When Did They Stop Loving?

When Did They Stop Loving?

by Jim Christian

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Father, we do love You. We give You honor and praise due to Your name. Blessing and honor be unto You. Hallowed be the name of the Lord. Glory be to God, Father. Father, our prayer would be in this season that we might see Jesus. Amen.

You know, I’m kind of excited to be in Arkansas. I have some memories of Petit Jean that go back a number of years. I have some memories of Marge and Mary that go back a number of years. And I had a favorite expression, and I don’t know whether anybody would take exception to it or not, but it’s the truth.

There’s Marge Lawrence and any of the other song leaders. She’s pretty special, and she can preach too. And she needs to do something. And Mary Whitney is just like having a breath of the Spirit flowing over you. And I’ve loved Bill Godfrey for longer than I can remember, ever since the first time I ever met him. And so you have to know that this is a very blessed experience for me to be here and share with somebody that I love in the Spirit and in the flesh.

Talking about the size of camps, this is the last reference we need to make to it. I started out in talking to CFOs back in 1964 by accident. Some gentleman down in Mississippi was hospitalized with cancer, and they asked me to fill in. And I thought that would probably be the first and the last of it. And by all rights, it should have been, ’cause I didn’t have anything to say, and it didn’t take them long to find it out. But Alabama took a big chance the following year and let me come down and speak to their camp. And I can remember that it was just about, it was a little bit smaller than we are. Just a little bit. We went and took some of our children. We always used to carry our children with us as much as we could, because I felt that it was, that there was no other place on earth for them to be exposed to the love of God like it was in camps. And a year ago when it was… I guess it was a year ago. I served a couple of years as chairman of the National Advisory Council Ring, and that’s over. Thank God. I don’t like to be around where people take a vote.

That’s why I say thank God. You know, I just kind of like to move with things. I never was much on choosing up sides. Because the minute you choose up sides, I want to win. Everything I do, everything I did, I did to win. But I was talking to them wherever this meeting was held. And I can’t for life of me remember. It may have been at… may have been at Oral Roberts. I guess it was. Senator Oral Roberts. Mary had arranged the meeting.

I was talking about all these things that I had seen take place in camps. All these signs and wonders. A people being willing to go up on to the Mount of Transfiguration and live it up with the Lord all night long. But they couldn’t spend an hour with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane without going to sleep. When He asked them to pray. And so, vividly came back to my recollection a comment that our number two son made. His name is Nat. Some of you remember the stories about Nat. Our number two son made to me a year or so back when he came to a CFO in another part of the United States. And I happened to be one of the speakers at that camp. He stayed two or three days. And as he was getting ready to leave to go back to the Air Force Base that he was flying from, he turned to me and he said, “Dad, when did they stop loving?”

And you know, I believe we stopped loving when we got so big that we couldn’t see wood for the forests. When we began to move in huge bunches. When we began to look for the manifestation rather than for the Jesus in each person. We began to look for signs and wonders. And thank God He does not deal with us in bunches until He’s dealt with us in the specific. And Nat was absolutely right.

But Margie is saying, we are so important to each other, aren’t we? And the love of God can come through so majestically and so powerfully. It makes all the difference in the world. And you cannot be overlooked this week. And you can’t overlook anybody. It’s just that simple. Here we are. And we will know one another spirit to spirit. It always struck me as an amazing thing and a rather shocking thing. And when Jesus is on the cross in this fashion, there’s absolutely nothing between Him and me, including clothes. I think the clothes part was what shocked me. Have you ever had the experience where you met someone, not just how do you do, or even sing the song and go around, or even go through the, what I call the CFO embrace? And a lot of it is just a bunch of la-di-da. And we don’t really mean it, but we’re expected to do it. So we do it. And then we all feel under condemnation because we didn’t feel real good about it, but we did it anyhow. But did you ever meet somebody spirit to spirit? And you knew, as Oral Roberts said, you knew that you knew that you knew that you knew that you knew. You knew someone. And you may not have known them more than 15 minutes. Maybe not more than a minute or two.

