January 30, 1914
If there is something wrong with a man’s spirit, he goes directly to
God, but the next day he has a pain in his back and he goes down the
road to the doctor’s. Where do you get your right to do such a
thing? There is a wretched looseness about consecration to
God. Christians do not seems to know what consecration to God
is. Christians do not seem to know what consecration to God means. What
would you think of Jesus Christ, if you saw Him going down the road and
into a doctor’s office for some dope? Why, you would feel like
apologizing for the Lord, wouldn’t you? Well, He has just as much reason
to apologize for you. When you become a Christian, consecrated body,
soul, and spirit, your privilege of running to the doctor was cut off
forevermore.
“Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” This young
man who testified says he suffers because of an appetite for cigarettes
and he hopes that we will pray so that the next time he wants to smoke
he won’t. I tell you God says, “Quit your sins and then come to Me, and I
will pardon.” He don’t say, “You come on with your sins, and I will
pardon you.” He says, “You quit your meanness, you quit fooling with the
doctor, and the devil, you quit your secret habits, and come to Me, and
I will deliver you.” That is the only road to God; that is the way in
God.
So a Christian’s consecration is not just a consecration of his spirit
to God, nor of his soul to God. It’s a consecration of body and soul and
spirit -- the entire man, everything there is of us, and it cuts us
forever plumb off from looking for help from the flesh, the world, or
the devil.
There are three enemies of man -- the world, the flesh, and the
devil. Our nature has three departments: spirit and soul and body. What
would you think of the Christian who would go to the devil or to some
deceitful spirit to find balm for his spirit? Why, you would think he
was not a Christian at all, nor would he be. Suppose a man wants peace
for his soul (mind), and he appeals to the spirit of the world or the
flesh to get it. You would not think he was a Christian at all. Then how
will you consider a man who wants healing for his body and goes to the
world and man to get it?
I am going to preach to you for five minutes out of the fifth of
James. He is very explicit in this matter. He is not laying down rules
for the people of the world. He is talking straight to the
Christians. “Is any among you (Christians) afflicted? Let him pray,”
not, “Let him go to the devil or the doctor or some human source.”
“Is any sick among you? Let him send for the elders of the church,”
meaning this, if you have prayed and deliverance has not come,
unquestionably it is a weakness of your faith. You need help. Then the
next thing is, “Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them
pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.”
When I was preaching at Washington, D.C., recently an old sister said
she had anointed her little girl the night before and she had put a
whole bottle full of oil all over her. So you see, she was not looking
to God to heal; she expected the anointing oil to heal. Satan is a
subtle old devil, but the Lord gives us light. He says not the
anointing of oil, but “The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the
Lord shall raise him up.” That is why I never use oil except when
requested to do so, because people are looking to the anointing oil
instead of to the Lord God. “Let him call for the elders of the church;
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick,” not the anointing
oil. The use of anointing oil is a matter of obedience. It is a symbol
of the Spirit of God, and that is all it is.
So we place upon the individual the anointing oil in order that we
fulfill the symbol of the Spirit of God as the healer, and that is
all. “The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise
him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.” Thus
he goes on and makes the teaching broader.
One of the beautiful things about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it
is progressive in its revelation and application. First, we were asked
to pray if we are afflicted. Second, we were asked to call for the
elders. Then, the Lord goes down to the real business in a man’s
heart. “Confess your faults one to another.” Get your old tattling,
blatting tongue tied up, and confess to the other party that you have
been tattling.
If all the Christians had that gag in their mouth, there would not be
half as much shouting in the meetings as there is. Now listen, I don’t
want to pound people on the head, but I want to teach you a lesson. Here
is the broad principle of the Gospel, “Confess your faults.”
When I went to Africa, I had the advantage of getting on absolutely new
ground that no one had spoiled with a lot of loose teaching. In this
country our people have been slobbered over with teaching that don’t
amount to anything, and they wobble this way and that way, “like a wave
of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” And God says, “Let not that
man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.”
One day when a young man, God brought me in to see my own need when I
needed healing from heaven. There was nobody to pray for me and I was
not even a Christian in the best sense of being a Christian. I was a
member of a Methodist church, but I had seen God heal one dear soul, who
was very dear to me. As I sat alone one day, I said, “Lord, I am
finished with the doctor and with the devil. I am finished with the
world and the flesh, and from today I lean on the arm of God.” I
committed myself to God and God almighty right there and then, though
there was no sign of healing or anything else, accepted my consecration
to Him. That disease that had stuck on my life and almost killed me for
nearly nine years was gone. It was chronic constipation. I would take
three ounces of castor oil at a single dose, three times a week.
