The Pajamas or the Prayer

The Pajamas or the Prayer

by Ruth Carter Stapleton

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Father, we ask Your protection over us tonight. And we ask that Your love just flow within our hearts. And Father, we just pray that through the power of the Spirit, that You will open our ears and our understanding to the Spirit and to Your voice.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. Jesus came proclaiming the good news. And Jesus said, “The kingdom has come.” And then He tried to explain to them, “The kingdom is within.” The disciples couldn’t understand what He was saying. Jesus walked with the disciples and He talked with them and He taught them everything that He knew. And then He said to them, “I must go. The time has come when I have to leave you.” But He says, “Now don’t be worried and concerned because I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m not going to leave you comfortless because my Father is going to send the Holy Spirit to you.”

And right now, He says, “While I’m with you, I can only be in one place.” Well, they couldn’t understand what Jesus was saying. And so as He left, He said, “I’ve taught you all that I know. There is so much more to teach you, but you can’t even understand the things I’m saying now.”

And so Jesus went to the cross. And He had told them, “When that day fully comes, that’s when the Holy Spirit, that’s when that comforter will be given to you.” And so after Jesus died on the cross, all of the disciples went back to their homes. They took up their nets and they began to fish again. And they thought, “Well, it’s all over. We thought the Messiah had come. We thought we had a king. And now the king is gone.” Well, you see, this shows the lack of understanding they had as to what Jesus was trying to tell them. But then Jesus began to appear back. And after He died on the cross, for 40 days, Jesus appeared back over and over and over again. And this time, as He appeared back, He was teaching the disciples. And He said, “Go back to Jerusalem and gather together and pray and come into one accord, into one spirit.” And so again, the disciples dropped their nets and many of the followers of Jesus went back to Jerusalem. And they had gathered there, waiting. I’m sure they didn’t know what they were waiting for. Praying, praising the Father in heaven. And then in the scripture, it says, “The day fully came.”

Now on that day, when the Holy Spirit was given, the Holy Spirit was given to all mankind forever and ever. The day fully came that day. And so the Holy Spirit has not had to be given by the Father again since that time because the Holy Spirit has been here for mankind.

Up until that day of Pentecost, there were only a chosen few that the Father chose to bless with the Holy Spirit. But after that day that the Holy Spirit was given by the Father to all mankind, this power has been available for every single human being on the face of the earth. As the scripture says, “For your sons and daughters and your children’s children and your children’s children all down through the ages.” And so this Spirit is available. This power is available for all who will open their hearts and receive.

Now Christ comes into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. And as the Holy Spirit begins to work and move within our beings, there is a power that’s released in our life. And this power has a two-fold purpose. This power begins to work within the individual person.

Healing, cleansing, enlightening, bringing all truths to the remembrance of that person, purifying, and perfecting. And as the Spirit works within each one of us in an individual way, the Spirit also works out to mankind. Now in the teachings of Jesus, we are to die to self and to live for others. Everything we have, we’re to give away. Every single blessing that God gives, He gives for us in order for us to give this blessing to someone else. And if we want to have power flowing in our life, we’ve got to use this gift for mankind. If we want to have love in our hearts, we’ve got to give away love. And if we want to have joy, we’ve got to give the joy away.

Now, Jesus was the only normal human being that has ever walked the face of the earth. And if Jesus is the only normal human being that’s ever lived on this earth, that makes every single one of us subnormal.

And so we have to look at the life of Jesus and see what He says. We’re not living up to our potential. Jesus set an example for us. And Jesus said, “All of the things that I do, you can do, and even greater things.”

Jesus was psychic. He was the only fully developed psychic that ever lived. But He didn’t operate in the realm of the psychic. He used this gift in the realm of the Spirit. And it was to help mankind. Now, Jesus and the Father knew humanity.

And yet, in knowing us, the weaknesses that we have, the fallibility of mankind, yet, knowing us as He did, He gave us a commission. And He says, “Reach out, go out into the world, and preach this same gospel that the kingdom of God has come, and that the kingdom is within.”

