You ever just read the Bible for the sake of reading the Bible? I'd like to advise you to do that. The Bible is just good reading. And I'd like to urge you to do that. I'd like to urge you to get hold of a Bible that is understandable. A lot of Bibles aren't understandable. And as a result, we think that God is not understandable.

And so I would advise you to get hold of a Bible that's understandable. Every once in a while I need to come and say that. And some of you have cut your teeth on the Living Bible, and that's good. That's basically a paraphrase, but that's good. Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network are making this mass advertising campaign now over the Bible that they're simply calling the book.

And it's the Living Bible is what it is. And people are buying it. They're buying it because it's going in the secular stores. They're buying it because they don't have to buy it in a Christian bookstore. They don't like to walk into religious places. They wouldn't come to the church to get it. But they will buy it at J.C. Penney's or wherever else it may be offered for sale.

And it's good reading, just good reading. If you're getting ready to buy a Bible or thinking about getting one for Christmas or for your family, I thoroughly recommend this version that I'm using, which is the New International Version, the NIV, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the easiest reading and the best scholarship of any of the Bibles that have been translated in a long time.

And I read it. I read it for pleasure. I picked up Joshua the other day. Joshua is a fun book to read. It's full of action. And there's a little interesting story in the beginning of the book of Joshua. Joshua takes place. It's historical. It's a biblical history, of course.

And it takes place with the death of Moses. Moses has died. Joshua has been commissioned to take the people, this whole group of people that have now started out as a group of former slaves and have now been welded by the desert experience into an army. A group of young bucks who are eager to go. They're a bunch of young Israelis.

They call them sabras in Israel today. They're the natives. Sabra is a cactus that grows over there. And Sabra is tough on the outside and tender on the inside. And the Israelis say that's what the native-born Jews are. They're Sabras. And this is a group of Sabras.

They've all been born out there in that desert. And they're getting ready to go in and possess Canaan. And they get to the Jordan River. And there's some interesting, miraculous things that happen that are covered in the first chapter of the book of Joshua. Cross that river.

And the first city that they're going to have to attack as an army, first battle they've gone into, is against the city of Jericho. And it's a walled city. They've never seen a walled city before. And this is a whole generation of people who've never seen a wall around the city.

They've been living in tents in the desert. And suddenly they're face to face with something they've never seen before. And so they ask the Lord, Lord, how are we supposed to handle this? And God gives some very specific directions as to how the battle plan is supposed to take place.

And he speaks to Joshua, and then Joshua speaks to the people, and they start by sending spies. Now remember, Moses got into trouble by sending spies 40 years before at Kadesh Barnea, and spies brought back a bad report.

But this is a whole different mentality. These fellows believe that they can do the impossible. They just want to find out how to do it easiest, that's all. And so they have gone, not with the intent that those early spies went from Kadesh Barnea, who came back and said, we'll never conquer that land.

These two guys have gone into Jericho, believing it can be done, knowing it can be done. They're just going to find the best way to do it. And they get in there and they party a little bit while they're there. They're not afraid. They're having a good time.

In fact, they wind up at a place that they shouldn't be at. They wind up at the house of Rahab, the harlot. And I'll not elaborate on that too much, but they got away from home and they went to the wrong place. And they're at Rahab's house.

And they know that she's a harlot because she's got a red ribbon hanging outside of her door. That was the sign of the house of prostitution, even as it is today, the red light or the red light district. And they get to Rahab's house, and Rahab confronts them.

She recognizes the fact that these fellows are not native Canaanites. These two guys have come in. They're Israelites. And suddenly, the terror of the Lord is upon that house. And Rahab says something to these two spies who have come in.

The Bible doesn't say why they're there, but I don't know why else they would have been at Rahab's house, except that they were there to offer or get what she was offering. And Rahab says something to them. I just want to read this here. This is Joshua 2.8, but you don't have to necessarily follow it.

