The following is a prophetic warning from Azusa Street 75 years ago, concerning the dangers of a Christless Pentecost!
Frank Bartleman was an eyewitness to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in 1907 at Azusa Street, Los Angeles. He has been characterized as the Reporter of the Azusa Street Revival. Nearly 75 years ago, during the outpouring, he wrote a tract warning of a Christless Pentecost.
I thought that the way to get power over sin would be to study the origin of sin. In other words, where did sin come from? How did I get infected with it? But what a long, involved study that is. It's a rather complicated story of a star war that took place before I was born, when the chief angel, Lucifer, led an army of a third of God's angels in an insurrection.
A sad young minister and his wife came to me for counseling recently. After four troubled years of marriage and two children, they were contemplating divorce. She was the saddest looking wife I have seen in years. Her husband, the young youth minister, stood nearby, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, while his teary-eyed wife sobbed out her confession to me.
The most difficult thing in all the world for Christians to do is forgive. For all the talk in the church about forgiveness, restitution, and healing, there is very little of it truly demonstrated. We all like to think of ourselves as peacemakers, lifters up of those fallen, always forgiving and forgetting. But even the most deeply spiritual today are guilty of wounding brothers and sisters by not showing a spirit of forgiveness.
When I was a boy the cry of the church was, “Jesus is coming!” All through my teenage years, every evangelist who came to preach in my father’s church had a stirring message about the soon return of Christ. Even today their sermons remain burned in my memory: “The Bible says Christ will come like a thief in the night, when you least expect him. It will happen in the twinkling of an eye, with the sound of a trumpet. You must be ready at all times.”
Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables: “All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:34-35, my italics).
The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). At the time these words were proclaimed, the Israelites had just returned from captivity in Babylon. Under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the people had rebuilt Jerusalem’s ruined walls. Now they set their sights on reestablishing the temple and restoring the nation.
What is it about faith that keeps demanding of us greater testings? Why do our afflictions grow more intense, more severe, the closer we get to Christ? Just when we come through one trial that proves us faithful, our heart declaring, “Lord, I will trust you for everything,” here comes another test, increased in its intensity.
This experience is shared by Christians all over the world. I see it in all my travels, from continent to continent, and our ministry regularly receives letters from readers who testify of a growing intensity in their trials.
“When they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief” (1 Thessalonians 5:3–4).
Right now, the world is in such turmoil that people are asking, “Are we seeing the winding up of history? Could we be headed toward a nuclear holocaust? Is the world spinning out of control?”
In Matthew 11, we find John the Baptist in prison. His powerful, anointed ministry to multitudes in Israel had been abruptly cut off by King Herod. Now the crowds who had followed John fervently were gone. The “voice of one crying in the wilderness” had been silenced.
