Acts 4:31 And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost… How well I remember a sermon I preached at a great outdoor meeting in the upper part of this State! For several days in that place prayer had been offered for the success of the service, and I had myself been unusually prayerful, and we had a Pentecostal blessing while I was preaching it. That afternoon I took the train for a great outdoor meeting in Ohio. I said to myself: "This sermon was blessed to-day, and it is fresh in my mind, and I will preach it to-morrow in Ohio." And I did preach it, but not in as prayerful a spirit, and I think no one else had been praying about it, and it turned into the most inane and profitless discourse that I ever delivered. It was practically the same sermon, but on Wednesday it had on it a power that comes from the secret place of thunder, and on Thursday it had on it no such power at all. Oh! pray for us! Poor sermons in the pulpit are the curse of God on a prayerless parish. We ministers and preachers want the power a man gets when he is alone, the door locked; on his knees at midnight; with such a burden of souls upon him that makes him cry out, first in lamentation and then in raptures. Let all the Sabbath-school teachers, and Bible-class instructors, and all reformers, and all evangelists, and all ministers know that diplomas, and dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, and treatises, and libraries are not the source of moral and spiritual achievement, but that the room of prayer, where no one but God is present and no one but God hears, is the secret place of thunder. Secret? Ah, yes! So secret that comparatively few ever find it. At Boscobel, England, we visited a house where a king was once hid. No one, unless it were pointed out to him, could find the door in the floor through which the king entered his hiding-place. When there hidden the armed pursuers looked in vain for him, and afterward through an underground passage, far out in the fields, he came out in the open air. So this imperial power of spiritual influence has a hiding-place, a secret place which few know, and it comes forth sometimes in strange and mysterious ways, and far off from the place where it was hidden. You can find it only by diligent searching. But you may find it, and some of you will find it, and I wish you might all find it, the secret place of thunder. (T. De Witt Talmage.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. |
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