This is… What day is this? Friday? Yeah. Last Friday at 6 o’clock, we went to the home of some friends in Lisbon, some Christian friends that we met. The lady’s father, the last thing that he had left after the revolution, had taken his bank, of which he was the president, 1,500 acres of land in the best farming section of the country, the Alentejo. He had a villa left down on the Algarve coast of Portugal. And I had never seen the people that lived in the villa. It was so big that our house looked sort of like the outhouse that went with the big house. And forsooth, that’s the truth.

But one year we met her, met the daughter. And through the daughter, we met the husband. And it turns out that the daughter is part of a very embryonic, charismatic group in Lisbon. They really don’t know what they know that they know that they know. And the priest who was sort of the bell ringer for them, died last fall. So they are in a real rocky state. But we went to their house on Friday night. And we went for dinner. But before dinner, we were going to have a prayer time. I sat and talked for a while, and they shared. The lady’s husband is just beginning to move into things spiritual. You remember how it was when your husband began to move in things spiritual? And some of you remember how it is now, when you try to get him to move in things spiritual. If you have any question of that, you can ask for it about how it was with me or Judy with Bill. But he was asking questions, and he’d like to head trip this thing. You know, he’d really like to think his way through it. And I’m pretty good at that sort of thing. There are very few places that you can run and outflank me. I’m like a hound dog on a rabbit scent if there’s raw material for conversion.

So as he began to try to look for bushes to run under, I quietly slipped around and cut him off at the pass, as he used to say in cowboy movies. And I was talking about Jesus and having a grand time, because that’s my favorite occupation. I was just telling him what he’d come to do and who he was and how he did it. And I looked at another couple who had come for dinner, and the girl had, you know, what we call the society of a silly grin or whatever, you know, that sort of thing. And you just know. She’s absolutely radiant. And I looked over at her husband, and he was an architect, and tears would roll down his eyes. And then we’d get very… The marginal man would make another maneuver, and the tears would go out of the architect’s eyes, and he’d get interested to see what was going to happen. And I would present Jesus to this man from a little bit different angle. Tears would come down the architect’s eyes again. So then we stopped, and we did have some prayer, and we had a word of prophecy for everybody there, and he cried his way through it. So we mopped up the floor and went on with business.

I’ve never seen this man before in my life, and he didn’t speak enough English for us to have… for me to have bought him an ice cream cone. But he understood every word I said about Jesus. He absolutely could understand the English and the moving of the Spirit, and it was so beautiful, and he would cry. And when I hugged that man, Spirit met Spirit. Spirit met Spirit. And I suggest that that is actually what will take place here. This week, this part of it. Not too long ago, back in the Easter weekend, as a matter of fact, Reet and I and some friends of ours and a whole lot of friends of yours and Marge Lawrence were down in Durham, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And the occasion was the dedication of Tommy Tyson’s retreat center. And Oral Roberts was there. And I had quite a good experience. I went to see a friend of ours. We went to dinner with a friend of ours a couple of nights before we would go down. And he has always said that when he retires, he teaches in Lynchburg. And when he retires, he’d like to move to Chapel Hill and retire. He’s got his doctorate there, and it’s a real live place as far as he’s concerned.

And everything that can run up the wall and cross the ceiling upside down will do it at Chapel Hill. Just one of those swinging places, I guess you’d say. So I said to Phil at dinner, “Phil, next weekend, I’m going down to Chapel Hill. I wish you’d come with me.” And he said, “Well, I’m not sure that I can go, but I’ll try to make some arrangements and see what can be done. What’s going on?” I said, “Oh, I’m just going down to gather with a few friends.”

Somebody’s going to do a little talk. Who? Or up. By God, he says, they’re ruining my university. And they did. No question about it. They ruined his university in the way that he saw it. Because it was some kind of day. What I want to call your attention is that this was a Saturday before Easter. And Oral got up and he began his comments by saying, by beginning his sermon. Began all three of his sermons. As a matter of fact, he did preach three that morning, didn’t he, Mark?

He began by saying that one morning at seven o’clock, the doorbell rang and the gentleman that’s, I suppose, the right-hand man for him at ORU came to the door to announce to them that his oldest daughter and her husband had been killed in a plane crash. And he knew that the children were awake or sitting up, had gotten up early and were over at their house waiting to meet Oral. Oral, I’m waiting to meet the daughter, excuse me, and her husband when he came in.