He said, “Go out and heal the sick. Go out and cast demons out in my name.” He even says, “Go out and raise the dead.” And see, in saying all of this, He says, “All that I do, you can do, and greater things.”

So what we’ve got to do is to understand the potential that we have, and to learn and know what is available for us as Christians today. Today, if we want to live the overcoming life, if we want to live a life of victory, we have got to call on the strength of the power of the Spirit. We’ve got to acknowledge what God has given us to use as tools.

Now, everybody, every Christian does not want to live the overcoming life. You see, we spoke the other night about the different steps. You can believe, and you can live all of your life in this first area of belief. And then, when you leave this earth, and you move into that next realm, you have eternal life. It’s a promise within the Scripture.

But there is a much higher calling. This is for self. The fact that Jesus gives Himself to me so that I can have eternal life. And then there is a next step that we talked about, when I give myself to Him, and I choose, by my will, to be an overcomer in this world.

Now, in the book of James, in that first chapter of James, we hit on that just a little bit. This is talking about the overcoming life. James says, now, if you want to live the overcoming life, a life of victory, a life of joy, that life when you can praise God for all things, this is what he says, when all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends. Now, listen, in our own strength, we can’t do this. We can’t welcome trouble, because in our own strength, the trouble gets on top of us and crushes us. And we move into depression. And we move into illness.

And we lose the joy. So, in order to be obedient to the Scriptures, we must have this power of the Holy Spirit in our life. We must open our hearts to this power of the Holy Spirit. Now, he says, realize that all of these temptations and trials crowd into your life. They come into your life to test, to test your faith, and to produce in you the quality of endurance. And let this process go on and on and on and on.

You see, we get to the place when these trials in our life, we say, “Well, I can’t stand it another minute. I just can’t stand another day of it.” And you don’t have to stand another day when you come to that place that you can accept it. Because then you’ve learned patience. Well, let it go on and on until that process of endurance is fully developed. And then you will find that you have become men of mature character, with the right sort of independence.

Now, here we are over here. This is that natural man that we are, that lets everything come on top of us and crowd us in and depress us and push us down. And yet, here is the kind of person over here that Jesus says we are to be. We are to be as He was. We are to live this victory, life of victory as He did. A life of freedom, a life of power, being able to be a witness to the truth of the victorious life.

And so somewhere there is a bridge in between these two. The weak man over here and the man of power over here. And so God has provided, through the power of the Holy Spirit, gifts or tools or instruments to use to bridge this gap.

Now, in the 12th and the 13th and the 14th chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul explains this bridge between the two. And until we have an understanding of these chapters and an understanding of the supernatural gifts that God has given us to use, and until we begin to use, accept these gifts and use these gifts, we are going to be operating over here on this side. Letting the world stay on top of us. And there is no way we can be obedient to the Scriptures.

Now, in this 12th, 13th, and 14th, you are very familiar, I am sure, with the 13th chapter because we hear it preached over and over. The love chapter. And so I want to start with this 13th chapter and show how the three chapters tie in together. In the 13th chapter, Paul says, now there are many gifts. But if you have these gifts and you don’t operate these gifts in love, they’re nothing.

So Paul is exalting love. This is the way. This is the path. Love is the vehicle to use for these gifts. The very first verse in the 14th chapter says, “Seek the gifts,” but use them in love. So we have to see that the gifts are necessary, these tools are necessary, but then it’s necessary that they be used in that vehicle of love. Now Paul says, if I speak with the eloquence of men and angels, and this means speaking in tongues, if I speak with the eloquence of men and angels, but I have no love, I become no more than a blaring brass or a crashing cymbal. Noise. That’s what he says. No matter how many different languages of tongues you can speak in, if you are not speaking in love, it’s just noise. And then he says, if I have the gift of prophecy, foretelling the future, and if I hold in my mind all knowledge, not only human knowledge, but the very secrets of God, and if I also have absolute faith, he says, if I have so much faith that I can move a mountain, and yet I do not operate these gifts in love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that I possess, and if I even give my own body to be burned, but if I have no love, I achieve precisely nothing.