The place of strength and the place of victory is the place of
consecration to God. It is when a man shuts his teeth and says, “I go
with God this way,” that victory is going to come. My! This wobbling
business makes one think of the old Irish woman who was on a ship in a
storm. When the ship rolled one way, she would say, “O good Lord,” and
when the ship would plunge to the other side, she would say “Good
devil.” When someone asked her why she did that, she said, “Why, how can
I tell into whose arms I will fall?”
May the Lord wake us up in our soul and get us out of this wobbly state
and get us where we all commit ourselves once and for all and forever
to Almighty God, and then live by it and die by it.
People say, like the dear soul last night who sent word to the meeting,
“I am very sick, and if I don’t get deliverance, I will have to do
something.” Why sure you can do something. You can die; you
ought to die instead of insulting and denying the Lord Jesus Christ and
turning your back on Him. People say, “I can’t die.” Yes you can, if you are not a coward, but you cannot sin. And
it is just as much a sin to commit your body to the Lord Jesus Christ
and then to run to the doctor as it is to go and commit adultery or any
other sin. It is a violation of your consecration to God.
Make a consecration to God and stand by that and live by that and be
willing to die by that. Then you will grow up into God, where your faith
is active enough to get answers to prayer.
There is no man who lives and has the ministry of healing that could
pray for all the sick people. There are so many of them. Why you come to
an assembly like this, and every old saint who has a stomachache will
come and ask you to pray for them, and there is no time for anything
else. God wants us to grow up into Him where we get answers to prayer
for ourselves. Then if there is an extreme case and your faith is
broken, confess your faults one to another and get the rest of the
people to pray for you, and then in the extreme cases send for the
elders of the Church, and that is the mind of God.
In the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit are enumerated.
To one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another
The world of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another faith
By the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same
Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy;
To another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues;
To another the interpretation of tongues.
These
are the gifts or enablements that are given by God to certain in the
Church. Now here is a thought I want to leave with you. We go over into
Ephesians and we see a different order. Now the gifts or enablements are
mentioned, but the gifts in this case are individuals. It is men to
whom God has given definite ministries.
And in the Church of Jesus Christ not only should the gifts exist, but
the faith to use them. And they do exist if they are developed, and they
are workable when the faith in your heart is made active to use
them. But you can have the gifts right out of heaven, and if the faith
in your heart is not active, you cannot operate them.
There is only one prayer that is answered. It
is not prayer that is answered but is the prayer of faith. It is the
prayer of faith that shall save the sick. Believing prayer is not much
noise. Believing prayer may not be any noise at all. Believing prayer is
a committing, an intelligent committing of yourself to God, and your
mind is stayed in God and your heart is stayed in God and you are
walking in God. You are ready to die rather than go to anyone but
God. That is the real believing prayer. That is the continuous
prayer. That is prevailing prayer. Blessed be God!
So in Ephesians, the Word God tells us that there are some apostles,
some prophets, some teachers, some evangelists, and some pastors. These
are God’s gifts, these men -- not gifts as they are mentioned in
Corinthians, but men are mentioned in Ephesians, and the men with
ministries are God’s gift to the Church until such time as they shall
all come, the entire body of Christ, into the unity of the faith, into
the likeness of Jesus Christ, into the measure of the stature of the Son
of God. “Till we all come,” not one or two. Blessed be His precious name!
These things will demonstrate to you how far we are behind the Gospel
ideal. We are away so far behind. A few years ago many commonly believed
that when the baptism of the Holy Ghost was being poured out upon the
world, that we were the particular little lot who were to be the bride
of Christ and go with Him when He came. But pretty soon it began to down
on those who looked into the Word that there was not even an tangible
body of Christ yet. The body of Christ is the members called to God,
united in one spirit and in one hope of their calling. Blessed be
God. With one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. That is the body. Then
all the other developments, the bride, and all the rest of it are born
out of the body. (Ephesians 4:2-6.)
God is getting a body at this present time, and in the body of Christ,
the orderly body of Christ, the unified body, He wants to bring it forth
today. He hath set His gifts -- the word of wisdom, knowledge, faith,
gifts of healing, etc. He has set likewise men -- apostles, prophets,
evangelists, pastors, and teachers.
For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry,
For the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the
Unity of the faith, and the knowledge of the Son of God, unto
A perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness
Of Christ.”
