JOHN G.

LAKE
STUDY LESSONS

PART TWO

(LESSONS 11-20)

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 CONTENTS

LESSON 11 CHRISTIAN COMMUNION 3

LESSON 12 THE CALLING OF THE SOUL 8

LESSON 13 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME 14

LESSON 14 DISCERNMENT 21

LESSON 15 CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 24

LESSON 16 COMPASSION 32

LESSON 17 GUIDANCE 36

LESSON 18 THE PLATFORM OF JESUS 37

LESSON 19 REALITY 44

LESSON 20 THE RECEPTION 52

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 11. CHRISTIAN COMMUNION

I want to read a series of portions of Scriptures this morning, with this one general
thought in view, the presence of Christ. Some of you may have read a little booklet by
an old monk, whose name was Father Lawrence, It is called “Practising the Presence
of Christ.”

One of the things the Christian world does not get hold of with a strong grip is the
conscious presence of Christ with us now. Somehow there is an inclination in the
Christian spirit to feel that Jesus, when He left the earth, returned to Glory, and in
consequence is not present with us now.

I want to show you how wonderfully the Scriptures emphasise the fact of His
presence with us now. When He was talking to the eleven, just prior to His ascension,
(Matthew 28), after delivering to them the great commission, He said:

“Go ye therefore., and teach all nation, baptizing them in the Name of the rather, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” He ended the statement with these words:

“And, lo, I am with always, even unto the end of the world.”

It would naturally seem as if a separation had been contemplated because of His

return to Glory, but no such separation is contemplated on the part of Christ. Christ
promises His omnipotent presence with us always, Christ omnipresent everywhere.
Present in the soul, present in the world, present always unto the end of the age.

As Paul was going down the road to Damascus, when the presence of God’s Glory
shone around him, he fell prostrate on the earth, and heard a voice speaking to him.
When he demanded to know who it was, the voice replied, “I am Jesus.” Jesus was
present with him as a Saviour to deliver him from his difficulties and his sins.

At a later time in Paul’s career, he returned to Jerusalem, and was in danger of his
life. While he prayed in the temple, he was overshadowed by the Spirit, and says, “I
was in a trance, and saw Him saying unto me, make haste and get thee quickly out of
Jerusalem: for they will not receive thy testimony concerning Me.” Paul endeavours
to argue with the Lord about it. That conversation has always been a blessing to my
soul. It is so real. I have always been so glad that Paul answered. back to the Lord,
and the details of the conversation have been recorded.

Paul said, “But Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them
that believed on Thee. And when the blood of Thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also
was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that
slew him.” But the Lord replied, “Depart, for I will send thee far hence unto the
Gentiles.”

Jesus is just as close to the Christian soul as He was to Paul. There is a beautiful verse
that expresses that so sweetly, “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands
and feet.”

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Christ is the living presence, not only with us, but to the real Christian, He is in us, a
perpetual joy, power and Glory in our life. When a soul reaches to the heights of God
it will only be because of the guiding and counselling and indwelling and infilling of
Christ.

TONGUES AND INTERPRETATION

Blessed Jesus, Lord and God, He who dwells within.

Blessed Jesus, He who came to free our hearts from sin.
Give us now Thy presence in us
Sweetly verified by Thy Holy Word
Give us now Thy presence
That we too may call thee Lord.
Precious Jesus, Lord of Heaven,
Blessed Jesus, come and dwell,
Blessed Christ of all the Heaven,
Dearer to our heart
Christ of God come in and dwell,
That within us we may be
Perfectly conscious of that indwelling,
And ever from sin set free.

Many of us no doubt have been struck with the beautiful war story that has been
going the rounds of the magazines for some months, called “The Comrade.” It is the
sense of comradeship that makes the Lord Jesus not only a Saviour in the ordinary
sense, but a Saviour and Companion in all our ways and walks of life, filling the place
in our soul that only a comrade can fill.

One of my exploring expeditions while in Africa, I met a man in Portuguese East

Africa, who told me he had lived for eleven years with only natives as his associates.
One evening as we came along, passing through the veldt, I observed this little cabin,
which indicated the presence of an European. So I started over, expecting to discover
a man with some white blood in him at least. But I was overjoyed to find he was an
intelligent English gentleman.

He had come to Africa in the early days with his wife and children. His sons had been
killed in a native uprising. His wife had died of fever and only he was left. I said,.
“Why didn’t you return to England?” He replied, “I did not have any desire to return.
Many of my friends I used to know had died or gone to Australia, or with a new set of
people. I concluded I would just settle down and spend the rest of my days here.”

He sat all night and talked about the ordinary things that were going on in the world
about us. It was the first time he had any outside news in several years. We sat
fellowshipping during the night.

Before I went away in the morning I asked him what it was he missed more than
anything else since he had been out there. He replied, “Mr Lake, I guess one word
will cover it. “Comradeship.” The lack of that real soul comradeship which makes life
so dear to every man.

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That is the place that Jesus purposes to occupy in the Christian life. That place of real
comradeship, whereby through His grace and love He supplies to us that thing that we
need so much to make this life the joyous, victorious life He purposed it to be. His
presence with us, His guiding counsel, His transforming grace, His soul absorbing
presence, which in the ultimate commands all the intensity of our nature, is for us.
Paul expresses it so wonderfully in the words, “Christ is all and in all.”

Paul gives us a still different vision of the presence and power of Christ with us in the
fourth of Ephesians. This time it is as a Transformer.

“Until we all come in the unity of the faith and of the

knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

This shows the ultimate purpose of Christ as Saviour, of Christ as a Companion, of

Christ as the Indweller. Christ’s presence with us is not just as an outward companion,
but an indwelling, divine force, revolutionising our nature and making us like Him.
Indeed, the final and ultimate purpose of the Christ is that the Christian shall be
reproduced in His own likeness, within and without.

Paul again expresses the same thing in the first of Colossians, the 22nd verse, where
he says,

“To present you holy and unblamable and unreprovable in

His sight.”

That transformation is to be an inner transformation. It is a transformation of our life,

of our nature. into His nature, into His likeness.

How the mechanical fades away in view of the living fact that Christ purposes to
accomplish in us through the Spirit. How wonderful the patience, and marvellous the
power that takes possession of the soul of man and accomplishes the will of God, in
His absolute transformation into the real beautiful holiness of the character of Jesus.

Our heart staggers when we think of such a calling, when we think of such a nature,
when we contemplate such a character. That is God’s purpose for you and me.

In emphasising this truth the apostle again puts in into a different form, he says,

“Until Christ be formed in you.”

Or until by the transforming operation of the Spirit of God we are remade, or

transformed, Until our nature is transformed by the operation of the Spirit of God in
our soul, then we are remade or transformed. Until our nature is transformed into the
nature of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

His was the perfect character. Consequently every other character that can be co-
joined with Him in real heirship must be like God’s Son. Jesus never can present that

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which is faulty or evil or weak to the Father. The transforming grace of God must take
away, and does take away, sin from the soul of man. It gives him His strength instead
of human weakness. It supplies the grace that makes him like the Lord Jesus Christ.

That is the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the marvel He has undertaken to
accomplish, to transform the soul of man into the likeness and character of Himself,
and then present mankind to the Father, “Holy and unblamable and unreprovable in
His sight.”

When Jesus stood before the disciples, just prior to His going out into the Garden, He
delivered to them that wonderful address of the 14th, 15th, and 16th of John. He
climaxed it with that marvellous high priestly prayer of the 17th. He endeavoured to
bring them to understand His nature and power. Knowing that all power had been
given unto Him. He took a towel and a basin and proceeded to wash the disciples’
feet. When He had finished He said, “Know ye not what I have done unto you. In
explanation He said, “If I then your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also
ought to wash one another’s feet.” In assuming the attitude of a servant He had taught
mankind what their relation as brother should be.

When we examine the human heart and endeavour to discover what it is that retards
our progress, I believe we find that pride in the human soul perhaps is the greatest
difficulty we have to overcome. Jesus taught us a wonderful humility,. taking the
place of a slave. So we are enjoined to thus treat and love one another.

His presence with us, His presence in us must produce in our hearts the same
conditions that were in His own. It must bring into our life the same humility that was
in Him. It is one of the secrets of entrance into the grace of God.

“When the precious Christ enters into the unregenerated heart He becomes the very
centre of their being, He becomes the very peak of their ambition, that they might be
like Him. He through true humility of His soul, left the things of His glorious Father’s
Kingdom to come into this world of woe and sin; by which He was enabled to live the
life of perfection in this earth and become the real Redeemer and Sympathiser of
mankind.” (Tongues and interpretation).

In the story of the Comrade the substance of it is practically that the Comrade is ever
present. In the course of the conversation with the Comrade it is observed that there
are wounds in His hands, and He replies, “Yes, they are old wounds, but they have
been giving me a good deal of trouble of late.”

That is the vital sense of real Comradeship that makes the Spirit of Jesus one with us,
so that we realise and He realises when the conditions of our nature and mind affect
Him.

For two days I have been under a tremendous burden, one of these spirit burdens that
come at times, when you can not define them. I could not tell whence it came. But
every little while I felt I wanted to sit down and cry. Presently during the day a friend
came and unloaded the burden of her soul to me, and then I realised that I had been
under the burden for that soul for two days. I had not known the trouble existed.

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That is the character of Comradeship, which is between the real Christian and the
Christ. The Christian feels the burdens of the Christ and the Christ feels the burdens
of the Christian and being united as one spirit, the interest of the Christ are the
interests of the Christian, and the interests of the Christian are the interests of the
Christ. That relationship is of the truest, deepest order, It is the relationship of spirit
with spirit.

When a young man, before I had entered into this life, indeed from my boyhood, there
were times when my spirit would become overshadowed with the burden of another
life, sometimes with the sorrows of another. I had one of these experiences when
perhaps not more that ten or eleven years of age. On a particular Sunday, I arose with
one of these burdens on my spirit, and I walked out into the fields. There was a high
hill on my father’s farm. The sun had not yet gotten over this hill. When I got to the
top I looked down over the beautiful field. There was a lake, and I was thinking how
beautiful it was and all the surroundings. In the midst of it tears commenced to run
and I sat down on a stone and cried. After a while I got up and wondered why I was
crying. Several days later we received a letter telling that dear old Grandfather had
died. And then the old Grandmother had said, “Well, I do not want to live any more,”
and she died also. Around them were a group of sorrowing friends, and somehow my
spirit contacted that sorrow.

One of the truest things in all my life, in my relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ,
has been to feel that He was capable of knowing my sorrows, and yours. And that in
the truest sense He thereby became our Comrade.

In Isaiah there is a verse that wonderfully expresses that fact. “In all their affliction
He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them...,” (Isaiah 63:9). “In His
love and in His pity He redeemed them, and bare them, and carried them all the days
of old.”

There is a union between the Christ and the Christian that is so deep, so pure so
sweet, so real that the very condition of the human spirit are transmitted to His, and
the conditions of the Christ’s Spirit are transmitted to ours. It is because of the
continuous inflow of the Spirit of Christ in our heart that we appreciate or realise His
power and triumph. It lifts man above his surroundings and causes him to triumph
anywhere and everywhere.

The Christian life is designed by God to be a life of splendid, holy triumph. That
triumph is produced in us through the continuous inflow and abiding presence of the
Spirit of the triumphant Christ. He brings into our nature the triumph that He enjoys.
Indeed the mature Christian, having entered into that consciousness of overcoming
through the Spirit of Christ, is privileged to transmit that same overcoming power and
spirit to other lives, in and through the power of the Spirit of God.

That is why the Christian who is joined with the Christ, lives, moves and has his
being in the same life, in the same Spirit that the Christ is and has, and is therefore the
reproduction of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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 12. THE CALLING OF THE SOUL

If I were to choose a subject for the thought in My soul tonight, I would choose “The
Calling of the Soul.”

Someone has given us this little saying that has become prevalent among many
people. “My own shall come to me.” Jesus framed that thought in different words. He
said: “He that hungers and thirsts after righteousness shall be filled.” It is the same
law. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be
filled.”

RIGHTEOUSNESS is simply God’s rightness. God’s rightness in a man’s soul,

God’s rightness in a man’s spirit, God’s rightness in a man’s body. In order that man
may be right or righteous, God imparts to man the power of His Spirit. That Spirit
contains such marvellous and transforming grace that when received into the nature of
man, the marvellous process of regeneration is set in Motion and man becomes
thereby a new creature in Christ Jesus.

The deepest call of our nature is the one that will find the speediest answer. People
pray, something happens. If they pray again something still deeper occurs within their
nature, and they find a new prayer. The desire is obtained.

In My ministry in South Africa I had a preacher by the, name of Van Vuuren. That
name means “fire.” Van Vuuren had been a butcher in the city of Johannesburg and
was given up to die of consumption. His physician said to him: “You have only one
year to live.” So he gave up his business and went down into the country to develop a
farm, that his family might be able to support themselves.

After he left the city many were baptised in the Holy Spirit and healed, and so forth,
and his friends wrote him a letter and “So-and-so, who was sick, has been healed; So-
and-so, your niece, has been baptised in the Holy Spirit and is speaking in tongues by
the power of God; So-and-so has been blessed of God,” and so on.

Van Vuuren took the letter and went out into the fields and got down under a thorn
tree and spread the letter out before God. Then he began to pray: “God, if you can do
these things for the people at Johannesburg, you can do something for me. I have been
a Christian for eighteen years, and I have prayed and prayed for certain things which
have not come to pass. God, if others can be baptised in the Holy Ghost, surely I can;
if other’s hearts are made pure by the power of God, the power that made theirs pure
can make nine pure also; if others have been healed, then you can heal me.”

As he thus gave himself to God, and opened his soul to heaven, suddenly the Spirit
came upon him and he became the most transformed creature I ever knew.