And then Paul goes on to explain love. Love is slow to lose patience. Love looks for a way of always being constructive. Love is not possessive. It is never anxious to impress, and never cherishes inflated ideas of its own importance. You see, this is the walk of the Christian life. Slow to lose patience. Always wanting to help somebody. Always wanting to build the other person up.

Love. This love has good manners, and does not pursue selfish advantage, and it’s not touchy. Well, he goes on, this love knows no limit to its endurance, and it has no end to its trust, and no fading of its hope, and it can outlast anything. In fact, he says, when every single thing else falls, love will still stand.

Now, this next part of the Scripture is a part that we really don’t concentrate sometimes on too often. Paul says, if there are prophecies, they will be fulfilled. And once they are fulfilled and done with, they’ll be gone. There will be tongues, but then the need for speaking in tongues will disappear. And then there will be knowledge given to us. But the knowledge will be swallowed up in truth. For all that is incomplete, when that complete comes, that will be the end of complete. All right, now what Paul is saying, he’s saying, the gifts or the tools that are given to us as Christians, the power that is given to us by the Father, it’s all necessary.

But there is going to come a time when the complete comes. And who is the complete? That’s at the end of the end times. When all scriptures are fulfilled in Christ, when that time comes, there won’t be any need for speaking in tongues. There won’t be any need for knowledge, divine knowledge. There won’t be any need for prophecy, because we will all know all truth. But Paul says, but for right now, he says, that time hasn’t come. For right now, we are living in a period of time when we need the supernatural gifts of the Spirit. He says, at present, we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. If you’ve ever looked on a glass mirror, and the mirror had a distortion in it, and you would see just a hazy flowing of a reflection. Paul says, right now, because we don’t have the complete with us, we don’t have all truth, as we look at the world, we only have partial truth. That time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face. But he says, at the present time, all I know is a little fraction of the truth. Now, that’s what we know. Just a little bitty fraction of the truth right now.

But that time will come when I shall know it as fully as God now knows me. All truth. And so, in this life, there are only three lasting qualities. The first one is faith. The second one is hope. And then the third is love. And he says, of all three of these, the greatest is going to be love.

So now we go back to the time of where we are now. Okay, here we are. We have accepted Christ. And we are ready to start out into this life, this Christian life. You see, Jesus says, “I’m the way and I’m the truth and I’m the light.” And so, when we receive Christ into our life, we say, we use the term, my spirit is born. I’m born into a new life. I become a new creature. And as we become that new creature, Christ begins to live His life out through us again. Or really, it’s a beginning for us. And we begin to move through every phase of life that we see recorded in the Bible. When we have the life of Jesus recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it’s not just so that we can read these Gospels and find out what Jesus did and know the historical Jesus. It’s a pattern for my life and your life.

And so, if we want to know what our life is going to be, the development, the spiritual development of our life, we can look at that pattern of Jesus. And here we began at the place of the River Jordan, by which we say, “All right, I present myself to You.” And every single guilt is washed away. Every sin in our life is done away with. It’s just as though we never ever sinned. So that’s where we begin in our Christian life. And then, the next phase of Jesus’ life, as He went down into the River Jordan and He came up again, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him as a dove. And this is that phase when we receive the Holy Spirit within our life. And we know this Spirit as the guiding force, guiding and directing within us. All right, the next step in Jesus’ life, He went out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness for 40 days. And He was tested. We have the recording of three different testings. We don’t know how many times He was tested. But He proved to be faithful and obedient to the leading of the Father. And so, at the end of the 40 days, He had passed the test.

Well, you see, after we receive the Holy Spirit in our life, we move into the wilderness also. And many people spend their entire life in the wilderness. Now, we don’t want to spend our life in the wilderness. We have testings and we have trials that come. But in Christ, we can overcome any temptation. There is no temptation that’s given to man that he can’t overcome in Christ. And so, we begin to say, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” Over and over. “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” And we move from one experience to the other in Christ. From one temptation and one testing to the other. And then, after Jesus stayed in the wilderness and completed the testing, He moved into a life of ministry. And God has called each one of us into a life of ministry. It doesn’t necessarily mean a public ministry, but there is a place and a plan and a purpose in the kingdom of God for every single one of us. And so, we began in obedience to live this life of ministry. And then, we come to the foot of the cross, just as Jesus did. By which, we die to self. Die to self. Die to self. And we become crucified with Him.