Before the spies lay down for the night, she went up to the roof. They're going to sleep on the roof that night. And said to them, I know that the Lord has given this land to you, and that a great fear of you has fallen on us. So that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.

We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt. And what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Ammonites east of Jordan, whom you completely destroyed, that was when God sent the hornets and stung those kings to death.

And when we heard of it, our hearts sank. And everyone's courage failed because of you. For the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below. Now that's a mighty statement for a young woman who is a streetwalker, who is a prostitute, who knows nothing, has never been to a Baptist Sunday school, has never had a Pentecostal experience.

She knows nothing about that. She never memorized the scriptures. But God somehow has revealed to her. And she makes this tremendous profession of faith. The Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.

Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show kindness to my family because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father and my mother and my brothers and sisters and all who belongs to them and that you will save us from death.

And the spies say, our lives for your lives. The men assured it. If you don't tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the Lord gives us the land.

Now, they're making a positive confession also. When they know the Lord's going to give them the land. And they say, we're going to treat you kindly. Now they enter into a little contract here, which is always interesting to see how the way the Lord takes that, which the world means for evil and returns it for good.

And they tell her, they said, take that red ribbon that you have hanging off your gate over there, the sign of prostitution, and hang it on the outside of the wall. She lived on a house that was built into the wall of the city.

And they said, instead of having it on the inside of the gate, hang it over the edge of the wall, and that will be a sign. That when the Israelites come and destroy this city, that they will protect those who are hidden behind the red ribbon. I love it. I love the way God does that kind of thing.

He takes that which we have and just says, listen, I can sanctify anything. And that's exactly what he does with this. And of course, Rahab goes down in the list of heroines mentioned even in the book of Hebrews.

1,200 years later, they're still counting Rahab as one of the great heroines of the faith. In fact, if you'll trace the genealogy, you'll find that the genealogy of Jesus goes back to Rahab and stops there. She's the first mentioned in all of the genealogies that Jesus himself sprang from this encounter of a woman who had heard from God in the midst of something that the world would call sin.

She had heard from God. Now, I was listening to Billy Graham several years ago. He was talking to a group of young preachers. And he said something, which I jotted down, which I thought was rather fascinating.

He said, the world will come with fascination to watch a person who is willing to burn himself out for Jesus Christ. Let me run that by you again. The world will come with fascination to watch a person who is willing to burn himself out for Jesus Christ.

Now, Graham was not urging that group of young ministers to become fanatics or oddballs. What he was saying was that they should not be afraid to be who they are. He was actually encouraging them to be witnesses for the Lord Jesus. Open, bold witnesses for the Lord.

Because he was saying the world is dying to see people who are different. Everybody we see seeks to conform. All of advertising is based on conformity. And so it's in style to wear a tie that has a little A on the bottom that's made by some... creep somewhere off of it.

I don't know. Anyway, that's in style. And I can buy this same tie for $4 and they put that little A on it and it costs 14. I bought this at a discount house for four and a half. But that's conformity. We were, Jackie and I walked through the store the other day and I said, why would I want to wear a shirt that has somebody else's name on the front of it? Pierre Cardin.

Why? I go into a store and they say, hi, there's Pierre. No, I'm not Pierre. I'm Jamie. The whole thing is designed to bring us to conformity, that it's in style to look like everybody else.

And we seek that. The hairstyles, the facial styles, the clothing styles, the mannerisms, the vocabulary that sweeps through the high schools. What's in this week? And there's always a new word that's in this week.

And everybody is using it. We are made different. Paul says to the Romans, don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. You're not like everybody else.

And the interesting thing is that the people who are different become the style setters. Those are the ones who everybody looks to if a person is willing to bust out of that. And do something else.

There's a country western singer that's got all kinds of problems, Willie Nelson. Willie's been all over. He's been in the drug scene and everything else. But I've always kind of admired Willie. Willie's a heathen of the first rank.

