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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church, People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled "Pathway to Power." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message. This tape is

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copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourselves or others is heartily encouraged. And here for a personal word before the message is Dr.

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Thielman. It is good to have this opportunity for a personal word with you before the more formal presentation which constitutes most of this cassette. I have been in the ministry about 15 years now and one of the things which I have observed on countless occasions is that people who become Christian, that is

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who are born from above by the power of God and as a gift of His grace, usually from that point go in one of two directions. Either they take off so that their feet never touch the ground again, that is their lives are full of excitement and joy and power, or, and this is unfortunately more often the case,

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they begin to question whether they have had an authentic experience or not. They become dull and rather laggard in so far as their Christian faith is concerned. They get locked up into the life of the church and somehow or other things don't seem, for them at least, to be as exciting as they are for other Christians. They

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have what I call the spiritual blaws. Why does this happen and when it happens what is the answer to it? This is what we will be considering in the next few minutes. I hope the words will be helpful. [Pause]

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Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in two portions of the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Reading first from chapter 1. In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was

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taken up after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the Apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem but to

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wait for the promise of the Father which he said, "You heard from me, for John baptized with water but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit." So when they had come together they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know

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times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." And then reading from the 19th chapter of the book of the Acts. While Apollos

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was at Corinth, Paul passed through the upper country and came to Ephesus. There he found some disciples and he said to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" And they said, "No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." And he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They said, "Into John's

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baptism." And Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus." On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them. And may God bless to us and

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to our understanding these readings from his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. What I have to share with you this morning will not be appropriate for all of you, but will be of tremendous importance to others of you. Jesus said,

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"I am come that they may have life and have it abundantly." Is your life full of that kind of life? Is there an effervescence and enthusiasm, a dynamic about your life which makes it exciting? If there isn't, then what I have to say this morning is for you. Jesus said, "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy

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might be in you, and your joy may be full." Is joy one of the hallmarks of your life? Do you have down deep inside a kind of continuing thrill and excitement because of the Christian commitment which is yours? If you do not, then I think what I have to say this morning may change your life. Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you,

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my peace I give unto you." Do you have peace of soul? Are you, in spite of outward circumstances, calm at the core of yourself because of your relationship to God through Jesus Christ? If you are not, then this particular promise of Jesus has not yet come to pass in you, and it can come to pass this morning.

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Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." That is, he gives meaning and direction and point and purpose to life. Does your life have a goal? Do you know where you want to go and how you are going to get there? If there is a meaninglessness about you, a pointlessness, a purposelessness, then

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something said from this pulpit this morning is precisely what you need to hear. Jesus said, "He who believes in me will do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do." Well, what about your works? Are you known for the good things you do? Are you known by reputation as one who has

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given over to Christ so significantly that your works are as his works? When people see you, do they think of Jesus or of the things that Jesus did? If that is not so, then you need to be here today. Jesus said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive if you ask in faith." What

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about your prayer power? The prayers of a righteous man or woman avail much. What about your prayers? Is there a strength in them? Is there a dynamic about them which not only deals with outward circumstance but also deals with any tensions, with any anxieties, with any discouragements that you know within

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yourself? Do you have that kind of prayer strength, that kind of yieldedness? If you do not, then by the grace of God, I think I have a word for you today. The Bible says, "God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape." How goes the battle

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between good and evil in your life? In that battle, the Christian should always be on the winning side. Are you then knowing victory over the temptations which confront you in your daily walk? You ought to be. The Scriptures say that there are certain fruits which should be evident in the Christian life. They are

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love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Are these things growing in you? If they are not, then I submit that you need to play close attention to what I would share. You can be very honest this morning. No one will know what you are thinking except God, who knows your

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thoughts before you think them, and yourself. So let's let it all hang out, at least in the privacy of that communion. I read somewhere about a girl who was given a very snappy sports car by her father. She took it out on one of the freeways and was driving it at 75 miles an hour in a 65 mile area, and very soon