God moved into the man. For eighteen days he walked as though overshadowed by
the Spirit of God, God talking continuously to his soul, directing him to this one and
that one, judges and lawyers, statesmen and physicians, rich and poor. When he
would reach them the Spirit of God would pour forth through his soul such messages
of God that in many cases they fell down and wept.

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This is the point of the story I wanted you to get. He said for eighteen years he had
prayed for the real conversion and transformation of his wife, and it had not come to
pass. But that morning after the Lord had baptised him in the Holy Ghost a new
prayer came into his heart, a new depth had been touched in the man’s nature, and
from that great inner depth flowed out to God a cry that had been going out from his
soul for years. But that morning the cry of God touched the soul of his wife, and
before he reached the house she had given her heart to god. In three months all his
family, his wife, eleven children and himself, had been baptised in the Holy Spirit.

The desire of which Jesus spoke of (for when He spoke of desire, He spoke of this
same call of the soul) was not the simple attitude of the outer man. Certainly it
included it. Perhaps the desire in the beginning was simply that of the mind, but as the
days and years passed, and the desire ability of obtaining grew in the soul, it became a
call of the deepest depth of the man’s nature. And that is the character of desire that
Jesus spoke of when He said: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

The spiritual action that takes place within the nature of man, that strong desire for
God, His ways, His love, His knowledge, His power, causes everything else, perhaps
unconsciously to himself, to become secondary.

Politicians talk about a paramount issue. That is the issue that stands out by itself
above all others and is the greatest and largest and of most interest to the nation. It is
the paramount issue.

The soul has its paramount issue, and when the desire of your heart is intensified so
that it absorbs all your energies, then the time of its fulfilment is not far away. That is
the desire that brings the answer. It is creative desire.

A woman testified in my hearing one day to this fact. She had been pronounced
hopeless and was going blind. No human remedy could do her any good. Someone
opened to her in a dim way the possibility of seeing through the power of God. She
was not very well taught, but she said this: “That every day for four years she gave up
two and one-half hours absolutely to expressing the desire of her soul for real sight.
Not only expressing it in words, but calling the power of God to her that would
recreate in her the function of sight in her eyes and make her see.” At the end of four
or four and a half years she said: “My eyes are as well as they ever were.”

That is the reward of persistence, of a desire toward God. Your nature may have sent
out just as deep a cry to God as my nature has, and still is doing. Is the cry to God
continuous? Gradually as the forces of life concentrate themselves in line with that
strong desire, the Spirit of God is operating through your heart, is being directed by
that desire and concentrated on a particular line, intensifying every day because of the
continuous desire of the soul to possess. The effect of that concentration of the Spirit
of God on that soul is that by the grace of God there is brought to your soul all the
elements necessary to formulate and create and fulfil the desire of your heart, and one
morning the soul awakens to discover that it has become the possessor of the desired
object.

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Jesus started men on the true foundation. Many simply desire health, others temporal
blessings. Both are good and proper, but Bless God Jesus started the soul at the proper
point, to first desire RIGHTEOUSNESS, the righteousness of God, to become a
possessor of the Kingdom. “Seek ye first,” said Jesus, “the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Jesus was bringing forth and establishing in the world a new character, a character
that would endure forever, a soul quality that would never fail, a faith that knew no
possibility of defeat. In establishing such a character Jesus saw that the character
could only be established in the depth of a Man’s being, in the very spirit of his being.
Then when once the soul was grounded in the paths of righteousness, then all the
activities of the nature would be along righteous lines, and in harmony with the laws
of God.

God has a call in His own Spirit. If we study our own spirit we. will understand the
nature of God. The call of the Spirit of God is the call of righteousness, the call of
truth, the call of love, the call of power, the call of faith.

I met a young man on one occasion who seemed to me to be the most blessed man, in
some ways, of all the men I had ever met. I observed he was surrounded by a circle of
friends of men or women, the deepest and truest it had ever been my privilege to
know. One day I said to him: “What is the secret of this circle of friends that you
possess, and the manner in which you seem to bind them to you.” He replied, “Lake,
my friendships are the result of the call of the soul. My soul has called for truth and
righteousness, for holiness, for grace, for strength, for soundness of mind, for the
power of God, and the call has reached this one, and this one and this one, and
brought them to me.”

Over in Topeka, Kansas, in the year 1900, one morning a man stepped off the train,
walked up the street, and as he walked up a particular street he stopped in front of a
large fine dwelling, and said to himself, “This is the house.” A gentlemen who
happened to be out of sight around the building said, “What about the house?” and
this story came out. He said: “For years I have been praying God for a certain work of
God among Christians known as the Baptism of the Holy Ghost. In my researches I
have visited every body of Christian people in this country that I knew of that claimed
to be possessors of the baptism, but as I visited and examined their experiences and
compared it with the Word of God, I became convinced that none of them possessed
the Baptism of the Holy Ghost as it is recorded and demonstrated in the New
Testament.

He said one day as he prayed, the Spirit of the Lord said, “Go to Topeka, Kansas.” As
he prayed he observed in the Spirit a certain house, and the Lord said, “I will give you
that house, and in it the Baptism of the Holy Ghost will fall.”

So he took the train and came to Topeka, walked down the street, and exclaimed as he
passed by, “This is the house,” and the voice around the corner replied, “What about
it?” When the man had heard his story, he told him he was the owner of the house;
that it had been closed for years. He asked him what he wanted it for, and he replied

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that he was going to start a Christian school. The owner said, “Have you any money?”
He replied, “No.” He said, “All right, you can have the house without money.”

About an hour later a little Quaker lady came down the street, hesitated and looked
around and said, “This is the house, but there is no one living there.” After a struggle
with her soul she went up and rang the door bell and the first gentlemen answered the
bell and asked what she wanted. She said: “I live over in the country at such a place.
As I prayed, the Spirit told me to come here to this house.” He said, “Who are you?”
She replied, “Just an unknown Christian woman.” He said: “What have you been
praying about?” She said, “About the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.”

Beloved, in three weeks eighteen persons were brought to that house. They formed a
little company and began to pray. The company grew to thirty-six. On New Years
night, 1900, the Spirit fell on that company, and the first one was baptised in the Holy
Ghost, and in a few weeks practically the whole company had been baptised in the
Holy Ghost. And from there is spread over the world.

Yesterday morning a woman came to my healing rooms, a stranger in the city. She
said, “I have been praying for healing and asking God to show me where I could he
healed. I heard of friends in Chicago who pray for the sick, and I visited them, but
when I arrived, the Spirit said, “Not here.” She said, “I bought a ticket and was about
to take a train back home, but as I sat in the station I was approached by a little lady
on crutches, and pitying her, I turned to speak a kind word to her. While conversing
with her I saw she was a Christian of a deep nature, rarely found. I told her my story.”
She said, “Oh, I know where the Lord wants you to go. The Lord wants you to go to
Spokane, Washington.” (3000 miles from Chicago) She asked her if she knew
anybody in Spokane, and the lady replied, “Why yes, I know Mr Lake, I used to nurse
in his home years ago.”

I prayed for her, and told her the thing to do was to came in for ministry every day
until she was well. She said she would. This morning I received a call on the
telephone, and she said, “I am not coming up to the healing rooms.” I said, “Oh, is
that the kind of individual you are? The one that comes once and gets nothing.” “No,”
she said, “I came once and got something, and I do not need to come back. I am
healed, and I am going home.”

There is a call of faith in this Church, that is reaching away out, far out and in
unaccountable ways. Away at the other end the Spirit of God is revealing truth to this
soul and that soul, and they are moving into this life, and coming into unity with this
Church.

Is there a note of despair- in your heart? Have you not obtained the thing your soul
covets? Have you desired to be like that sinless, unselfish, sickless One? God will
answer the call of your soul. You shall have your hearts desire. But before that call
becomes answerable is must be the paramount call of your being. It is when it
becomes the paramount issue of the soul that the answer comes. Jesus knew. That is
the reason He said, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for
they shall be filled.” There is not a doubt about it. All the barriers of your nature will
go down before the desire of the soul. All the obstacles that ever were will disappear

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before the desire of you soul. All the diseases that ever existed in your life will
disappear before the desire of your soul, when that desire becomes the one great
purpose and prayer of your heart.

I love to think of one great soul: he was not a great Christian, but he was a great soul.
He was the son of a Church of England clergyman, and came to South Africa,
thinking he might get his system back to a normal state of health. He came to the SSS
diamond mines at Kimberley and took a pick and shovel and worked with them long
enough to understand diamonds. Indeed, he studied diamonds until he knew more
about them than any other man in the world. Then he went to studying Africa, until
one paramount desire grew up in his soul. He said, “I will plant the British flag across
the continent.” Eventually, this is what he did. He told me that in the beginning his
vision extended to the Vaal River, then to the Zambezi and then across the trackless
desert. He also planned a railroad six thousand miles long. John Cecil Rhodes died
before he could fully bring to pass the paramount issue of his soul!

“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.”

Oh, if I had one gift, or one desire that I would bestow on you, more than all others, I
would bestow upon you the hunger for God.

“Blessed are they that hunger.” Hunger is the best thing that ever came into a man’s
life. Hunger is hard to endure. It is the call of the nature for something that you do not
possess. The thing that will satisfy the demands of the nature and the hunger of a
man’s soul is the call of his nature for the Spirit of life that will generate in him the
abundant love of God.

Years ago I was one of a family of which some member was an invalid in the house
for thirty-two consecutive years. During that time we buried four brothers and four
sisters. A call arose in my nature to God for something to stay that tide of sickness
and death. Materia Medica had utterly failed. One after another the tomb stones were
raised. The call arose in my soul for something from God that would stem the tide and
turn it backward.

Nothing else but healing could have come to my life, no other thing but the
knowledge of it. God had to bring from the furthest ends of Australia the man who
brought to my soul the message of God and the manifestation of His power that
satisfied my heart. And healing by the power of God became a fact to me.

We live that our souls may grow. The development of the soul is the purpose of
existence. God Almighty is trying to obtain some decent association for Himself. By
His grace He is endeavouring to have us grow up in His knowledge and likeness to
that stature where as sons of God we will comprehend something of His love, of His
nature, of His power, of His purpose, and be big enough to give back to God what a
son should give to a great Father - the reverence, the love, the affection that comes
from the understanding of the nobleness and greatness of His purpose.

Great Britain produced two marvellous statesmen, a father and his son. They are
known in history as the old Pitt and the young Pitt. The young Pitt was as great a

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statesman as his father. The son grew to that largeness where, catching the vision of
his great father his soul arose to it, and he became his father’s equal. As I walked
through the House of Commons I came across the statues of the old and young Pitt. I
have forgotten the inscription at the bottom of the elder Pitt’s statue, but at the base of
the son’s statue were these words: “My father, the greatest man I ever knew.” Do you
see the call of his soul for his father’s largeness, for his father’s nobility, for his
father’s strength and influence?

“Blessed are they that hunger.” Bless God! What are we hungering for a little bit of
God, enough to take us through this old world where we will have the dry rot and be
stunted and then squeeze into heaven? “Blessed are they that hunger” for the nature
and power and love and understanding of God. Why? They shall be filled.

Not long ago I stood before great audiences of the Churchmen of the world. They
said, “Through all your ministry there is one note. It is the call for power.” They said,
“Do you not think it would be better if the Church was calling for holiness instead of
power?” And I replied, “She will never obtain the one without the other. There is
something larger than holiness. It is the nature of God.” The nature of God has many
sides. From every angle that the soul approaches God it reveals a new and different
manifestation of Him: love, beauty, tenderness, healing, power, might, wisdom, and
so on.

So the Christian who hungers and hungers, bless God, and lifts his soul to God brings
God down to meet his own cry. The spirit of man and the Spirit of God unite. The
nature of God is reproduced in man as God purposed it should be. There are no sick
folk in God. There is no sickness in His nature.

There is an incident in the life of Jesus that is so marvellous. Jesus Christ demanded
His right to heal a woman who was bound by Satan with a spirit of infirmity, and He
was not satisfied until it was accomplished. Devil and Church and creed and preacher
went down before the call of the Son of God to assert His right to deliver that soul
from sin and sickness. “Blessed are they that hunger.”

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 13. CHRIST LIVETH IN ME

That is the text, “Christ liveth in me.” That is the revelation of this Age. That is the
discovery of the moment. That is the revolutionising power of God in the earth. It is
the factor that is changing the spirit of religion in the world and the character of
Christian faith. It is divine vitalisation.

The world is awakening to that marvellous truth, that Christ is not in the heavens
only, nor in the atmosphere only, but Christ is IN YOU.

The world lived in darkness for thousands of years. There was just as much electricity
in the world then as now. It is not that electricity has just come into being. It was
always here. But men have discovered how to utilise it and bless themselves with it.

Christ’s indwelling in the human heart is the mystery of mysteries. Paul gave it to the
Gentiles as the supreme mystery of all the revelation of God and the finality of all
wonder he knew. “Christ in you.” “Christ in YOU.”

Christ has a purpose in you. Christ’s purpose in YOU is to reveal Himself to you,
through you, in you. We repeat over and over that familiar phrase, “The Church
which is His body,” but if we realised the truth of it and the power of it, this world
would be a different place. When the Christian Church realises that they are the
tangible, living, pulsating body, flesh and bones and blood and brain of Jesus Christ,
and that God is manifesting through each one every minute, and is endeavouring to
accomplish His big will for the world through them, not through some other body,
then Christian service and responsibility will be understood. Jesus Christ operates
through you. He does not operate independently of you, He operates through you.
Man and God become united. That is the divine secret of a real Christian life. It is the
real union, the real conscious union of man and God. There is no substitute for that
relationship. You can manufacture all the ordinances on earth, all the symbols there
ever were until you become dazed and you lose yourself in the maze of them, and still
you must find God.

