Mark Rutland

I want to share tonight that uh Pastor Morris uh sent me a letter and just ask if I would consider the possibility of um uh speaking uh toward the issue of the Holy Spirit.

And for me, of course, that's just like waving a red flag at uh at a bull.

So my son, uh, you know, I don't know how many of you get absolutely no respect from your children, but uh my son, who used to travel with me a great deal, he always used to say, Dad, which version of the Holy Spirit sermon are you gonna preach tonight?

So I was delighted to do so.

Let me uh let me begin by saying this to you.

I I was not raised in a uh particularly religious home.

My parents came to full faith after I was uh uh grown and actually um uh in in high school.

But uh but I was raised in a very odd family, very unusual.

I I think that I see a lot of young people here tonight.

I think that you will find the older you get, you realize how really odd your family was.

I was raised by uh nomads.

We just moved uh constantly.

Uh we uh we were a sort of a band of eccentric vagabonds.

Have any of you seen uh Little Miss Sunshine?

Anybody ever seen that?

Okay, actually, I was raised in that van.

I identified with that family at a really tragic level, actually.

And uh and uh my parents were were uh they're now in their 80s, and uh they were very interesting people.

My mother particularly.

I I know uh my mother has as high a native IQ as anyone I've ever met.

In her 80s, she has a mind like a steel trap.

She can walk through a field of wildflowers and tell you their Latin names.

Uh she is uh a voracious reader, she has a vocabulary that would make William F.

Buckley jealous, but she's a ninth grade dropout.

My mother never finished the ninth grade, and uh she uh believed in uh education in the purest sense of the word.

Uh that is not actually going to school but learning things.

And uh and above all things, my mother was devoted to vocabulary.

Uh she believed that it was a sin against the cosmos to use a word wrongly, and uh and she just pounded it on us.

I was homeschooled more or less by default before the phrase was ever invented.

We we just never lived anywhere long enough to really get a consistent education.

And so uh my mother took it on herself.

We didn't have a family Bible, we didn't have devotions in the evening, but we had a family dictionary.

And uh at night my mother would uh pop open the Webster's Collegiate, and like a racing form, she would just uh put her finger in, and whatever word she landed on, we had to uh learn its derivation, we had to learn if it was a verb, how to conjugate it, how to use it in a sentence, uh, synonyms, antonyms.

I deeply resented these interminable dictionary devotionals.

And I was like a lot of children that are taken a great deal to church when their children, you know, the Sunday school and church and night church and Wednesday night service and vacation Bible school, and a lot of times they say to themselves, all right, when I'm grown, I'm never going to church anymore.

And then, of course, what happens is as soon as they are grown, they drag their children to every service.

When I was sitting there through those things, you know, where we're discussing the German derivation of words, I remember thinking, when I'm grown, I'm going to become an illiterate.

But it left me with a with a great appreciation for words, for the sanctity of words.

Um we we are living now in the 21st century in the age of the Mad Hatter.

You remember the Hatter told Alice, when I use a word, it means what I want it to mean.

And and as a result, our vocabulary is shrinking.

And that's actually tragic.

Because as a society or a culture suffers the loss or corruption or diminution of its functional vocabulary, it loses to one extent or another its ability to think.

Because we think in words.

We do not think in pictures or concepts, we think in words.

And words mean things.

If we use the wrong word with which to think, we may actually think wrongly simply because our vocabulary is twisted.

Now words just mean anything.

I I was preaching in California recently, which is evidently where all human vocabulary begins to be corrupted.

And I was speaking to a high school audience, and uh afterward I was talking to some boys who were just very taken with the message.

They were just swept up, and they they came to me afterward to talk to me, and they said, Dr.

Rutland, the first boy said, You are one bad preacher.

Now, when did bad come to mean good?

The second boy said, You are not bad.

He said, You are the baddest preacher I've ever heard.

Baddest is not even a word in the English language.

The third boy said, You are not bad.

He said, You are corrupt.

One can only sense my level of personal affirmation.

I remember setting a life goal early on to become a really corrupt preacher.

But the fourth boy, he he was he was not content with these low altitude compliments.

He said, You are not bad.

He said, You are not corrupt.

He said, You are one sick dude.

I mean, I just came home floating on air.

Words, words mean things, and and gradually they can be twisted to where they they mean totally different things.

And this is a very youthful church, but I wonder if there's anybody here that remembers when gay actually meant happy.

You young people have no idea what I'm talking about right now.

