Dr. Mvouni with you,” my reaction was, “That really you, Lord?”

And I felt sure that it was. So my next ploy was, I don’t even know where to find him. And the Lord didn’t seem to give any answer to that. So I thought, well, I just walked by the operating rooms on my way out to the car. This was about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, 5 o’clock. So I walked by the operating rooms. I opened the door and looked in. There was Dr. Mvouni operating. I said, “Etienne, Steven was the first name Etienne in prayer. Etienne, I’m going out to this little church in the city. I’m going to give a little Bible study. You want to go along?” He says, “Yes. Wait just a minute. I’m almost through here.” That was my first clue that God was going to do something. So I waited a few minutes and he finished up and he came with me. And we went on out to this church and we got there. They had already started. It was one of these noisy places again. It was a little mud church, probably half the size of this, but there must have been a hundred and 150 people packed in it. And they were all stamping their feet and clapping their hands and banging things and singing, not in a very melodious way.

As soon as we got there, the pastor brought us up, Dr. Mvouni and myself both, and set us down on a little bitty platform. It was only about four or five feet wide, just big enough for both of us to sit there. And he announced to the congregation that the two doctors from Mama Yemo Hospital… President Mobutu had changed the name of the Kinshasa General Hospital to Mama Yemo Hospital because his mother’s name was Mama Yemo. And he wanted to identify more closely with the hospital. He came down and he did know where this was lots of times too. But anyway, he said, “The doctors from the Mama Yemo Hospital are here. Dr. Youmans, who’s the director there, is going to talk to us. And Dr. Mvouni is going to translate.”

Now, I’m a little sensitive about people getting cornered. And I turned to Dr. Mvouni and said, “Etienne, I didn’t invite you to come to sit up here and translate. You don’t have to sit up here if you want to. You go back and sit in the backwood church if you like. And you sure don’t have to translate for me if you don’t want to.” He says, “But I want to.” Okay. We don’t have to manipulate people. We don’t have to corner them. Just speak the word of truth. That’s all. Be open. Let them decide. The Holy Spirit can work in their hearts too, you know. So, when the time came for me to talk, I started giving a talk on John 14. About obedience and love. “You say you love Jesus, let me see how much you obey Him.”

That’s the way you measure your love for Jesus. Not how high you can raise your hands or how loud you can sing. Let’s see you obey Him. That’s the real love of Jesus. Check yourself out on that. Do you really love Him? And I went through this. And one of the illustrations I used was the dam that they were building across the Congo River, a place called Inga. And they’re building a power line that would carry the electrical power clear across the country out to Shaba, where they did the copper mining. And they were going to smelt it with the electrical power. And the newspapers were full of this. So, I used this as an illustration. That they’re going to build these power lines across there. And everybody wants some of this power. And you just reach up and touch… You don’t have to touch, coming in a few feet, of those 120,000 volt lines. You’ll get all the power you need. You’ll get all the power you need. No siree. If we’re going to use that power, we’ve got to know something about electricity. We’ve got to get some transformers in there and step it down to where we can handle it. If you want to use the power of God, you better get the book out and learn the rules of how you use spiritual power.

He gave us a book that teaches us all about how to use the power of God. Read it. Know it. Use it. Or you’ll be destroyed. You can’t stand the power of God unless it gets stepped down a little bit for you.

And then, even if you know it, that’s not enough. You can know all about electricity and you still get in a few feet of those wires. You’ve had it. You’ve got to have some insulation. You’ve got to have something that insulates you.

You know, the purity of our lives is the insulation that enables the power of God to flow through us without burning us out. You wonder how come you only have enough power of God to light up a little flashlight bulb? How about the purity of your life?

We’ve got to have some insulation. Straighten out your life. Your thought life. I shared that. They knew what I was talking about. They understood. They understood, Dr. Mvouni. I had to look up the scripture that I was using, not only in the English Bible and the French Bible, but I had to help him with the Lingala Bible because he was speaking in Lingala and I was preaching in French. It was quite a struggle. I got through. I said, “Is there anybody here who wants to have this power of God? Just stand up.” Everybody in the church stood up.

