HomeARC ML 2544
WHAT ARE YE AMONG SO MANY? DO 2544 6/89
1. Since we're all together now, why don't you lead us in prayer, Mama? (Maria: Thank You Jesus for this wonderful opportunity to meet together with Thy Prophet & with You, Lord. TYJ! We're so privileged, Lord, to sit at Thy feet & hear from You. We ask now that You will strengthen Dad & really anoint him & empower him to give Your Message which You have for us, & which You have for the World. Strengthen him & give him extra anointing for this task, Lord!
2. (We rebuke the Enemy & any evil devices he might try to bring upon us, Lord, any distractions, anything that would not be of You, we just rebuke it, in Jesus' name! We withstand the Enemy, Lord, & we know that You're going to come through in Your power, & that You're going to answer our prayer. You promised that when we ask, You will do it, that You might be glorified. Please strengthen each one of us & give us receptive, hearing ears & open hearts to Thy Message, in Jesus' name!)
QUIETNESS!
3. PTL! Hallelujah! TYJ! Help us to hear from Thee most of all, Lord! Amen, thank You Jesus, praise You Lord! (Sings:)
"Blessed quietness, holy quietness,
Such assurance in my soul!
On the stormy sea, He speaks peace to me,
And the billows cease to roll!"
4. Hallelujah! (Tongues) "Hear ye the voice of thy Father & listen thou to the Words of David, for they come from Me!" Hallelujah! Thank You Jesus! Praise You Lord! That old song came to me as I was praying about this meeting, how beautiful quietness is. "In quietness & in confidence shall thy strength be."--Isa.30:15.
5. There are a lot of verses about quietness, can you quote any of them? (Fam: "Be still & know that I am God."--Psa.46:10) I had Techi memorise these once upon a time because it's so difficult for her to hold still & be quiet. You should really admire her for sitting here without moving. She has a hard time being quiet, she's so full of energy & joy! She's a bouncy girl! TTL! TYJ!
6. This is a nice quiet room here. I felt it was more secure than that other meeting room where there are not only a lot of distractions, but people outside could possibly hear me once I get warmed up & start shouting! So this makes a very secure room for a lecture room. PTL! The last class we had in that other room I had to really try to remember to keep my voice down, but in here I feel we're much more secure.
7. I'm reminded of that famous old tape, "The Endtime Whispering Vision." (ML#334) We had a cook once at the Florida Soul Clinic, Bob, an old drunk from Skid Row who came to the Lord & became a very valuable man. He cooked & he kind of managed our house, an old rooming house that had been full of drunks & bums in Miami. Whenever we got short of funds & food, he'd go out & do what amounted to some of our first real provisioning! He even used to go down to the Howard Johnson's restaurant & get us ice cream!
8. I found out later that whenever we'd have any visitors, it didn't matter at all who it was, he'd bring them into the livingroom, sit them down & say, "Oh Dave's busy right now, but you need to listen to this while you're waiting."--He was a little bit authoritarian. Then he'd put the tape on nice & loud, sometimes it would even bother me upstairs, of "The Endtime Whispering Vision"! He felt that was the most important thing for them to hear to prepare them for whatever they had come there for!
9. Sometimes it would be perfect strangers, Systemites, salesmen, & they'd get a real dose of what the future was going to be like! That was his way of witnessing, he figured that was the best thing to give them. He used to put on the original tape with my voice whispering away about the Antichrist & the Tribulation!
10. Well, we need to be more & more like that all the time, & try to use nice, almost soundproof, secure, out-of-sight, out-of-mind meeting rooms where we can sing softly & very quietly, as well as teach & fellowship & worship together, all the things you need to do in your daily devotions etc. We all need to learn to be as quiet as possible, & especially avoid being an annoyance or a nuisance to the neighbours. Thank God, I think we have pretty well learned to do that now, although I hear that some of the rest of the Family have been pretty loud sometimes.