But when I was a child, gay had nothing to do with homosexuality.

Uh homosexual actually meant homosexual.

As bizarre as that is.

She'd say, Stay another hour, leave at one.

Then she'd say, Are you having a good time?

I'd say, Yes, mom.

Everybody here is gay.

She wasn't worried.

We were just happy.

It can happen in any discipline of life.

But when it happens with our functional biblical vocabulary, when it happens with our theological vocabulary, the words with which we think about God, then it can change everything.

I was preaching many years ago at the Minneapolis Soul Fest.

It was an urban inner city outreach, would put up big uh portable platforms and crank up huge speakers and blast the music out at a level where the birds drop dead out of the sky and then preach.

I remember one night as I was preaching, the the platform was taller even than this one, and people who came forward would just come to the edge of the platform, and the workers would kneel along the front and deal with seekers at the front.

And one young girl came here just to the front and laid her forehead over on the over on the uh platform, and no one seemed to see her, so I just went and knelt down beside her and I said, Young lady, would you like me to pray with you myself?

She said, Yes, please, but she never looked up.

I said, Do you want the Lord to come in your life?

She said, I really need it, mister.

I said, All right, I'm gonna lead you in a prayer.

I want you to pray after me.

I said, just say the words I say.

Heavenly Father, silence.

I said, Miss, I want to make sure you understand what I want.

I want you to pray after me.

I'm gonna say the words, you repeat them, and Christ is gonna come into your heart.

Are you ready?

She said, Yes.

I said, All right, pray with me.

Father in heaven.

She didn't say anything.

And I said, Miss, do we have a problem here?

And at that moment she looked up for the first time, and this eye was swollen shut.

She had uh obscene fingers of blue and green bruise marks running across her cheekbone, and her lip was split right there till I could see her little teeth.

Tears streaming down her face, and she spread her hands out and she said, You know, mister, I've got all the father I can handle.

And I realized that she had no opposition to who God is.

She was having to warp her understanding of God around her misapprehension of fatherhood.

That it was fatherhood that was the problem.

Now we in this postmodern era, and I hear it all the time, postmodern, postmodern, postmodern, ad nauseum.

And I I understand the issue of the shifting nature of vocabulary in the postmodern world, but the answer to a postmodern world is not a postmodern church.

There are words here that mean things.

They mean things.

And we we have to we have we can't just simply abandon these this vocabulary because someone has an has an awkward reaction to it.

But we we must invest ourselves creatively in the words with which we talk and think about God, because unless we understand them, how can we dare to expect the world to understand them?

So there is this sort of clustered vocabulary, like a like a cluster of grapes around the central vine of the Holy Spirit.

Words like power and grace, holiness, the spirit of holiness, Romans chapter 1, that raised Christ Jesus from the dead.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

The spirit of life, the spirit of light, the spirit of truth, the spirit of conviction, these words cluster around the Holy Spirit.

And when we begin to consider the person, work, and ministry of the Holy Spirit, these words are summoned forth.

And they speak to us of those things which he does and those characteristics of his own personality and ministry to us and in the world.

When it comes, we narrow that vocabulary to yet another level down.

What about those words that speak of the work of the Holy Spirit at the point of encounter where I become subject to and indwelt by the Holy Spirit?

There are three main words in Scripture which are used to describe that moment.

Filled, baptized, and received.

Luke 3, 16, John is speaking.

John the Baptist, not John the Apostle, John the Baptist.

It comforts me no end to know that the first person to preach a baptism in the Holy Spirit was not a Pentecostal, but a Baptist.

John said, not many days from now will come the Messiah, and he shall baptize you with fire and with the Holy Ghost.

One cometh after me, the latchet of whose shoes I'm not even worthy to loose.

And he shall baptize you with fire and with the Holy Ghost.

Jesus himself, in uh the opening verses of the book of Acts, speaks of the same moment in terms of filling.

And in the second chapter of Acts, it says, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

In Acts chapter 19, Paul the Apostle at Ephesus says, Have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed?

Acts 19 · chapter mention

So we have these three words, to be baptized and to be filled and to receive.

To be baptized has about it a sense of uh of um uh of plunging, of of um of immersion, of pouring.

Uh however you wanna, however, you want to envision the act of of baptism, it means somehow or another that the that some extra personal uh substance is poured on you, or you are immersed in it, or it is thrown on you.

If your background is uh more liturgical, somebody said, well, okay, what about sprinkling?