There is only one reality. That reality is God. The soul of man must contact God, and
unless the spirit of man is truly joined to God there is no such thing as real Christian
manifestation. All the processes of preparation, by which a soul is prepared by God
for such a manifestation, are only preliminary processes. The final end is that man
may reveal God and that God may not only have a place of residence but a right
action in the body and spirit of man. Every Spirit-taught man in the world is aware of
how gradually his own nature has become subjected to God and His will.

I was visiting with a gentleman who had a grouch on me. He said, “I wrote you a
twenty-four page letter, and you have not received it. If you had you would not be
here.” I laughed. That man has been a Christian for thirty or forty years. Always a
devout man, and I have spoken of him frequently to my wife and my friends as one of
the most consistent Christian men I ever knew. Yet every once in a while we see how
the big human just rises up above the spirit and spoils the beauty and delight and
wonder of the life that is revealing God.

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God’s effort and God’s purpose in us is to bring all the conditions of our being into
harmony with His will and His mind. God’s purpose is not to make an automaton. We
see a ventriloquist operating a little wooden dummy, and the wooden dummy’s lips
move and it looks as though it was talking. It is just moving because another power is
moving it.

Now God has a higher purpose than making man an automaton. God’s highest is to
bring out all the qualities of God in your own soul, to bring out all the individuality
that is in your life, not to submerge or destroy, but to change it, to energise it, to
enlarge it, until all your individuality and personality and being are of the nature and
substance and quality of God.

You notice among the most devout Christians how continuously their thought is
limited to that place where they can be exercised or moved by God. But God’s best is
more than that. Receive the Spirit, then use the Spirit for God’s glory.

While I was in Chicago I met a couple of old friends who invited me to dinner. While
at dinner the lady, who is a very frank woman, said, “Mr Lake, I have known you so
long and have had such close fellowship for so many years, I am able to speak very
frankly.” I said, “Yes, absolutely.” “Well,” she said, “there is something I miss about
you. For lack of words I am going to put it in Paul’s words, ‘I bear in my body the
marks of the Lord Jesus.’ You do not seem to have the marks of Jesus.” I said, “That
depends whether or not it is the marks of mannerisms. If you are expecting that the
personality that God gave me is going to be changed so that I am going to be another
fellow and not myself, then you will miss it. If that is the kind of marks you are
looking for you will not find them. But if you are expecting to observe a man’s flesh
and blood and bones and spirit and mind indwelt by God, then you will find them, not
a machine, not an automaton, or an imitation, but a clear mind and a pure heart, a son
of God in nature and essence.

What is all God’s effort with the world but to bring out the real man in the image of
Christ, that real man with the knowledge of God, that real man reconstructed until his
very substance is the substance of God. And when you stop to reason that to its proper
conclusion, that is the only way that Jesus Christ Himself or God the eternal Father
will have fellowship with man forever.

When one stops to analyse that fact, we see that God is trying to make us in all our
nature and being and habits and thought, in all the structure of our life, just as
beautiful and just as real and just as clear-minded and just as strong as Jesus Himself.
Than we understand what Christ’s redemption means. It is the bringing out of Christ
IN YOU, until Christ in you is the One manifest - manifest through your eyes just as
God was manifest through the eyes of Jesus, manifest through your touch just as God
was manifest through Jesus. It is not a power nor a life separate from yourself but two
lives made one, two natures co-joined, two minds operating as one - Christ in YOU.

In the Chicago conference I sat with an old coloured lady one afternoon after the
meeting, and she told me of her woes and sicknesses, and they were many. After a
time when she had grown somewhat still, I said, “Dear Mother, how long have you
been a Christian?” She replied, “Since I was a child.” Then I tried to show her that

Page 15
God expected a development of God and His nature and the working and action of
God in her in transforming power through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and that
there was a process of remaking and remoulding that should change her nature and
life, and dissolve the rheumatism and Bright’s disease and all the other difficulties,
just as truly as long ago sin dissolved out of her soul.

After the conversation had gone on to the proper point, I said, “Dear Sister, anybody
can see that Christ dwells in your spirit.” Her eyes were lovely, delightful. “Let your
mind extend just a little bit. Let your thought comprehend that just as Jesus dwells in
your spirit and also possesses your soul, in just exactly the same way He is possessing
your blood and your kidneys and your old rheumatic bones, and that the very same
thing will happen in your bones when you realise that truth as happened in your spirit
when you were converted at the altar.” (She told me how she had prayed twenty-two
days and nights until Christ was revealed in her soul as Saviour. She seemed to want
to wait twenty-two days and nights for God to manifest Himself in the rheumatic
bones, and I was trying to get her away from it.) She said, “Brother, lay your hands on
me and pray for me, and I will be healed.” I answered, “No, I want you to get well by
realising that right now that same Christ that dwells in your spirit and your soul is in
your bones and in your blood and in your brain.” Presently the old lady hopped to her
feet and said, “My God, He is.” She had it. Christ had been imprisoned in her soul and
spirit, now He was permitted to manifest in her body.

Brother Tom Hezmalhalch came into a Negro meeting in Los Angeles one day where
they were talking about the Baptism of the Holy Ghost. He had picked up a paper and
read of these peculiar meetings, and among other things that they spoke in tongues.
That was new to him. He said, “If they do, and if it is real, that is an advance in the
Spirit of God beyond what is common. I am going to get it.” He went, and listened as
the old black boy taught. He was trying to develop the thought of conscious cleansing,
and he used a beautiful text: “Now ye are clean through the Word which I have
spoken unto you.” That became very real to Tom, and after a while they were invited
to come and kneel at the altar to seek God for the baptism of the Spirit. Tom said unto
me, “John, I got up and walked toward that old bench with the realisation in my soul
of the truth of the Word, and that the real cleansing and Cleanser was in my heart.
‘Now are ye clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you.’”

He knelt down and he prayed for a minute or two, his soul arose and his heart
believed for the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Then he arose and took one of the front
seats. One of the workers said, “Brother, don’t stop praying until you are baptised in
the Holy Ghost.” Mr Seymour said, “Just leave him alone. He has got it. You wait and
see.” A few days passed, and one day Tom said the Spirit began to surge through him,
and a song of praise in tongues, angelic voice, broke through his lips.

An old preacher came into my office in Africa and said, “Brother Lake, there is
something I want to talk to you about. There used to be a very remarkable
manifestation in my life. It was the manifestation of tongues and interpretation. But I
have not spoken for a year. I wish you would pray for me.” I said, “No, go over and
lie down, and get still and let God move in your life.” I went on writing a letter.
Presently I observed that something wanted to speak in me, and I turned my head just

Page 16
a little to see that the old man was speaking in tongues and I was getting the
interpretation of it as I wrote the letter.

Don’t you know Christians are stumbling every day over that fact. You are doubting
and fearing and wondering if Christ is there. Beloved brother and sister, give Him a
chance t o reveal Himself. He is there. Probably because of your lack of realisation
your soul is closed and He is not able to reveal Himself. You know God is never able
in many to reveal Himself outside of the spirit or soul. The real secret of the ministry
of healing is in permitting the grace of God in your heart to flow. out through your
hands and your nerves into the outer life. That is the real secret. And one of the
greatest works God has to perform is to subject our flesh to God. Many Christians, the
deepest Christians who really know God in their spirits and enjoy communion with
God, are compelled to wait until there is a process of spiritualisation takes place in
their bodies before God can reveal Himself through them. Do not imprison Christ in
you. Let Him live, let Him manifest, let Him vent through you.

There is one great thing that the world is needing more than anything else, and I am
convinced of it every day I live. Mankind has one supreme need, and that is the
LOVE of God. The hearts of men are dying for lack of the love of God. I have a sister
in Detroit. She came over to Milwaukee to visit us for two or three days at the
convention there. As I watched her moving around, I said, “I would like to take her
along and just have her love folks.” She would not need to preach. You do not need to
preach to folks. It is not the words you say that are going to bless them. They need
something greater. It is the thing in your soul. They have got to receive it, then their
soul will open and there will be a divine response. Give it to them: it is the love of
God.

You have seen people who loved someone who would not respond. If there is any
hard situation in God’s earth, that is it, to really passionately love someone and find
no response in them.

I had an English friend and was present at his marriage. Some years later he and his
wife came to visit our home. He was the cold type of closed up Englishman, and his
wife was the warm type. One day as they started out for a walk, I noticed the
passionate yearning in her soul. If he would just say something that was tender,
something that would gratify the craving of her nature for affection, but he seemed to
go along absolutely unconscious of it. After a while they came back from their walk. I
was sitting on the front steps. After the lady had gone into the house, I said, “Hibbs,
you are a stiff. How is it possible that you can walk down the street with a woman like
your wife and not realise that her heart is craving and crying for you to turn around
and do something that shows you love her?” He said, “Do you think that is the
difficulty? I will go and do it now.” And everything subsided while he proceeded to
do it.

What is it men are seeking? What is it their hearts are asking for when they are
seeking God? What is their soul crying for? Mankind is separated from God. It may
not be mountains of sin between you and God at all. It may be that your nature is
closed and unresponsive. My! When the real love touch of God is breathed into your
soul, what a transformation takes place. There is probably no more delightful thing on

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earth than to watch a soul praying into God, when the light of God comes in and the
life of God fills the nature and that holy affection that we seek from others finds
expression in Him.

That is what the Lord is asking from you, and if you want to gratify the heart of Jesus
Christ, that is the only way in all the world to do it. You know the invitation is not
“Give Me thine head.” The invitation is, “My son, give Me thine HEART.” That is an
affectionate relationship, a real love union in God, a real love union with God. Think
of the fineness of God’s purpose. He expects that same marvellous spiritual union that
is brought to pass between your soul and His own to be extended so that you embrace
in that union every other soul around you.

Oh, that is what it means when it talks about being baptised in one spirit, submerged,
buried, enveloped and enveloping in the one Spirit of God.

While I was in Milwaukee recently, I went out one morning with Rev. Fockler to
make a call on a sick person. We stepped into one of the most distracted homes I have
ever been in. A strange condition had developed in one of the daughters, and the
household was distressed. They were the saddest group. They were German people.
Fockler speaks German. Presently he began to talk to the household. I just sat back
and watched. Presently I noticed the faces began to relax and the strain was gone. The
girl was apparently insane. She came down the stairs, stood outside the door where
she could not be seen except by me. He continued to converse with the family, and as
their souls softened and their faith lifted, her eyes commenced to change. She was
moved upon by the same Spirit until her nature responded, and in just a little while
she stepped into the room. She had tormented that household. Nobody could get near
her. She slipped up behind Fockler’s chair, stood with her hands on the back of the
chair. He understood and disregarded. After a little while she put the other hand on
the other shoulder. And in fifteen or twenty minutes we left that home, and there was
just as much distinction between the attitude of those dear people when we came in
and when we left as between heaven and hell. If hell has a characteristic, it is that of
distraction. If heaven has a particular characteristic, it is the presence of God, the
calm of God, the power of God, the love of God.

There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching hell to
them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it. And men are
discovering there is only one way and that is the Jesus way. Jesus did not come with a
club, but with the great loving heart of the Son of God. He was “moved with
compassion”.

This morning I lay in bed and wrote a letter, an imaginary letter to a certain
individual. I was getting ready so that when I came down I could dictate the sentences
that would carve him right. One of the phrases was, “You great big calf, come out of
it and be a man.” As I lay there I got to thinking, “If Jesus was writing this letter, I
wonder what He would write?” But somehow it would not frame. My soul was not in
an attitude to produce such a letter. So I came down this morning and called Edna and
commenced to dictate, and I was trying to dictate a letter in the Spirit of Jesus.
Presently I woke up to the fact that I was putting the crimp into it like a lawyer. After
she had written it and laid it down for me to sign, I commenced to read it over. It was

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not what I wanted to write at all. The first two paragraphs had a touch of the right
spirit but that was all. So I laid it aside. Then I went in and prayed a little while. After
I had been praying for twenty minutes, the telephone rang. It was that fellow. He
wanted me to come down to the Davenport Hotel. We had three of the best hours
without being aware of the time.

We boast of our development in God; we speak glowingly of our spiritual

experiences, but it is only once in a while that we find ourselves in the real love of
God. The greater part of the time we are in ourselves rather than in Him. That
evidences just one thing, that Christ has not yet secured that perfect control of our
life, that subjection of our nature, that absorption of our individuality, so that He is
able to impregnate it and maintain it in Himself. We recede, we draw back, we close
up. We imprison our Lord..

The secret of a religious meeting is that it assists men’s hearts to open. They become
receptive, and the love of God finds vent in their nature for a little while, and they go
away saying, “Didn’t we have a good time? Wasn’t that a splendid meeting?”

I wonder if there is anything that could not be accomplished through that love of God.
Paul says there is not. “Love never faileth.” That is one infallible state. Try it on your
wife, try it on your children, try it on your neighbours.

Ah, sometimes we need to get things over on to the bigger love, the greater heart. It is
a good thing to detach your soul. Do not hold people. Do not bind people. Just cut
them loose and let God love them. Don’t you know we hold people with such a grip
when we pray for them that they miss the blessing. Why, you have such a grip on
your humanity that it is exercising itself and the spirit is being submerged. Let your
soul relax and let the Spirit of God in you find vent. There is no substitute for the love
of God. “Christ in you.” Oh, you have the capacity to love. All the action of the Spirit
of God has its secret there.

I stood on one occasion by a dying woman who was suffering and writhing in awful
agony. I had prayed again and again with no results. But this day something just
happened inside of me. My soul broke clear down, and I saw that poor soul in a new
light. Before I knew it I reached out and gathered her in my arms and hugged her up
to my soul, not my bosom. In a minute I knew the real thing had taken place. I laid
her back down on the pillow. In five minutes she was well. God was waiting on me
until He could get to my soul the sense of that tenderness that was in the Son of God.

