DIRTY, SHIRTLESS, AND STINKING OF ALCOHOL

DIRTY, SHIRTLESS, AND STINKING OF ALCOHOL

John 14:6 ¶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

I love to talk about my testimony, actually it is not my testimony but the testimony of Jesus. I accepted Christ in August of 1973. It happened at the Lakefront in New Orleans by the Mardi Gras Fountain. Parris and I had just watched the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar and had been deeply effected by the crucifixion scene. We managed to move ourselves from the movie theatre on Canal Street to the lakefront and wandered into a gathering of Jesus freaks. They were singing Jesus songs accompanied by an acoustic guitar. All I can remember is how real Jesus appeared to me that night. He was real, my sinfulness had become real to me, and the power of forgiveness in His blood became real. I accepted Christ that night and forty years later I have never looked back. Little did I know that thousands of other young men and women were experiencing the same thing all over the country. The Jesus movement was in full swing, The Lord was doing something very special all across the land. Here is a quote from Vinson Synan’s book on the Century of the Holy Spirit as he remembers this unusual move of God.

“ (Chuck) Smith was the pastor of the small Calvary Chapel Foursquare Pentecostal Church in Costa Mesa, California. During a Sunday night service, about a dozen hippies showed up unexpectedly. They were dirty, shirtless, loud and smelled of alcohol and drugs. An older member of the church sent a note to Smith that read, “When are you going to throw them out?” Smith’s reply was, “I’m not going to throw them out. They were created in the image of God.”
The next Sunday night, the church overflowed with hippies who sat on the floor and even on the platform. Some of the older saints stalked out of the church—never to return—after some of the hippies sat in “their seats.” Amazingly, Smith chose the smelly hippies over the critics and a revolution began that turned Southern California upside down. In the next two years, Chuck Smith baptized more than fifteen thousand former drug addicts in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. News of the California revival spread across the nation as thousands of hippies flooded into local churches everywhere.”

Our God loves surprises. He loves to do things like they have never been done before. During His ministry He did some unusual things. He put spittle in a deaf man’s ears, made clay from spit and mud and anointed a blind man’s eyes (they were both healed), and baptized His followers in the Holy Spirit and marked the event by enabling them to speak in strange, foreign tongues. Maybe, just maybe He is about to move in one of His unprecedented ways in the earth. Don’t be surprised if some stinking street people reeking of alcohol and other things end up in your seat this Sunday. You could get offended or just say, “Jesus must be in the house”.