And of course, the shock was something unbelievable. And he went in and he told Evelyn about it. I’m making this very brief and nothing like as dramatic as when Oral told it. But he went in and he sat down on the edge of the bed with Evelyn and he said, “We’ll have to pray about this.” And they began to pray.

And he got a revelation from God. And he turned to Evelyn and he said, “Darling, we will have to take this sorrow and sow it as a seed.” And she said she couldn’t do it. And he said, “We’ll have to.” And he got up and he went over to the house of his daughter to tell the grandchildren about the death of their mother and father. And that’s the story in itself. And then he came back to his house and he knew in his, deep within his heart that this thing had to be given in some fashion to the world as a seed which he would plant.

And they prayed some more and Evelyn was not in the least certain that she could do it. Didn’t want to try it. It was, you know, not rebellious but just didn’t see it as a possibility. But nonetheless, she agreed to go with her husband. And they went over to the center where all the television recordings and radio recordings and all these things are made. And they set up and normally he says they do, they have what you call fillers. Some la-da-da here and some what-nots in there. And then the talk begins and you cut out on the la-da-das and the what-nots and get it wedged into whatever time slot you wanted to go to. And on this particular day they sat, he and Evelyn sat and they shared before the television cameras what it was like for a man and a woman and a husband and wife who are devoted, who have devoted their whole existence to the Lord to suddenly find that they have lost their own flesh and blood.

And they talked to the sorrow that was in their heart and they talked to the confidence that they had in the Lord and they sowed a seed before people that as I began to think about it afterwards, he didn’t try to qualify what he’d done. He simply said that he knew that he had to share with the world the fact that a Christian could be broken in his heart and still victorious in his spirit. There’s some people right here with you that can do this much more eloquently than I.

I went back that day that we went back to Lynchburg or went on with his talk incidentally made a tremendous talk. His icy fingers touched my wallet and everybody else’s wallet and contributions for Tommy Tyson was something ferocious. Give you a little aside. He says, “Reach in your pocket and pull out the biggest bill that you have.” I pulled it out. Held it in my little hot hand. He didn’t know I’d already written a check for that exact amount I had in my pocket. So Tommy wasn’t going to come out any less well off because I just happened to have this thing stuck back here. And I knew I had him. I had him both ways. See, I had the bill in my hand and a check in my pocket and with an identical amount of money. And then he finished and he said, “If you are not satisfied with the bill that you’ve got in your hand, we will accept your check.”

And I looked at little old fat Tommy jumping up and down, absolutely shaking all over with the sheer joy of the people that were out there that had come to love him and to do him honor because he is a great man of God. And Oral Roberts there talking about him. If you’ve ever seen your kid on Christmas morning and he comes down and whatever it was he’s looking for, there it is. Tommy was that pressed down and running over. Everything about him twitched. His shoelaces fluttered. You know how he does all that stuff. Now, it’s just priceless. And I twitched a little too when Oral’s icy fingers, as I say, got right inside my pocket and everything changed. So he was effective in every way. But I began to think about this as I went back about what he’d said. And you know, I’m familiar with seed faith, planting the seed and all this sort of thing, and so are you. And I think that’s a doggone good wrinkle. I think as long as you don’t do it trying to get God to do something, it’s first class. If you do it because you believe God can do something with it, that’s an entirely different story. But the next day was Easter.

And the only thing that I could think of was that God sowed Jesus. Actually sowed Him in the ground. Gave Him up to the ground to raise Him up to glory. And that God in every sense has to sow us into death and raise us up. Has to sow His Son in us to grow us up. The implications of the sowing of the person of Jesus and the raising up of Him so that He could be re-sown in us and that we could be sown was like a progression. And I just simply had a field day with it. I’m not going to try to tell you what I discovered in it because I think that’s one of those personal things that you will feel within your own person. And you begin to think about this now. Not the fact that Oral sowed his grief for the world so the world would know that it was right for a Christian to be broken in heart but alive in the spirit.