But he doesn't make any pretense to be anything except just what he is. But I kind of admired him because when everybody else was dressed in one way, he dressed in another. He wore an old sweatband around his head and this kind of thing.

But what happened? Was it after Willie became popular, everybody had sweatbands on. They were all dressing like Willie Nelson and trying to imitate his style. But he became a pace setter in the midst of this because he was willing to be who he really is.

The world is dying to see people who are different. Someone who has an alternative. To the lack of direction that is offered by this world. Now, the thing that makes us different as Christians, and I'm speaking to you as Christians tonight, or those of you who are looking in from the outside and at least considering the possibility of being a Christian.

But the thing that makes us different is that we take our directions from a different voice. We're like Thoreau's man who walks to the sound of a different drummer. Everybody else is going in this direction, but our ear is tuned someplace else.

And that is the basic difference between a person who is in this world and a person who is in the kingdom of God, is that we take orders from a different authority. That's what makes us different. We have a Lord who leads us.

I live in this world, but my ear is constantly tuned to the other world. You think I'm living in this world, but I'm taking my direction someplace else. I take my orders from a worldly boss or a worldly supervisor, but final decisions are made by the Lord.

And there's always a place to where there is a line, I will not cross over. Because my God has said, if you cross that line, you have stepped out of my will and into the world. And I will not have you in that.

Now, because I live in a physical body, I'm still very much part of this world. And I always will be as long as I live in this physical body. The only full release to total sanctification, as far as I can tell, is when I put off this physical body and I am no longer bound and encumbered.

But I don't try to mortify this body. I'm not going to go back into a medieval concept. Instead, I'm going to glorify this body. I'm going to see this body transformed, my mind transformed, my body transformed, all done for the glory of God.

But I am a man under orders. And you're a man under orders. You're a woman under orders. There are certain things that you have heard God say to you. And those are your orders. Those are your commands.

And that's the thing that separates us from all the rest of the world. Now, I believe the world will follow a person. I agree with what Dr. Graham has said. That the world will follow a person who is sold out to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, I'm not talking about fanatics who do weird and crazy things. I'm talking about a person who is walking intelligently and deliberately. Full of the Spirit, boldly, as a soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the world will follow that kind of person. So many times we think we have to conform in order to get a following. One of the things that I admired about Curry Vaughn when he was in the Army, and I spent a lot of time with Curry while he was still on active duty.

We visited on a number of places. I spent time with him in Germany on a couple of occasions. I spent time with him in Korea on two occasions. I watched him as he functioned. And I watched him in conjunction with so many other chaplains I saw who somehow kind of developed a mentality that they had to be what they call good Joes.

They had to become like the world, like the other soldiers, in order to identify with them. And then here came along a guy like Curry Vaughn. And he was, he's a soldier. Curry's not here tonight, so I'll talk about him a little bit.

He's a West Pointer. He's a military man, served on active duty as a ranger, as a parachutist. He went through the whole thing. He was tough. And then he went on back and went into the seminary.

And he emerged out of that seminary, not as a good job, but as a man of God, and went back onto active duty again, only this time going to lead men to the Lord. And I watched him as he walked through those military camps, different.

Straight ramrod soldier, rising in rank, every bit a soldier. And yet at the same time, he was different. He did not conform. He simply would not do it. He wouldn't do what everybody else was doing.

And as a result, every place he went, every station, every command he had in the army, he disturbed. The powers that be. They didn't know what to do with a charismatic chaplain. With a guy who says, I love Jesus more than I love the commanding general.

I'll support the commanding general. I'll salute him. But I'm under orders from Jesus Christ. They didn't know what to do with a fellow like that. And so they'd stick him way out in the swamps.

They'd give him a Quonset hut or a tent. Up at Fort Stewart, Georgia, they gave him a tent. Chapels every place. And they wouldn't allow him to have a chapel building. They gave him a tent. When we were in Korea.