That is the reason that His Name is written in imperishable memory. And the Name of
Jesus Christ is the most revered Name in earth or sea or sky. And I am eager to get in
that category of folks who can manifest the real love of God all the time.

The real Christian is a SEPARATED man. He is separated forever unto God in ALL
the departments of his life. So his Body, so his Soul and his Spirit are forever
committed to God the Father. From the time he commits himself to God, his BODY is

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as absolutely in the hands of God as his spirit or his soul. He can go to no other power
for help or healing.

An hundredfold consecration takes the individual forever out of the hands of all but
God.

“Ye are not your own.”

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 14. DISCERNMENT

1 Corinthians 12:8-12

My first great interest in Africa was stimulated when a child through reading of
Livingstone’s travels and exploration, and of Stanley finding Livingstone in the heart
of Africa, and still more by reading of Stanley’s trip across the Continent and down
the Congo.

As the years of my boyhood passed, I became conscious of a certain operation of my

spirit, which I shall endeavour to describe.

In my sleep, and sometimes during my waking hours, it seemed to me as if I were

present in Africa instead of America. At such times I would note the geography of the
country, the peculiarities of the landscape, the characteristics of the various tribes of
native people. I became deeply sympathetic with effort of the Boers as I watched
them endeavouring to establish their republics.

As I reached manhood these excursions in the spirit became more intelligent to me.
On one occasion, while in the attitude of prayer, I approached South Africa from the
Indian Ocean, and travelled through Zululand over into the mountains of Basutoland.
I noted the distinctions of the tribal characteristics as I passed through these states,
also the Orange Free State and the Transvaal from Basutoland to Johannesburg.

This excursion, projection of spirit consciousness, or whatever it may be termed,

occurred during hours of communion with God in prayer.

While meditating and praying while on the sea, on my way to Africa, I would become
suddenly conscious of the political conditions of South Africa, would feel the
struggles of the various political elements in their contest for supremacy. Then again I
would realise the condition of the country financially, and still again see the religious
aspects of the nation. I saw the predominating thought that bound the Boer people as a
nation to the Dutch Church and the struggles of the civilised native people to attain a
religious independence.

While in the spirit I comprehended not only present fact, but my consciousness would
project itself into the future so that I saw the train of national events that are yet to
take place, also the West coast of Africa, when they had become great commercial
seaports, with lines of railways extending up into the Transvaal.

Much of this vision I have seen fulfilled at this writing, namely the uniting of the
South African states into a national union (Natal, Orange Free State, Cape Colony and
the Transvaal), the great religious upheaval, the settlement of political and financial
problems, and so on. I saw the conquest of German Southwest Africa by the British,
including some of the battle scenes of the present war there. (World War 1).

No one could realise, unless they had been associated with me in the work in Africa,
how thoroughly this knowledge of the conditions in Africa was made to me. This was

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not the result of reading, for I had read practically nothing of Africa since my
childhood.

In travelling through the country after my arrival, there was nothing new. I had seen
it all in advance, and could recollect times and circumstances when in my visions of
Africa I had visited one city or another.

This knowledge of affairs was of inestimable value to me when I was actually on the
ground. Business men and statesmen alike frequently expressed surprise at the
intimate knowledge I possessed of conditions in the land, little realising how this
knowledge had come to me.

This spiritual consciousness of conditions, or gift of knowledge, continued with me

throughout my fist years as President of the Apostolic Church of South Africa.

It was my custom to dictate my letters in the morning before going to my office, or

out among the sick, for the duties of the day. At such times, if I wanted to write a
letter, for instance to Cape Town, Peitermaritzburg, Pretoria, or some other place, I
would bow my head in quiet before God for a few moments. While in this attitude
there would be born in my consciousness of the conditions of the Assembly or
district, or town, as the case might be. I could see the difficulties the brethren were
having there, if any and hundreds of times have written revealing to them an inside
knowledge of the conditions among them that they were sure no one knew about.

In the conduct of our native work, this feature was so marked that after a time, an
adage grew up among the natives, “You can not fool Brother Lake, God shows him.”
Many, many times when the natives would come and present perhaps only one side of
a matter, I would be able to tell them the whole truth concerning the difficulty.

On one occasion a man came from Robertson, made charges against a brother who
was one of the elders in the work there. When he got through I said to him, “Brother,
let us bow our heads in prayer.” Instantly I seemed to be in Robertson. I observed the
assembly, saw the various brethren there, noted their piety and devotion to God. I saw
that the condition was almost the reverse as it had been presented. The man, himself,
was the trouble maker.

On another occasion a woman came to me several times requesting prayer for her
deliverance from drunkenness. I urged upon her the necessity for repentance unto
God, confession of her sins, and so on. She assured me many times that she has done
all of this. One day she came while I was resting on the cot. My wife brought her into
the room. She knelt weeping by the cot. As usual she asked me to pray for
deliverance. I said to her, “What about the two hundred and fifty pounds sterling
worth of jewellery that you stole from such and such a home?” She threw up her
hands with an exclamation of despair, supposing that I would deliver her to the police
or tell the party from whom she had stolen it. I calmed her by assurance that as a
minister of Christ no one should know from me concerning the matter. I regarded the
knowledge as sacred before God because God had revealed it to me in order to assist
her out of her difficulty. She was delivered from her drunkenness, and remained a
sober woman, working earnestly in the vineyard of the Lord.

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Some days afterward, a woman came to me, saying, I have heard that so-and-so
(naming the lady of whom I have spoken) has been converted, and I know if she has
must have confessed to you that she stole jewellery from my home. I explained to her
that even if such a confession had been made, as a minister of Jesus Christ I could not
reveal it and would not reveal it.

As we conversed I told her I believed God had sent her in order that we might discuss
together the forgiveness of God. I showed her that God expected us to forgive, even
as we are forgiven. Indeed, that we are commanded to forgive. The Spirit gave me
such a consciousness of the forgiveness of God that as I presented it to her it seemed
to flow in liquid love from my soul. She broke down and wept, asking me to pray for
her that God would deliver her from her own sins, and establish in her a knowledge
and consciousness of His presence and life. She left saying, “Tell so-and-so that as far
as the jewellery is concerned, I shall never mention it again. There will be no
prosecution, and by the grace of God I forgive her.”

My wife possessed the spirit of discernment in a more marked degree than I did,
especially concerning difficulties in peoples’ lives, particularly regarding those
seeking healing. She had the power to reveal the reason they were not blessed of God.

It was my custom in receiving the sick in my office, to let then stand in a line, and I
would pray for them, laying hands on each as they passed me. Some would not
receive healing, and their suffering would continue. Some would receive healing in
part, and some were instantly healed. I would pass those who received no healing into
the adjoining room, and when I had finished praying for the multitude, I would bring
my wife into the room where these unhealed ones were. She would go close to one,
and would say, in substance, “Your difficulty is that at such-and-such a time you
committed such-and-such a sin which has not been repented of and confessed.” To
another perhaps it would be, “God wants you to make restitution for such-and-such an
act that you committed at such-and-such a time.” To another, “The pride of your heart
and the love of the world have not been laid on the altar of Christ.”

Upon hearing the inner things of their hearts revealed, many would bow at once and
confess their sins to God. We would pray for them again, and the Lord would heal
them. Some would go away unrepentant. Some would go through the motions of
repentance, but it was not of the heart, and they would not be healed. Thus we were
taught to value highly the gift of God of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:10,
“to another the discerning of spirits.”

The Spirit of God is like the bread that the disciples held in their hands. When they
broke it and distributed it to the multitudes there was more remaining than when they
began. The Spirit of God is CREATIVE, GENERATIVE, CONSTRUCTIVE, and the
more you give the more you receive. Jesus laid down a perpetual law when He said,
“Give and it shall be given unto you.”

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 15. CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a wonderful single word that expresses what God is trying to develop in us.
That word is CONSCIOUSNESS. I love it. It is an amazing word. Consciousness
means, THAT WHICH THE SOUL KNOWS. Not that which you believe, or that
which you have an existent faith for, or that which you hope, but that which the soul
has proven, which the soul knows, upon which the soul rests, the thing, bless God,
which has become concrete in your life.

Consequently God’s purpose, and the purpose of real religion, is to create in the
nature of man a consciousness of God. And that Church which will succeed in
creating the highest degree of consciousness of God in the soul of man, will live
longest in the world. And the only mode of possibility of perpetuating a Church in the
world forever is to bring into the souls of the people the full measure of the
consciousness of God that Jesus Christ enjoys.

It is a good thing, not only to be good, but to know WHY you are good. It is not only
a good thing to be an American, but to know WHY you are an American. It is a good
thing, not only to be a Christian, but to know WHY you are a CHRISTIAN and to
know why CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS is superior to every other known
consciousness.

And I want to declare that Christianity stands superior to every other form of religion
under the heavens and in the whole earth; that no other religion under the heavens has
the same consciousness of God or the same means of producing a consciousness of
God, that Christianity possesses.

In 1893 in this city, was the great Chicago World’s Fair. Among the features of the
fair was a Congress on Religions. All the religions of the world were invited to send
their representatives, and present their peculiar religion for the good of all. Many
regarded is as a great calamity that the varied forms of Eastern Philosophy should
thus be introduced into this country. I never felt that way. I have always felt that if
Christianity could not demonstrate her superiority over every other religion, then
Christianity has not the Place and power that Jesus Christ said Christianity had in the
world.

But the result of that Congress of Religions was that Christianity was so poorly
presented that the Indian Philosophers ran away with the whole thing, and in the
minds of thousands who listened, it left a belief that their knowledge of God, and
God’s laws, and the laws of life, were greater than the Christian possessed.

And fellow Christians, there began in my soul a prayer that Almighty God would
reveal in my soul what the real secret of real Christianity is, in order that in this world
Christians might become kings and priests, and demonstrate the superiority of the
religion of the Son of God beyond that of every other in the whole earth.

In later years I went to South Africa. It was at a time of peculiar interest in South
African history, just following the Boer War. The great industry there is mining. One
quarter of the gold of the world comes from Johannesburg and vicinity. The diamonds

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of the world come from South Africa, and the United States is the greatest diamond
market of the world.

When the Boer War came on, the native people became so frightened over war
between white men, that after the war was over and settled, they could not coax them
back to open the mines. The result was that in order to get the industries established
again, they had to send to China and got two hundred thousand (200,000) Chinese,
and put them to work to open the shops and mines, and all the other industries. These
Chinese came in real colonies. Come were Confucianists, some were Buddhists, some
were Brahmans, some represented this form, and some that form of Philosophy. They
brought their priests, and their priest ministered unto them.

At the same time there were in South Africa one and a half million East Indians.
These represented all the cults of India. They made complaint that they were not
being properly cared for, and the British government sent to India and imported a
great company of Buddhist priests, and Brahman priests, and Yogi priests, and all the
rest of them, and they came to South Africa to assist their own people.

I had a Jewish friend, Rabbi Hertz, who became famous as a great Rabbi, and because
of his influence for the British during the war. There was also a Roman Catholic
priest, Father Bryant, a wonderful man. I listened to Dr Hertz give a series of lectures
on the Psalms of David, which I regard as the finest of that character I had ever heard.

One day he said, “Did it ever occur to you what an amazing Congress of Religions we
have in this country? It would put the one in Chicago in 1893 in the shade.” I said, “I
have thought of it, but do not have sufficient acquaintance among these other men to
undertake it, but would gladly give a helping hand.” So it was eventually brought to
pass.

We gathered once a week. They sat on the floor all night, Eastern fashion, a priest
with his interpreter, and we gave the individual a whole night if he wanted it, or two
nights if he wanted it, or as long as he wanted, to tell out the very secret of his soul, to
show the very best he could, the very depth of his peculiar religion, and the
consciousness of God it produced. It was not the details of his religion we sought, but
the soul of it, and the consciousness it possessed. We listened to the Indian Buddhist
priest one night, and the Chinese Buddhist priest the next night, the Indian
Confucianist priest one night, and the Chinese Confucianist priest the next night; the
Indian Brahman priest one night, and a Chinese Brahamn priest the next night, and it
went on. Eventually it came to the night that Dr Hertz, the Jewish Rabbi, was to give
the secret of the Jewish religion, and tell out the whole of God that the Jewish religion
revealed, and the consciousness of God that was produced by the Mosaic and the
prophetic teachings.

Did you ever stop to think that in all religious history, the Jewish prophets knew more
of God than all the Philosophers of earth combined? They superseded all others of the
ancients in knowledge of God, His ways and power. They gave to their day and
generation such a revelation of God as the world had never known. Stop and think of
the wonders of God that the Old Testament revealed. Think of the marvels that it
seems would stagger the very soul of modern Christianity.

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When the Israelites were travelling over the deserts, God arrested the processes of
decay in their very shoes and clothing, and they wore them continually for forty years.
Think of the marvel of it, the arrest of the process of decay! And then someone
wonders if it is possible to arrest the process of decay in a man’s life. Yet, it is. Bless
God! Jesus Christ arrested the process of death by the power of God, through the
introduction of the life and the Spirit of life in Jesus Christ, giving man eternal life.

Think again of the old prophet, who when they had lost the axe in the water, and came
to him in their distress, takes a stick and holds it in his hands. What for? Until that
stick became magnetised by the Spirit and power of God. And when he threw it in the
water the axe arose and came to the stick. Think again of the prophet, when he was
called to the dying boy. He said to his servant, “take this staff,” the staff that he
carried, “go ahead of me, lay it on the child.” What for? Because he carried that staff
next to his God anointed hands until the staff itself became impregnated with the life
and power of God. So the servant went ahead, and there was enough of God in that
staff to keep the life there, and the spirit there, until he arrived and called the child to
life by the power of God.

Later they were burying a man, and in their haste they opened the grave of Elisha, and
when the dead man touched his old Go-filled bones, he became alive. There was
enough of God in the old bones to quicken him into life again. Bless God.

