<TITLE>06. Par 26-37</TITLE>L-26 The reason people go and join organizations, and substitute a handshake in the stead of the new birth, they're trying to bypass the new birth. They don't want the new birth. And they--they know we teach it in the Bible, so they want to substitute something for it. And the Pentecostal people are just as bad, trying to substitute something. They want it in class. It must be just so classy, "We'll shake hands and join the church, and be sprinkled or baptized," or something. They are afraid of the new birth. I sometimes believe the Branham Tabernacle's getting afraid of it.

L-27 Now, we all know that a birth, I don't care where it is, or where, whereabouts, it's a mess. If a baby's born on a shuck pile, on a hard floor, or in a pink-decorated hospital room, it's a mess, anyhow. A birth of a calf, birth of anything else is a mess.
And the new birth is nothing less than a mess. But people so starchy, "We'll go over where they shake hands. We'll go over where they don't bawl and cry, and beat on the altar, and cry out." You want to be too human. What we need is birth, dying out, to bring forth Life.

L-29 A seed, an old potato, a seed potato, you take that potato and put it in the ground. Until you can have new potatoes, that old potato has to rot. A corn cannot produce new life until it's rotten.
And a man or woman can never have new birth until their intellectuals and their own self is rotten, dead, die out at the altar, and scream, get all messed up to a place the starch gets out of your collar, and you're borned again by the Spirit of God. I don't care if you squall, speak in tongues, jump up-and-down, flop like a chicken with its head off, you're bringing forth new Lifes. But we substituted something for it; we want the classical way. Sure.

L-31 The other day, Friday, wife and I was going to the store. I don't mean to harp on this. But as we went down the street, I just kept turning my head one way for the other: naked women. I promised God when I was a blind man, if He'd heal my eyes I'd look at the thing was right. I keep a little cross hanging in my car. When I see such as that, I look at the cross and say, "O God, that's my Refuge," as I looked at the cross.
I seen those women. Meda said, "We haven't seen one woman today that's got on a skirt." And she said, "Bill, look at that woman there with those little straps around the top of her body," and said, "you mean to tell me that woman don't know that's wrong?" Said, "If she doesn't know it's wrong, then she's out of her right mind."
I said, "Just a minute, honey. She is an American; she does as the Americans do."

L-34 I said, "I was in Finland not long ago, sweetheart." And I questioned there to a man that set me down, Doctor Manninen. And we were going to the--the health baths, what's called the sauna, and they take you in and pour hot water on, or water on hot rocks, and it just sweats you. Then they make you jump in ice water, and then back out. Then you take you into a room, and there's nurses in there, women who scrub the men (and them naked), send them back into the pool. I wouldn't go in. And I said, "Doctor Manninen, that's wrong."
He said, "All right then, Reverend Branham, that's wrong. Then how about your American doctors that'll strip a woman naked and lay her on the table, examine every sex organ she's got? How about your nurses in the hospitals?"
I said, "Excuse me, Brother Manninen--Manninen, you're right."

L-37 What is it? It's customs. When I was in Paris I could hardly believe it, that the urinals for both men and women was the same one. I couldn't understand it, that the rest rooms was on the side of the street for both male and female. I couldn't believe that when women went to the beach to go swimming, a boy and his sweetheart, they had no dressing rooms; they just took all their clothes to the last garment, then turn their backs and put on a little strap and went swimming, but it's so. They pay no attention to it. It's a custom of France.


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