And then, there is the resurrection. Now, how many of us are resurrected on the other side of the cross? This was the teaching of Rufus Moseley over and over and over. Rufus Moseley felt that we would be able to live the life, the resurrected life on the other side of the cross, right here in this life. If we could so yield our will to the Father, that we would be able to live in this world and in this life and on earth in the glorified body, by which in Christ we too would be overcome, we would overcome death. But you see, in our Christian life, we stop way back up here, sometimes with the very first step.

And we don’t go, we don’t continue the Christian pattern of growth. Now, to move back to that 12th chapter that Paul was talking about before, before the love chapter, he begins to explain these gifts. And Paul says, “Now I want to give you some further information concerning spiritual matters. You have not forgotten that you were Gentiles, following dumb idols. But now, I want you to understand that you are Christians and that no one speaking by the Spirit of God should call Jesus accursed and no one could say that He is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.” And then he begins to explain that in this Christian life, men have different gifts, but it’s the same Spirit who gives them. And they have different ways of serving God, but it’s the same Lord who is served. And God works through different men in different ways, but it’s the same God who achieves His purpose through them all. And then Paul goes on to list nine gifts that God gives to us, gifts of power to work, to minister, to live the overcoming life. Now, God is perfect order. And so as we understand these nine gifts that are given to us, we can see the perfect order in God. There are three gifts of revelation. There are three gifts of working power.

And there are three gifts of utterance. Now, in order to minister, we need the gifts of revelation. You know, many people reject these gifts. They reject anything supernatural about the Christian life. And sometimes we can look at our churches, at the organized church, and we wonder, why is it that the church seems to have no life? And it’s because man has so rewritten Christianity through Sunday school lessons and through all kinds of publications that man has explained away every supernatural miracle of the Bible and all of the supernatural power. And we look back into the 12th and 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, and we see these great saints and these great men of power. And we read their life and their biographies, and we look in our church today and we say, “Where are these men now?”

It’s because we’re afraid of the supernatural. Well, you see, God knew, the Father knew, that we wouldn’t be able to live the Christian victorious life without supernatural power. So if there is anything we need to go back to here in 1970, it’s the truth of the scripture of the miracles of that time. Because the Bible says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And Paul says, Christ in me is the hope of glory. And so the hope of 1970 and the hope of the future is letting Christ, Spirit, and power flow out. And as we said, Jesus was the only normal man. So what He did was not supernatural, but it was natural. So if you don’t like the term supernatural, just think of how it was natural with Jesus. Now in these three gifts of revelation, we have the divine word of wisdom. And for every supernatural gift that’s given to us through the power of the Spirit, there is the natural gift. We have natural wisdom, but yet when we call on the strength, the power of the Spirit within, for the supernatural word of wisdom, this goes beyond man’s intellect. We see this with Jesus when they came to Jesus and they were going to catch Him in a trap.

And they said, “Should we pay the taxes?” And Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and what is God’s unto God.” And this was a word of wisdom that came forth from Jesus. Now we say, how does this relate to me? All right? Now wherever we are in our homes, if you’re a school teacher, if you’re in business, if you have any dealings with your fellow man, there are… you have time after time after time when you’re questioned in counseling and you can look to Him and there you can have that word of wisdom that’s exactly the right thing to be said at that particular time. It goes beyond anything that you could have known yourself. Now there is the word of knowledge, a divine word of knowledge. And then there is the discernment, divine discernment.

Now if we’re going to minister and if we’re going to move out doing for and giving to our fellow man, we need to have these gifts. We need to cultivate these gifts within men. We need to ask God to release these gifts within us. Discernment so that we’ll be able to look into the lives of others to know the spirit of that person in order to minister to that person.