You say, “Well, how can Christianity demonstrate anything further than that?” When
I listened to Dr Hertz, my heart asked, “Dear God, when I get my turn to reveal what
Christianity is, what am I going to say that is going to reveal Christianity as superior.
to the Jewish dispensation, and the consciousness of God that it produced in the souls
of the prophets?”

From eight o’clock at night until four-thirty Dr Hertz pours out his soul in a wondrous
stream of God revelation, such as my soul had never heard. In the morning as I started
for home I prayed, “God, in the Name of Jesus, when it comes next Thursday night,
and it is my turn to show forth Jesus Christ, what am I going to say to surmount the
revelation of God that he gave?”

I had searched Christian literature for it. I had searched the libraries of the world. I
could not find it in the writings of the old Christian Fathers. I searched the Word of
God for it. I saw flashes of it, but somehow it would not frame in my soul. I decided
there was only one way. I gave myself to fasting and prayer and waiting on God. And
one day in the quiet GOD TOLD ME THAT SECRET.

And from that day my heart rested in the new vision of Jesus Christ, and a new
revelation of the real divinity of Christianity came to my heart.

So it came my turn and I sat sown and reviewed for hours with care, step by step, the
consciousness that the Philosophers and priests had shown as belonging to their
respective religions, and finally the wonderful consciousness that Dr Hertz had shown
as belonging to the Mosaic dispensation.

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Oh, bless God, there is a secret in Jesus Christ. CHRISTIANITY IS ALL
SUPERNATURAL, every bit of it. The Philosophies are natural. The Mosaic
dispensation and its revelation was supernatural, but its revelation did not have the
high degree of overcoming consciousness that belongs to Christianity. Yet you can go
around the world, and you will not find one in a hundred thousand that can tell what
the real secret of Christianity is, which makes it superior to all other religions.

You say, “It is the Holy Ghost.” Well, the prophets had the Holy Ghost. There is no
more marvellous record given than the Old Testament records. When Moses wanted
mechanics and workmen for the new tabernacle, the Lord called a man by name and
said, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, and in understanding, and in
knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in
wood, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving
of timber, to work all manner of workmanship.” That is the way they learned their
trade.

Later they were making preparations for the building of Solomon’s temple. That
temple is one of the seven wonders of the world. Did you ever stop to think of where
the plans came from, or how they got them? Old David tells us that God gave him the
plans of the temple in writing; “while the Spirit of God was upon me in writing,” and
he wrote the details of it. He put these details down with such accuracy that they
prepared the temple in the mountains, and when they came to put it together, there
was no sound of a hammer. Every piece fit to piece. Wonderful movings of God!
Wonderful presence of God! Talk about the glory of God. Why, when Moses came
down from the mountain, his face shone or radiated with the glory of God so intensely
the people were afraid of him, and he was compelled to wear a veil until the anointing
had somewhat left his soul.

But, beloved, Christianity is more than that. Paul declares that the glory of Moses’
face was superseded. I said a moment ago, Christianity is not a natural religion. It has
nothing natural in it. IT IS SUPERNATURAL from the top to the bottom, from the
center to the circumference, within and without. It comes right from heaven, every bit
of it. It is the divine outflow of the holy soul of the crucified, risen, glorified Son of
God.

Why does God come down from heaven into the hearts of men, into the nature of
men, into the bodies of men, into the souls of men, into the spirits of men? God’s
purpose in man is to transform him into the nature of God. Jesus said, “I said, YE
ARE GODS” (John 10:34).

The philosophers came to the grave and died. They had no further revelation to give.
They had left their tenants, and they exist to this day. I have studied the great Eastern
philosophies. I have searched them from cover to cover. I have read them for years as
diligently as I have read my Bible. I have read them to see what their consciousness
was. The secret of salvation is NOT in them.

But in my Bible is seen that the Son of God saves men from their sins and changes
them by His power in their nature so that they become like Him. And that is the
purpose of Jesus, to take a man and make a Christ out of him, to take a sinner and

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wash him pure and white and clean, and then come into his life and anoint him with
His Spirit, speak through him, live in him, change the substance of his spirit, change
the substance of his body, until his body and his blood and his bones and flesh and his
soul and his spirit are the body and blood and bones and soul and spirit of the Son of
God. (Ephesians 5:30 and 1 Corinthians 6:17).

Oh, Jesus was crucified. Jesus was crucified after there grew in the soul of Jesus the
divine consciousness that He could go into the grave, and through faith in God accept
the word of God, and believe that He would raise Him from the dead. Jesus went into
the grave with a divine boldness, not simply as a martyr. He was God’s PRINCE,
God’s KING, God’s SAVIOUR. He went into the grave God’s CONQUEROR. He
was after something. He went after the power of DEATH, and He got it, and He took
it captive, and He came forth from the grave proclaiming His victory over DEATH.

No more bowing before the accursed power that had been generated through sin. It
was a captive. No more fear of hell! Do you hear it? No more fear of hell after Jesus
Christ came out of the grave. He had death and hell by the throat, and the key in His
hands. He was Conqueror!

When He came forth from the grave He came forth bringing that wonderful spirit of
heavenly triumph that was begotten in the soul of Jesus because He had not failed. He
had gone and done it. No longer a hope; no longer a faith; now a knowledge - God’s
consciousness in His heart. It was done!

Oh yes, bless God, I am coming back to that word with which I started. Do you know
the secret of religion is in its consciousness? The secret of Christianity is in the
consciousness it produces in your soul. And Christianity produces a higher
consciousness than any other religion in the world; no other religion in the world or
other revelation of the true God equals it. It is the highest and holiest. It comes
breathing and throbbing and burning right out of the heart of the glorified Son of God.
It comes breathing and beating and burning and throbbing into your nature and mine,
bless God.

So that is the reason I love the religion of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. That is
the reason the cross of Calvary is a sacred place. That is the reason that the conquest
of the Son of God in the Regions of Death makes a man’s heart throb. That is the
reason He gathered His disciples together, and as if He could not wait, He said, “Let
me breathe it into you. Go forth in its power. All power is given unto me, both in
heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore. These signs shall follow. Cast out devils, speak
with new tongues, heal the sick. Amen.”

In those early centuries of Christianity, Christianity did not go into the world
apologising. It went to slay the powers of darkness and undo the works of the devil,
and it lived in holy triumph.

HEALING CONSCIOUSNESS

I am going into the history of the Old Testament. It is surprising how ignorant people
are of the Word of God. God made a covenant of healing with the children of Israel

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after they crossed the Red Sea, and they lived under that covenant four hundred and
fifty years, unbroken, and there never was an Israelite for four hundred and fifty
years, so far as the record goes, except Asa, who ever took one dose of medicine. One
backslider went back on God and called the physicians like the heathen did, but the
people trusted God and God alone for four hundred and fifty years, or until Solomon
got into polygamy. He went down into Egypt and married Egyptian wives, who
brought their heathen physicians with them. And eventually the whole nation had
fallen from grace, and gone back again and were taking pills and medicine and dope,
just like some Pentecostal heathen do.

Do you want to get on God’s territory? Cut it out. It belongs to the devil and the
heathen, and the great big unbelieving world.

When you see those holy flashes of heavenly flame once in a while in a person’s life,
as we observe in our Sister Etter, when someone is healed, it is because her
consciousness and Christ’s are one. She is fused into God. I saw a dying, strangling
woman healed in thirty seconds as Mrs Etter cast out the demon. The flame of God,
the fire of His Spirit, ten seconds of connection with the Almighty Christ at the
Throne of God, that is the secret of it.

Oh, I would like to get you in touch with the Son of God for five minutes. I would
like to see the streams of God’s lightning come down for ten minutes! I wonder what
would take place.

A few months ago I was absent from the City of Spokane, and when I returned we
discovered Mrs Lake was not at home. It was just time to leave for my afternoon
service. Just then someone came in and said, “Your secretary, Mrs Graham, is in the
throes of death, and your wife is with her.” So I hurried down to the place. When I got
there the wife of one of my ministers met me at the door and said, “You are too late,
she has gone.” And as I stepped in I met the minister coming out of the room. He said,
“She has not breathed for a long time.” But as I looked down at that woman and
thought of how God Almighty, three years before, had raised her out of death after her
womb and ovaries and tubes had been removed in operations, and God Almighty had
given them back to her, after which she had married and conceived, my heart flamed.
I took that woman up off that pillow, and called on God for the lightnings of heaven
to blast the power of death and deliver her, and I commanded her to come back and
stay, and she came back, after not breathing for twenty-three minutes.

We have not yet learned to keep in touch with the powers of God. Once in a while our
soul rises, and we see the flame of God accomplish this wonder and that, but beloved,
Jesus Christ lived in the presence of God every hour of the day and night. Never a
word proceeded from the mouth of Jesus Christ but what was God’s Word. “The
words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”

When you and I are lost in the Son of God, and the fires of Jesus burn in our hearts
like they did in Him, our words will be the words of life and of spirit, and there will
be no death in them. But, beloved, we are on the way.

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I have read Church history because my heart was searching for the truth of God. I
have witnessed with my own eyes the most amazing manifestations of psychological
power. I know an East Indian Yogi who volunteered to be buried for three days, and
he came up our of that grave well and whole. I saw them put a man in a cataleptic
state and place a stone fifteen inches square on his body, put his feet on one chair and
his head on another, and strike that stone with a twenty-five pound sledge seven
times, until it broke in two.

I watched these things, and I said, “These are only on the psychological plane.
Beyond that is the Spirit plane and the amazing wonder of the Holy Spirit of God, and
if God got hold of my spirit for ten minutes He could do something ten thousand
times greater than that.”

Why Jesus was the triumphant One. Did you ever stop to think of Jesus at the Throne
of God? I like to think of the twentieth century Christ. Not the Jesus that lived in the
world two thousand years ago. Not the humiliated Jesus. Not Jesus dying on the cross
for my sin, but the glorified, exalted Son of God at the Throne of God, who stands
declaring, “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore;
and have the keys of hell and of death.” Blessed be God.

And that is the Christ that breathes His power into your soul and mine, and that is the
Consciousness that is breathed from heaven in the Holy Ghost when it comes to your
heart. Amen.

God purposed that the Christian Church should be the embodiment of the living,
blessed Son of God - Christ living not in one temple, Jesus, but in multitudes of
temples - the bodies of those yielded to God in holy consecration, God’s real Church,
not in name only but in power. Many members, one in Spirit, one divine structure of
divine faith and substance. Man transformed, transfigured, and transmuted into the
nature, the glory, and the substance of Christ.

“THAT EVIL ONE TOUCHETH HIM NOT”

When the Spirit of God radiated from the man Jesus, how close do you suppose it was
possible for the evil spirit to come to Him? I believe it was impossible for the evil one
to come close to Him. The Spirit of God is as destructive of evil as it is creative of
good. I am sure that Satan talked to Jesus from a safe distance.

The real Christian is a SEPARATED man. He is separated forever unto God in ALL
the departments of his life. So his body and his soul and his spirit are forever
committed to the Father. From the time he commits himself to God, his BODY is as
absolutely in the hands of God as his spirit or his soul. He can go to no other power
for help or healing.

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A hundred-fold consecration takes the individual forever out of the hands of all but
God.

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 16. COMPASSION

I wonder if you ever settled in your own mind what is the greatest blessing, or
revelation of the Spirit or power of God. I believe the greatest thing is that Jesus
showed the world how to exercise compassion for one another. The law of Moses,
that preceded Jesus, was exacting in its demands, as all law is. That is the nature of
law. And Jesus undertook to reveal the Father-heart to the world. The greatest
movement in the soul of God Himself was that movement of compassion for a needy
world, which was so great, that the Word says, that “God so loved the world, that He
gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on Him, should not perish, but
have everlasting life.”

We are inclined to think, sometimes, that God is careless about the world. Not so.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever
believeth on Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His
son to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”

When the multitude had followed Jesus into the wilderness, He was moved with
compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. The disciples said,
“Now Lord, let us send them away.” Jesus understood men’s humanity. He
understood the fact that they were hungry; and the heart of the Christ was moved with
compassion for them. He said, “No, get them to sit down. All there is in the company
is 5000 people, beside women and children. You get them to sit down.” When they
were seated, He took the five loaves and the two fishes, blessed them, brake, and gave
to His disciples to give to the multitude. Jesus taught the world to have compassion.
Men have loved to have compassion on the lovable, and on the beautiful; but Jesus
taught the world to have compassion on the unholy, the sinful and the ignorant. One
day they brought to Him a sinful woman, and. they said, “According to our law, she
should be stoned.” According to the law there was nothing else for her; but the
compassion of Jesus covered that soul and He said, “Go, and sin no more.”

Someone told me this incident: A lady who lives in the country, a widow, who had
one daughter, was labouring for small wages; her great ambition was to be able to
educate her daughter. She had toiled, and worked, and invested the money in Liberty
Bonds, to hold for the education of her daughter. Recently she came down from one
of the country towns to Spokane, to make a few purchases for the daughter, that
would be necessary for the girl’s new life and school. She stood at one of the counters
of the Crescent Store; she turned her back for a moment and presently discovered that
the little treasure was gone. The savings of a whole life, the struggles of a mother’s
heart! The endeavour to gratify the one big love of her soul in the education of her
daughter. In spite of the assistance of the officials of the store, she was unable to find
any trace of it. At last. she sat down and. wept bitterly. A lady, the widow of a, banker
who saw her, told her to come up on the balcony with her and sit down. Another lady

joined them, and the lady who first saw her said, “Now come, we are going to sit
down together and believe God on behalf of this soul. We are going to believe that
God will move the soul of the person who took that little treasure, until his soul sees
that thing like this mother sees it.” Men are learning, Blessed be God. And they sat
down together, to pray for that soul. The mother returned to the country, and in the

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mail following her came a letter with the little treasure, and a little note, saying: “I
couldn’t keep it; forgive me, and may God forgive me. Compassion reaches further
than law; further than demands of judges. Compassion reaches to the heart of life, to
the secret of our being. The compassion of Jesus was the Divine secret that made Him
lovable. Religious people are exacting; good people are exacting; but good folks have
to learn to exercise compassion just like others do.