11. I didn't intend to preach you a sermon on security this morning, but maybe that's something the Lord knows the whole Family needs more of now! Remember, as I speak, I'm not only speaking to you, but I'm speaking to our whole Family worldwide who also need to remember these things. What we do & the example we set, they should do likewise. PTL? (Fam: Amen.)
12. We don't have too many face-to-face classes any more because we feel that you should learn to live on the written Word, the printed Word. You should be able to live on that & eat of that, just as well as the rest of our Family around the World does who have never met with me face-to-face, most of whom have never even seen me.
ANONYMITY!
13. Because of our anonymity, being incognito & on the run most of the time, we have managed to survive now for some 20 years!--In spite of having earned a rather dubious reputation with lots of enemies! The first that Mama can even remember about the Family is that we were secretive & we were sort of hiding out in the Club at Huntington Beach.
14. I'll never forget the time the fire chief walked in one day while we were having a class, & he started asking me, "How many people are here? How many people do you have here at night?" I said, "Sir, do you realise you're interrupting a religious service, which is against the law in the State of California?" He was a little taken aback that I was challenging him when he was intending to challenge me! I said, "I think if you want to talk to me you should come at some other time. We are having a religious meeting here right now, so would you please excuse us?" And he said, "Oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, I'll see you later."--And he never came back!
15. They were just trying to harass us & be annoying.--Because they were afraid of us. People are afraid of things they don't know & they don't understand. They thought maybe we were a bunch of Red radical revolutionists that were trying to overthrow the government, or maybe we were making bombs! It's really pitiful what the World thinks about us sometimes. So they were naturally afraid of us just because they didn't understand us. But when I spoke with authority & I spoke the truth & challenged him that he was out of line & that I knew what I was doing, he backed off right away. "Resist the Devil & he shall flee from you!"--Jam.4:7. TTL! Amen?
16. But one of the best things to do is avoid the Devil, stay out of his way, detour around him and be quiet. Sometimes you have to come out in the open & explain who you are & what you're doing, & our PR officers & materials are for that purpose. We try to help people understand us. But on the other hand, we also try to avoid having to explain ourselves, & one way to do it is to avoid their curiosity.
17. By keeping from attracting their attention you can avoid them becoming curious. Sometimes what they don't know won't hurt'm, but sometimes a little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all! Of course, that's what the Devil has been up to for years, giving the World a little bit of false knowledge about us to try to turn them against us, or playing up & exaggerating some of our peculiarities.
18. So it's wise for us to meet secretly so they don't get afraid of numbers. You'll notice one of the first things dictators do or martial law does, is prohibit the meeting of more than three people in one place at one time & that sort of thing. They're afraid of people getting together & organising & becoming of one mind. They're afraid they might challenge the System & the authorities.
19. They're scared to death right now about that youth meeting in Tiananmen Square in China. Even the army & the government have been afraid to touch them because of their vast numbers.--Not that they are necessarily so physically in danger from those helpless unarmed civilian students, but they're afraid of their power over the minds of the masses, & they're afraid of their publicity & the publicising of their message. But they're also afraid of attacking them physically & violently for fear of World opinion. The publicity & the openness of that meeting in some ways has been its protection. (It was--until the hard-liners finally took over, cracked down & murdered'm!)
EARLY DAYS PUBLICITY!
20. That was much the way we operated in the early days.--We had a lot of publicity! We marched, we had sit-ins, we picketed, we were in the headlines of the local paper almost every single day, week after week, believe it or not! Everybody knew about us & everybody heard! If they didn't actually see us, they read it in the papers! The court cases & church sit-ins & marches & all of these things were very public.
21. We operated very openly, carried placards & had beachfront baptisms where there were thousands of people on the beach! I must admit it was a little difficult with those big breakers rolling in at Huntington Beach trying to find a moment when you could dunk the person under safely so that they weren't ripped out of your arms & rolled onto the beach! That was the most difficult baptismal service I ever held!