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she had heard the whine of the siren behind her, and when the police officer on his motorcycle got right up beside her at 75 miles an hour, she accelerated a little more and pushed the car up to a hundred, whereupon he accelerated a little more and pushed his motorcycle up to a hundred again side by side. So she

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pushed down a little harder and pushed it up to 125. He had to push his all the way to the floor and stand on it, but he managed to get his motorcycle up to 125. The thing was quivering beside her car there side by side. She looked over at him and smiled, and then pressed hers all the way to the floor and zoomed off in a

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cloud of dust at about a hundred forty-seven miles an hour. She went that way for a few miles and then slowed down, looked in the rearview mirror, didn't see him, stopped and waited, still didn't see him. Puzzled by what happened, she turned around and went back. The motorcycle was smashed to smithereens in a ditch by the

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side of the road. The poor officer was lying there, terribly injured, both legs broken, both arms broken, both ears on the same side of his head, terrible state. She goes over to him and she says, "What happened?" He said, "Well lady, the last time you pulled away from me I thought my motorcycle stopped, so I got off to

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see what was the matter." All right, on the highway of life, are you always getting off your spiritual motorcycle to find out what's the matter? Or do you have the kind of dynamic in your Christian experience which lets you accelerate when you need to? I'm not asking you this morning whether you are a Christian or

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not, I'm assuming that. I'm asking you whether you're a two-cylinder Christian or an eight-cylinder Christian. You see, there are two kinds of Christians. There are those who are born from above, come to an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ, and take off. They mount up with wings like eagles. Their life becomes one

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victory after another, one triumph after another, exciting and victorious from the moment of that beginning until the time when they go to be with him forever. If you want one word to describe that life, it's "zap." But that's not the way it is with most people. Most people who commit themselves to Jesus Christ have at least

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a momentary enthusiasm, but then it begins to wear away. It begins to dissipate. They begin to wonder about themselves. They begin to wonder about him. They begin to wonder about the church of which they are a part. Usually about this time someone puts them on a committee. You know what a committee is?

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That's a group of the unwilling appointed by the incompetent to do the unnecessary. And in that kind of an environment, the little bit of confidence which they have begins to dissipate even further until pretty soon their lives can be typified by this word, "blah." Paul talks about these two kinds of

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Christians. He says some are ready for red meat and others have to have only milk, spiritual pablum for all their days. The difference between the two is the matter of power. There are some Christians who have in them a tremendous power from God. There are others who do not, and that power is desperately

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necessary if you want a fabulous future. And that power comes from the Holy Spirit of God. Jesus said in the first passage read to you this morning, "And ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and ye shall be my witnesses." The answer to spiritual blaws is the power of the Holy Spirit. And

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regrettably, too many people are binatarians. Not Trinitarians, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but binatarians. They know the Father and they know the Son because of the Father, but they don't seem to have the power of the Holy Spirit. Now whenever you talk to somebody about the Holy Spirit, you immediately

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find yourself in difficulty because it's difficult to speak of him. It's difficult first of all because he is pure spirit, and we are made of both spirit and matter. Now because there is matter in us, because we are both physical and spiritual, we tend to think of things in terms of words and symbols which can be

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measured with the physical dimension of our being, with our five senses. But none of those words or symbols with which we think or speak can be applied to something which is totally spiritual, such as the Holy Spirit. That's the reason we have difficulty talking about him. And we also have difficulty focusing

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on him because the Holy Spirit's principal ministry is always to point people to Jesus Christ, so that every time we look at him, he points us away at the Son of God. It's very much like the sun. When you look at the sun, you can't see it. It blinds you. Yet it is by the light of the sun that you are able to

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see everything that you are able to see. Just so with the Holy Spirit. Look at him and he immediately diverts your attention to the Son of God, to the Only Begotten. That's another reason why it's hard for us to come to an understanding of the Spirit, and that's what leads me to say that really we must approach the

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Spirit not so much with our heads as with our hearts. Now I'm not suggesting to you any anti-intellectualism this morning. I'm simply pointing out that the Holy Spirit has not so much to be measured as he is to be moved in. The New Testament Church didn't spend any time trying to define the Holy Spirit. Instead,