We remember the incident with the disciples and the Samaritans. The Samaritans did
not want Jesus and His disciples to come. They said, “We have heard strange stories:
how this thing happened, and how that thing happened. How a great amount of swine
were drowned,” and so on. They had heard about the pigs, but they probably had
never heard how the widow’s son was raised from the dead, how the water had been
turned into wine. The disciples loved their Lord; they were exercising His power, they
were ministering to the sick, they were endeavouring to alleviate the sufferings of the
world; but still that sense of insult was so overpowering, that they said, “Master, shall
we call down fire from heaven, to consume them?” My, how the big thing in your
soul gets hurt; and how easy it is for us to feel the righteousness of the issue, rather
than the compassion of the Son of God. There is no limit to the compassion of Jesus.

Two blind men were crying by the wayside, calling on the Lord to have mercy on
them. And He stopped, and asked what they wanted. They answered, “Lord, that we
may receive our sight.” And He healed them. And if you want the real explanation for
His saving men out of their sins and sicknesses, it is in the love of His soul; that
Divine compassion of God, and His desire to help men out of their sorrows and
difficulties, and back to God.

Jesus’ example on the Cross, is set forever and ever as the very peak, and the very
soul of the compassion of God, through Christ. After they had pierced His hands, and
pierced His feet, when with His last breath He prayed to God, “Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do.” When a man is able to look upon his own
murderers, and speak such words as these, surely it shows, that he speaks beyond that
which the human heart is capable of giving, and is speaking only that which the soul
of God can give.

How long should we endure? How long should we endure the misunderstandings of
friends without rebuff? If we consider these things, surely we see the secret of the life
that He endured all the way. And unto the very end, and also in the very end, He was
blessed by God. His triumph was there. The ignorant crucify you, and trample over
the loveliest things of your soul, like they bruised the soul of Jesus. The triumph is
there.

In the Divine fullness of the heart of God in Christ, is the revelation of a Divine
conception, that alone endures, even unto death, and through which the nature and
love of God is revealed to a dying world. When Jesus was trying to give us balance in
the life of God, He gave us, once more, a beautiful parable; the parable of the Good
Samaritan. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among
thieves which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving
him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way.” And one
should have expected compassion of a priest; but when he saw him, he passed by on

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the other side. And the Levite, the holy man of the people came down, and he looked
upon him, and passed by on the other side. But the poor Samaritan, the dog in the
mind of the Jew, “When he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and
bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and
brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he
took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, ‘Take care of him;
and what-so-ever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.’” He did
not do the best thing, but he did the best thing he knew, and Christ commended it.
How often you have had the loveliest things of your soul trampled upon? Not by some
drunken person, but probably by the one nearest to your heart; probably by the one
who ought to have understood more than any other.

And do you not see the manner in which we wound the soul of Jesus continuously,
through our lack of holy compassion? There is a something a man has never divined,
and probably that a man never will be able to divine; that subtle something in the
nature that can be touched and moved by Divine compassion. It takes down the bars
of our life, and lets the Divine love of God flow through our soul.

How often you and I have stood or knelt by the side of the dying and disease smitten,
and have waited and prayed, ineffectively, until, within our own heart, something
melted, something dissolved, and something richer than tears came from our souls,
and by the grace of God, we saw the answer to our prayers before our eyes.

There is such a thing in the world as stigmata, that is, contemplating something so
much that it actually becomes a fact in your own being. It is well explained by telling
an incident from the life of St Francis, who had contemplated the Cross of Christ with
such intensity, and it so moved him, that he said to his follower, “When I am dead,
open my body, and you will find the impress of the Cross of Christ on my heart.” And
sure enough, after his death, when they opened his body, there was the impress of the
Cross of Christ on his heart. There is an inner life, an. inworking of God.

The compassion of Jesus was illustrated when He broke up a funeral procession, one
day, as He passed along in that little city of Nain. He was named by these tender
terms; the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. When Jesus looked on that
procession, something broke loose in His soul. He stepped up to the bier, being
moved with compassion, and said, “Young man, I say unto thee arise.” The sorrows
of others moved the soul of Jesus, and touched His heart. Lazarus, His friend, died,
and four days later the Lord went there, and hearing that He was approaching the
village, one sister came to meet Him; and she said to Him, “Lord, if Thou hadst been
here, my brother would not have died.” The other sister poured out her heart to Him
in a similar manner. Eventually, He stood by the grave of His friend. And Jesus wept.
Something. terrific was moving, in His soul He said, “God, I thank Thee that Thou
hearest me always.” Then He cried. with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.” And he
that was dead came forth.

Once in South Africa, we were praying for a sick lady, for a time without result. Then
I said, “I will take my sister and go and pray for her” We prayed. again, and there was
no victory. A day or two afterwards, we were down in the city, in one of the large
department stores. As we stood there, the Spirit of the Lord said to me, “Go to her

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now.” I said to my sister, “As soon as you are through, we will go over and pray for
that sick lady.” We went and I watched her writhe in pain and agony, until I put my
arms about her, and cuddled her head close to my heart. And then, presently,
something broke loose in my soul; and then in one moment, (I hadn’t even started to
pray) she was lifted out of her agony and suffering. A Divine flood moved her, and I
knew she was healed. Then I laid her down on the bed, and took my sister’s arm and
we went away, Praising God.

And yet one more incident; and I want to give you this for your own help and
blessing. I knew a man in South Africa, who was an ardent Methodist. He had ten
sons, all Methodist (local) preachers; and three daughters; three beautiful daughters;
holy women; a wonderful family; one of the most wonderful families I have ever
known. The old gentleman had been stricken with disease, and the agony of his
suffering was so great that there seemed to be only one way, and that was to drug him
into insensibility. As the years passed, he became a morphine fiend. He told me that
he smoked 24 cigars, drank two quarts of whisky, and used a tremendous quantity of
morphine every day. Think of it. So the old man, until he was 73 years old, was
drugged into senselessness most of the time. I prayed for him unceasingly for 16
hours without result. William Duggin, one of my ministers, hearing of the situation,
came to my assistance; and I remember how he stood over him and prayed for him in
the power of God. Somehow there was no answer. I watched that man in convulsions
until his daughters begged me just to let them give him morphine, and let him die
senseless, rather than to see him suffer longer. And I said, “No. I have had your
pledge and his too, that life or death, we were going to fight this battle through.”
Presently, as I stood there, and was watching the awful convulsions, particularly in his
old bare feet that were sticking out at the bottom of the bed, this came to my mind,
“Himself took our infirmities.” And I reached out and got hold of them, and held them
as in a grip of iron; and that thing, that is too deep for any form of expression that we
know, broke forth in my soul: and in a single moment I saw him lie still, healed of
God. Many a day after that I have walked with him over his three vast estates, on
which there were 50,000 orange trees and 50,000 lemon trees, and the old man told
me of his love for God, and of the richness of His presence, and I had my reward,
Blessed be God.

If this Church ever succeeds in doing that big thing, that great thing, that unspeakable
thing that God purposes that we should do, it can only be when we enter into that
Divine compassion of the Son of God.

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 17. GUIDANCE

Oh, Soul, on the highway, from earth unto glory

Surrounded by mysteries, trials and fears;
Let the life of thy God, in thy life be resplendent;
For Jesus will guide thee; thou need’st never fear.

For if thou wilt trust me, I’ll lead thee and guide thee
Through the quicksands and deserts of life, all the way.
No harm shall befall thee; I only will teach thee
To walk in surrender with Me day by day.

For earth is a school to prepare thee for Glory;

The lessons here learned, you will always obey.
When eternity dawns, ‘twill be only the morning
Of life with Me always, as life is today.

Therefore, be not impatient, as lessons thou’rt learning;

Each day will bring gladness and joy to thee here;
But heaven will reveal to thy soul, of the treasure
Which infinitude offers, through ages and years.

For thy God is the God of the earth and the heavens;
And thy soul is the soul that He died for to save;
And His blood is sufficient, His power is eternal;
Therefore rest in thy God, both today and alway.

Given in the Spirit in tongues with interpretation

to John G. Lake at Johannesburg,

South Africa, 1908.

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 18. THE PLATFORM OF JESUS

There has always been a passage in the Declaration of Independence that has rung
very deeply in my spirit. It was the thought of the Revolutionary Fathers in diving an
explanation and reason to the world for undertaking to set up a new government
among the families of nations. They said something like this: out of due respect for
mankind they felt it necessary to give a reason for such an act.

As we invite this company of people together in this section of the country, I feel that
a due word of loving explanation may be helpful.

I have been in this particular manner of ministry for many years. I believe Brother
Fogwill and I began in this ministry some 16 or 17 years ago, or there about. Of
course, we had been Christian ministers before that, but at that period God enlarged
our vision of Himself and His purposes.

Personally, I received my ministry in the gospel of healing through John Alexander

Dowie, a man whom I have loved with all my soul. And though in his later life he
became broken in mind and committed many foolish things, so that discredit for a
time was brought upon his work, I knew him from the beginning until the day of his
death. I have gone to his grave since I have returned to this land, and as I have
thought over that wonderful life, I have prayed in the silence of the night time, “Lord
God endue me with the Spirit of God in the measure that you did that life.”

I have always regarded it as a privilege in my life and as a unique thing, that after his
death I was invited to preach in his pulpit, and I preached there for several months. I
remember as I stood on the platform, above my head was a great crown possibly eight
feet in diameter. It was made from boots with iron stirrups on them, thick soles, and
all that character of thing that had come from people who had been healed of short
limbs. Can you wonder, as I stood in that place, and looked around those walls, and
saw plaster of Paris casts fastened on the walls, some of which had come off of my
own friends who had been healed, iron braces that cripples had worn, cots on which
the dying had been brought, one of them Anna Hicks. That cot was fastened to one of
the walls above the gallery. And as I thought of the day when she was carried in
practically dead, and that old man prayed for her and she was healed. And the
company of her students who had lovingly escorted her to the station at Beren,
Kentucky said to me, “We carried her as if we would if she had been dead, as pall
bearers, and we received her back as from the dead.”

Her friends cabled her and telegraphed her from all over the earth, and she gladly told
the story, the wonderful story, almost the same character of story that our Brother
Zienke told you this morning, of the love of God, of the tenderness of the Christ that
mankind has not known, of Jesus the Healer still.

Beloved, there is a deep passionate yearning in my soul, that above all else, this
congregation may set forth to the praise of God such a character of righteousness in
God, such a purity of holiness from God, that this people may not only be recognized
in this city, but throughout the world, as a people among whom God dwells.

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Beginning this work, as I do at this time, I want to say that I do not come as a novice
to this time of my life. God has permitted me in the years that are past to assist in the
establishment of two great works of God, each of them on a new plane in God. I trust,
blessed be His Name, that in calling together once again the people of God, that it
shall be to establish a work on a new plane. Indeed, a higher one that our souls have
ever known, where the radiant purity of the holiness of God shall be shed forth into
the whole world. And I believe that is God’s purpose.

Jesus, Himself, stood at Nazareth on an almost similar occasion. He had been raised
in one of the country towns. He had disappeared from His community, gone down to
the Jordan, and had been baptised of John. The Holy Ghost had come upon Him, and
He had returned to his own home town, to the synagogue where He had worshipped
as a boy.

One thing I have always praised God for is that when God put me into public
ministry, He made me start in the very town, the very community, next door to the
very home where I had been raised. When a man fights out the battles of life in his
own community, in his own home town, among his friends and neighbours, and
receives love and confidence from them, I always feel he has received a good
preparation for the next step in life. Jesus knew the place for a man to begin to serve
God when He had said to the demoniac of Gadara who was delivered, “Go home to
thy friends, and show them how great things the Lord hath done for thee” (Mark
5:19).

If your wife does not know you are a Christian nobody else will be likely to. If your
husband does not know you are a Christian, it is a poor testimony, It is the woman
that is with you, who eats with you, and sleeps with you, that will know whether you
are a child of God or not. It is the man who lives in the same house with you, and the
people in your community, who will know best how much of the life of God radiates
from your own soul.

So Jesus stood in His own home town of Nazareth and read this wonderful text that I
am going to read this morning. It is known, or ought to be, as the platform of Jesus
Christ.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath

anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.”

THE POOR. (Jesus Christ has an anti-poverty program) That is the first duty of every
child of God and every Church of God that ever came into existence. And the Church
that fails in that duty to mankind has failed in the first principle, and has denied the
first principle of the platform of the Son of God.

My heart has never gone out in sympathy to a body of Christian people who became a
little clique and represent a certain select number of society. My conception of the
real Church of God is one where rich and poor alike, bless God, feel at home, where
there are no barriers and no boundaries but where soul flows out to soul, and in the
larger life man knows only man and God. Blessed be His precious Name.

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 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath
anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.”

The ministry of the things of God must ever be without money and without price. My
soul could never descend to the place where charges are made for the services of the
minister of the gospel of Christ. Never, Bless God!

It is our privilege to make possible a ministry to the people without money and
without price, bless God. The magnanimity of the Lord Jesus Christ has stood out as
blessed and wonderful feature in all His ministry. I have sometimes wondered how
many people really knew how the Lord existed during His own earth life. The Word
of God gives us one little hint in these words: “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s
steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their
substance.” That was how the Son of God was able to minister without money and
without price to mankind. We today have that privilege too. It is ours. I have faith in
God that this Church will demonstrate Christ’s ministry to the poor.

For ten years God has privileged me to preach the gospel without salary, without
collections. I never asked a man for a cent in my life, and I have lived, Bless God, and
been able to minister every day. God has met me every time, and I believe He will
meet every other man and woman who will likewise put their trust in God and go
forward.