Okay, fine.

Or uh, you know, if it's pouring, then fine, or if it's immersion, fine.

But somehow or another, that there is some way in which the Holy Spirit, it's a it's an Old Testament view of the Holy Spirit coming upon, pouring upon.

It has about it the view of the of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament where it was referred to often as mantling.

Uh, it's an unusual, uh, unusual uh look of the Holy Spirit being poured out.

You remember from uh from the Old Testament where the uh 70 elders of Moses received the spirit of prophecy.

But these two poor guys, you know, they just come out to watch these guys get the spirit of prophecy and they just get too close.

Do you remember that?

They're just standing there, you know, I think these guys are gonna get the spirit of prophecy, you know, let's watch this.

And it just like splashes on them.

I mean, it's a strange view.

We don't think of it that way in New Testament terms.

But they're just standing there watching the deal, and you know, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the elders of Moses, and it kind of like splashes on these guys.

And they start prophesying.

There, there is that sense of it, and and it has an adventuresome feel to it.

I I believe that in the in the latter part of the 20th century, at the at the tail end of the charismatic renewal movement, and in the early part of the 21st century, we have to a certain extent gutted the experience of the Holy Spirit of its nature of adventure.

There is a kind of breathtaking moment, you know, where baptism, if you use the sense of baptism by immersion, where somebody takes you and you know plunges you under the water.

In that moment, you are in a sense dead.

And if he's stronger than you, it could be an ongoing experience.

And there that's a it's a kind of it's a kind of breathtaking thing.

I I I don't think you ought to hold, I teach at the university when I teach on baptism, I don't think you ought to hold people under till they're fighting you.

But I do think they ought to come up really happy, you know.

And and and I think that the I think that one of the character characteristics of the of the personal experience of the Holy Spirit is that sense of of plunging in, of of it being pouring in some way in which it, that breathtaking moment, you know, when the Holy Spirit comes upon.

Then then there there is this second experience, the the sense of being filled.

That speaks to the human condition of emptiness.

Emptiness is not simply the absence of substance, it is an emotional and psychological and spiritual experience which is defined inside of us as hollow and and and shallow and uh emptiness is a horrifying feeling.

If you've never dealt with emptiness where you ache for anything, for something, life, drugs, alcohol, sex, something, fill me, fill me.

You've never struggled with the deep sense of emptiness and the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Is that is that sense of the Holy Spirit coming with Himself and all of His graces and all of His wonder and all of His power to meet the emptiness of my life?

Then there is the third, to receive the Holy Spirit.

That that now turns the whole thing slightly, don't you see, to be filled.

Somebody can do that without you participating, to be baptized, but to receive, to receive now speaks of some attitude in yourself.

To receive a guest, to welcome, to accept, to uh go forward in that kind of openness where the the Holy Spirit comes in.

If the Holy Spirit is the breath of God, and both the Old Testament and the New Testament say that he is, ruach, the wind, breath, spirit, and in the New Testament, pneuma is the Greek word, we still use that.

And if you have pneumonia, uh it is a disease of your breath, a pneumatic drill works on the power of compressed air.

So if the Holy Spirit is the breath of God, the wind that brooded over the face of the abyss, there is some sense in which we may envision the receiving of the Holy Spirit as the in-draw of breath.

That I welcome him in, that I breathe him into myself.

John Wesley said that life in the Spirit is the exchange of breath with God Almighty.

We breathe out our fetid air, and he breathes in from his own divine lungs the power of his presence.

So there is in receiving the Holy Spirit a way in which we welcome him into us.

In uh 1975, uh, as I look across the congregation, which was before most of you were born, I finished uh I finished theological seminary just at the end of the uh Civil War and went on into ministry.

I I was a United Methodist minister at that time.

I had uh had uh an adolescent experience with Christ.

I I wanted to live for God.

I I wanted to uh be an evangelical preacher, I wanted to pastor a Methodist church.

Uh my wife and I, Allison and I, were went to uh seminary in Atlanta at uh Emory University at uh Candler School of Theology.

I began pastoring a small country church there.

But um there was there was a sense, a deep and abiding sense of emptiness.

It created in me a kind of um a kind of adversarial relationship with the gospel that I was preaching.

I talked about hope, but I had no hope.

I talked about faith, I couldn't find faith.

I would preach on joy, I couldn't experience joy.

And it and it created a sense of disconnect and uh a deep sense of uh of personal fraudulency began to set in.