They had a huge, Jackie and I visited there, a huge, beautiful church building, chapel. And they wouldn't let Curry go in there. They gave him a Quonset hut, way off on the edge of the base. And in six months' time, he had filled that thing twice. I mean, people were flocking from all over.

And that's what happened up at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The big church remained empty. They were packing out the tent, packing out the Quonset hut. And I said, why? What's the difference? And the difference is because folks are looking for somebody to follow.

Somebody who raises the banner and says, follow me, I'm for Jesus who will go with me. There's a lot of people who are saying that this world doesn't have answers and they're following. Now, the reason that I'm going into all this is because this is the thing that makes it imperative that if you are, if the thing that makes you different is the fact that you are a follower of the Lord.

Then it is absolutely imperative that you hear God correctly. Otherwise, you are just one step removed from fanaticism. Half a step removed from fanaticism. You're sold out to God, but if you don't hear God, you hear all kinds of voices because there's many voices speaking out there.

And they'll whisper weird and odd things into your ear and you will go forth in the name of Jesus, but it won't be Jesus that's... that's leading you. And so I want to talk to you for just a few minutes. I'm not even about to say that I've got the final word on this or a concluding word on this.

Volumes of books have been written on prayer and how to hear God correctly. All I want to do when I come at a meeting like this is stimulate you. I don't want to give you answers. You're not going to remember most of what I say anyway, and I know that.

I want to stimulate you. I want to motivate you to find your own answers. I want to stimulate you that you'll go back to your Bible and you'll seek the answers for yourself, that you'll get alone with God and you'll seek him yourself, that there'll be something that will spark inside of you because you can't remember what a speaker says.

You can make voluminous notes and you still won

Here is the cleaned-up version of the sermon transcription:

Tremendous! Herman has a little book on hearing the voice of God, and he's having it republished again. And so they're updating it and revising it a little bit. And Herman wanted me to write a couple of pages on how I, Jamie Buckingham, hear from God. He's going to include that in the book along with some other people, I think, that he's asked to.

How do you hear from God? Then I got to think, how do I hear from him? My goodness, what if I have to write how I hear from God in a page and a half? How do you hear from God? Well, I can begin to list some things. I read the Bible. And the Bible speaks. The Bible is the word of God. It's the written record of God's activities on earth a long time ago. And it gives the principles for God's activity on earth today. It is the word of God. But it's not the only word of God. It is God's word. It is all God's word. But it's not all of God's word. There's more.

Than this Bible. And the Bible is not the only way that you hear from God. Now, I've got friends in other denominations who claim that the Bible is the only way you can hear God. Where the Bible speaks, we speak. Where the Bible is silent, we're silent. It's a good Church of Christ procedure. But there's more than that.

Where the Bible is silent, the Spirit of God speaks. And there's more than just the Bible. But the Bible is imperative. To hearing the word. I hear God through my wife. She speaks God's word to me. She speaks it loud. She speaks it soft. She speaks it harsh. She speaks it gentle. She speaks the word of God to me.

Sometimes she catches it with an introduction. Thus saith the Lord. Try to listen when she speaks that way. Expects it in the middle of the night. She rises up in the middle of the bed. You know, I want to hear what God is saying.

But my wife speaks God's Word to me. My children and my grandchildren speak God's Word to me. They catch me in my inconsistencies. And sometimes it's very easy to hear the voice of God as they catch me in my inconsistencies.

I love when my granddaughter came in and wanted to play the rabbit game on my word processor. There's a... My word processor is a professional instrument, sanctified interest. It's not the kind of instrument you play games on. Although we've got some little discs that you put in there and games appear on the screen.

And one of those is a little game with rabbit. A rabbit goes through a maze and eats a carrot. And you have to punch little buttons to get the rabbit to get to where he's going. And my granddaughter's age, four and something, less than that, like to go back and play the rabbit game.