But that there is that a seed has been sown every time anything’s been raised up and had died. Play with that, son. That’s fun. About four weeks ago, five, six weeks ago, Bill Godfrey and Judy and a bunch of us finally got to Israel. Arete went with me, of course. I’ve been trying to go to Israel ever since the first person wrote me a letter and said, “Wouldn’t you like to get together a group of people and go to Israel?” and there’s something about me that just won’t let me do that. I think if I’m going to go, I’ll buy my own ticket and I can go when I want to go. So we made all we were continually making these plans to go to Israel and continually the curtain was falling down. We weren’t going to go. I’ve learned not to kick against the pricks, not to push God. Have you? Hmm? You all learned that? That when you’ve got to get underway, you do understand this, that a homing pigeon doesn’t get direction sitting on the nest, and the boat doesn’t move tight, doesn’t, you can’t do anything with a rudder when it’s tied up to the dock. You get underway. But when God gives a direction to the pigeon, the pigeon takes off in that direction.

And when the boat is finally put underway, it responds to the rudder. So what I’m saying is that when God says no, I can sense it. But it’s necessary for me to be underway before I can get my no signal. I got about six no signals and we weren’t supposed to go to Israel. Couldn’t believe it. Wanted to go with Tommy this year. Tommy couldn’t let me have, do what I wanted to do, so that had to block that out. Turns out that when God finally puts the trip together, we have five couples from Lynchburg who are deep and beautiful friends in Jesus Christ. We pray together, we love each other. Presbyterian minister and his wife from Winston-Salem, Bill and Judy and their daughter, and we go.

God introduces Himself to you in the presence of Jesus. And I’m just as satisfied as I stand here that the second way that the Lord introduces Himself to you is in the presence of His land, His holy land, the land He set aside, the land He called the promised land. He’s anything I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not going to tell you how it has to happen to you, because I don’t know. You know, I don’t know what will speak to you, I only know what spoke to me. And I’m not going to tell you what spoke to me, because you try to have that experience. You want to fall down stricken by blazing light. God, I’ll tell you one thing.

You can stand at that wailing wall, which is set aside for Jews, so is they, and let one of your big-mouth tongues-talking buddies get over on your left-hand side, with both hands up on that wall, and you there, and you begin to pray, and praying for the peace of the world, and you look down right between your feet, and you cry to puddle of water there, and the power of God is moving something tremendously. So you’ll do those sort of things. And He’ll put you on the funniest old boat, going across the Sea of Galilee. And I guess this is really sort of the first little glimmer that I had, and they said, “You are now headed toward Capernaum,” which looked like a bunch of trees to me. And somebody says, “Right over there is the Mount of Beatitudes,” and maybe a bunch of you’ve been. Now, you see, this is so new to me that I just scarcely knew where I was going. And I looked over at that mountainside, and I thought, 5,000 people sitting on that hillside, and Jesus standing at the edge of this water, with His heart broken, tears in His eyes, loving them. Just trying to show them the infinite possibilities of God for their lives.

And really, that’s all I ever see Him doing anymore, is just loving people. Even in anger, it’s love. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that later on, not tonight, or maybe some other time. But to… I wasn’t able to contain this, so it again comes out of my eyes. To see the Man standing before 5,000 people, not beating them over the head with something, but opening up to them how absolutely magnificent they really were, and how much God loved them, and how much He loved them.

And it begins to say, if it’s possible for you to find your way into this dimension of expression, this is the result for you. If you can believe that God can do it, you can be born again, and this is what will take place.

If you want to have peace, He says, let My nature become your nature. Loving 5,000 people, as Ebb Carter likes to put it, simply loving them into life. Bringing them into fellowship. Getting very, very, very close to them. Remember the part in Luke where they run out of, it’s getting late in the day and they want to eat? Same day, same day.