And uh and uh I had struggled with uh a lot of sense of um lack of self-worth, uh uh uh lack of ability, uh fear of the ministry, fear of the gospel, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, uh, all of those things.

In uh in 19 in the early 1970s, we moved to Atlanta and became I became the senior associate at um a large United Methodist Church there in the Atlanta area.

That sense of emptiness and that sense of powerlessness and anger, um I became explosively angry.

Explosively.

My wife lived her terrified little life walking on eggshells around me.

I would explode in anger, yelling.

Anger is unpredictable at that level, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and it manifests itself out of a life that is deeply empty and deeply disturbed.

I was angry that this wasn't working for me.

I was angry with God, angry at myself, angry at the world, angry at childhood.

I was an explosive person.

I remember one night I had a flat tire in the parking lot of the of the Kmart, and when I popped the boot of my car open, the spare was also flat.

And I just I wigged out.

I lost it.

I jerked a tire iron out of the car, out of the boot of my car, and I did hundreds of dollars worth of damage to my car before I could stop, before I could get control myself.

Just cracked the windscreen and hit and knocked out the headlamps and just dented the cars, just screaming, yelling.

And when I sort of came to myself, there's this crowd of people standing there.

My wife is weeping, you know, tears flowing out between her fingers.

She's shivering, you know, in fear, watching this.

And here's the Methodist preacher beating the living daylights out of his car, and your poor little wife just, you know, wrecked, you know, shivering in fear.

Because a guy that'll take a tire iron and destroy his own car, that guy, you don't know who he's gonna hit with that tire iron.

That's a very scary moment for a woman and for anybody.

And that, you know, people there at that moment, what do you say?

I mean, your demons are on your sleeve at that point.

I mean, what do you say?

Boy, there was a bug on there somewhere, I don't know.

And uh our our marriage became uh deeply wounded at a profound level.

All of my dis-ease uh psychologically and emotionally and spiritually uh uh took out in uh uh on her and on myself.

Any dimest store psychologist will tell you anger first expresses itself outwardly and then it turns inward.

And uh inward anger is called depression, self-loathing, deep sense of self-disappointment, and and that uh quickly brings you to the point of self-medication.

Nothing is helping me.

Nothing is helping me.

I am depressed, I'm angry, I'm falling to pieces, I'm empty.

Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, I got up from the pulpit chair to make my way to the to the pulpit and saying to myself, the whole way as I walk, today I'm gonna tell him I quit.

Today I'm gonna tell him, today I'm gonna get out of the ministry and get a real job, you know.

And uh and by the time I would get to the pulpit, it would dissolve.

And I was going through the motions, uh, an empty, depressed, angry man preaching an empty and depressed gospel to empty and depressed churches.

I I I remember uh one Sunday before I moved into the uh city of Atlanta in the country church I was pastoring, just a little tiny church about the size of this little group right here.

And we had a visitor, you know.

I mean, this is a big event.

And uh on a nice looking suit and everything, you know.

I realized that this one man from the suit had the capacity to double my Sunday morning offerings.

And I was very excited about this whole thing until everything was fine until we we came to the doxology.

You know, the doxology, you know, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him, all creatures here below, praise him above, ye heavenly hosts, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Pretty praiseworthy little song, actually.

But uh we were, you know, praise God from whom?

And I looked out in the congregation, his visitor had his hands up.

You know, he's standing there singing at the top of his lungs with his hands up in my church.

In my church! And I'm I'm shooting him telepathic messages from the pulpit.

You know, get your hands down.

He was oblivious.

He was oblivious, he was in a zone, you know.

So after the after the service, I was always my habit to shake hands at the door and and the people coming out.

Now I only wanted to talk to this man, so people, yeah, goodbye.

Go get some chicken, you know, go, go.

And so this guy came, you know, and put his hand out with a big smile, and I grabbed his hand and I said, Now listen, I just need to make something clear to you.

I said, I just want to make something clear.

I said, uh, you're welcome in this church.

I love to have you here.

We always welcome visitors.

I said, I just need you to hear something.

We don't do that kind of stuff in this church.

I said, now you want to do that, you know, all that hand raising and everything like that.

I said, there are other churches that welcome that.

That's not welcome here.

He didn't get angry, he didn't blow up, anything like that.

He just reached out and put his hands on my shoulders like that, and he said, Pastor, do you have the joy of the Lord?

God, I'm I'm telling you, fury, fury, fury, rage, I mean I remember thinking, where is that tire iron?

