<TITLE>06. Par 56-63</TITLE>L-56 And all of a sudden, the cloud was upon him before they knew it. That's the way judgment strikes. It comes so sudden; you wonder how it can get there so quick. How I have seen cruel men, who once cursed God, fall and scream, and say, "How could You treat me this way?" The whole, every foundation was swept out from under him in a moment. It pays to take warning.
Oh, you might laugh at the messenger; you might be able even to kill him; but you cannot kill the message. It'll go on just the same. God's message is eternal. His Words will never fail.
Paul was successfully in having Stephen stoned. But all through his life until he surrendered to Christ, was he never able to get away from that message, "I see heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God." Something got ahold of him. It wasn't the messenger; it was the message he had.

L-59 While the storm swept through the country, it caught the chicken house and the farmer, and they never found his body. And his wife, frantically fighting... And they lived close to the great Okeechobee Lake, and the waters begin to rise as the typhoon lifted the waters all the way from the bottom of the lake. That's what makes them so dangerous; they're shallow; the boats rock, and that's how the waves come up and turn the boats beneath them. The storms comes and just whirls up the water and packs it for miles. And the water is sweeping, until the mother knowed there was no hope but to get her children on top of the building. And she got her children, and got them on top the building, holding onto the chimney of the house.

L-61 And then the wildlife, the Cottonmouth moccasin, I believe, a more deadly snake than your Diamondback rattler, they was crawling for safety, and they come on the roof with her. And by listening to her husband, not taking heed to the warning, she had to... She stomped and she beat, but she had to stand and watch those vicious snakes bite her children until they died on the roof. And the mother herself was bitten so much until finally she died; that's the only way we got the story. After the storm had quietened, and the search parties hunting for bodies, and so forth, they found her laying on top of the roof, with her children laying by her side.

L-62 Oh, it pays to take warning. The first thing to do, before there can be a warning, there has to be a preparation made for safety, or there's no need of sending a warning. And the warning is only a voice of one having you to prepare for the danger. There has to be a preparation made first. And then if the preparation is made, then the warning can go forward to cause you to make your decision whether you want to listen to it or not. If you don't want to listen to it, well, that's up to you. If you do listen to it, there's safety.

L-63 God has the same method. We work on God's method in that way. God, in the early days, when the antediluvian world, when people had gotten so wicked and so sinful, that God could not look upon it and be just...
God is just, and He has laws. When those laws are broken... Any law that's broken, has no penalty to it, isn't law. You cannot break the laws of God without having to pay for it somewhere. You must do it. The Bible said, "Be sure your sins will find you out."
And what is sin? I'd like to stop here just a moment. Many people think smoking cigarettes is a sin. It isn't. Many people think that lying is a sin. It isn't. Committing adultery, that isn't sin. That's the attributes of unbelief. You... The reason you do those things is because you are an unbeliever.


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