<TITLE>05. Par 16-18</TITLE>L-16 Now, notice, but they were all this a way because that they refused to accept what God had provided for them, and they wanted to add something to it. There's where we always make our mistakes, is when we try to add something to what God has done and what God has said. Just let it alone. They have been for two thousand years trying to add one word to the Lord's prayer to make it better, or take one word away to make it better. And you can't do it, because when He speaks it's perfect. And if you add anything more to perfection you're out of order. God does anything, It's perfect.
And when we try to think that He needs our assistance... He doesn't need our assistance. He's God. You say, "Well, He has to use men to preach the Word." Just as John said, "God's able of these stones to rise children to Abraham." He don't need us. He's Creator; He can do whatever He wants to because He's God.

L-17 Now, we find out that all these things... They had a passover lamb provided. God had provided them manna out of heaven for the journey. He had provided them a rock to drink from when they were thirsty, a brass serpent to heal them when they were sick. And yet, with all that, they had to have a law. They wanted a--a theological experience so that they could have something to fuss and organize and break themselves up.
That's just the same kind of a thing that happened to our Pentecostal fathers over forty years ago. God called out a man in California, a Negro, one crossed eye, give him the experience of the baptism of the Holy Ghost. From there formed Azusa Street, the old Azusa Street Mission. From there it's scattered till it swept the whole nation. From nation went to nation after nation, until Pentecostal revival was burning everywhere. What a blessing God had provided by grace. Many of them couldn't write their own name. Some of them come to church in rags. They walked out on a railroad track and picked up hands full of corn and beat it out on the track, little mothers, to feed their children so their husband could preach the Gospel. They wandered about; they were made fun of, mocked, and called holy-rollers, spent all night in jail, day after day. Some of them, they wanted to put them in the insane institution, said they were crazy.
God had provided for them one of the greatest revivals that this nation has ever known. I don't care when it was; there's never been a revival like the Pentecostal revival. Right. Wesley never had it; none of them had it. Spurgeon, Calvin, Knox, great reformers, but they never had the revival like the Pentecostal revival. It's the greatest thing that struck the earth since the Holy Ghost fell on the day of Pentecost. Nothing... Right now they--they got more conversions last year, the church itself put more conversions than almost the rest of the churches put together. You heard Billy Graham speaking of it not long ago; you can't ignore it.

L-18 Where did we make our mistake? Like Israel did, we couldn't get along just getting--going the way the Holy Spirit was leading us. We had to add something to cause unbelief to come in. If Israel would've went ahead following the way the Lord was leading them, within two weeks they had been in the promised land. But they had to substitute something. And if the Pentecostal church would've moved on in the Spirit, the way God ordained it to go, and had already proved that He was in it, we'd have been living in the millennium. But they did the same thing they did back there, as the Bible said in Corinthians, those things were our examples. What happened to them happens to us.
What happened the first thing? We couldn't be--go on being led by the Spirit in a group of believers; we had to have something to tack a name onto us. We wanted to make an organization.


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