Rev. Lee Stoneking - Not without Witness

0:00It was Thomas Jefferson who said, I am never so happy as when I am in the free flow of affection among friends. And that's how I feel about being with you people here tonight. There is a free flow of affection, the wonderful spirit of God. We have come from all walks of life, and the truth of the matter is, most of us would not be friends because of personality differences if it had not been for a man called Jesus. We would have nothing in common, but I am so glad that he came down the road of my life. You may be seated for just a moment. But several people have been very kind to me from this district, and they have said some very fine things to me, very complimentary.

1:03People have said things like, I'd like to be what you are. I would like to have what you have a hold of. And they're wanting an answer. The answer is a very simple one. I am no one special. To me, I'm just me. I know me. To me, I'm no one special at all. I'm just me. But I love Jesus, and I know Him. If there is any single contributing factor to whatever I am in God, it has to do with one word, consistency, consistency. As long as your flesh controls you, you'll be nothing for God. You must come to grips with your own flesh. My flesh does not control me. I control it. I make this body do things it does not want to do. I drag it to the prayer room. I push it away from a table.

2:05I am determined not to be a slave to my flesh. You'll never survive unless you learn to control your flesh. Marriage is not the answer to the loss of the flesh. You had better pray that through before you get married. Or you are headed for trouble. Tremendous trouble. I know because I've passed it. If you were to pray one hour a day, and never miss, at the end of one year, you would have prayed 15 straight days, 24 hours a day without stopping. Or you would have prayed two weeks and one day straight without stopping 24 hours a day. There's no way. There's no way that you can pray with that kind of investment in heaven and not be used by God. There's no way. If you fasted one day per week, and did not fail,

3:06just you set aside a day every week and you fasted. At the end of one year, you would have fasted one month and 22 days, or one month and three weeks, or seven continuous weeks, would have been given to the Lord without food in the course of one year. There is no way you can pray two weeks and one day, and fast seven continuous weeks out of every year. And not be used by God. It's an impossibility. Hell is not made for praying people. People who pray will never go there. They will never go there. All that I am and all that I ever hope to be is because of a man called Jesus. And I have reached the place in all of this. I don't really care what anyone thinks anymore. I'm just going to do my thing for Jesus and get out of here. And the only way out is up. It's the only way out. There's no other way out. I would like for you to stand.

4:06That's for free. But consistency. Oh, consistency, that's what a jewel. It's like putting money in the bank account. When you need it, you can write a check on it. No deposits, no withdrawal. And the kingdom of God is like that. No deposits, no withdrawal. It's a very interesting statement made in the book of Acts chapter 14. The Bible says in Acts 14 and 9, the same hurt Paul speak, who steadfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, said with a loud voice, stand upright on thy feet. And he leave and walk. This got Paul into some trouble. They want to make a God out of him. He refused, and then they're going to kill him. That's just exactly how fickle people are, too. That's just exactly how the human element is. He went on to preachable discourse. And verse 17 says, nevertheless, he, God, left not himself without witness. In that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.

5:09Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness. And I want to entitle this tonight, not without witness. Would you pray with me together? In Jesus' name, and everyone said, the Lord bless you, you may be seated. We tonight live in a world when Pentecost is enjoying the limelight of attention from every major denomination. Every major denomination in this country is now aware of the fact that we do exist and that we are also powerful in some leading denomination, the illogical seminaries. They teach vehemently against coming to our meetings. They are told that if they ever come in among us that whatever it is will get a hold of them and they are doomed to be a Pentecostal.

6:09I know of one professor who told his theological class he said those Pentecostals are like a dog with rabies. If they ever get their fangs in you, you catch it. You cannot escape it. God is doing something in this hour. I just got word from Sister Tinney that there is a Baptist church in Louisiana. The pastor has received the revelation of the Oneness of God. He has baptized himself in Jesus' name. He has baptized his entire congregation in Jesus' name and they have all received the baptism of the Holy Ghost speaking with tongues. The Bible says the Holy Ghost will lead you into all truth. And in the last days God will put his spirit upon all flesh. If what is poured out upon us in this conference becomes poured out upon them out there, we are headed for one of the most fantastic,

7:10one of the most glorious, one of the most earth-shaking rivals that this world has ever known. In the last days, say of God, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. That Pentecost is not new. Pentecost is not new. You are sitting tonight among people who are from ancient days. We represent something that began thousands of years ago and began to move with incredible, shall I say, ingenuity, and the breath, the Theonustos, the inspiration of God, from profit to profit, from father to son. It was noise to broad that there was coming something into the world called a Messiah, an old covenant, an old promise, suddenly in Bethlehem of Judea. Christ, the Lord, was born. Angels came and worshipped.