Healing. Then we have the three working gifts. The gifts of healing. So often times, well we hear a lot about healing at CFO, but so often times in some of the churches in our hometown, we don’t hear too much about healing. It’s a real, real miracle when someone has a healing. How many here have had a healing, a supernatural healing through the power of the Spirit? We know it’s real. My husband was one of the strongest objectors of a supernatural power of healing. And being in medicine himself, it was just very hard for him to accept it. And he was always just a little bit ashamed of the fact that some people knew there in my hometown that I believed in the supernatural power of healing. And then after my husband experienced, had a conversion experience, and received the Holy Spirit, one week later, he went to a CFO. And he was practically crippled at the time. He wore braces on his feet. He hadn’t been able… He still played golf, but he had to ride on a golf cart. He couldn’t walk. He wore orthopedic shoes. He slept every night with braces on his feet. And so a week later, after his experience of receiving the power of the Spirit, we went to a CFO at Nags Head, North Carolina.

Corner. And that night, he went to the altar, when they gave an altar call. And as he knelt down at the altar, all of a sudden, he got his toes caught behind him. And that pain began just to shoot, you know, through his foot. And he thought, “Oh my goodness, you know, I know when I get up, both feet are going to drop off.” And he thought, “Oh, if I just hadn’t come to the altar.” And just in panic, he said, “Oh Lord, while I’m here kneeling, heal my feet.”

And God healed his feet completely that night. Not one pain, we got back home, and it was quite some time before he realized the complete healing of his feet. And then, finally, about a month later, he said, “I’m going to try to put on a pair of leather shoes.” And then about two months later, he was able to throw away the orthopedic shoes. He kept expecting the pain to come back. Of course, this has been three years now.

It’s a beautiful thing when we really began to realize that this power is available for plain, ordinary, normal people like us to minister to each other. You mothers, when your children are sick, to know that it’s God’s way that you go into their bedroom and lay your hands on that child and just say, “Jesus, I know that You’re the divine healer. So heal my child.” And lay your hand on that child and expect that power of God to just flow to that child and heal that child.

This should be the normal for us. Did you know that? In the Christian life, this should be the normal. We shouldn’t be so amazed and have to get up and give testimonies as to healings because it should be happening every single day in all of our lives.

Faith. And then there is that supernatural gift of faith. This is such an important gift. Now, if you say, “Well, I would love to believe in healing. I would love to believe God could use me, but who am I to be used? You know, who am I?” And you think, well, if I just had the faith, well, God really doesn’t expect us to walk around as walking faith. God expects us to be normal, natural, human beings. Getting up every morning, just like the rest of the world, cooking three meals a day, or going to the business if you’re a man, shaving like everybody else. But when the need… The men… But when the need arises, you see, we don’t walk around with a hand full of healing power. And we don’t walk around with a body full of faith. But we walk around as natural human beings. And when the need arises, we ask God, if we can’t quite believe He can do it, we ask God to give us the supernatural faith to believe.

And then it’s up to God to let this faith just flow from us. And when that faith begins to move, there is a knowing within, and then we reach out and we pray for that person to be healed.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a person in your business office or a person in the beauty parlor. It just comes to my mind now, this power of the Holy Spirit. As I said, this power is available for everybody. And this gift of the Holy Spirit, it’s available for everybody. But the Bible says there is one condition. You must ask. You must desire with your heart. And if the Father, your earthly Father, knows how to give good gifts, how much more your Heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. And so you ask and you desire. Now you can ask alone.

You can ask someone to pray for you to receive this gift of the Holy Spirit. You can be in a group and you can sit right here in this audience, in this group right now. And if your heart is receptive and if that desire is within your heart to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, all you’ve got to do right now is just to receive it. And God can give you this gift right now.

Now as we begin to minister, I know in the book of Acts many times, well, there are three different occasions that are recorded when some of the people said, “Holy Spirit? What is the gift of the Holy Spirit? We don’t even know. We never have even heard there is a Holy Spirit.”

And Paul says one time, “Well, what were you baptized into?” And they said, “Well, into forgiveness, John the Baptist’s baptism.” And it says here that Paul laid his hands on the people and they received the Holy Spirit. Now, after we have received the Holy Spirit, we have the power to lay hands on others for others to receive the Holy Spirit.