The second plank in the platform of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is this:

“To heal the broken hearted.”

There are lots of them. I tell you since I have been in Spokane the Lord has let me
into the homes of the rich and poor, and it is not in the poor districts that you find all
the broken hearted by any means. “He hath sent Me to heal the broken hearted,” that
is the ministry of this body. If there is a broken hearted soul in your locality, you are
the one, who in the Name of Jesus Christ, has the privilege of ministering in the
things of God to that soul - broken hearted because of sin, broken hearted, sometimes
by sickness, broken hearted because of the conditions around them that they seem
unable to control.

When I see the living God in His tender mercy touch one and another and make them
whole, whether in spirit, in soul, or in body, I rejoice equally in either case, for what
God does is always good, and worthy of praise. I regard the healing of a man’s body
to be just as sacred as the healing of his soul. There is no distinction, Jesus made
none. He provided a perfect salvation for mankind - all that man needed for spirit,
soul or body.

So this ministry, bless God, will be a healing ministry. This Church will be a healing
Church. This will be a Church to which you can invite your friends who are ill, and
bring them here, and help them. I trust after a time we will be able to bring the people
in great numbers, the sick who are on cots and stretchers and crutches, that the Lord
Jesus through this Church and its ministry may make them well.

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It is my purpose that a number of brethren, who have had this same burden on their
hearts for many years as I have had it, may come together in this city as a
Headquarters, and that from this city we may extend this ministry throughout the land.
I have particularly invited my old preaching partner, Brother Cyrus B. Fockler, of
Milwaukee, my dear, precious brother, Archibald Fairley, of Zion City, a prophet of
God and one of the anointed of the Lord, Brother (Rev.) Bert Rice of Chicago, my
dear Brother (Rev.) Charles W. Westwood, of Portland, Oregon, and Reverend
Fogwell to assist me in this ministry. Brother Westwood visited with me a few days,
and is now going on to Chicago to make the necessary arrangements.

This is the outline so far as God has made it clear. This is to be a healing Church.
Everyone who has been called to this ministry and those who will be called in the
future will minister to body and soul and spirit through the Lord Jesus Christ.

The third plank in the platform of Jesus Christ is this:

“To preach deliverance to the captives.”

How many there are! One day, not long ago, I received a telephone call from a lady in
one of the Missions saying that she had a man there who was a terrible drunkard.
Every once in a while he would get delirium tremens. He saw devils: he was haunted
by them. The lady said, “We can not do anything for him. We thought perhaps you
could help him.” He came up to see me. He sat down to tell me about himself. Right
away I could discern that he was a soul who from his very birth had been gifted with
spiritual sight. But instead of associating in the spirit with angels, with God, with
Christ, all his spiritual association was with devils, demons, horrors, until that to
escape from that condition he had become a drunk in his youth. In order to have
relaxation for a time, he had paralysed himself with drink, and that was his difficulty.

I said to him, “my son, kneel down. We are going to pray to God.” And I prayed that
God would bind every last demon and lift his soul into union with God, and fill him
with the Holy Ghost, so he might associate with the angels of God and become a new
man in Christ, and have fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

In a few days he returned and said, “Oh, brother, it is all so new, so different. As I
walk along the street there are no more demons, no more devils; but as I came up to
the Church today an angel, so beautiful, so sweet, so pure, walked by my side. And,
Brother, there he is now, and He has wounds on His hands and on His feet.” But my
eyes were dim; I could not see Him. I presume they were like the eyes of the servant
of Elisha. “To preach deliverance to the captives” from all kinds of powers, earthly
and sensual. It is the privilege of the real Church to bring deliverance to the captives
of sin, of disease, of death and hell, not only proclaim the message of deliverance but
exercise the power of God to set them free.

The fourth plank:

“Recovering of sight to the blind.”

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Among the blessed healings of the past few weeks is one dear soul who is not yet
completely healed, a blind woman whose eyes have gradually opened day by day
from the first morning of prayer, and who will be present with us in the near future, as
Brother Zeinke was this morning, to praise God for her deliverance.

“Recovering of sight to the blind.” But there are many blind hearts, blind minds, blind
souls, just as well as blind eyes, who do not see the beauty and power of the things of
Christ. And to them we bring today the message of our Christ, “recovering of sight to
the blind.”

I pray above every other thing this Church will be a Church that will know God so
intimately that when men come in contact with any one of us they will feel that they
have met one who is able to reveal the Lord Jesus Christ to them. I believe it will be
so.

The fifth plank:

“To set at liberty them that are bruised.”

There are the bleeding ones, the bruised ones, those who have been hid away, and
those whose life has been made a burden. May I tell you this incident.

The last night I preached in my tabernacle in Johannesburg, they brought a young

man with whom life had gone so very hard. He had lost hope and had gone into
despair so that he tried to blot himself out by committing suicide. He shot himself in
the mouth, and the bullet came out the back of the head, strangely without killing him.
This left him with a violent pain in the base of the brain that caused him to suffer
untold agony, and his neck was rigid.

This night the greatest part of the congregation was composed of Cornish miners,
whom I have regarded as the hardest men I have ever met in South Africa. They live a
very hard, terrible life. They dissipate terribly.

This man came up on the platform to be prayed for, and I wanted the sympathy of the
people. So I made a plea in some such words as these: “Here is a poor fellow with
whom life has gone so hard that he tried to blot himself out, and in his endeavour to
do so, he shot himself, with the result that he is in the condition you see him in now.”
Presently I began to observe that up from the audience there came a wave of loving
sympathy. I said, “If you never prayed in your life, if you never prayed for yourself,
bow your head and pray tonight and ask God to deliver your fellow man.”

I put my hands on him and prayed, and the power of God came down upon him and
instantly the joints became loose, the neck pliable, the pain gone. Looking up into my
face, he said, “Who did that?” I said, “That was the Lord Jesus Christ.” And dropping
on his knees before me he said, “Brother, show me how to find that Christ; I want to
know Him.”

Down in the audience that night was one of the most cultured gentlemen it has ever
been my privilege to know. He raised in his seat and reverently raising his hands, he

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said, “My Lord and my God.” He had not been a Christian, but he saw a new vision of
the love of God for man that night.

Away back in the audience another soul was touched. He was a different type of man.
He came from a different environment. He raised up and slapped himself on the hip,
and shouted, “Bully for Jesus!” It came out of the depth of his soul.

Beloved, it is my conviction that the purity of Jesus Christ and the radiant holiness
and the power of God will manifest Christ alike to the cultured and the uncultured, for
both hearts are hungry when they see the living Christ.

The sixth plank of the platform:

“To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Not next year, not in five years, not when you die, but a present salvation, a present
healing for spirit, soul and body. Blessed be His Name. All you need, bless God, is to
bring your whole being into perfect harmony with the living God so that the Spirit of
God radiates through your spirit, radiates through your mind, and radiates likewise
through your body. Blessed be His Name.

Among the most precious privileges that is given to the real Church is to be in fact,
not in word alone, the Body of Christ. The Word of God speaks of “The Church,”
which is His body. And as God, the Father, manifested Himself through that one
beautiful, holy, purified body of Jesus Christ in such a perfect manner, when men
looked upon Him they did not see the man Jesus, but they saw God. Then He
ascended and sent the Holy Spirit to the Church, to you and to me. What for? That the
new Body should come forth, and the Church, the real Church, united to God and
filled with the Holy Ghost, should manifest God again to mankind through this Body.
That Church is made up of all that are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

When God wants to heal a man, the healing does not fall down from heaven, but it
does come through the medium of the child of God. Therefore, God has given us the
exalted privilege of being co-labourers together with God. And among our high
privileges is to radiate, to give forth from the love passion of our souls the courage
and strength to help other souls to come to God. And the business of the Church is to
be a saviour, or saviours, for the Word of God says, “And saviours shall come up on
Mount Zion.” These are those in such union with God that they are able to lift
mankind up to the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.”

WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?

Probably the most simple way is to pray, “Father, forgive all my sins. I take Thy Son,
Jesus Christ, to be my personal Saviour. I invite You to come and live in my heart.”

“Will God hear me?” you may ask. God has commanded all men everywhere to
repent (Acts 17:30). Certainly He will hear and accept you, for you are obeying His

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own command. Jesus said in John 6:37 that he that comes to Him he will in no wise
cast out. It is God’s will that all come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). He is able to save to
the uttermost all that come unto God by Him, that is by Jesus Christ (Hebrews 7:25).
What happens to your sins and iniquities? “And their sins and iniquities will I
remember no more,” (Hebrews 10:17). What love God is willing to bestow on us! For
God so loved the world (you) that He gave His only begotten Son for you and for me
(John 3:16). Why not bow and repent from your heart that simple prayer this very
moment. It will revolutionise your life and give you that more abundant life and the
peace of God that passes understanding. God bless you..

If I were to come as an accredited agent to you from the upper sanctuary, with a letter
in invitation to you, with your name and address on it, you would not doubt your
warrant to accept it. Well, here is the Bible, your invitation to come to Christ. It does
not bear your name and address; but it says, “Whosoever:” that takes you in. It says,
“All” that takes you in. It says, “If any:” that takes you in. What can be surer and freer
than that.

The depths of our misery can never fall below the depths of mercy.

Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. (1 Corinthians 16:13)
Be strong in the Lord. (Ephesians 6:10)
Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. (2 Timothy 2:1)

True love never grows heavy. Who would be loved must love. Love warms more than
a thousand fires. Love rules without law. Love is master of all arts.

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 19. REALITY

PRELIMINARY

Hebrews 2.

When I read this chapter there is a thrill that goes down through my soul, and I would
to God that the real spiritual truths of it could forever be established in the minds of
men.

I once listened to an eminent divine preaching from the text, “What is man?” When
he got through I had a feeling that man was a kind of whipped cur with his tail
between his legs, sneaking out to throw himself into the lake, and saying, “Here goes
nothing.” I said, “He has never caught the fire of the thing Jesus is endeavouring to
teach through the apostle; that man was the crowning creation of God - that God
endowed him with a nature and qualities that by the grace of God can express more of
God than any other of God’s creations - that God purposed by the Holy Spirit to make
the salvation of Jesus Christ so real in the nature of man that “He that sanctifieth”
(Jesus Christ) “and they that are sanctified” through His grace are both of one nature,
of one substance, of one character, one in life, one in the righteousness of His death
and one in the consequent dominion that came because of His resurrection and glory.

“For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified

are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call
them brethren.” (Hebrews 2:11)

Brethren of the Lord Jesus Christ! He, the elder brother, we the younger members of
the family of the same Father, begotten by the same Spirit, energised by the same
divine life of God, qualified through the Holy Ghost to perform the same blessed
ministry.

“He took not on Him the nature of angels;

But He took on Him the seed of Abraham.”

I wish I could write these things in your soul and brand them in your conscience.

SERMON

When the purpose of God in the salvation of man first dawned upon my soul, that is
when the greatness of it dawned upon my soul. Experimentally I knew God as
Saviour from sin; I knew the power of the Christ within my own heart to keep me
above the power of temptation and to help me live a Godly life; but I say to you that
when I knew the purpose of God and the greatness of His salvation, life became for
me a grand new thing.

When, by the study of His Word and the revelation of His Spirit, it became a fact in
my soul that God’s purpose was no less in me than it was in the Lord Jesus, and is no
less in you and me as younger brethren than it was in Jesus Christ, our elder brother,
then, bless God, I saw the purpose that God had in mind for the human race. I saw the

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greatness of Jesus’ desire. That desire that was so intense that it caused Him as King
of Glory to lay down all that glory possessed for Him, and come to earth to be born as
a man, to join hands with our humanity, and by His grace lift us in consciousness and
life to the same level that He Himself enjoyed. Christ became a new factor in my soul.
Such a vision of His purpose thrilled my being so that I could understand then how it
was that Jesus, as He approached man and His needs, began at the very bottom, called
mankind to Him, and by His loving touch and the power of the Spirit through His
word, destroyed the sickness and sin that bound them and set them free in both body
and soul, lifted them into union and communion with Himself and God the Father.
Yea, bless God, by the Holy Spirit indwelling the souls of men, Christ purposed to
bestow on mankind the very conditions of His own life and being, and to give to man
through the gifts of the Spirit and the Gift of the Spirit, the same blessed ministry to
the world that He Himself had enjoyed and exercised.

The old song that we used to sing became new to my heart. Its melody runs through
my soul:

“Salvation, O the joyful sound,

In a believer’s ear
It soothes our worries, heals our wounds
And drives away our fears.” And lots more, bless God.

I could then understand what was in Charles Wesley’s heart when he wrote his
famous hymn, “Jesus Lover of My Soul,” and penned its climax that marvellous
verse:

“Thou, O Christ, art all I want,

More than all in Thee I find;
Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
Heal the sick and lead the blind.
Just and holy is Thy name;
I am all unrighteousness,
Vile and full of sin I am,
Thou art full of truth and grace.”

(This was not the last verse, but the third.)

The same thing was in the spirit of Isaiah when in the beautiful thirty-fifth of Isaiah
his exultant soul broke forth in the shout of praise, “He will come and save you. Then
the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.
Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.”

I could understand then the thrill that must have moved David, when he sang the
103rd Psalm.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His

benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth
all they diseases.”

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The vision that has called forth the shouts of praise from the souls of men in all ages
is the same vision that stirs your heart and mine today. The vision of the divine reality
of the salvation of Jesus Christ by which the greatness of God’s purpose in Him is
revealed to mankind by the Spirit of the Living One, transformed and lifted and
unified with the living Christ through the Holy Ghost, so that all the parts and
energies and functions of the nature of Jesus Christ are revealed through man, unto
the salvation of the world. Bless God.

