<TITLE>07. Par 24-26</TITLE>L-24 Now, we hear so much today about, "We are free. Oh, we live in a beautiful America. We are free." Oh, the air's full of it. Books are wrote of it, thousands of them. But you are a million miles from being free. You're not free. Don't you be deceived by that. America is one of the greatest deceived nations, and in more bondage than any place I know of. They're worse in bondage than communism could put them in. Communism can only hurt the body; they can only put the body in bondage. But when the devil comes in, he puts the soul in bondage.
And man is a slave. America is a bunch of slaves. You may be a slave to pride. You might walk up and down the streets and go through every store and every fashion that you can see on television, and go from store to store trying to buy something. You become a slave to it. You become a slave to your dressing. You can become a slave to your money. That's the only thing that you think of is to make money, grab, and put it up here. If you do that, you're a slave.

L-25 You may be a slave to your religion. You may be a slave to a bunch of creeds. And let me tell you, a creeds is nothing but framework for a communism. It's the scaffold work that the devil can use to build communism, is a cold formal church. For men and women will go to that church, and become a slave to their religion, become a slave to the devil. Going into the church, and putting your name on the book, and paying money into it... Or either they'll go there and there's never nothing said about wrong.
I don't like to say this, but I going to say it anyhow. I--I'm not speaking too hard. Now, I hope I'm not. I want to say it with season in it. But sisters will go through the... Out here in... On these streets here in Chicago, it's disgracefully, to see them, how they would take their clothes off and walk on the street. And they, seemingly, don't know any different. They don't realize that they're committing adultery. You say, "Well Brother Branham, I know women that..."
A woman cannot wear shorts without having an evil spirit on her. You get that. Because she might not believe it in her intellectuals, but Satan has put that spirit on her to show herself before men. And at the day of judgment, every man that looks at her in a wrong way will be guilty with her for committing adultery with her, on the day of the judgment. And her pastor don't say nothing about it.

L-26 They say I'm hard. I'm not hard. It's not hard. That's truth. You know why? She's blind and he is too. And the Bible said, "If the blind leads the blind, both of them will fall into the ditch." It's intellectual. And men also will go out and do things: cheat in business deals, and still even be deacons in the church, smoke. When a hundred and thirty-three thousand Americans will die this year from smoking cigarettes, one hundred and thirty-three thousand is marked up for death this year with smoking cigarettes. The medical science said in the last "Reader's Digest," that if a man smokes in these days, it's so advanced that he will never live his time out. Something don't kill him, why, he will die with cancer before his time's out. That's right before his eyes. And yet, he will go on. I shook hands with a pastor the other day, that his fingers was yellow from smoking cigarettes. "If you defile this body, I will destroy it," saith the Lord.


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