22. But it gained terrific publicity! It really got out the Message! People were astounded! Sometimes during those baptismal services, people would come up & want to be baptised right then, it was amazing! They knew they needed it! It almost reminded you of some of the public baptisms of John & Jesus in the early days.
23. Jesus' early days were rife with publicity, that's what it was all about! In those days publicity was the name of the game! They preached openly!--Even right in the Temple, the hotbed of their enemies, the religious authorities of the day. The accepted, established religion, whatever it may be, is always the main enemy of God's children, His True Church.
24. But in those early days, the whole idea was big publicity! We carried it from Huntington Beach on across the nation! A hundred or more of our red-robed prophets would come marching down the street either barefooted or just with sandals on.--And those huge staves they carried were not just little willow sticks, many of them were 2 inches in diameter, 7 feet tall, higher than their heads!--Huge staffs! And when they came marching down the street in unison...(Tongues) "Such was the way of your Father in those days, it was different!" They came along pounding those staves, "Boom! Boom!", & it was like thunder! Even the police were practically frozen with fright!
25. We marched through the streets of the biggest cities in the U.S.A. I'll never forget when we marched in Pittsburgh, we even defied the traffic signal lights! The police actually protected us & gave us a virtual police escort to where we just marched right on through the lights & everything, it didn't matter, & the people all stood back. I think they thought maybe it was the end of the World! It was a testimony, it was a tremendous Message! They sensed & knew what it was, even if we didn't say a word, that we were preaching the end of the World!--"Repent!"
THE WORLD HAS HEARD!
26. So that's how it was in those days, but now, 20 years later, the World has heard the Message, the whole World has heard the Message! I doubt if there's anybody on Earth who hasn't heard, unless they're in the most backward, remote, isolated area that has no newspapers or radio or anything, which is unlikely. But maybe there are a few places like that where they've never heard of us by one name or another, or heard our Message, literally proclaiming the end of the World!--"Repent, because it's the End!" Isn't that really our Message?--"Believe on Jesus, He's our only Saviour, & this wicked Earth is about to be judged!"
27. We have done our job, we have gone to the ends of the Earth, we've preached the Gospel in all the World & to as many creatures as we could get ahold of, even the animals! "Creatures" includes all creatures, great & small!--So that they have heard! There was a great wave of publicity & popularity featured by the networks & television & newspapers. I'll tell you, God did His best to get out the Message!--Even the Devil got out the Message in the ways he fought us!
NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY!
28. As Hollywood says, & as book writers & publishers say, "There's no such thing as bad publicity!" One way to make a real hit movie or book is to get it banned somewhere in some country. Everybody wants to see it then, everybody wants to buy the book then. All that publicity for that human devil's book, "Satanic Verses," probably did more to help sell that book than anything else! In fact, Khomeini's condemnation of the book & his pronounced execution sentence on Salmon Rushdie is what literally helped publicise & sell it! It would be interesting to know the real figures on it, just how much it sold after Khomeini publicised it! That was one of the worst things the Devil could do! Sometimes the Devil's pretty dumb!--Although other times he's pretty clever.
29. After the good wave of publicity about us had rolled across the Earth & we were very popular for awhile, then that began to peter out & the Lord had to think of something else to keep up their interest & keep it going! So He then let some of our very shocking doctrines & practices & policies be revealed to the World by the Devil's own forces, & the wave of publicity kept rolling!--And it's never really stopped! Then began the bad publicity, & it has rolled, & in some ways it's almost made us more popular than ever!
30. Don't kid yourself, the World loves to hear about us! They love to hear all about our sexiness! They wish to the Devil that they could join us & enjoy such freedom! But that has kept the Message rolling, just as it did with Jesus. Some of His radical doctrines were just as unpopular & made the religious System just as furious as ours do! I'm sure the Lord allowed our sexiness not only to liberate us & help us to know the freedom that He intended for us to have--intended for Man to have from the beginning, because that's the way it was--but I'm sure that He has also used it to popularise us with some, & to stir up our enemies to publicise us to the entire World!