I can't I thought if I could get my thumbs around your lerenic, you'd think joy of the Lord.

It it made me so angry, it made me so angry that I preached a six-week series on joy.

It is it is a remarkable thing to watch a really angry man preach on joy.

We're gonna have joy in this church if I have to kill somebody.

By uh by the middle, by the 1974, all of that that had been happening and been happening slowly began to happen rapidly, and then I stepped into the elevator shaft and and and the floor went out from under me.

I began to um go back to an alcohol habit that I'd had in high school, and uh I began secret drinking, uh private drinking, drinking alone, drinking myself to sleep two or three nights a week.

Horrific nightmares.

Nightmares beyond anything I can describe to you, that terrified me at such a level I would wake up night after night screaming in a pool of sweat, just screaming.

And and my poor little wife in the bed beside me, she would say, Mark, we you you've got to see somebody.

This is not right, this is wrong.

You ought not to be having these dreams like this.

This is not right.

And I can remember screaming at her, not right, not right is not right.

I'm cracking up.

I would say, of course it's not right.

I'd say, What do you think?

I said, I'm cracking up here.

It got horrible.

God's our marriage was just uh hanging by a thread.

I I would go into a liquor store in another part of town praying contrary prayers at the same time.

Oh God, don't let anybody see me.

Oh God, maybe if I meet an elder and it's exposed and it'll be over with.

You know, I and this is all this uh all of this cognitive dissonance is going on inside of you, and it's it's very conflicting and really, really uh a terrible experience.

Deep depression set in at a at a at a level that I can't even express to you.

Until by by 1975, uh November of 1975, alcohol and the wickedness and the depression all caved in.

Uh Thanksgiving uh afternoon 1975.

I um left the Thanksgiving table with my extended family and went to my brother's house, which was next door to my dad's house.

I grew up around guns, and my brother always had guns in his house.

And I went in there and took a Desert Eagle 357 Magnum and put it in my coat and went into the woods behind my dad's house.

And on Thanksgiving afternoon, 1975, I put a Desert Eagle 357 Magnum in my mouth until I was choking on the barrel and pulled the trigger, and God jammed that gun.

I don't know if you know anything about guns.

I'm gonna tell you something.

You can jam a nine just by shooting too fast.

But you can't you can't jam a 357 magnum.

I could throw one out there on that floor and it'd probably go off when it hit the floor.

If that one had gone off, it would have shot my head across Taylor County, Georgia.

But instead of feeling rescued, I felt I I remember dropping down to my knees in the pine straw there and thinking, I can't even do this.

How can you put a gun in your mouth and miss?

I attempted it again uh two nights later in an automobile, blacked out in an attempt to drive my car into a bridge piling.

And when I came to, I was on the side of the road.

I don't know what happened.

My car safely pulled to the side of the road, the emergency flashers were on, the emergency brake was set.

A few nights later, a few days later, the first week of December 1975, there was a conference in Atlanta, Georgia called the Conference for Power for Ministry Today.

For Methodist preachers to try to understand the charismatic renewal movement.

We had charismatics in our churches like uh like insects and um they're just they're like termites, you know, they just get in, you can't get them out, and they they and and uh the worst, then they multiply.

Uh is they get in the woodwork and breed, and it's just it was awful.

So uh somebody, you know, said, why don't we have this convers?

We'll you know try to understand the charismatic movement.

I did not want to go to this conference.

It was actually sponsored by charismatic Methodist preachers in the North Georgia conference, and they were notorious.

We all knew who they were, and they were the ones who sponsored this conference, and I I refused to go.

The senior pastor at the church where I was the associate, uh, he made me go.

He see, he said, Something's wrong with you.

He said, I don't know if this thing can help you or not, but you're going.

I was furious.

I was absolutely beyond fury when I got there.

I was so angry.

And um, I got when you go to things you know that you don't want to go to, you you go late.

And uh I got there late.

Uh, there were 150 Methodist preachers in the in the ballroom at the Ramada Hotel, and somebody had set up 150 chairs.

So every chair was filled except for one.

The only empty chair in the house was on the front row.

And so I'm gonna sat down on the front row, and the little man sitting next to me I didn't recognize, had a very conservative-looking little man, wire-rimmed glasses, had his Bible on his lap.

He said, I think we're gonna have a great time in the Lord.

I said, you know, uh sang a couple of hymns and had a prayer, nothing, no, you know, no funny business.