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they devoted themselves to the Holy Spirit. They didn't worry about explaining him. They went on to enjoy him. And if the bells are going to ring and the lights are going to flash and the sirens are going to sing in your Christian experience, you're going to have to become a part of the power of that Holy

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Spirit to step into the pathway of power which is the Holy Spirit. Now because he's hard to understand, I want to speak of him this morning in terms of an analogy. And I would use the analogy of electricity. The word for power, which is used in this text, "and ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon

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you," that word is dunamis in the Greek. It's the word from which we get our word dynamo. So the analogy of electricity coming from a dynamo is appropriate. And just as we cannot define the Holy Spirit, so we cannot define electricity. No man or woman, living or dead, has ever been able to define electricity. We don't even

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know whether electricity goes through a wire or whether the wire goes through the electricity. It's not commonly understood that we don't understand electricity, but it still is so. Even as the Holy Spirit is indefinable, so electricity is indefinable. But even as we use electricity, so we can use and be

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used by the Holy Spirit. Another thing that parallels between the Holy Spirit and electricity is this, they're both invisible. A couple of weeks ago, I was ministering in Central Africa in a place called Munkamba, and I was staying in a house by the side of the lake. This house had only a thatch roof, and there were a

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lot of bats in the house. There were 12 bats in my room, and all night long when you were sleeping, you'd hear this flutter flutter flutter flutter flutter flutter over your head. Now, you know, bats carry rabies, and I had visions of being attacked by these monsters. They were about that big, you know. Being

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attacked by these monsters and bitten with all the difficulties that would go with that kind of situation, I was told I didn't have anything to worry about. For although a bat has no eyes and no ears, a bat does have a strange radar capacity so that he can send out a sound wave and it bounces back, and in some way he is

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sensitive to that so he knows where to fly, and he never runs into anything. And sure enough, there was a thing as big as I am in that room for a week, and none of them ever ran into me. Now, you couldn't see that capacity. It was invisible, but it was nonetheless real. And so with electricity, no one has ever seen

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electricity. Or you might see how electricity reacts on certain chemicals in a cloud with lightning. You might see what happens when electricity hits that nail that you stick into the wall plug. You might feel that too, but nonetheless you do not actually see electricity. No one has ever seen it, and yet it is a

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very important part of our lives. So the Holy Spirit and electricity are alike again. They are invisible, but even though they are invisible, they still may be experienced and enjoyed. And here's another similarity between the two. They both are inviolable. Electricity must be used on its own terms. It does not do

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what we want it to do. What we must do is to bring our concepts into line with the laws that are part of electricity. If we will do that, then we can put electricity to work, but we must yield to it. If we do not yield to it, and that which is basic to electricity, we'll either get no electricity or we'll be electrocuted. We

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must do what it does. It is inviolable. The Holy Spirit is exactly the same way. His principal mission is not to be used by us, but to use us. And until we bring ourselves into oneness with him, until we yield to the laws which are basic to him, until we adapt ourselves to what is inviolable in him, we cannot expect to

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know the power which comes from him. Now the first of those laws is this. He comes into us in the moment when we come into Jesus Christ. In the moment of our initial acceptance of faith, as we become one with God through Jesus Christ, we also become one with the Holy Spirit. When Jesus says to the disciples, "And ye

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shall receive power," he uses a verb which is a future. It is not a subjunctive. There's nothing conditional about it. He does not say, "You shall receive the Holy Spirit if you do this, if you do that, if you accept this, if you accept that, if you meet this responsibility, if you fulfill that requirement." There are no

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conditions about it. He says, "You are going to receive the Holy Spirit unconditionally." And he also says, "The Spirit will come upon you." The preposition is to come from above. In other words, the Spirit does not come from within a man. It doesn't come from anything a man does. It doesn't come from any

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experiences that a man has. It doesn't come from any commitments that a man makes. The Spirit comes from above. It is the gift of God, just as Jesus Christ is the gift of God to men. And the result of the coming of this Spirit from above is that we immediately become his witnesses to the uttermost parts of the earth. Now

