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Now, Milton . . . When I say Milton, a lot of people don’t even know who he is anymore. They are not even being educated anymore, it seems like. But he had an experience in his life.

“Blind men seldom quote books, but it is not so with Milton. The prodigious power, readiness, and accuracy of his memory, as well as the confidence he felt in it, are proved by his setting himself, several years after he had become totally blind, to compose his Treatise on Christian Doctrine, which, made up as it is of Scriptural texts, would seem to require perpetual reference to the Sacred Volume.”

Did you catch that? AFTER he was blind, he took up his theological work.

“A still more extraordinary enterprise was that of the Latin Dictionary—a work which, one would imagine, might easily wear out a sound pair of eyes. After five years of blindness, he undertook these two vast works, along with Paradise Lost.”

I never knew that! A Latin Dictionary, are you kidding me? And then a theological, verse-by-verse stuff that he believed and taught. Doing that after he was blind.

That is what encouraged Helen Keller when she read “Paradise Lost.” That’s where we get that.

And so, here we are, we got eyes, we got ears, we get put up against the wall. We get discouraged. We faint. The assurance I got for my salvation finally came when I realized that I was calling God a liar. What do you mean? Well, He saved me. There was a change. There was some rough stuff afterwards. And I could never get it settled because of all the different preaching and teaching I heard about how you could do it, you could not do it, how to be saved.

Finally, I went to the Bible and I looked at that. And God took me down the Romans road again, “Whosoever that shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” I went through those verses over and over again. And in my mind, I was saying, ‘Lord, why do You keep bringing me over here, man?’

It was like a voice came out of nowhere, right? I use the word ‘stupid.’ ‘Because you are stupid!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you keep calling Me a liar!’

Do you like being called a liar? People used to have duels and kill one another over stuff like that. And here, Christians go around, after having been there when it happened—when they got saved—and went through some difficulties not knowing the Scriptures to grow in the Lord, they started accusing God of something He didn’t do. Because the Devil’s done got them in their minds. Listen, if there is a time and a place and you know you left this life and you asked Jesus Christ to save you, then you went into the light and you are no more in darkness.

It’s the Devil’s job to confuse us and to put us against the wall. But it is our job to cry out ‘Abba, Father!” To cry out to God for help! And I’m telling you, the Devil is slick like this. If we don’t get our prayers answered immediately, if we don’t start getting blessed, like we think we should (because we are watching TV and all this other junk), then we accuse God! And I’m telling you, it’s hard to get your prayers answered when you are calling God a liar!

If you are His kid, you are under Him. He is a holy God, He is a just God, He is a righteous God. When you mess up you need to come to Him and get that thing cleaned up. And when it’s cleaned up and you are waiting for answers—just wait! Why? I read the Scriptures. And I read about all sorts of characters and studies that are in this Bible, and I’m finding out that that is the way it works! He’s the Boss! Oh man!

So, when all else fails, guess what? Stay with Him when all else fails. Then you’ll be used to just going to Him when the stuff hits the fan. It will! Because we are proved. Our faith is proved. Do you want to come forth as gold? Do you want to have a good judgment at the Judgment Seat of Jesus Christ? Then you are going to have to learn to suffer with Him. For righteousness sake, do right. You have to learn to get right when you are wrong. Just admit it, just get right!

You are going to have to really believe what the Book says. And this Book should be your final authority. Don’t trust in yourself. Don’t trust in the confidence of the flesh, trust in God. It’s all about God. This is a God thing. If you are saved, there is a supernatural event that happened to you. You have a supernatural Book—this King James Bible—that goes with it, you got the Holy Ghost you are sealed with. I mean, you got a convicter, a teacher, a comforter. You got Jesus Christ wrapped up in that Holy Ghost inside of you. What a blessing!

But you gotta believe that! You gotta practice the presence of God every day. Be a creature of habit. Talk to Him. Tell Him you are sorry, as many times as you got to, you just do it. Do you know what that does for Him? That makes Him, like, personal. It puts Him right there with you. And when you don’t do that, you ignore Him. He’s somewhere off. Like Earl Hughes said, ‘a spare time.’ You’re just waiting for a flat tire, so you can go get Him out of the trunk.

You don’t want a God like that, and God doesn’t want a kid like you. He wants you get close to Him, grow and have fellowship with Him. That’s why He saved us.

So, whether in the valley or on the mountain top, whether being a bad kid all dirtied up, or not, you need Him to clean you. You need to come home and have that stuff taken care of. If you don’t maintain that, I’m telling you, you are just loading up a wagon full of junk. Eventually you’re going to start hitting that top of that hill with that wagon, and when it starts to go down, it ain’t gonna stop—and when it does—I ain’t gonna say it won’t stop, it will stop—abruptly—and everything in there will just cover you up. Spiritually speaking, you will be so depressed and discouraged and darkness—you’ll think there is no hope again.

I’m telling you, there is hope! But you didn’t have to fill that wagon with a load of stuff. You put the stuff in the wagon. God knows how to take it, how to empty your wagon, clean you up, give you peace in your heart, and you can be led by the peace of God instead of your stupid mind. It messes up at times, because you are not developing the mind of Christ.

The Holy Ghost’s purpose is to convict us of things that are wrong. It’s our job to receive the conviction and to tell God we are sorry

You need to get the slate clean again. Get the Blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, to cleanse you. Make you have peace.