And you might say, “Oh, but this is a, would God operate this through me?” Why, surely. But you might have to say, “Lord, I need the gift of faith in order to believe that if I lay my hands on another person, that You are going to give them the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

So this gift of faith is a gift that we have to call on over and over and over. I think I shared this in Boston, but I remember going to a Presbyterian class one night to teach and I gave this little talk for about 15 minutes and at the end of the time, one of the ladies said, “Oh, by the way, our minister is in the hospital with a heart attack and why don’t we take up a collection and buy him a pair of pajamas?”

And they went on to share with the group that he wasn’t going to be released from the hospital for six weeks, that the doctors had said it would take that long for him to be healed. I think it was six weeks. And anyway, so they thought, well, it was a great idea to take up the collection. And so then one of the ladies as an afterthought said, “Oh, you know, why don’t we, we better, let’s pray for him.” And so they asked me if I would lead in prayer for this minister. And so I said, “All right, you know, let’s bow our heads.” So everybody bowed their heads and I started to pray. And all of a sudden, I thought, well, what will I pray? And I said to the women, “Well, what are we going to ask for? Are we going to ask that the pajamas fit?”

Or shall we ask that Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday and today, that He heal that minister completely tonight so he can come home from the hospital and preach next Sunday? Well, you know, I said, “How many of you believe that Jesus is the same today and He can heal that minister tonight?” I said, “Now let’s be honest.” Not one single person could believe it. Now that’s honesty. And you see, we’ve said before, that’s where God begins at that point of honesty. And so I said, “All right, let’s pray that this group can come into agreement, one accord, one spirit. And so let’s pray that God will give us the gift of faith to believe.” And so as we prayed, do you know the hearts of those women were changed through the power of the Spirit? And I went around and every one of them said, “I believe it.”

And you know, the beautiful thing about God is that we only have to believe just long enough to think the prayer. Just long enough to put that thought into action and then it’s done. And that old unbelief can come right back and it doesn’t affect a thing because that process has already begun. And so just for long enough for us to pray the prayer, we all came into agreement of one accord and we said, “Lord Jesus, we believe that You are the same today. And so touch that minister tonight and make him whole. Amen.” And Jesus touched him. And my phone really was ringing off the hook. Not a single woman by the time they left that meeting that night had any idea that Jesus was going to heal that minister. But you see, they released that prayer of faith. And that’s why it’s so important to understand this gift of faith because all of the rest of the gifts are tied up with the gift of faith. You see, we beat ourselves to death because we say, “Oh, I just can’t believe.” “Lord, help my unbelief.” And Jesus says, “Well, if you’ve got the faith of a grain of mustard seed, that’s not but that much. And if you’ve got just that much faith, that’s all you need.”

Because if you’ve got that much faith, that’s enough to turn to God and ask for enough faith to pray. You see? That’s all you need. Well, then, the third gift of power. You see that these three gifts of power is the working of miracles.

Now, I suppose we’d all be shocked to say that if Jesus is the only normal person that ever lived, that it was a very normal thing to look down at the fishes and the loaves and see it increased. Christ.

Well, you know, if you began to read any of the books of the Eastern religions, and I read all six volumes of the teachings of the East, and you know, it just really makes me ashamed that here I am, a Christian, who believes in Jesus Christ, and yet, in some of the Eastern religions, in the Eastern countries, is they can increase food. They can walk on water. They can do these miracles that are so far beyond what we, or the Christians that I know, are claiming the power to do.

Now, I haven’t increased fish and loaves myself, but we need to begin to raise our level of thinking and our level of consciousness and begin to believe the word of the potential that we have in Christ, that every single thing that He did we can do. And you know, it begins to make the Christian life exciting to know the potential of where we can move to.

We get sidetracked, and we get off on tangents, and I’m the worst one. I remember after becoming a Christian, I got so bored, you know, with reading the Bible and reading about Jesus. And so then I began to delve into metaphysics. And then Arthur Ford came to Fayetteville, and I got involved with that group. And I was looking for something just a little bit more exciting than Jesus, and a little bit more exciting. And then one night, I was listening to a man speak, and he said, “Have you progressed beyond Jesus?”