It was just pretty straight Methodist meeting.

And then the speaker said, Well, our first speaker tonight is uh one of the great spokesmen of the holiness movement, uh, pastor at First Methodist Church in Wilmore, Kentucky, and author of books that have sold in the millions and millions.

And so we'd like to ask Dr.

David Siemens if he'll come to the platform.

The little man sitting next to me, patting me on the arm, and he said, Now you pray for me.

And you could, and he got up and came up here, and I realized, you know, I was sitting next to the speaker, and you can feel God moving in on you.

He said, I know that you invited me here tonight to preach on the Holy Spirit, but he said, I just don't feel led to do that.

Instead, thank you, God.

He said, instead, he said, I'd like to preach on sin in the ministry.

I don't know if you've ever been in a meeting where you're under conviction, but you you feel like everybody in the house is looking at you.

And that man read out aloud everything that was going on in my secret life, and it was, it's like he's saying, it's this guy right here in the front.

You know, this is the one I'm it was horrible, it was horrible.

You ever hear, Pastor?

You ever hear people say, Well, you really stepped on my toes.

Did you hear that?

That little man whooped me with a bicycle chain.

You know, you you you run into some uh into some uh theological argument to hide, you know?

And he pops out of the closet and hits you right across the face, you know.

It was awful.

When he got finished, uh I made a straight line for my car, and I I drove all the way home.

I didn't even go into the hotel room that my church had paid for.

And I got home and my wife was still awake.

I ranted and raved, I stormed all over the house.

These people are crazy, they can call themselves Methodists if they want to, and nothing but a bunch of jack-legged Pentecostals screaming and yelling.

Nothing had happened.

Nothing had happened.

We sang three hymns, had a prayer, and a man preached on holiness, and I was I was in a zone.

I was so angry.

Anyway, I said I couldn't go in the morning if I wanted to.

I would go back, but I can't go in the morning because I've got to mow the lawn.

This is the first week of December in Atlanta.

I got up the next morning, had on a coat and gloves, you know, and cranked the lawn, but went out.

At that time I had a Catholic neighbor on one side and a Baptist on the other.

Don't you know they hit the windows?

Come here, Margaret, he's gone over the edge.

I'm out there mowing the lawn and I realized that no grass is kicking out of the blower.

And I thought, you know, I've got a four credit A in the book of Acts and the postgraduate level.

I'm not gonna be intimidated about the Holy Spirit.

I think I understand the theology of the Holy Spirit.

I mean, I've got a four-credit A at the postgraduate level in pneumatology.

I hope somebody says Holy Spirit to me.

I went back, got dressed, got it, started out of the house, I decided I'd go over there.

And here's what I never understand about women.

Why won't they just leave it alone?

Started out of the house, and my wife leans out of the kitchen and said, decide to go back.

I showed up at that conference in a rage.

I took my Bible, I stormed, I said, Man, I hope somebody, I just hope they say Holy Spirit to me.

I opened the door, the morning session had just ended, and when I opened the door, they came boiling out.

Boiling out.

Some were weeping, some were laughing, some were down on their knees on the floor praying with each other.

What meaneth this?

And then I identified one of the guys I knew as, you know, not one of these charismatic nuts.

He was a nice, safe guy that I'd known for years, and I saw him coming up the aisle and I said, What in the world is happening here?

And this nice, safe, straight Methodist preacher grabbed me by my lapels and screamed in my face.

He said, Jesus has healed me and fill me with the Holy Spirit.

I I I felt the only defense was my seminary voice.

I said, now, when you say, Jesus has healed me, when you say, how exactly do I connect with that?

I mean, what what do you mean?

Where do I plug in?

To Jesus has healed me.

And what's the meaning of that?

Oh, you laugh, you laugh.

There are people that listen to sermons like that every Sunday.

He stared at me like I was speaking Russian.

He said, He said, Don't you understand, healed?

He said, I'm deaf in my left ear.

I knew that he had no bones in his inner ear.

He had an infection in his childhood.

You don't hear with what's on the outside, you hear with what's on the inside.

He said, A man from California just prayed for me in there, and he said, I can put my hand over my good ear and I can hear you.

He said, Furthermore, I've hated my father since I was five years old, and God has filled me with love and forgiveness.

He said, I'm healed.

I'm healed and I'm filled.

He said, Let's go to lunch.

So we went downstairs to the restaurant in the hotel, and I sat with my friend.

He's still just careening off of the walls, you know.