Now healing is not a difficult matter. It does not take a bit more
faith to be healed from your sickness than it does to be saved from your
sins. The only difference is that in your own consciousness, you knew
there was no place to get forgiveness except from God. You had sense
enough to know you could not get it from the devil; you had to get it
form the Lord.
But your body gets sick and your consciousness, because of your
education, permits you to go to the doctor or the sorcerers or the
devil, and the one is just as offensive to God as the other. The
Christian body and soul and spirit is one. A
real Christian has committed his whole being unto the living God. He
consecrates himself to Jesus Christ with all the fullness that Jesus
consecrated Himself to the Father at the river Jordan on the day He was
baptized. He consecrated Himself unto the uttermost, unto “all
righteousness,” unto everything that was right, to the will of God
forever. Blessed be his name.
Now there are examples in the Word of God that are very striking along
this line. You listen to the Word of God. “Cursed be the ma that
trusteth in man.” Talk about your running to the doctor. That is what
the Lord thinks about it. “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and
maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.” And the
Word of God in the fourteenth of Second Chronicles gives us a most
remarkable example of Asa, the Kink of Israel, who trusted God when the
great armies of their enemies came up again them. He went down on his
knees before God, and he said,
LORD, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many,
Or with them that have no power: help us, O LORD our
God; for we rest on thee, and in thy name we go against
This multitude. O LORD, thou art our God; let no man
Prevail against thee.
-- 2 Chronicles 14:11
Their little handful of men conquered the whole mob.
But after awhile, Asa got a disease in his feet and the Word says his
disease became exceeding great and in his disease he trusted not the
Lord, but the physicians, and Asa died. It is recorded against him as an
offense against God that he failed to trust God for the disease n his
feet, but instead trusted the physician.
Somebody says, “Well, all right. I will commit myself to the Lord, and
then of course, I will not have any more stomachache. I will just be
kept, etc.” Maybe you will if your faith stands in God strong enough and
perhaps you won’t if it does not. But there is one thing that stands --
that is your consecration to God. If your faith fails it does not make
any difference, you stand consecrated to God just the same. If you do
not get answer to prayer you are consecrated to God just the same. If
you do not get answer to prayer, you are consecrated to God just the
same, and if God Almighty has got to let the devil thrash you half to
death for a week or two months or longer, you take it until the crook is
out of your life that the lord is after and faith has conquered. Then
you will learn obedience to God by the things you suffer. That is the
only way.
People go around cursing the devil all the time. You go in the ways of
the devil, you get crooked in your soul and proud in your heart, and
that cuts you off from God and you are left in the hands of the
devil. The wisest thing to do with you is just like I did with one of my
sons. I said, “Young man, you just take your own way until you bump
your head against the wall.” When he was hurt almost to death, he was
glad to come back to his old dad to be helped out.
We know the Word of God so well, so in our proud hearts we say: “We
have been baptized in the Holy Ghost,” and all that kind of attitude. It
is just as offensive to God as it can be, and God has just got to draw
back His hands and let you go, like I did my son. And then you will come
down with some old disease, and you will lay and fret and fume and cry
until you get right with God and open your heart to God, and He will
rebuke the devourer, and He will take the thing away. Bless God.
I used to be a member of a church where it was considered just as
offensive to take medicine or go to the doctor as it was to go to the
devil for health. The Christian who would run to a doctor was on a level
with the adulterer or the thief. That is absolutely right. That is
according to the Word of God. A whole consecration of your whole being,
your body and soul and spirit, is what Jesus demands. It is what Jesus
asks, and bless God, that is the only place that is worthwhile.
We go around talking and shouting about the Almighty Christ and what He
can do and what He is, etc., and the first time w get a stomachache,
away we go to the doctor and get a dose, and the Almighty Christ gets a
slap in the face.
Beloved, you listen to me. If there are any people in all the world
that ought to be taught of God, who ought to be walking with God, who
ought to be consecrated to all the will of God, it is the Christian
people, especially those who are baptized in the Holy Ghost. It ought to
be absolutely unnecessary for any man at this day to even speak of
these things in a public service. We ought to have been so committed
from the first day to the Lord Jesus Christ that the committing of
ourselves to any man for anything would be highly offensive to our
spirits. And if we saw our brothers or sister becoming weak and falling
into the hands of man, our prayer and love and faith and sympathy ought
to get under them as though they were falling into the habit of drinking
whiskey again.