The vision of God’s relation to man and man’s relation to God is changing the
character of Christianity, from a grovelling something, weeping and wailing its way
in tears, to the kingly recognition of union and communion with the living Son of
God. Yea, bless God, to the recognition of the real fact that the Word of God so
vividly portrayed in the lesson I read. That “in the bringing of many sons into the
world” not one son in the world, but in the bringing of many sons into the world, “it
became him to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering.” Blessed
be God.

I am glad, bless God, that the Scriptures have dignified us with that marvellous title of
“sons of God.” I am glad there is such a relation as a “Son of God” and that by His
grace the cleansed soul, cleansed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, filled and
energised by His own Kingly Spirit, that he too by the grace of God has become
God’s king, God’s gentleman indeed and in truth.

The Spirit of the Lord says within my soul, that the kingly nature of the Son of God is
purposed to be revealed in the nature of every man, that Christ’s kingliness may be
prevalent in all the world and govern the heart of man, even as it governs the heart of
those who know Him and have entered into His glory.

( A young man called up from audience.)

I listened to this young man’s testimony on Friday night with a thrill in my soul. I
want him to tell you what God had done in him and for him.

TESTIMONY

“I do not know whether I can tell it all or not. I am sure there is a good deal I can not
tell. When I was a lad of about 14 years old I was forced into the mines to work, and I
worked a great deal in the water, which brought on rheumatism. I was crippled up for
years in my younger days, and gradually grew worse. I could walk around, but you
could hardly notice where I was afflicted. It was in the hips and back.

A great many physicians said there was no relief for me. When I came down here
to Spokane and was labouring on anything I could not stoop down. When I would
drop my pick or shovel I would have to pick it up with my feet and reach for it with
my hands.

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I came to this meeting last fall, and with one prayer by Brother Lake I was healed in
thirty minutes of rheumatism, which had been a constant torture to me for years. Later
on I contracted tuberculosis, and was examined by the county physician, Stutz, who
advised me that the best thing to do was to go to Edgecliff. Also other physicians said
I was very bad, and they did not think I could live more that six or eight months,
unless I went out there right away.

I took the same thing for it. I went to the healing rooms for prayer, also Brother
Peterson prayed for me, and in three weeks I went to Dr Stutz and he could not find a
trace of it. I have gained eleven pounds, and I never felt better in my life.”

That is a simple story isn’t it, but that story is a revealer of the question that has
probably caused more debate in Christian life than almost any other, and of which the
world has little understanding. That is that the Spirit of God is a living force that takes
possession of the nature of man and works in man the will of God, and the will of
God is ever to make man like Himself. Blessed be His precious Name.

It would be a strange Word indeed, and a strange salvation if Jesus was not able to
produce from the whole race one man in His own image, in His own likeness and of
His own character. We would think that salvation was weak, would we not?

If the world were nothing but cripples, as it largely is, soul cripples, physical cripples,
mental cripples everywhere, then I want to know what kind of a conception the world
has received of the divinity of Jesus Christ, of the Power of His salvation? Is there no
hope, is there no way out of the difficulty, is there no force that can lift the soul of
man into union with God, so that once again the life of God thrills in his members?

Our purpose, by the grace of God, is to reveal to the world that that is the real truth
and purpose and power of the salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ. My soul rejoices
every time I see a man set free, for I say within my heart, “There is one more witness
to the divine fact that the Christ of God is a living power, taking possession of the
nature of man and transforming man’s being into His own image.”

The mere fact of our brother’s deliverance from suffering and inability to help
himself, and a possible premature death, is a very small matter in itself, in comparison
with the wonder it reveals to us. The revelation of the power of God at the command
of man, to be applied to the destruction of evil, whether spiritual or physical, mental
or psychological, shows us Christ’s purpose and desire to bring man by the grace of
God once more into his heavenly estate, where he recognises himself a son of God.
Blessed be His Name.

Years ago I found myself like my brother, but worse crippled than he when my legs
drew out of shape and my body became distorted by the common curse of
rheumatism. My pastor said, “Brother you are glorifying God,” and my Church said,
“Brother , be patient and endure it. Let the sweetness of the Lord possess your soul.”
And I was good enough to believe it for a long time, until one day I discovered that it
was not the will of God at all, but the will of the dirty crooked-legged devil that
wanted to make me like himself. And then, bless God, everything was changed and I

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laid down everything and went to Chicago to the only place where I knew then that a
man could get healed. I went to John Alexander Dowie’s Divine Healing Home at
12th and Michigan Streets, and an old grey haired man came and laid his hands on me
and the power of God went through my being and made my leg straight, and I went
out and walked on the street like a Christian.

Do you know when my legs straightened out it taught me the beginning of one of the
deepest lessons that ever came to my life. It taught me that God did not appreciate a
man with crooked legs any more than He does with a crooked soul. I saw the
abundant power of the gospel of salvation, and that it was placed at the disposal of
man to remove the unchristlikeness of his life, and if there was unchristlikeness in the
body, we could get rid of the curse by coming to God and being made whole. For
there is just as much unchristlikeness in men’s bodies as in men’s souls. That which is
in the inner life will also be revealed in the outer life. That which is a fact in the
mental and psychological will become a fact in the physical also. And, Bless God,
that which is the divine fact of all facts, that the spirit of man and the Spirit of God are
of one substance and one nature, and his mind and body take on of the spiritual power
imparted, until it too becomes Christlike. Blessed be His holy Name.

The Spirit of the Lord speaks within my soul and says:

“Within the breast of every man is the divine image of God (living God), in whose
image and likeness he was made. That sin is a perversion, and sickness an imposter,
and the grace and power of God through the Holy Ghost delivers man from all
bondage of darkness, and man in all his nature rises into union and communion with
God and becomes one with Him the truest sense. One in the thoughts of God, one in
the aspirations of God, one in the Spirit of Jesus Christ as the Saviour of man and man
then gives himself a Saviour also lifting man by the grace of God to the Lamb of God
that taketh away the sin of the world.” Blessed be His holy Name.

“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,

Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His Justice,
Which is more than liberty.

But we make His love too narrow

By false limits of our own,
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.

There is welcome for the sinner,

And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Saviour;
There is healing in His blood.

For the love of God is broader

Than the measure of Man’s mind;

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 And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

If our lives were but more simple,

We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.”

So the divine realities remain. The reality of God a living power. The divine
assistance, the heavenly nature known to every man who enters by the Spirit through
the door, Christ Jesus, into a living experience. The man who doubts is the man on the
outside. The man on the inside has not questions to settle that do not comprehend
God, as that soul that has never been in contact with His life and power. But Christ
invites mankind to enter with Him into the divine knowledge and heavenly union that
makes the spirit of man and the Spirit of God to be one indeed and in truth. Bless
God!

Man is the divinest reality that God has given in His great creation. Man in the image
of God, man renewed by the life of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, revealing and
giving forth by the living Spirit, transformed eyen as himself has been transformed.
Blessed be His name.

God has made us in the truest and highest sense co-partners and co-labourers with our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He has not withheld one possibility that was
manifested in Jesus from any man, but on the contrary invites mankind to come forth
in the dignity and power of sons of God, and to that Christ and in Christ join in the
mighty wonder of the salvation of the world over sin and sickness, and the power of
death and darkness and hell. Bless God.

Salvation to my heart is Christ’s glorious reality. Under a tree away back in Canada
one night I knelt and poured out my heart to God and asked Him, by His grace, to
take possession of my life and nature and make me a Christian man, and let me know
the power of His salvation. And Christ was born in my soul. Such a joy of God
possessed my heart that the leaves of the trees seemed to dance for months following,
and the birds sang a new song and the angels of God witnessed of the glory of heaven
in my own heart. Blessed be His Name.

Salvation is a progressive condition. The difficulty with Church has been that men
were enduced to confess their sins to Christ and acknowledge Him as a Saviour, and
there they stopped, there they petrified, there they withered, there they died, dry
rotted. I believe in these phrases I have expressed the real thing that has taken place in
85% of professing Christians in the world. Oh, Bless, God, we never saw Christ’s
intention. That day away back there, when the glory light of God first shone into my
soul, was a glorious day, the best I had ever known to that moment. But, beloved, it
would be a sorrowful thing in my life if I was compelled to look back to that day as
the best. No, bless God, there were better days than that. There were days when the
Lord God took me into His confidence and revealed His nature and revealed His
purpose, and revealed His love and revealed His nature and revealed His ministry.
Yea, Bless God, there came a day when God once more in His loving mercy endowed

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me with the Spirit of God, to be and perform the things that He had planted in my soul
and had revealed in His own blessed Word and life.

I invite you to this life of divine reality. I invite you to enter into the Lord Jesus. I
invite you to enter into His nature that you may know Him, for no man can say that
Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. It is through the revelation of the Spirit of
Christ in the soul of man that he is privileged to know Jesus as the Lord. Blessed be
God. We may know Him as an historic character, we may know Him as the ideal
man, we may know Him as the Christ and Saviour, but we do not know Him as the
living God who imparts His own nature and life and power to us, until we know Him
as the Scripture says in the Holy Ghost. Bless God!

He who has lived and felt that religious life was a dream or a myth or an abstract
something that was hard to lay your hands on, an intangible condition, has been
mistaken. I bless God. In the bosom of the Living One is the divine realities of God,
filling and thrilling the soul of Christ Himself, filling and thrilling the soul of every
recipient of the life of the Lord Jesus.

And the Spirit of the Lord once more speaks within my heart and says that, “the joys
of God and the glories of heaven and the understanding of angelic existence and being
are only known to him who is privileged in consciousness to enter that life and realm.
That God by His grace has purposed that man in his nature and consciousness shall
live in union and communion with our Father God, and with the Lord Jesus Christ,
His Son, the innumerable company of angels and the presence of just men made
perfect and we shall know the power and wonder of the blood of Jesus that speaketh
better things than that of Abel.”

And the Spirit of the Lord speaks yet again and says that as Jesus was the Prophet of
all prophets, because of the completeness of the union of His nature with God, that
man in turn becomes the prophet of prophets as his spirit assimilates with the Spirit of
Him, the divine One; that man becomes the lover of all lovers, even as Jesus Christ
was the lover of all men, thrilling men with the intensity of His affection in the union
of spirit with Himself, binding them by the love of His nature as the bond-salves of
Christ forever.

So the Christian draws to himself the love of men, not because he slavishly desires it,
but because of the fact that he obeys Christ’s divine law, “Give and it shall be given
unto you, full measure, pressed down and shaken together and running over, so shall
men give into your bosom.” Blessed be God.

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And I want to tell you that this little Church is one of the most loved of all Churches
in all the world. I want to tell you that more hungry hearts are turned in longing
toward this little company of people than to any other company of worshippers in the
land. Why? They have heard that God is here and the longing of the nature of man to
know God causes them to turn their hearts and their faces toward the source of
heavenly blessing. Shall we give it to them, or will we disappoint them? Shall they
receive the blessing of God through our heart, or will they turn away hungry and
dissatisfied? Yea, I know your answer, for I know the answer of the Spirit, “Give and
it shall be given unto you.” Blessed be God. The greatest giver is the greatest receiver.
He who gives most receives most.. God’s divine law. The reverse of God’s law is
always evidenced in the soul of man as selfishness. Always getting, always getting,
always getting, until the nature contracts and the face distorts and the brain diminishes
and the life that God gave to be abundant becomes an abomination, that men are
compelled to endure.

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 20. THE RECEPTION

List! ‘Tis the morning hours in Glory.

A shadow through the mists doth now appear.
A troop of angels sweeping down in greeting,
A welcome home rings out with joyous cheer.

A traveller from the earth is now arriving,

A mighty Welcome’s ringing in the skies,
The trumpets of a host are now resounding,
A welcome to the life that never dies.

Who is the victor whom the angels welcome?

What mighty deeds of valour have been done?
What is the meaning of these shouts of triumph?
Why welcome this soul as a mighty one?

She is but a woman. frail and slight and tender,

No special mark of dignity she bears.
Only the Christ light from her face doth glisten,
Only the white robe of a Saint she wears.

She is but a soul redeemed by the blood of Jesus,

Hers but a life of sacrifice and care.
Yet with her welcome all the heaven is ringing,
And on her brow a victor’s crown she bears.

How came she thus from sin’s benighting thralldom,

The grace and purity of heaven to obtain?
Only through Him who gave His life a ransom
Cleansing the soul from every spot and stain.

See! As you gaze upon her face so radiant,

‘Tis but the beauty of her Lord you see;
Only the image of His life resplendent,
Only the mirror of His life is she.

See with what signs of joy they bear her onward,

How that the heavens ring with glad acclaim!
What is the shout they raise while soaring upward?
Welcome! Thrice welcome thou in Jesus’ Name!

Rest in the mansion by thy Lord prepared thee

Out of loving deeds which thou hast done,
Furnished throughout by thoughts and acts which have portrayed Me
Unto a lost world as their Christ alone.

Hear how thy lovely harp is ringing;

Touched are its strings with hands by thee unseen.

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 Know that the music of thine own creating
Heaven’s melodies in hearts where sin has been.

See how the atmosphere with love is laden

And that with brightness all the landscape gleams.
Know ‘tis the gladness and the joy of heaven
Shed now by rescued souls in radiant beams.

Oh, that here on earth we may learn the lesson

That Christ enthroned in our hearts while here
Fits and prepares the soul for heaven
Making us like Him both there and here.

Doing the simple and homely duties

Just as our Christ on the earth has done,
Seeking alone that the Christ’s own beauty
In every heart should be caused to bloom.

Showing all men that the blood of Jesus

Cleanses all hearts from all sin below,
And that the life of Christ within us
Transforms the soul till as pure as snow.

When we thus come to the dark, cold river,

No sin, no darkness, no death is there,
Only great joy that at last the Giver
Grants us anew of His life to share.

Given to John G. Lake in tongues and interpretation while in Africa.

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