Look like a ping-pong ball in a room full of mouse traps, and four chairs at this table.

David Siemens, the speaker from the night before, came, he said, Can I sit here with you guys?

I said, If you won't talk about sin, you know, just eat your soup.

The other speaker came in, a guy from California, he just gave me the absolute heebie jeebies.

In the first place, he's wearing white shoes in December.

What's up with that?

In the second place, the name is Church Melody Land.

Melody Land, you can't Melody Land, you can't name a church Melody Land.

First Methodist, I understand that.

Calvary Assembly of God, Antioch Baptist, those are they mean things.

What is Melody Land?

Start with Melody Land.

Next thing you know, you're naming things like gateway and stuff.

Once you open the door, once you open the door, then there's no end to it.

Dr.

Ralph Wilkerson, who was the other speaker for Melody Land, he came and sat at the table with us there.

I just so Dr.

Siemens said to my friend there, he said, Why don't why don't you have prayer?

I don't know how you pray in restaurants.

I don't know how you pray in restaurants.

You ever pinch the bridge of your nose so people think you got a headache?

Oh God.

Jesus' name.

Amen.

Not Marcus.

He jumps to his feet, he says, Oh God, we thank you for this food.

People came out of the kitchen for ministry.

It was humiliating.

I wanted to stand up and tell everybody in the restaurant, I don't know these people.

I I am a Baptist.

They have kidnapped me.

I'm not.

We went back up for the afternoon session, and Dr.

Wilkerson spoke.

He preached for about 20 minutes.

He didn't say one single thing that I could theologically argue with.

He flipped his Bible shut.

He said, Well, that's enough of that.

That's enough.

You can't end a Methodist sermon.

That's enough of that.

He said he hadn't even read his poem yet.

You can't end.

That's enough of that?

And he said, uh, he said, we've been talking about the Holy Spirit.

He said, the Holy Spirit never allows himself to be discussed in a vacuum.

He said, the Holy Spirit is here.

I just want to tell you the temperature in that room is going to be 20 or 25 degrees in a second.

The air conditioning couldn't deal with what was happening.

We were sweating and looked at the praying and began to minister with people.

It was so powerful.

It was the oxygen out of the air.

I felt like I couldn't breathe.

I tried to leave.

I felt crapped.

It was it was uh breathtaking and it was frightening, and and I could sense something was happening.

Finally, Wilkerson said uh he said the Lord.

Tells me that somebody here is going to give a word of prophecy.

I had never heard the phrase word of prophecy used in a functional sentence.

I'd studied 1 Corinthians.

I knew it, you know, inscripturally, but I never heard anybody actually use it in a sentence.

And I remember thinking, does he think that the prophet Isaiah is going to just drop through the roof?

What can he even be talking about?

He said, God's going to give somebody a word of prophecy, and I want them to stand up and give it right now.

A guy on the front row that I had known for years, he was so liberal, this guy, I didn't even know if he believed in God.

You laugh.

I mean, this guy was way left.

And he stood up and turned around, his face was white as a sheet, his hands were shaking.

He said, Well, boys, it's me.

He said, The weird thing is, I don't think I even believe in this.

He said, I was just sitting here, and the thought came in my mind in a moment that man's gonna call for a word of prophecy.

Stand up and open your mouth.

I'll fill it.

He began to speak.

I'm going to do a great thing, says the Lord.

And it's beginning now in this room.

When he said that, the Holy Spirit fell on that room.

The Holy Spirit fell on me.

I fell in the floor, the middle of the floor, collapsed.

I I began to weep, not nice, you know.

But I mean old horrible sobbing, runny nose, you know, laying in the floor, and then I saw a panorama of all the nasty things I'd ever done.

Like a technicolor movie.

And I thought that God was showing me the reason that He was going to slay me.

That I'd come into His presence and He was revealing the indictment.

And it terrified me so bad I began to cry out.

You know, don't kill me, don't kill me! You know, you want a part of a room full of preachers like the Red Sea.

You know.

I'm laying in the floor rolling around, crying, don't kill me, don't kill me.

Those guys were backing up.

And Wilkerson, God bless his heart, came out, left the platform, and came out and got down in the floor with me.

And he put his hands under my shoulders like that and lifted me up against him like a baby.

And I just braced myself.

I just braced myself.

I know, oh, he's gonna try to do.

If he'd have said anything to me but what he said, if he'd have said, all right now, you're gonna talk in tongues or whatever, anything, I'd have been okay.