And I got so mad with that man, and I don’t know if you know this truth or not, but any time you react to another human being, you have to look into yourself and say, “What is it in me that makes me react?”

Another person is almost like a mirror to ourselves. If that person does anything that causes me to get angry, or to react in any way, I wouldn’t react if that flaw wasn’t within me. So I’m seeing a mirror of myself. And so that night when I reacted, I knew it wasn’t that speaker’s fault, but something was wrong with me. And I really and truly had, in my mind, progressed beyond the Bible. It wasn’t exciting enough for me. And so I had to get back. I was talking about getting out of my center the other night. And this is another time I had to get back in that center. And I said, “Oh, Jesus, reveal Yourself to me. And reveal Your life to me.”

You see, we can never progress beyond Jesus. And all the things that He did, if we can open our understanding and open ourselves to that inner voice and teaching, I believe that He’ll teach each one of us to develop as He developed.

All right, now we have the three gifts of utterance. Prophecy, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues. Now, you know, when we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or immersion in holy love, or coming into the consciousness of Christ, or however we say it, and we begin to talk about the supernatural gifts of the Spirit, so many people think, “Wham, that means speaking in tongues.” Well, that’s wrong. Speaking in tongues is just one of the lesser byproducts of having the gift of the Holy Spirit. And yet, we take that one little gift, and we blow it all out of perspective, and it becomes a thing, a great big thing in itself. And so, it’s just in its proper place. It’s just one of the three gifts of utterance. We have prophecy. Paul says, if you’re going to desire one of the gifts, desire prophecy, because it can benefit the whole body, because you are giving to the body the words of God. Prophecy means to proclaim news concerning the kingdom of God. You can proclaim the news that’s at hand right now, or you can proclaim what is to come in the future, but it’s a gift of God. There are many ministers, oftentimes, that can be in the pulpit preaching, and all of a sudden, they begin to preach something they haven’t read, and something they haven’t studied.

It just begins to flow through them in words, and they hear truths for the first time coming through their lips, and they’re doing prophetic speaking and preaching. And then the gift of tongues, which is the next one. Paul has a whole chapter devoted to this, because here back in Corinth, a group of little Christians here began to see these supernatural gifts working in their life, and they began to bicker, and one would say, “Oh, I’ve got the gift of healing,” and the other would say, “Well, oh, that’s not as good as my gift, you know, I’ve got, I prophesy, so I prophesy for the whole church.” And so they began to bicker about all of their gifts, and so Paul is writing this to explain. The 12th chapter, he explains the gifts. The 13th chapter, he says, none of these gifts are worth two cents if you don’t operate them in love. And then the 14th chapter, he says, because speaking in tongues was so controversial, he begins to explain it. And he says, “When a person speaks in an unknown tongue, he speaks mysteries unto God. And nobody can understand him.” So in other words, he’s saying, if you speak in tongues, keep your mouth shut in public unless you can interpret. Because the only thing you’re going to do is bring confusion.

And so, therefore, use this gift in the privacy of your own closet in order to thank God and praise God and glorify God. Now then, the third gift of utterance is interpretation. And Paul says, if you speak in tongues, ask that you can interpret so you’ll know what you’re saying.

Now these gifts are gifts that we have to move into by faith. Most all of these gifts are gifts to operate for other people. The wisdom, the words of wisdom are given to us to help other people. The words of knowledge are given to us to help other people. The gifts of healing are given to us to help other people. The working of miracles. And the only gift that’s given to us for our own edification is that one gift, the gift of speaking in tongues. And that’s why it’s so much less important than the others. It’s because it’s for me or myself or you and not for the use of a whole group unless you interpret. And to edify means to build myself up spiritually. Now, this is important. Why do we have quiet time in meditation? It’s to build ourselves up spiritually. It’s to bring us into closer communion with God. And so that’s the purpose of this gift of speaking in tongues, is to build us up personally toward God. Now, many people confuse this gift and they think it is the sign of receiving the Holy Spirit. And this is not true either. It might come. It might be expressed through you. And it might not. But there are millions and millions and millions of people who have received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Who are operating in tremendous power who never ever speak in tongues. And so we need to know the truth about these gifts. Because we don’t want confusion. And we don’t want to become selfish or get the feeling that someone’s got something that I haven’t. There is only one gift. And that is the gift of the Holy Spirit. All of these things that we’ve mentioned tonight are just different manifestations of the gift. And that gift that we desire and seek is the Holy Spirit. It’s the highest gift that God can give us. Because it’s the gift that’s going to make that bridge from the natural man to be able to live the overcoming life over here. And so if you want to live the overcoming life. If you want to truly keep the commandments of Jesus. When He says, “Go out into the world. And preach that the kingdom of God has come. It’s within.”

