<TITLE>03. Par 9-11</TITLE>L-9  Oh, that little sacred place that where man can meet God as Moses had on the back side of the desert. After forty years of good schooling, the highest degrees that be--could be given, knowing his position as a deliverer and as a Hebrew, and knowed that God had called him for the commission, and yet he knowed more about God in five minutes in the presence of that burning bush than all of his forty years of theology taught him. He was in the Presence of God.
And every man that goes to the field to preach the Gospel should never leave until he has that back-of-the-desert experience. No one could explain that out of your mind. No matter how much they twist the Scriptures and say this, that, or the other, if you've ever met God face to face in the true baptism of the Holy Spirit, there's not enough theologians in the world to ever erase it from your memory. Something happened; you were there. When a man gets that place, there is no one can explain it away from him.
And when a person finds that place in Christ, that faith that says, "By His stripes I am healed," there would--could not be enough doctors in the world tell you was fixing to die. No matter what your symptoms are, you still believe it anyhow.

L-10  Like Abraham, who called those things which were not as though they were, he took God at His Word, believing that He was able to perform that what He had promised. The trouble of it is with the church today, we come with hope in the stead of faith. Faith is positive. Faith needs no booster; faith knows what it's talking about it's talking about. Faith is strong. Faith has hairs on the chest; it speaks and the rest of them shut up. Symptoms can't even speak at all when real godly faith speaks. It's got the floor. It knows where it's at. It's had an experience.
When I hear people say of their symptoms, I think of Jonah. If there was any man who had a right to complain about symptoms, it would been Jonah. We would think him to be backslid because he was out of the will of God when he had failed to do what God told him to do. And then he was--had his hands tied behind him; he was in the belly of a fish, and out into the stormy ocean with a big tornado on top of the ocean, in the belly of a whale with seaweeds around his neck and vomit. And if he looked this a way it was whale's belly. Every way he looked it was whale's belly. You talk about symptoms, he had them. There's no one here tonight in that condition.

L-11  But look what that fellow done. We think he was backslid and so out of the will of God, and we are perfectly in His will. And under that kind of a setup he said, "They are lying vanities. I won't even look at them. But once more will I look to Your holy temple." For he knew that when Solomon dedicated the temple and prayed this prayer to God, "If Thy people be in trouble anywhere and will look towards this holy temple, then hear their prayers, Lord, and deliver them..." And he believed in Solomon's prayer and a temple that was built by man. And under those symptoms and them circumstances, if he could believe Solomon's prayer, and a temple that had been made with men, what ought we tonight under these circumstances, not look to a temple made with hands or an earthly man who prayed, but to the throne of God Himself where Jesus stands at His right hand with His own Blood making intercession upon our confession, when He died for that purpose. We should look away from our symptoms and call those things which are as though they are not. God made the promise.


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