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a witness is a disciple. So what Jesus is saying is this, that as you become my disciple, as you become part with me, as you go out filled with me to tell of me and all the world, in that time the Spirit and you and I are one. That is that in the moment we accept Christ, we have also accepted the Spirit. And as

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Jesus enters into us, so does the Spirit. Now I emphasize this because there are many people today who suggest that the Holy Spirit must be received by some special activity which comes somewhere along the road of the Christian life. They imply and in fact

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unconditionally state that unless certain requirements are met later in the Christian life, you only have Jesus and somehow or other, and I don't understand how their hearts can be at peace when they say this, somehow or other Jesus isn't enough. You have to go on to fulfill these other requirements

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to get the Holy Spirit. One of the passages in Scripture to which they refer is that 19th chapter of Acts, a portion of which I read to you a few minutes ago. You remember the incident. Paul encounters some people in Ephesus. He notices that their lives are without power. He says to them, "Have you received

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the Holy Spirit?" They say, "We've never even heard of a Holy Spirit." He says, "Into whom were you baptized?" They say, "We were baptized into John." Paul says, "John's baptism was unto repentance. It was of the law. You've not been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. You've not received the gospel as yet, therefore I will

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baptize you." He baptizes them and they receive the Holy Spirit. "Aha!" some of these individuals say. "Aha!" You see this story in Acts? This tells us, you see, that the one baptism isn't enough. You have to go on to receive this second baptism in order to know the power of the Holy Spirit in your life. To interpret that

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passage of Scripture in that way is to fly in the very face of it. Paul meets Christians in Ephesus who are without power. He knows the Holy Spirit is the source of power, so he says to them, "Have you received the Holy Spirit?" They reply, "We haven't even heard of the Holy Spirit." What then does Paul ask? Does he ask if

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they fulfilled other conditions? Does he ask if they fulfilled other requirements? Does he ask if they fulfilled other obligations? No. Paul knows that the Holy Spirit is received in initial Christian baptism, so as soon as they say to him, "We haven't even heard of the Spirit," Paul's immediate response is, "Into whom were you

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baptized?" They respond, "We were baptized into John." That is, they had the baptism under the law and not under the love of God made known in Jesus Christ. In other words, they had not received Christian baptism. They were unbaptized insofar as the gospel was concerned. And so Paul says, "Now I will baptize you into Jesus

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Christ." And he does. And the moment that he baptizes them into Jesus Christ, they receive the Holy Spirit. And it is always so. With entrance into Christ, the Holy Spirit enters into life. Everyone who is born again of God and is one with God through Jesus Christ has the Holy Spirit. But you say, "Pastor, there's a

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serious inconsistency here. You began these remarks by saying that most Christians are without power in their lives. Then you went on to say that power comes from the Spirit, and now you say every Christian has the Holy Spirit, so every Christian must have power. How can you say they are powerless

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when they have power?" Well, I return to this inviolable nature of the Holy Spirit. Another law of the Holy Spirit is this, that, to go back to our analogy of electricity, the electricity may be flowing into your life. The Spirit may have come into you in the moment of baptism. It has so come. But it is

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possible for you to block the channels of the Spirit with your sin. It is possible to plug the lines so that the power of the Spirit, which God has given to you, is in fact cut off. Every Christian, you see, has two relationships with God. The first we can describe as a relationship, as a son with a father. But

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beside this relationship, he also has fellowship. And fellowship is to be in oneness of mind and purpose and heart with the Father. Now, you know how it is with your earthly father. You have your relationship with him by birth. If you do something against his will, he is not, if there is any love or wisdom in him at

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all, going to throw you out of the family. You're still a part of the family. You do not lose your relationship. But you may very well be out of fellowship with your father. Now, it's precisely that that happens when we sin. We do not lose the relationship with God which has been bought for us with the blood of Christ.