It is just as offensive for the Christian to take medicine as for the
drunkard to take whiskey. Don’t you see, beloved, the great wonderful
advantage in the Christian’s life of becoming cut clear and free form
all dependence on the arm of man? You are cut forever from the world,
from the flesh, from the devil. Bless God.
I had a friend in Africa who was greatly distressed because he could
not learn to swim. Finally one day he got drunk and walked off the docks
into the sea at Capt Town into about five hundred feet of water, and he
could swim after that, all right.
Don’t you see, beloved, that you will never have faith in God in the
world until you launch out into God, until you commit yourself to God
and then either live or die? I belong to God and I am done with man, and
I am done with leaning on his arm.
I know what these things are. In my home I had seven children. They
were born without medicine. One dear brother testified the other night
that the Lord had kept disease out of the home. It was not that way in
mine. There wasn’t a devilish thing came down the road that my family
did not get, from pneumonia, small pox, typhoid fever, to a shooting
accident, and God let us be tested right up and down the line.
It is one thing to get down on your knees and say I commit my body, my
soul, my spirit to God, and it is another thing to stand by your baby
until you hear it gasp, and it is another thing to close its eyes in
death if necessary, but I am not going back on my Lord. That is the kind
of training I got, and that is the cleanness in faith my heart cries
out for.
Maybe in another generation we will have a multitude of people who
stand in God like giants, and we can have a manifestation of the sons of
God and take the world for God and crown the Christ King of kings and
Lord of lords.
Now I do not preach to anybody else what I have not been through
myself. I tell you the Lord has let me go through the mill. One time I
got inflammatory rheumatism and for nine months I suffered. I guess I
did. But I shut my teeth and I said, “You devil, you can’t put me in
bed; I won’t go,” and I dragged myself home and I would get in bed and
feel like crying out in my agony. At the end of nine months God had
wrought one thing in my heart, that if I died the devil would not get me
to take medicine again. One day I felt in my spirit I needed
help. There was nobody there that could pray for me. So I got on a train
and went to Chicago to John Alexander Dowie. One day there was a
company of people like this, and when I came along it was so packed full
I could not even look into the door. After awhile there were some other
people who couldn’t get in, and finally an old man, an elder, came
along and prayed for us out there, and as he did I was healed from the
crown of my head to the soles of my feet. Years after he told me that
was the only healing he ever had that he knew about.
I often wondered if the virtue came through the old brother or not, but
God met my faith. Do you not see, to commit yourself to God means
something? I tell you, it is probably going to mean some suffering
someday, but that is the way of clearness, the way of truth. That is the
way you can look every man in the face and say, “I am not leaning on
the arm of the flesh; I am going God’s way.”
We are such a weak, wobbly lot in these latter days. God is just trying
to get some backbone in us. We come along and are baptized and about a
week after, we can find them doing all sorts of things. The Christian in
the old days came down to be baptized, and as they did so a Roman
officer took their names and sent them up to Rome. Instantly their
citizenship was canceled, their right of protection from Roman
government was cut off, their good were confiscated, they were left as a
prey to the avarice of the people, but they got baptized just the same.
Bless God.
I tell you that is the kind of people that thirty million of them gave
their lives to God in the first four centuries and were blotted out of
the world in various ways. Thirty million of them! There was some
Christian spirit, there was some consecration to God in those days. It
was poverty or death or sickness or prison or anything else, but it was
God’s way of consecration. I tell you God will meet that kind of
thing. If they lived, all right, and if they died, all right. They
belonged to God, and the world ever since for 1400 years looks back with
pride to that list of people who gave themselves to the Lord God. They
put the stamp of character on the Christian world. Bless God.
All the heroes, bless God, did not live back there either. You come
down to the history of Scotland, to the Convenanters. They wrote a
covenant and said, “We will have nae King but Jesus,” and you can see
the old Scottish man shut his teeth and opening a vein in his arm, signs
the covenant. And three hundred thousand of them gave their lives then
to make that covenant good and died saying, “We will have nae King, but
Jesus.”
Now you listen to me. I will guarantee to you that if there are fifty
sick people in this room and you commit yourselves to God in that spirit
and with that reality, bless God, you won’t need anybody to pray for
you. You will just get well. Bless God. The devil cannot come around you
when that kind of thing is in your soul.
One of my sons was dying with Pneumonia once. I prayed for that fellow
and I prayed for him, and it was not a bit of good. But one day I was
downtown, and I was praying about that boy and the Lord said, “You go
home and confess your sins to your wife.”
