-
Weeping Between The Porch And The Altar...part 1... Series
Contributed by Hugh Laing on Nov 28, 2017 (message contributor)
Summary: Today, what I want to offer you is a launching pad...one that lights the FIRE of the HOLY GHOST in each of you with PRICKED HEARTS...the same PRICKED HEARTS they had at Pentecost.
Isn't it staggering when you think that one sermon on the day of Pentecost produced 3000 people for God?
And we had some cities last Sunday where 3000 sermons were preached and nobody was saved...and it doesn't even faze us...how many ministers do you think actually went home and cried?
THE CHURCH USED TO BE A LIGHTNING BOLT, NOW IT'S A CRUISE SHIP.
WE ARE NOT MARCHING TO ZION...WE ARE SAILING THERE WITH EASE.
MOST CHRISTIAN ARE JUST SITTING AND WAITING TO BE RAPTURED. SO WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?
In the APOSTOLIC CHURCH (the Pentecost Church) it says they were all amazed...and now in our churches everybody wants to be amused...every minister has got to have a catch in his sermon...a joke to get started.
Listen to me...the church began in the upper room with a bunch of men agonizing after being BREATHED UPON BY THE SPIRIT...and it's ending in the supper room with a bunch of people just organizing.
We mistake a little rattle for revival, and commotion for creation, and action for unction.
In the Pentecost Church...they never gave an invitation at the end of a sermon...NEVER...people were just CONVICTED...their hearts were just PRICKED...and they just came...AMEN!!!
SECOND...I THINK THIS IS A CRITICAL HOUR IN OUR HISTORY, THE MOST CRITICAL HOUR IN OUR HISTORY EVER!
The Middle East is ready to blow up...the prestige of this nation has gone down...and Islam is getting mightier!
“A pastor I know said he was old enough to remember the years prior to the Vietnam conflict. His cousin had been to their house about a month before he was to go, as straight as a ram-rod. He had joined up and proudly wore his marine uniform. This pastor said as a child he looked at him and thought... 'My, what a marvelous thing to be a soldier.' Then the cousin went to Vietnam and he came back a physical and emotional wreck.”
Why do I tell you that...Beloved...hear me...war is not only unchristian...it is uncivilized...yet because of the state of the world we feel it is necessary...and we've been involved in war after war since that war.
I want you right now to in your minds go back to prior to World War I...we called that the “War to end all wars”.
Before the war England had a group of intellectuals called “Fabian Socialists”.
These red bearded man...all great minds...gave us plays like Pygmalion and My fair lady … George Bernard Shaw was one of these super intellectuals but really, the leader was a self anointed and self-appointed prophet of a new world order and his name was H. G. Wells and he was a cocky little man.
These men did not talk about redemption or about sin ... they were just rationalists...just humanists.
Away back in 1912, two years before the 1914 war, H. G. Wells had said... "It is possible for us to have a new race of people by intellectual and biological processes. We don't need the Bible, we don't need the church, we can pull down the hills of wealth, we can fill up the valleys of poverty."
He didn't talk about sin and redemption and wickedness...he talked about the adequacy of materialism...he talked about the inevitability of progress...he talked about the self-sufficiency of man.