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But we are out of fellowship with him to the degree that the power of the Holy Spirit which is given to us is not experienced by us, and that leads to real misery. The most miserable man in the world is not the non-Christian. He does not know what he's missing, so he can't be miserable about it. The most miserable

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man in the world is the Christian who has blocked the power of the Holy Spirit in his life, because having become a Christian, he knows what he ought to be, but he also knows he isn't that. On the one hand, he knows the power he ought to have, but on the other hand, he knows that power is not part of his experience. It

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becomes crucially important then that we get rid of the sin in ourselves. Now, how do you do that? Well, you can die. That's the only way you can stop sinning altogether, because sin is part of our imperfect natures. We will sin throughout all of our lives. As long as we are alive, we will sin. But there's another way. We

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can confess. Scripture says, "If we confess our sin, those we know of, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness, that is, even of the sins that we do not know of." About six years ago, I received a telephone call. It was two o'clock in the morning. It was a young college man from

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our church back east who had gone away from the church just about a year before to go off to this school, a fine, growing, maturing young Christian. But he went to one of those universities that spend their time not fanning the flame of faith, but trying to put it out. And he had fallen into that kind of snare. He

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had particularly become related to a young girl who was free, free of the principles of faith, free of the containments which are part of commitment and conviction. She led him into promiscuity and then there was fornication. He fell out of relationship with her. He tried to have a similar

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relationship with other girls. They rejected him. He fell out of relationship with his friends who saw what was happening to him and tried to pull him back and couldn't. His relationship with his parents became strained. His grades started to suffer. He lost his campus job. His life was falling in. I did not know

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this. When he called me, his voice was strong, but as he began to relate these details, as they began to pour out of him like some stone which had been rolling up from the inside but again and again had come trembling to his lips and then rolled back again, but now for the first time was coming out. As it came out, his

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voice broke and he began to weep and it came with tears until finally he cried out to me, "Bruce, help me get to Jesus again. Help me." Now I could identify with the way he felt. I could think back to a time when very far from the Christ I knew, I had gone to one of my seminary professors

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and I'd said to him in his office one day, "Dr. Shear, I want you to know that right now the only way I can hold on to Jesus is to hold on to you." And that's what that boy was doing. He was trying to hold on to Jesus by taking hold of me and in that act of confession he was reaching out and taking hold. I said to

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him, "Sam, let's pray about this. The Holy Spirit is trying to get through to you again. The Holy Spirit is nudging you. The Holy Spirit is trying to unplug the lines. You've begun that process. You've confessed it to a brother. Now confess it to God. Let's pray." He said over the telephone. I said, "God is where you are.

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God is where I am. Let's pray." And then I said, "Father, one of your sons has been very far from home. He wants to come back again. Hear him with all the love your heart can hold. Now Sam, you go ahead and pray." It was a stumbling prayer at first but then it came a torrent of words, broken with sobs and watered with tears

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so that I couldn't understand what he was saying but I know God understood. And when he was done, I thanked God for the forgiveness and the newness which had come. And then I said, "Sam?" There was no answer. "Sam, are you there?" And then he responded, "And I shall never forget the sound of his

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voice or the words he uttered." He said, "I'm plugged in." I talked to him almost every day for about a week, then about every week for a couple of months, then when he was home on summer vacation. Now we just exchange Christmas cards but on every card he writes, "I'm plugged in." And the power of God flows through him. Why?

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Well there was psychological release in confession. We all know it helps to get things off your chest but also in that moment of confession to God and to another man, he was renouncing evil in his life. Evil had been in the hiddenness, in the secret dark places of his experience and now he was letting the

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light of God shine into that place so that that festering, filthy thing shriveled and died. That was what was happening and it was happening as Scripture says it will happen. "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another and you will be healed." That's the testimony of the Word of God.