And somebody comes up and says, “We haven’t got anything to give.” He says, “You give them something to eat?” He says, “We haven’t got anything to give.” He says, “All right, you do what you can do. You make them sit down in little groups,” and then He gets the loaves and fishes and blesses them and passes them out, and they feed. I do love that. Just simply saying to them, “You feed.” How else would they know they didn’t have anything else to give? You know, it’s only when you try to do something and you realize you haven’t got the ammunition. The biggest curse in the world is to be a big doer. To have a lot of personality and talent and all these things. You don’t need the Lord. Man, you can wheel and deal off the back of your hand. And then the Lord suddenly says, “You feed them.” And you realize He’s talking about giving them something and you don’t have it in your hip pocket. And your checklist doesn’t even have the first step in it. And you say, “Lord, I haven’t got anything to give them. Thank You that You let me know the poverty of my own spirit.” And then He gives you that blessedness of allowing you to cause them to sit down.

Which you’re smart enough to do. Any second-class Presbyterian deacon can make people sit down in bunches. You know, and He makes them sit down. And then He gets the loaves and the fish and He breaks it up. And this sort of gets me. He gives it to them and lets them give it to the people. And I’ve told so many people that you better believe that if God were to break up loaves and fishes and give them to me and have me feed 5,000 people, I’d make them think I’d done it.

Chances are I’d get 50% of the credit for it, wouldn’t you? Isn’t that just like it? If you want to, you can kick Him right in the face. Let me remind you that there isn’t anybody here any better than you are. Not so. And if you’ve got any question about it, you ask God tonight to reveal the power that He has ready to manifest through you. Just let you have a little glimmer of it.

And if that doesn’t satisfy you, if you’re not power mad, and I hope you aren’t, ask Him to let you have a look at the grace that He’s caused to operate in your behalf today. The sins of today that have been forgiven in Jesus.

You are right up there among the elect. Isn’t anybody here any better than you? The things that are operating for Marge are operating for you. Godfrey hasn’t got anything going that you haven’t got. Ben Bacon hasn’t got anything.

And it’s God’s idea that we experience fellowship. That didn’t get boogered up until we learn sin. Adam was in a perfect state of fellowship with God. You’ve got to work to break fellowship. It’s a divine plan. You’ve got to turn your back on me or you’ve got to turn your back on God to break up the fellowship that the Lord wants to create and to bring to pass in this particular time. So I suggest that if you are powerful and the grace of God is operating in you, and He’s in the process of building His body, and He really isn’t too concerned with whether you end up in Birmingham or whether you end up in St. Louis, He’s concerned that when His voice speaks that you hear His voice. And you respond to Him. See? And if it has to be down there or over here, great and good. If it has to be in this spot, great and good.

Now, who’s got your loaves and fishes for this week? Do you know? Which person is Jesus for you in this week? Hmm? Can you tell? We’re all listening to the same voice. The Lord is putting us together now in a relationship that pleases Him.

And if you believe that the same power is in you that was in Christ Jesus, your miracle can come from any one of these people right here. Whatever it is you want, whatever it is you need. It’s gonna be fun, you know? I remember once talking with a group somewhere about this business of fellowship and relationship. And you know what I discovered? I discovered that the First Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, where I go, and I know you’re not supposed to talk about churches and CFO, but I go to one, I might as well talk about it. I’m not necessarily happy there, but I go. And when I’m there, I know the Lord comes in when I’m there, if He didn’t come with anybody else. But I read something the other day that just tickled me to death.

Isn’t it funny? How some Christians are so different. Isn’t it amazing how some of them slurp their soup? Did you ever try to love somebody with a bad breath? If we act like that, it’s a big deal, huh?

I may one day have a little something that’s offensive to you. But the Lord thinks I’m beautiful. And the only thing that we need to do is to have a need for each other. The only thing that produces fellowship is for you to need me and me to need you. And the only thing that produces fellowship for the Lord is for us to need Him and want Him to be Lord.

Relationship is when He’s Savior. Fellowship is when He’s Lord. And that’s what’s in your church. You’ll find a lot of people that know Him as Savior. And that’s a relationship. He is my Savior. But when He’s my Lord, I fellowship with Him. When our daughter Martha was in Europe the summer that she graduated, she was still our daughter. The relationship hadn’t changed, but there wasn’t any fellowship. We weren’t together.

So you see, the fellowship is… He is my Lord. And I lift Him up. And as Marge says, we have come to bless God. If when we leave this camp we have reached the capacity to bless God and really mean it, it will be one of the greatest things that ever happened in your life.