THE THREE CAMPS!--AND THE MODERNISTS!
31. The World, in a sense, is divided into three camps, just like they were at Jesus' crucifixion. First of all, there was the little band of those who loved Him & were followers. Then there was another little band of His bitter enemies who were out to kill Him, & were killing Him. But the vast majority of the people at Jesus' crucifixion were the indifferent, the unconcerned, many of whom had not yet formed an opinion. In a way, the crucifixion was almost like the final dividing of the sheep from the goats. Many were won by His crucifixion, like the Centurion.--Mat.27:54.
32. So it has been with us! We are a very small band compared to the other Christians in the major denominations. The Catholics claim 900 million members!--Of course, they count the population of whole countries that are supposed to be predominantly Catholic. The largest Protestant church in the World, the Methodists, claim a membership of 24 million!
33. Of course, the Methodists have about as little religion as you can get & are mostly Modernists who don't even believe the Bible any more, don't believe in Salvation, don't even believe Jesus is the Messiah! They believe He was simply a great teacher, a great ethics expert & all of that.--Just as my Mother used to think when she was a blatant atheist! She said she studied all the various prophets & philosophers, but she certainly recognised that Jesus had the best system of ethics & was the greatest philosopher the World had ever known!
34. There are many Modernists who believe that Jesus certainly was a great Man, perhaps even a Prophet. Other religions also believe that He was another Prophet, like Mohammed etc. Some of the largest churches, like the Methodists, are dominated by total unbelievers who no longer believe the Bible to be the authoritative Word of God. They're like the Sadducees, and that's why they were so sad, you see, because they didn't believe in the Resurrection, they didn't believe in the Next Life, they didn't even really believe in God, or that the Bible was the Word of God. The Sadducees were the Modernists of that day.--Acts 23:8.
35. But the largest group in the World is the one that God is trying to sway one way or the other! We're a very small group. We're up to something like 16,000 Members, including DFers & those who are regularly keeping up with our teachings & literature & responding etc. We have a little over 12,000 TRFers who are really full-fledged, indoctrinated Members who help to support us, as well as evangelise the World.
36. What is a mere 12,000, half of them children & half of the other half women? Who are these? Who are these compared to so great a multitude of even the other religionists, the 900 million Catholics & the 24 million Methodists! Even all the Protestants together don't add up to as many as the Catholics. What are we to all of these?
THE LOAVES & FISHES!
37. It reminds me of what the Disciples said when Jesus was about to feed the multitude. There were 5,000 men in one group & 4,000 in another, not counting probably an equal number of women and even more children! There were thousands & thousands of people, & Jesus said to His disciples, "Have ye any meat? Have you anything for them to eat? How many loaves have ye?"--Mat.14:15-21; 15:32-38; Jn.6:5-13.
38. He had compassion on the multitude. In one case they'd been there for about three days, night & day! They apparently just laid down on the grass & pulled their clokes over them & slept at night. Israel was a fairly warm country & it must have been the summertime, because I'll tell you, their winters are cold! They wouldn't have been sitting out there on the grass in wintertime!--It even snows in Jerusalem! We went through one winter there & we were glad to get out of it, for more reasons than one!
39. But He said to His Disciples, "Have ye any meat?" They said, "All we've been able to rustle up is this little lad who has a picnic lunch with five loaves & two fishes!--But what are these among so many?"--Thousands of people! All Jesus said was, "Bring them to Me!" And as He blessed them & broke them, they grew & grew & multiplied & multiplied until they fed those thousands & thousands of people! And even afterwards, the Disciples were very saving & good on recycling, they went around & picked up 12 baskets full of scraps that the people couldn't even eat!