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That is sure. It involves not only confessing to God but confessing to another. You see, if you only confess to God, you're confessing to one who already knows about it. I had a friend who was unfaithful to his wife. He confessed it to God and now declares that he heard God say to him, "Norman, don't tell me

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about it. I reminded you. Go and tell your wife." That's what happens in confession. It is not enough that it had this direction, it must also have this direction. We must hold on to someone who's holding on to Jesus. As we open ourselves, make ourselves vulnerable to God, we indicate this by making

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ourselves vulnerable to someone else who is in Christ and who loves us because of him. Care must be chosen in such a one, but such a one must be chosen. And when such a one is chosen and confession is entered into, then the invincible power of the Holy Spirit surges into you. Working in my backyard yesterday, I found

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a rock through which a flower had grown. I can't explain that power. I could talk about osmosis or capillary attraction, but I could not explain to you how a flower grows through a rock. Yet I saw that power. I can't explain to you the power of the Holy Spirit, but I can tell you because of what I've known and what

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I've seen, it is the most glorious, the most wonderful, the most completing, the most sustaining, the most ennobling, the most enabling power that anyone can know. I've often wondered how the Church has been able to hold together behind the Iron Curtain. And I came across a narrative about a small group of

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Christians meeting in a remote Soviet village, meeting illegally. And the secret police came into that meeting and they made a list of the names of all the people who were there. And then the officer in charge as they were leaving said, "Every one of the 30 of you will receive a summons. You will report to the

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court and there you will receive your punishment." And an old man stepped forward and said, "You've missed one name." The officer said, "There are 30 of you and I have 30 names. I have missed no names." "You have missed one name." "I shall count them again." And he counted them. One, two, three, four, thirty. "You see, I have 30 names,

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30 people. They are all here." "No, you have missed one name. You have missed the Holy Spirit." Oh, the officer said, "That's another matter." Dead wrong! That was the only thing that mattered. The power of the Church behind the Iron Curtain, the power of the Church behind the Bamboo Curtain, the power of the Church behind

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the Curtain of Hatred, the power of Christ behind the power of the Curtain of Fear, the power of the Holy Spirit is what goes behind every curtain that a man can erect in his life or in his world. Nothing can stop that invincible power. And if you have it, though it's indefinable and invisible and inviolable,

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you will become by that power invincible. And even the angels will envy you. I mean that. For I dreamed a dream, and in that dream I walked the streets of the New Jerusalem, and I heard 10,000 times 10,000 in song, gathered by a sea like glass mingled with fire, harpers harping on their harps. And then there was a

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great silence, a hush and a stillness, and after about a half an hour, one voice was heard in song. All the harps stood mute, all the trumpets stood tuneless, but one voice could be heard. That voice had about it something of earth and something of heaven. It came from near the throne. I said to one robed in white

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who stood near me, "Who sings?" He said, "It is David, the sweet singer of Israel." And the sweet singer of heaven, the greatest sinner in the Bible and the greatest saint also, he had confessed. And to that voice that was added another. This was a deep voice, a base voice, a passionate profundo. And this was the

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voice of Paul. And I heard him take up the melody, Paul, who had been the enemy of Christ and became more than any other man the friend of Christ. And then there was added a soprano line. She was beautiful to look upon with long golden hair like Gossamer. And with that hair she had wiped her tears from the feet of

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her Savior. She had confessed. And then to that voice an intense tenor song, vibrating with emotion. And that was Peter. Peter, who had denied him and then wept the bitter tears of repentance and confessed his sin before the church. And now the great chorus of the redeemed took up the song. And it was more than I can

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explain to you. The very walls of heaven shook and the very center of my soul was moved. The chorus of the redeemed. Sinners but saved by the Son, weak but made savagely strong by the Spirit. Alone but now the children of God. Oh, the power in that Holy Spirit and the magnificence in that song. It reaches down into the center of you when he puts

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his fingers on the strings of your heart and there makes his melody. It changes you. It changes life and it will change the world. It is beauty to go through life and into life eternal murmuring, "Beni, beni, Spiritus Sanctus. Beni, beni, come, come, Holy Spirit, come, come, come."

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That's the way to a fabulous future. Let us pray. Holy Spirit of God, we know that you are in the heart of everyone who believes. Lead us before the sun goes down this day to confess any sin that plugs thy

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power in us and then so flood into us that we might be lifted up on thine own wings and made victorious. And the love of God the Father, the peace of Christ the Son, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, be and abide with you both now and forevermore.

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