8:12Wise men also came. Jesus said, being the fulfillment of the old, made a new covenant and said in His new promise, but He shall receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost. And that covenant is in effect tonight. This thing began over 1,900 years ago, among 12 ignorant unlearned fishermen for the most parts, and spread to 120, who out of 500 found themselves in an upper room. Amazing, 500 saw Him go. Only 120 were there to receive it. But suddenly the Bible says there came a sound from heaven as if a rushing mighty wind. It filled all the house, but they were sitting. It appeared into them clothing tongues like as a fire. It set upon each of them and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

9:13A poor fisherman called Peter, stumbled out of an upper room and lifted his voice and said, this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And in the last days, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. May I say to you tonight that in the beginning, the church was born crying. Just as the baby in the natural is born crying, show the church when it came into existence was born crying. And from that tremendous inauguration, in the Old Testament, when the law was inaugurated, fire and smoke caused the mountain to tremble. But in the New Testament, the same power was not content to rest upon the mountains of the land, but rather it covered above the framework of human flesh. And now it was humanity that was trembling and shaking underneath the power and the presence of a holy righteous God who is alive forevermore.

10:14And who said, I want to dwell with you, the church fell into a tremendous onslaught of persecution. In the beginning, there was a tremendous famine in the land for the word of God. For example, you can go now to a local Bible bookstore and buy a New Testament for just a few cents. In the beginning, it was not so. A copy of the scriptures would cost you from 10 to $15,000. Every Torah was written by hand. People could not own the scriptures. It was an impossibility. Versescution arose against the church. Tremendous opposition. There were the apostolic fathers whose lives overlapped the apostles. Policarch being the most famous of them, who knew John the beloved. When they were martyred and killed off, church fathers arose on the scene, but her known in church history as aologist. These men began to apologize and explain away the scriptures, some of them running to save their own skins, later to come back and pick up the office of the bishop and carry on.

11:17Many of them were politicians. Many of them were not genuinely converted. There was a tremendous onslaught against the church and the church staggered beneath this particular onslaught. In the beginning, the word Christian and martyr were synonymous because one meant the other. If you were a Christian in about the year 100 AD or even before that, you also were up automatically for martyrdom. The church began to stagger beneath the pressures of onslaught. Out of that particular era of time, there was a group of people called the mountainist. The mountainist were people who believed in the gifts of the spirit. The church in history, the original church, was called a Catholic church. The word Catholic means universal. But through the centuries, it became known as the Roman Catholic Church and that is an entirely different scene.

12:17But out of this period, in the Renaissance period, and even the Dark Ages, the church in history, which we know now to be have been calm at least, the Roman Catholic Church, has always burned everything that opposed them. They have destroyed everything that opposed them. They have burned it in bonfires or they have burned them at stakes, one or the other. They have done everything they can to eradicate anything from the face of the earth that opposed them and their theologies. But they have made some very serious mistakes because in their effort to destroy, yet in their own writings, those people that they called heretics, they took the time in their own encyclopedias to write down what the so-called heretics believed. And in so doing, we have been able to discover from history that these people were really not heretics, but that these people sometimes

13:17were the last vestiges of the truth that existed in the world at that time. They called the mountainist heretics. But in reality, friend of mine, those mountainists, I have read after them, they lived in the gifts of the Spirit and they spoke with tongues and the church in history called them heretics. But the Bible said he left this world not without a witness, somewhere in the world through every generation, every century, every millennia, there has been a witness of the truth. The Bible says he left himself not without a witness, it has always been alive, somewhere surviving the mountainist, there rose a group of motorists. They are called in church history, motoristic monarchians or monarchians or patropassians or subbellians. They are listed as various names in Roman Catholic registers and encyclopedias. But these people were not heretics, just because they opposed the Trinity doctrine, did not classify them as heretics as far as God was concerned. They were not heretics, but they were people who believed