40. So what are ye amongst so many? I'll tell you, when we're gone, they're going to still be picking up the scraps of the Food & the Word that we gave them & fed them by the millions & millions of copies!
41. When I first told you that we were going to give the millions to the billions, you probably thought, "Oh, that's one of Dad's big exaggerations, he's trying to inspire us & encourage us. That's great `evangelistically-speaking' talk to inspire the dumb sheep, & somebody might even believe it. You know Dad, you know how he exaggerates & speaks in big terms & figures!" Well, all you have to do is read last year's end-of-the-year report to see the proof of what we have accomplished, the millions & millions of pieces of literature we passed out, "the loaves & the fishes," to billions of people!
THE WARNING TRACT!
42. I remember when the only thing we had to pass out was the little Warning Tract! In the beginning we had nothing at all, no literature! I said, "We need something to leave with these people after we've witnessed to them & they've seen us & heard our Message vocally. Fine, we're winning souls, we're doing great, but we've got to have something to leave with them. We can't afford much, but we'll have to have something we can turn out on our mimeograph machine." And we figured out a little tract that had the whole Message condensed down, & as I recall it was nothing but Scripture & Grandmother's Warning Prophecy. It had the whole story from start to finish, I think it practically went from Genesis to Revelation with all the major Scriptures we thought the World needed to know!--The whole story, from the Beginning to the Endtime!
43. It was just a little tract that was half the size of a sheet of letter-size paper, folded just once so that it had four pages, & it had the whole Message right there! We sure have gotten windier, haven't we?--Ha! We rolled them off first on mimeograph machines, then we got printers who offered to print them, & we passed that out by the tens of thousands! You've all seen it printed in the Books (ML#655, Vol.5), but can anybody remember getting one of those little original Warning Tracts? That's all we had, our little "loaves & fishes," but we passed them out by the thousands & it was amazing how it grew & multiplied!
WE PROVOKE THEM TO JEALOUSY!
44. Now the Message has gone out by the millions to the billions! The World has heard about us & has heard our Message, they know what we preach! A lot of the church people don't even consider us Christians! I would say at least the World is fair, they consider us a Fundamentalist Christian cult with a lot of crazy doctrines, sex & blah blah! The sex is the thing they like to promote the most! The World loves to read about it & wish they could be there & participate! The church people love it too, don't kid yourself!
45. What was the matter with the Pharisees?--They were filled with envy!--Mat.27:18. Envy of Jesus & His Disciples' freedom!--Freedom from the Law! They constantly broke the Law--the religious Law, the Laws of Moses--& they were constantly criticised for doing so by their enemies! They were envious, they were jealous, extremely jealous! Paul said that we provoke them to jealousy with our zeal!--2Cor.9:2.
46. So it only takes one little tiny spark to ignite such a bomb! I guess I'm the spark & you're the bomb! I just ignited you & you went out & exploded, & the whole World heard the boom! Think of it! It's amazing! I sometimes lie in bed at night thinking & praying & saying, "Lord, it sure had to be You! We couldn't have done it ourselves!" I'm just absolutely astounded at what so few of us have accomplished!
OUR FINAL WITNESS!
47. Well, our enemies finally began to really be horrible & violent, inciting people to persecute us, even kill us!--Just like Jesus' enemies finally did to Him. Jesus & the Disciples had to then go underground & be much more secretive.--Until about the last week of His life. Then He knew they were going to kill Him anyhow, so He came out in the open again & even went back & preached in the Temple, of all things! And then, of course, they knew they had to kill Him.--Mat.26:3,4.
48. If our life follows anything like that example, it could be that we will be like the Two Prophets in Revelation, outstanding Witnesses in the Last Days of this dispensation!--Rev.11:3-12. That'll be probably the last time we'll ever come out in the open until Jesus comes, & then we'll all be out in the open, thank the Lord, but on our way Up where they can't touch us! TTL!
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family