And I don't like to play the rabbit game with him because that takes a long time. I have to take all of my good stuff out of there and put the rabbit game in, and that takes time. So I'm constantly saying to him, not now, we'll do it later.

And Kristen, who is, what, three, caught me with this today at noon. Papa, can I play the rabbit game? Not now. I'll do it later. She said, Papa, you told me that yesterday and the day before yesterday.

And what she had done was catch me in a lie. And God spoke to me about this. You're going to have to watch yourself, Papa, because you've got a pure heart that's here that you shouldn't be damaging with that kind of thing.

And so my children and my grandchildren speak for God. Friends do this. You know, it comes from all different areas.

We were an elders meeting earlier this week and we had some decisions to make. There were some things that the elders of this church are concerned about. And we reached a place where it was almost a stalemate. What do we do with this situation? And one of the elders made just a rather simple suggestion. He said, let's all get quiet. Let's stop our talking.

And let's just get quiet. And everybody listen. And then we'll take turns and we'll speak what we hear God saying during the quiet time. It was interesting what happened when we did that. Because we all got very quiet around the table and just waited before the Lord.

And different men began to say, I had this picture appear in my mind. I felt the Lord was saying this, and there were different kinds of reactions that began to come, which all applied to the problem that we were looking at.

We were hearing the voice of God in a corporate way, respecting. Now, that can be done with a family. That can be done with husband and wife. It doesn't have to be done with some kind of church group. It can be done any place.

We've done this sometimes in our home group when we meet together. We simply get quiet and listen. You hear the voice of God. You hear the voice of God in circumstances.

Sometimes there just won't be any place to go except the place you're going. I hear him in silence many times. Walk on the beach. Walk in the woods. I guess the best place, and this is if I write anything for Herman Riffel, why I'll have to deal with this particular issue, but I hear him best in the shower early in the morning.

And I'll tell you why. Because oftentimes when I go to sleep at night, the last thing I will pray before going to sleep is, Lord, I ask you to go to work in my subconscious. My conscious mind now is going to blank out. It's going to disappear for a few hours. And I'm not going to have any conscious thoughts that would push you out.

And so I invite you, Holy Spirit, to come into my subconscious while I'm sleeping and to work in the deep areas of my life. And just invariably when I do that, when I get up the next morning to get into the shower for an early morning shower and I'm standing here under the warm water all soaked up, there'll be a voice that will speak out of that subconscious that will come back into my conscious mind and I will hear the voice of God.

I've never heard an audible voice. in the shower. But there are things that happen under that quiet, cleansing, private place where there's no interruptions in those few moments. You will hear God begin to speak. God spoke to me this morning in the shower and said, this is what I want you to deal with tonight.

That's kind of the essence of what we're dealing with here tonight is because the Lord spoke because I went to sleep last night saying, Lord, what do you have for me? And he said, get into this area. Now, There is a fallacy abroad today that says busy people can't hear from God. And that's wrong. Busy people can hear from God.

It's the undisciplined person that has trouble hearing from God. Busyness has absolutely nothing to do with it. God can and he does override our activity. He will speak to us in our busiest moments. He will speak to us in our quiet moments. He will speak to us when everybody else is speaking.

There will be a voice that will speak inside, and you will know that it's God that he will speak to. He'll speak to you when you're rested. He'll speak to you when you're exhausted. He'll speak to you when you're all prayed up. He'll speak to you in the middle of some kind of gross sin that you're involved with.

God speaks to you, but it's these patterns that we're that we're dealing with that make it easier to hear from God. Now, let me talk for just a minute about when things go wrong, the things that block us from hearing from God.

And there's two or three things I just want to touch on here. James says that one of the reasons we don't have an answer to our prayers is because we ask amiss, is the word that he uses there, or we use wrong motives. Let me, those of you who are making notes tonight, let me give you a... Scripture reference on that from the book of James.

It's James 4, beginning with verse 2. You want something, but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have. because you do not ask God. And when you ask, you don't receive because you ask with the wrong motives.