Because you see, you are priests to the King. And your responsibility is to bless God. Not just to get your strokes. When the spirit of man moves, a few people get a blessing. Do you ever go to a meeting and all of a sudden half of them are clapping their hands and jumping up and down and the other half weren’t? You were one of the other half and you wondered what was the matter with you?

Nothing. The spirit of man was moving. God allowed it. Half the people got blessed. Had a marvelous time. Whooped and shouted and carried on. And when the Spirit of God begins to move, man doesn’t do anything to man. The Spirit of God ministers to man. And more often than not, the holy hush settles on a group.

There are so many different ways. I will honor you if you need to express something in the flesh. And I’ll join you in it and I’ll love you in it. But I would that we came to the day when our desire, our heartfelt desire was to bless God. With our mouth. With our body. With our spirit. With everything He’s got. That He’s put within us. And we lift and exalt Him. And become what Peter says that we are. Priests. To the King. And He isn’t but one. And His name is Jesus. God is trying to teach me. I think. That I need to depend on Him and not on rules about Him.

I think He’s also trying to teach me to have spiritual integrity. And not to put forth more than the Spirit is putting in. And He’s also very clearly manifesting that everything that He does is present in Jesus. And if I’m not careful, I can come to a meeting looking for a tiny and miss the lasting gift that’s the Lord Himself. Did you ever go to camp looking for healing? And get the healing and go away with the healing and miss the blessing?

See, we came with an ingrown toenail and we forgot that Jesus is all healing. This is sort of just a little rambling sharing with you. I believe what He’s going to do is feed us this week. As people to people. If you want, I’ll be glad to teach you. I might even get around sometime and preach.

But I think what we want to do is to begin to relate and become a fellowship. And I want to know what’s in your heart. And I want you to know my heart. And I want us to be so much one with this Lord Jesus Christ of ours. That we begin to see for the first time what the body of Christ really looks like. I would hope that every one of us in a group of this size could look at that other person, every single one of you, and say, “Hey, I know what that person’s ministry is. I know exactly what God has called them to do.”

I see the Spirit of God moving through them. I knew it. If I need, if I need, I need, I go to. And every single one is vital to the sum of the whole. I’ve never seen that happen.

I’ve seen a whole lot of big, big things running around. I’ve seen a whole lot of, but I believe we can feed the Word of God until we become like what we’ve eaten. And I believe we can get close enough to Jesus in this week

to be like Him. And we’ll minister to others what He’s ministering to us, and no more. No more. My ministry will never go beyond my ability to be obedient to what the Lord calls me to do. I’m going to talk a little bit to you about condemnation before we leave here too, I hope, because I’m tired of seeing people that think they’re second-class Christians. They aren’t.

The Lord on the edge of that mountain was loving people into life. Paul says in Colossians, the second chapter, the second verse, I’m here, let me see exactly, I’ve got a little translation, what is that, New International: I’m here to the end that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love.

Now tonight, when you go to bed, you do one thing for me, will you? You can read the tail end of the 18th chapter of Luke, and that deals with, the first part deals with the importunate widow, and the last part deals with blind Bartimaeus. And I want you to read the part about blind Bartimaeus. And there’s a reason for it. And the reason is simply this, that here’s a man sitting by the side of the road, been blind, I’ve forgotten how long, I get confused, some of them blind X number of years and some of them cripple so long, but long enough to wish he could see. And he senses Jesus coming before he can hear them, and he calls out to the Lord, and he says, “Jesus, Son of David,” and the crowd tell him to shut up because Jesus is teaching. You remember the story. That’s kind of typical, you know. It’s not time now. The prayer meeting takes place a little later.

We got to go through, got to go through the talk first, and then we’re going to have rhythms, then we’ll have prayer groups. But the man calls out again, and this time it’s a groaning of the spirit that’s talking about in Romans. He says, “Oh, Jesus.” And Jesus comes over to him, and He asks him a question, not because He’s, not because Jesus is stupid, but because part of the healing process is our willingness to articulate the need.