And I said, “I will.” I stopped and got one of the old elders to come
down to my house. As we rode along we talked together, and I said, “I
have some things I want to fix up with my wife before you pray. There
has been all kinds of prayer, but He won’t hear.” So I took my wife in
the other room and told her the whole business, all there was, and we
went into the other room and prayed for that son and he was healed in a
second.
I want to tell you that when Christians are not healed, as a rule you
get digging around and get the Holy Ghost to help you, and when they
have vomited out all the stuff, they will get the healing.
You listen to me. Healing comes straight down from God. All man is, is a
medium through which God can work. God is a Spirit, He needs
embodiment. He chooses man as a body. The Church is the body. “Know ye
not that ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost?” There is something that
gets into your spirit or into your body that is obstructing the free
flow of the Spirit of God. Get that thing out, it is between you and
God.
I tell you, when you line people up so they will trust God for their
bodies as they do for their souls, there will not be one half the
back-sliding there is now. I was a member of a body of
one-hundred-thousand people and I never heard of such a thing as any of
them backsliding. They stood for God and they died for God. The
character was in them, and they did not know half as much about God as
we do by the revelation of the Spirit in these days.
I am twice as anxious this afternoon about his great body of people
here, to know whether or not they are going to commit themselves clear
in God, than I am about the sick. There may be dozens in this room who
are so very sick that they need God. But beloved, listen. Suppose one of
them was not healed and the rest were made clear in their consecration
to God, you would have a bigger demonstration.
As fast as you get them healed, the Christians without Christ’s
consecration are down in their faith and becoming sick. After awhile a
preacher gets to be a kind of doctor of saints in his little
assembly. God does not want it. Get clear; get straight in your
consecration to God. Put yourself body and soul and spirit forever in
God’s hands. Do it today, bless God. Do it today.
How ashamed a Christian ought to be that he is trusting in the arm of
flesh or in a medicine bottle somewhere around the house. You go home
and gather up the abominable stuff and put it in the alley box and then
apologize to the alley box.
You cannot tell me anything about medicine. There never was a bigger
humbug practiced on mankind than the practice of medicine. The biggest
men in the medical world have declared it over and over again, but the
mob do not pay any attention to it.
Professor Douglas McLaggen, who had the chair of medical jurisprudence,
stood up among one thousand students, when asked to lecture of the
Science of Medicine, and he said, “I am an honest man, and ‘An honest
man is the noblest work of God’; form the days of Hypocrates and Galen
until man we have been stumbling in the dark, from diagnosis to
(illegible).” Sir Ashley Cooper, who was physician to Queen Victoria for
twenty-five years, the greatest physician in Great Britain, he said,
“The science of medicine is founded upon conjecture and improved by
murder.” Dr. Magendie of Paris, who has the greatest system of diagnosis
in the world, said, “We take up the attention of the patient with our
medicine, while nature cuts in and makes a cure.” But you cannot tell a
third-rate American doctor that.
Yet the Christian would turns their back on the Son of God and goes and
puts themselves in the hands of men. No man that ever lived, or ever
will live, will ever reduce the subject of medicine to a science. No two
doses of medicine will ever produce the same effect in your own
person. You can take a dose of medicine today and another tomorrow, and
you will have a different effect tomorrow than you had today.
That may be all right for the world. Why the man that is not a
Christian has got to have a physician of some kind, but the Christian
can’t. God cut the privilege off long ago. Bless God. “Is any among you
(Christians) sick? Let him call for the elders of the church.” That is
tall the privilege the Word of God gives him. That is the way into God,
on the line of divine healing. Bless God.
Bless God, I tell you I am just looking for the day when there will be a
great, blessed, true company of men and women in this world who will
stand in this through the living God just as clear as crystal, who have
cut clear off form the world, the flesh, and the devil. That is the
characteristic of the church of Philadelphia all right.
God has let me see healings in every way that human eyes can see
them. I have seen them come like the flash of lightning. I have seen the
Spirit of God as lightning flash around the room, just like the
lightning. God was there in lightning form, and the devils were cast and
the sick healed. I have seen God come as the tender bud when nobody
knew He was there, and people were healed. I have seen people healed in
the audiences when cancers would melt away and varicose veins were
healed. Nobody prayed for them. They just put themselves in the hands of
God. That is all.
There is no man that lives who can define the operations of faith in a
man’s heart. But there is one thing we are sure of, that when we cut
ourselves off from every other help, we never found the Lord Jesus
Christ fail. If there are any failures, it is our failure, not
God’s. Bless God
FINIS -- THANK GOD.
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