And the King James Version says you ask amiss. You ask with the wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your own pleasures. So one of the reasons that we simply don't hear him very well is that our motives are wrong.

The other reason that I want to touch on tonight is usually it's because we're asking the wrong God. There are other gods out there. And if you don't know God, then when you try to listen, you'll hear the wrong things.

It's very easy to hear a deceptive voice that will say, do this and I'll put my approval on it. Eve heard one of those voices in the garden and said, it's okay to do this. And they did it and found out that all kinds of disaster fell on them because it was out of the will of God.

These things must be checked out with others around you. I've been intrigued. In fact, I turned on the television last night and got the last half of it. But I went back earlier this year and skimmed through Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Great old classic.

And there's a fascinating scene that Defoe writes in Robinson Crusoe. You remember the story of Robinson Crusoe? This Britisher, this very proper Christian Britisher who was shipwrecked on a desert island. And then there was another fellow who was shipwrecked there also, who was a native someplace from Micronesia out there in the South Pacific.

And they came from entirely different cultures. And the fascinating part of the book is how Caruso tried to put his culture over on this fellow Friday. Even though they were both in the same boat, he tried to make Friday the slave and he was going to be the master. Because that's the way they did it back in England.

Not only that, but he... He tried to take his concept of God and place it on this rather simple, naive kind of fellow. And there's a fascinating scene in Robinson Crusoe where Friday asks Crusoe to dance. And Crusoe says, I don't know how to dance. And Friday says, well, this is the way you dance.

And he dances like they all dance, all over, you know, like this, and he's dancing around. And then Crusoe says, well, I can dance. And he says, how do you dance? He says, I dance like this. And Friday says, you're only dancing with your feet.

You have to dance with all that is within you. You have to dance. You can't just dance with your feet. And then he asks him to sing. And Caruso says, oh, no, I can't sing. He says, only the riffraff sing in England. He said, the proper people don't sing in England.

And Friday says, well, I sing. And he says, in fact, our whole village sings. We must all be riffraff. And then he says to Caruso, sing me a riffraff song. And Caruso finally says, all right, I'll sing you a riffraff song.

And so he sings kind of a barroom tavern song. A song about a boy and a girl out in the field, in the rye. And he's singing it along. Then he gets into about half the song. All of a sudden he jumps up from where he's singing and runs across the woods and heads to the waterfall and throws himself into a huge pool of water.

Friday runs after him and jumps in and drags him out and pumps him out. And he said, I liked your song. He said, why did you try to kill yourself? And Caruso says, I wasn't trying to kill myself. So that would be a terrible sin before God to kill yourself.

And Friday says, then what were you trying to kill? He says, oh, I was killing my desires. They were rising up as I was singing the song. I had to put my desires to death. And Friday says, does that make your God happy?

And Caruso says, yes, God hates desires. And Friday says, what a frightening God you serve. And I thought, my word. That's where we've gone wrong. We serve our own God.

If you take this Bible and just simply read it through, you don't find 90% of what the church teaches today. You find something entirely different than what the church teaches today, than what theology gives us today. I have been in sections of this world where the Bible has been left behind.

And some of you have heard me tell some of these stories before. In fact, I told the story in a little book I wrote with the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service called Into the Glory. If we're a Bible translator in Peru, in northern Peru, up on the Brazilian-Colombian border, where those three nations come together at the banks of the Amazon, where the Ucayali River joins the Amazon River and flows on across Brazil into the ocean.

There's an Indian village. And a Bible translator went back into that Indian village and translated a portion of the Bible. He translated... I believe the book of Mark and about half of the book of Acts, maybe the first seven or eight chapters of the book of Acts.

And then he had to leave. And all he left behind was the translation of that Bible with this group of Amazonian Indians. And he left that scripture behind. And then he came back two years later.