I know what to do next. I thought, well, let’s pray. So we started to pray and I walked out among the people. I would lay hands on some and some would raise their hands and some were falling down. They were talking all kinds of dialects and I couldn’t tell whether it was Lingala or Otetela or Kikongo or French or English or who knows what. But they were sure being blessed. This went on for 45 minutes. And I kept thinking to myself, what’s Dr. Mvouni going to think of the medical director of Fomeco? What if he talks to President Mobutu and tells him what I’m doing out here? What am I going to do?

But it seemed to me by witness of the Spirit that this was the right thing. So I continued to pray and that people continue to be blessed. And finally, they got settled down again and the pastor took over and said that while we have the doctors here, maybe some of you would like to be prayed for healing. So just come forward. And they came again for another 45 minutes. The same kind of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But in the car on the way home, I was driving along like this, looking at Dr. Mvouni out of the corner of my eye, wondering what he was thinking.

And finally he said to me, “Dr. Youmans, I have never seen God visit my people like I did tonight.” I thought, here’s a man who understands Lingala, Otetela, Kikongo. He knows the culture of these people. He knows what’s going on. Here’s an atheist, the vowed, open atheist, who tonight testifies that he saw God descend upon his people. I was blessed and touched. And then he said, “This must have been the way it was in the early church. When the Christians got together and God poured out His Holy Spirit on them.” I thought, man, atheist, God is really speaking through you. And I said, “That’s right, Etienne. That’s exactly the way the early church was.” But then I got a twinge of conscience. I thought, but you know, it’s not that way every time I speak. I can remember just last week I spoke up to the university. They have a medical school there in Kinshasa, too. I spoke at the university. And I have never seen such a hostile crowd. Mocking, cat calls, interruptions. Terrible. Now they weren’t quite so bad with me as they were with some of the black Christians who were giving a testimony. But it was the worst I’d ever seen. And he said, “Well, don’t you think that we’re in the time now where the nominal Christian is just sort of disappearing?

“And you have to decide, do you want to be with Christ? Or do you want to be opposed to Him? And the division is coming.” I said, “Praise God. That’s exactly where we are. The world of the nominal Christian is finishing. And we must now open ourselves and identify ourselves either with the Christians, wholehearted, 100%, sold out, pure life, flowing with the Spirit. Or go ahead and identify ourselves with the world and the lusts and the pleasures and so on. The middle ground is going away.”

Then he said to me, “If that’s true, Dr. Youmans, then Jesus must be coming back soon.” Let me leave that with you. The signs are all here. Whether this culture is being swept away and replaced by another culture, or whether Jesus is coming back tonight or next week, I don’t know. He’s coming back soon. The Bible says that. “I am coming soon.” How soon is, I don’t know. But when He comes, I want to make sure that He finds me over here with the Christians.

Praying, working, open, sincere. He knows my heart and life. No pretense. And I know that’s what you want. Now, this is spiritual reality. This is where we really are. If we’re going to deal with reality, if we’re going to talk in a scientific way about what is real, let’s lay it out and say, this is what’s real, and this is why I believe it, and this is what it means, and then put our money where our mouth is. See how much we obey Jesus. Is that what you want? Amen. Let’s pray and ask for it right now. Lord Jesus Christ, You know our hearts. You know our minds and how terribly deceitful we are with ourselves and with others.

Lord, we plead the blood of Jesus Christ for our sins, our pride, our arrogance, our lust, our stealing, murder, hate. We plead the blood and claim forgiveness. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. You are our Savior, Lord. We want You to be the Lord of every part of our life. We’re too dumb to know what that means even. So we ask You right now, Lord, to anoint us with Your Holy Spirit.

We give You permission. We give You our wills. Illuminate my life and heart with Your Holy Spirit, Lord, to show me who I really am, what I really believe, to show me reality. I trust You, Lord, because You died for me. I can’t trust many people, but I can trust You.

Right now, Lord Jesus, anoint me with Your Holy Spirit. Anoint each person in this room with Your Holy Spirit. Illumine their hearts themselves. Illumine their hearts themselves. And enable them to make the decision with their spirit. A decision to commit everything they are and ever hope to be to You.

I will it, Lord. I will it. So be it. Amen.