14:17in the Oneness of God. For example, subbellius himself wrote and left in the annals of history, he said, father, son, and Holy Ghost are identical. One God, three manifestations. There was the man whose name was Noetus. He said, quote, when father had not been born, he yet was justly styled father, and when it pleased him to undergo generation, having been begotten, he himself became his own son, not another's. He maintains that he who was seen in the flesh and was crucified is son, but the father it is who dwells in him. He said, Christ was the father himself, and he himself was born. This man in church history said, I know but one God, it was he that was born and suffered. There was, according to the Roman Catholic history, text, and chronology, and register of Roman Catholic Popes, a Pope whose name was Zephorinus. He was a Pope from 1999 to 217 AD.

15:17He wrote and said, I know that there is one God, Jesus Christ, and I know no other. Collect this between the years 217 and 222, also listed as a Roman Catholic Pope in Roman Catholic history said, Father and son are names of one indivisible spirit. The father took unto himself our flesh and made it one with himself. There was a man whose name was Prasician. He held to the doctrine that the gifts continued in the church. Prasician's God is the God Christ, invisible in the Father, and visible in the Son. He said in Christ is all without him nothing. Braxius maintains that there is only one God, the almighty creator of the world, and only God that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are the very self-same person. These men stand out, along with one whose name was Pope Stephen, who baptized in Jesus' name, until the church in history threatened on Nathema, and were going to cut him off. These people were not heretics,

16:18but rather they were the last messages of truth struggling to hold up the banner that a man called Jesus had transmitted to twelve injured unlearned fishermen, who said, but one God, I know only one of his name is Jesus, and beside him there is no other. Jesus himself said, I am the first and the last. I am Alpha and Omega. Isaiah said, beside me, there is no other God. I know not any. The Lord himself is God and the Lord. He is one. There was an Ethiopian unique. You know the story. Most of you know the story. He was cut away in the Spirit, and or rather he was on his way back to Ethiopia, and Philip was cut away in the Spirit, and was joined to this Ethiopian, on his way back to his homeland, evidently a convert to the Jewish faith, who had come to Jerusalem for the high holidays, and evidently had heard the preaching of John the Baptist. This man was a believer in this messianic ship, Philip preached to him baptism in Jesus' name,

17:20and he baptized him in water. I heard Brother Nathaniel Urshin tell that when our missionaries first went to Ethiopia, they discovered it in the land of Ethiopia. They were still baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. They did not know any other formula. How did they ever know about that? I'll tell you how they knew about that. There was a man called Philip, and there was an Ethiopian unique that got together, and the message has still survived until this very hour. I do not believe that this gospel ever went out. This candle, this flame has never vanished. It has never vanished. It may have flickered in the winds of opposition, but I want you to hear me tonight, that once the Holy Ghost of an Upper River, once the revelation of the Oneness of God was in the world, it has never ever totally been stuffed out. He left himself not without a witness. It has always survived some place, somewhere it has always flickered. I did a live radio broadcast, one hour per night, to a listening audience of over four million people. They called in and asked questions.

18:20It was a live radio broadcast. I challenged them. I said to them on the air without fear of paper, and without apology. I said to them, I have the truth. I have the only truth that exists, and I can prove it biblically, or I can prove it historically. Any way you want to go, I can prove it. It's the truth. It's just the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We have the truth, the truth. Jesus said it. Jesus said, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Free of what? Free of every other ideology, every other doctrine, every other dogma. That's why there's such a demonstration of the Spirit of God in power here. There's a revelation coming in upon us. We are suddenly beginning to understand who we are, and what it is we've got to hold of. Do you understand what you've got to hold of? Do you know who it is that lives inside of your heart and soul? I'll tell you who it is. It is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the Creator that said, let's there be light,

19:21and there was light. It is the same verses that rise, that bend rock. You shall know the truth, and it shall set you free. There was a man, there was a man in church history whose name was Huss. He was the Bohemian monk. He was the Bohemian priest. He somehow got a hold of God, and he abored the debauchery and the sin in his generation from the church.