And what had taken place was so miraculous that he couldn't receive it. He came from a very straight, conservative, evangelical background with all of the stuff he had brought with him of cultural Christianity.

And when he walked back into that Indian village, and they were experiencing all of the things that the Bible experienced. Literally, they were experiencing them. Pentecost had fallen, literally had fallen.

And they had set aside preachers. And they had called on God. And there had been a meeting one night when fire had fallen out of heaven and had sat on the heads of all the people who were gathered.

Hundreds of Indians were coming from all over the jungle for this great revival meeting that was taking place. And everything that's described in Acts 2 had taken place. Literally had taken place. People had been raised from the dead. Folks were being healed.

The young people had gotten on fire for Jesus, and they were all in their dugout canoes, the 15, 16, 17-year-olds. They were going out as evangelists. They were being commissioned and sent out by the church up and down the Amazon River in their canoes, going from village to village, telling people about Jesus.

They were being stoned. They were being run out of town. They were sticking the dogs on them. They were still going back. All of the persecution that had happened in the New Testament was happening in this little Indian village.

And this missionary went back and he said, that's not the way to do it. He said, listen, you guys have got to build a church building. Then you're going to have a pulpit. And you've got to have stated services on Sunday morning. You can't do it this way.

And they got all confused. They said, we don't understand. All we're doing is just reading the Bible and all of these things are happening and we're doing it the way the Bible says.

Well, I've talked to some of those people. Some of those Indians. And I came away with this deep, deep conviction that God wants to bring us back to the Genesis, to the beginning of the move of the Spirit.

That's what he wants to do with us today. He wants us to be able to hear from him the way Peter heard from him, the way Paul heard, to be able to take our direction in life that way.

He wants us to be able to be people of such power, who are such followers of God, that the same thing will happen to us that happened to those two spies when they walked into the house of Rahab.

That the prostitute will say, the Spirit of God is upon you, and I know that God is moving in your midst. How do they know that? Simply because these were folks who belonged to a different kingdom.

That's all. We don't have too many folks like that. But I believe God is saying that's where he wants to restore us to.

And that means we've got to hear the right God. And the only way I know to hear that right God is to go back to this book and to hear him from there and then to have that confirmed by others who are going back to this book and who are walking in concert with him.

If not, we're going to get into the same problem that Robinson Crusoe had. And we're going to say to the Fridays around us, this is God. He's a God who's cruel. He's a God who's mean. He's a God who wants to cut all the desires out of you.

He's a God who wants to do this and wants to do that. But that's not who God is at all. God is a God who takes that which we have and he sanctifies it to his purpose.

And he takes the red ribbon that we use for one thing and touches it with his blood. And it's used for his glory from then on. I trust tonight, that the Lord will stir in your heart and bring you to whatever that next stage is in your life so that you will listen just a little clearer, just a little plainer, and that you will be willing to take the step when God says take the step.

Well, I won't go into all of it tonight. We'll get back to it some other time, but there's some remarkable stories. Listen to this one. Paul and his companions having traveled throughout the region. of Pergia and Galatia, and having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.

When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to do so. And so they passed by Mysia and went on down to Troas, and during the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, come over to Macedonia and help us.

And after Paul had seen the vision, he got ready at once to leave from Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to him. Such a simple little passage in the 16th chapter of the book of Acts. But because Paul and his companions listened to God, you and I are here tonight.

The gospel never would have been preached to the Gentiles, never would have gone to

Here is the cleaned sermon transcription:

Our lives, we don't have to be in full-time evangelistic missionary work like Paul was. Just wherever you are, listen to him. You belong to a different kingdom. There's a different voice that's out there that speaks for you. A different Lord than the Lord of this world.

If you'll get quiet, you'll hear a drum beating that's out of step with the world, but that's in step with the kingdom of God. Pray with me, would you? Father, I ask tonight, as we come to the conclusion of this service, that you stimulate us to the place of dissatisfaction. That we will remain dissatisfied until we hear your voice.