Instead, he whispered in my ear and he said, My dear brother Pastor, I love you.

You know, maybe if we'd love more people and quit trying to shake tongues out of them, somebody might get the Holy Ghost.

He said, My dear brother Pastor, I love you.

And it broke me.

I said, if you knew me, you wouldn't love me.

If you knew me, you wouldn't love me.

I'm living in sin.

I've got a serious alcohol problem.

And I said, Mr.

I tried to commit suicide in the last three weeks twice.

I said, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make it to New Year's.

I'm not gonna make it.

He said, Don't you want to receive the Holy Spirit?

Don't you want to receive the Holy Spirit?

See, there was that verb.

Receive the Holy Spirit.

I believed in the Holy Spirit.

I knew there was a Holy Spirit, I understood the Holy Spirit brooded over the face of the abyss, but what did it mean receive the Holy Spirit?

That indicated that there was something I was supposed to do, some attitude or posture or something.

Don't you want to receive the Holy Spirit?

I opened my mouth to say, no.

No, I don't believe in that.

I don't want that.

There's no second work of grace.

I when I got saved, I got it all.

I opened my and I heard my own mouth say, Oh, yes, please, that's what I want.

He said, All right, pray with me.

I'm gonna lead you in a simple little prayer.

God, I give you my life, everything I am, everything I have, all my future, my past, my sins, my weakness, my will, everything.

And I'm asking you to fill me with the Holy Spirit.

This is second verb.

I'm asking you to fill me with the Holy Spirit.

He said, All right, now I'm gonna lay hands on you, and God's gonna baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Do you want to receive the Holy Spirit?

God, fill me with the Holy Spirit.

Now God's gonna baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

He reached his hand out toward me, and I just I just cringed.

I thought, oh no.

I had been taught in seminary that Pentecostal evangelists had buzzers in the palms of their hands, and that they would say, and I saw, oh God, he's gonna buzz me.

I know he's gonna buzz me.

He said, All right, I'm uh I'm gonna lay hands on you and God's gonna baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

He just reached his hands out, placed his hands on my head.

Nothing weird, nothing forceful.

He said, All right, son, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the authority of that name only, receive the Holy Spirit.

I don't know what happened in 149 other Methodist preachers on December the 5th, 1975.

I only know that I knelt on the floor, sad, broken, empty, wounded, used up, suicidally depressed, and bound-up Methodist preacher.

And God filled me with the Holy Spirit.

My life changed, our marriage changed, the ministry changed.

All of those words that cluster like grapes around the central vine of the Holy Spirit became precious and real and wonderful in my life.

I'm not saying that they were distilled at any particularly wonderful level in my life.

I'm not saying that everything that needed to get done got done.

But what I am saying is that that was an immediate and wonderful and miraculous turnaround.

Where there was emptiness, fullness came.

Where there was darkness and depression, joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Where there had been a ministry that was useless.

Where there had been a ministry that was useless, entirely useless, God began a fresh work in my life.

People ask me about the difference the Holy Spirit made.

It may not seem like much to you.

I wouldn't tell you about miracles, though I've seen them.

Or the hundreds of thousands of people that I've seen since 1975 saved or filled with the Holy Spirit, I wouldn't even mention it.

If you asked me what difference the Holy Spirit made in my life, I'd say, I'm a happy man.

I'm a happy man.

Now that may not seem like much to you, but if you've ever lived in darkness and emptiness and fear and anger and depression, and to feel it lifted, to realize that from that moment, from that moment, never once, ever, another nightmare.

Never once ever.

Never another drop of alcohol.

To realize then that happiness is not simply a state or a condition subject to outside realities, it is an inner work of the living Spirit of God.

Now I want to ask you this question.

Have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed?

I'm not asking if you're a Methodist or a Baptist or a Pentecostal, God can make Pentecostals out of the chairs you sit on.

I'm asking, have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?

A lot of people attend spirit-filled churches, and the worship is spirit-filled, and the atmosphere is spirit-filled.

And you know, that question can just get lost for them personally.

I'm not asking if you attend this wonderful spirit-filled church and hear this beautiful music and put your hands up and feel the joy.

I'm asking, have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?

Have you been filled?

Have you allowed him to take you by the nape of your neck and in that breathtaking moment plunge you beneath the surface?

He shall baptize you with fire and with the Holy Ghost.

Have you received?

Have you received?

Have you received this precious Holy Spirit?