If you want to be able to heal the sick. If you want to see your church come alive. You don’t go and talk all of this. But you quietly ask God to begin to teach you. And express through you these gifts of power. In a way that will be natural to your nature.

Not to be as a phenomenon. But natural to your nature. In a quiet way. And begin to let Jesus operate. Now if each one of us as Christians could go this step. We would see our churches come alive.

We would all learn to be obedient to that Spirit within. We wouldn’t be going around trying to fill up because we were dry. We’d be able to turn within. And know that all things are within me. And all things are within you. Because that’s where the kingdom of God is. And the reason that’s where the kingdom of God is. Is because that’s where the king lives.

And I think it’s so great. I think it’s a Christian… Let’s see. I don’t know who they are. The group that had… They draw the picture of the little throne. The self. The round body. And the little throne. And they say, “Who’s on your throne?”

Is it yourself? The I that sits on the throne? Or does Jesus sit on the throne? Well, you see, that’s where we’re to be concerned. Not whether we speak in tongues. Not whether we are performing miracles. But who’s sitting on my throne?

And if you’re sure that it’s Jesus, then act like it. And then step out in faith, and in boldness, and in power, knowing that that king that lives within you has come to save the world. To heal the world. To be a peacemaker to broken homes.

If we knew this, if we really and truly knew this, and knew that the king, Christ, was on the throne within us, we’d put Peter to shame. You know, they had to walk in the shadow of Peter to be healed. But if we really knew the power that’s within each one of us in Christ, all we’d have to do is to walk into a room and the whole room full of people would be healed by our presence. Do you believe that? That’s the truth. So what we’ve got to do is to raise our consciousness of understanding and ask God to give us the faith to believe the word so that we can know what we’re here for. And to know. And He says, “Go into the world.” Well, you know what that means? It doesn’t mean, as I said the other night, that we have to go to China or to India or to the Philippine Islands. He says, “Go into the world.” Now that’s any world that’s near you. I have my little world that I live in.

There’s some hippies that live downtown, and they have a world that’s very different from mine. But when I cross the way and move into their life, I enter into their world. So what He says is to follow the example. Don’t be a respecter of persons. Don’t let the world keep you into your little social mold or your little religious mold or your little prayer group. But go into the world. When you go to the grocery store, that’s a different world from your world. There are those people that come to that grocery store day after day to work. That’s their world. When you go to eat lunch, if you eat lunch downtown and you go into that cafe, you’re going into a different world. That’s the world where those people work every day. And so He says, “Go into the world and preach or teach that the kingdom of God has come.” And that’s spreading the gospel, the good news, person by person. It can’t be done through Billy Graham and mass media. It’s got to be done spirit to spirit, soul to soul, brother to brother. And that’s why we are so important. That’s why we are so precious in God’s sight. Because that’s the commission He’s given us. He has chosen us to be the vessels to bring the kingdom of heaven on earth. Isn’t that great?

He has chosen the weaklings and the fallible people that we are to be the vessels to bring the kingdom of God on earth. And so we’ve got to accept our challenge and the commission that He’s given us. Let’s pray.

Father, we know that this is a high calling. And yet, Father, it’s so good to know that it’s in our weakness that we can know Your strength. Father, we know our weakness. But tonight we ask You to help us to know Your strength.

And help us to know the calling that You have on our life. Amen. Amen.