Now, we may say one thing. What did I tell you the man did the first time he hollered out to Jesus? He says, “Jesus, Thou Son of David, have mercy.” And not too good of theology, but he had a real good question. He said, “Have mercy.” And they said, “Hey, shut up, man is teaching.” And the next time his spirit cries forth, and the Lord stops dead in His tracks and comes to the man.

Now that’s significant, because if you cry out the first time, you’re going to cry out the top of your head, which is what he did. He knew he was blind, but the second time he cried out, he cried from the spirit within him. And you know, we don’t know, do we, what blindness is. We really don’t know what caused a man to be physically blind, and I never saw anybody blind psychosomatically, but I suppose that that is possible. Don’t quote me on that. I don’t know if it’s true, but anything at all could, it could have been indicated. Jesus came to him and says, “What’s the matter?” And he says, “That I might receive my sight.” He said what he thought, but the spirit had already spoken, and the Lord had heard the cry of the spirit from the man. I would like to ask you tonight that when you go to your room or wherever, whatever you want to do,

allow the Spirit to pray through you. Allow Him to reveal, not only to the Lord but to you. He’ll do it. Ask Him, not what you need is, but ask Him what Jesus Christ is prepared to do, desires to do in you through His body in these days. Let’s see what He tells you.

Ask the Spirit to show you what Jesus desires to do for you through this body in this time that we’re here. Understand, not what you think you want. I want you to go into your prayer closet and pray, pray in tongues, pray any way that you want to pray.

You may even desire to, you may, may find that you go to sleep while you’re praying. Fine. You need to sleep more than you need to verbalize prayer. And He may come to you in a dream. He may move you to some Gentiles, as you can’t tell. I’m not being funny, but it can come in any kind of way. But ask Him by tomorrow morning to reveal to you. And the reason I’d like for you to do this is because I know that Jesus didn’t bring you here for no reason at all. He didn’t bring you here to get your strokes. He didn’t bring you here to have a family reunion. He brought you here to do a specific work in you, and I believe it’s a deeper work than we know in our natural mind. And if He shows us, think of the enormous expectancy as you move from person to person. I never will forget, if she never does anything as long as she lives, Marge Lawrence, down at Sumatanga, Alabama, some eons ago,

played the word picture game. See yourself as the Apostle Paul, blind, in the room in Damascus. And I was looking at the supposed room about six weeks ago. I looked at it. It didn’t look like it looked when Marge was having me imagine.

And imagine Ananias coming, and imagine all the other people that came. This is Marge doing this now. Came into the building, you hear their footsteps, and you’re wondering, is it he, is this the one, and finally he comes. He says, “Brother Paul.” And you know that that’s getting half to death, probably, absolutely flabbergasted when he heard himself saying, “Brother Paul,” or Saul. And he prayed for them, and won’t it be fun when we know the Lord intends to do something. He’s given us a glimmer of what it is that we can watch to see through whom you bring His blessing.

One other thing: none of us leaves without having received a blessing and without having imparted a blessing in the power of Jesus. I would say that we have enjoyed the fullness of God if every person sees a blessing, but more, if every person is a measure of the impartation of a blessing as the expression of Jesus Christ.

He wants to love us, He wants to love us through each other. And I want to love you, and I need to be loved by you, and I want to fellowship with you. I don’t want to just relate to you as speaker and people. I want to fellowship with you. I want us to enter into the fullness of God. Do it in your own way.

But do it, will you? Hmm? Hmm. Okay. Father, as we come to You honestly, in the name of Jesus, not playing games, because someone suggested, but Father, just coming in the honestness of our helplessness and asking You to take us beyond our natural mind and natural body, but no further than Your Spirit.

And by the Holy Spirit of God, revealed to us in our spirit, the increase, the blessing that You are prepared to give us in this season, Lord, will You attune our ears and our eyes to hear from these friends and to see in their faces and to receive from them that measure of grace that You can bring to us, that measure of the power of the Spirit that You can bestow upon us. I pray that You do a thing that I have never seen in my whole life in these friends gathered here, in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus. And Lord, I pray, whatever is done will bless You. Will bless You, Lord, that we be priests to You, and I bring You praise and honor and glory in Jesus’ name. Amen.