Christ Magnified In My Body # 5

Christ Magnified In My Body # 5

One of the great contemporaries of John Wesley was a very powerful speaker in France by the name of Voltaire. He ridiculed the scriptures. One day he said in his little house, "One hundred years from now, Bibles will only be in museums. People will be so advanced that they won't bother with a Bible." Well, he didn't miss it by much, did he? By about a thousand million copies! (One of the nice things that World War II did was to blow his little house off the face of the earth. But a few years before that happened, the Geneva Bible Society bought that house and distributed Bibles all through Europe out the very house from which he said that Bibles wouldn't be existing in a hundred years.)

Here it is: God's Word. It will last forever! "Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever." "Heaven and earth may pass away. My word shall not pass away." Here it is. It has all the power of God behind it!

So, the Holy Spirit of God who invaded the lives of those men in the upper room, according to Romans 8, is the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, and is the same Spirit that abides in us and has raised us from the dead spiritually! We can think and move and have our being in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Lowery, an old Nazarene, wrote a marvelous book that's out of print. It's called "The Possibilities of Grace." I've never read it. I just peeped into it. I have an old, old copy. But I think of that so often. It stretches our the possibilities of grace. What does the Good Book say? "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But He has revealed it unto us." Not to the world! They stagger at it. Impossible.

How amazing that a human being, corrupted, defiled, doomed, and damned can be forgiven, cleansed, and indwelt by the Spirit of God and become a living vessel of God.

God is yet to produce the greatest men ever. I don't believe that God went off production with Wesley, Finny, and George Whitefield. All the great men who built the old spiritual empires like Hudson Taylor and others who went to China, Gilmore to Mongolia, Judson to Burma, Carey to India, and Henry Martin.

I wish some of you folk would wake up and use your brains while you're young enough to use them. There was a young lady singing on TV born in a little shack somewhere up in the Mississippi area. Somebody took her into a home and heard her play with the piano. They they discovered that she had a voice. I think she went to the conservatory in Milan and various other places. Now she can sing in about five different languages. Did somebody suddenly suspect that in that girl with all this talent and all this ability? No. They just gave her a chance in one direction, and she took off in another.

The Roman church is pretty smart. There's a great college in Ireland, called Maynooth. You can send a plowboy into that school that can hardly do his mathematics or anything. They'll turn him out in five years and he can recite the whole Mass in Latin. They have other convents where they take young ladies. They'd be average farmers daughters. They'll talk with them. Show them maps of the world. Tell them the need in the world: lack of education, lack of Christianity, and so forth. Those girls will say, "Oh, I think I'd like to go to South America...Brazil. Portuguese, all right. Argentina?...Spanish." Every time they sent a missionary out, the missionary knew the language before they got there. What did they do? They went into the school system and taught. Therefore, the churches didn't have to support them because they were earning their money. They didn't have to wait for them to stammer out a new language in a few years. Immediately when they got off the boat they could speak the language. Immediately they were put into operation to teach in the schools and to teach religion. In other words, when they went, they were already accomplished in languages, and because of that they could sign up in government jobs. There was no support needed from home.

Now, here very often, we have people to say, "Oh, yes, well take you on, but you have to go around to churches begging. Ask them to support you. Ask them to give you so much a month - so much a month - so much a month." I think God must be embarrassed by the Church these days. What beggars we are! Why can't you use your brains now? Learn a language. Get awakened. Get stirred in your spirit. Find our where God wants you. There are lots of hell-holes that need the light of the gospel. If you think you have the courage, why not pray about going to Russia. Get behind that Curtain.

I don't think there are 5 missionaries in the whole of Albania. They purged Albania sometime in the last century. I think they put Christians in barrels, sealed up the barrels, and pushed the barrels out to the tide as it was receding out to the ocean. And there they were, cooped up in those horrible things. The sun coming in and roasting them. They exterminated the Church to that degree there. So there's a challenge. There's nobody in Albania. Why not be the first to go?

What about getting behind the Iron Curtain? Czechoslovakia or some of the other countries? What about the 800 million people in China? This week they said there were 700 million people in India. It has about 400 languages or dialects. The world population is now the greatest it's ever been in history. There are more lost people tonight than there's ever been in history. Yet, I think there's more indifference. Sure, we give a little bit to support a missionary. We do this, we do that, we do the other. But that great dominion of satan is almost unchallenged in the day in which we live.

~Leonard Ravenhill~

(continued with # 6)

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