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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eric Walsh: Must Be the Music

Eric Walsh

Culture, Sex, and the Fight for Purity

Countdown to the Showdown

Culture, Spiritualism, and the War for Your Soul

We'll read our opening text and we'll go into the message.

We'll start in the book of Acts the 16th chapter.

The scripture says, and it came to pass as we went to prayer a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying.

The same followed Paul and us and cried saying, these men are the servants of the Most High God, which show unto us the way of salvation.

And this she did many days, but Paul being grieved, turned and said to the Spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.

And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught Paul and Silas and drew them into the marketplace unto the rulers.

A sermon, a sermon this morning is entitled The High Price of Holiness.

Father God, we thank you Lord for bringing us together in this place.

We thank you Lord for your word and your truth.

We ask now Lord that I would just be made a nail upon the wall, a rusty old sorry old nail, Lord, hammered in by the Holy Spirit.

That upon that nail, Lord, I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ so that Eric Walsh is not seen or heard this morning.

With that, Lord, we hear a message from the throne room of God.

Many times it's happened to me that while I've been preaching, there have been people who have been seemingly exuberant in the audience.

Now I come from churches where people respond.

Call and response is a part of the black liturgy of church services.

So in and of itself, that isn't abnormal, that we preach and someone shouts amen or preach on, brother, or whatever they might say.

But there have been times when the response has been so overwhelming by 1 particular individual that it's distracting.

And I can remember this year and I was in Birmingham, Alabama preaching at the 1 of the oldest largest black Adventist churches in the south, the main church there in Birmingham, the mother church, and there was a woman to my left who just kept shouting stuff I mean beyond amen beyond hallelujah she was saying stuff like you're my pastor you you're my man keep preaching and I said you know this again a little uncomfortable you know I'm trying to focus and preach here, and this woman is like throwing all kinds of stuff up at me here.

And finally, I stopped my sermon, and I said, my sister, please allow the Lord to speak.

Because basically we were both preaching a sermon.

Hers just was garbled, disjointed statements.

She threw 1 or 2 more out, just kind of snuck them in.

After church, I got a letter that afternoon after I did my seminar in the evening from a church member who complained that I had dealt too harshly with the woman.

That This is a woman who had joined the church in the last couple of years, and I had no place to tell this woman how she should respond to the Holy Spirit.

And as I was flying back to California, I took out my laptop and typed a very long letter back to the church and to this individual who decided to remain anonymous, except to tell me that it was someone who had gone to Oakwood, not with me, but they had gone to Oakwood as well.

So I wrote back a long letter and the text I used to defend my stance was this 1.

The text I used to say that just because people are saying Christian things does not mean that it is the Spirit of God moving on them.

Just because the words might be accurate, and her words in my opinion weren't even good words to be being said because she was focusing on me not on the word not on God not on anything so I I start our message this morning that way because I never heard back from anybody because I think when they went and read the text they saw exactly what I meant.

He knows when God has gained momentum and I'm a big sports fan so I know about momentum.

You know a basketball or football game can change drastically with 1 fumble or 1 turnover.

The whole game can change, the mood can swing, the momentum goes the opposite way, and 1 team that was clobbering the other team can then become the 1 being clobbered.

It's the same thing in the spiritual realm.

The devil is always looking in our lives for opportunities to change our spiritual momentum.

And 1 of the ways he has learned to do that is that he has learned that if he comes at you as if he is the enemy, your guard goes up and you often become more spiritual.

So what the devil has learned to do is to garb his disturbances, to clothe his disturbances in the garb of Christian rhetoric and wording so that when he comes at you, your guard is down and you take his momentum changing disturbances as if they come from God.

So that he can distract you and mislead you and so as I was preaching there and this woman did this and again I don't really mind people saying amen I actually prefer to know that the audience is alive and awake but this was getting to the point of being ridiculous and I knew that it was not the Spirit of God.

It's happened to me many times actually I could tell you stories from places even around the world I remember being in Jamaica and a lady coming out of the darkness of the wooded area there in Frankfield, Jamaica and walking out in front of...

I'm preaching, doing slides and everything, crusade, evangelism, And this woman walks out right in front of the pulpit right in the middle of the service.

And I have to admit, if you know anything about Jamaica, you know that they don't do voodoo, they do something called obia.

And it happened that my sermon that night was entitled, Duppies, Dummies, and Demons.

Duppie is the Jamaican popular word for ghosts.

So I was talking about spiritualism and I was railing on Obeah and Voodoo saying it has no power, God is all-powerful.

Now in Jamaica they don't have, at least where we were in Jamaica, they didn't have sound ordinances.

So they had loudspeakers on top of the tent.

People would come out of their houses in their pajamas when I made altar calls because they could hear the sermon so far away.

I'm not sure it was, you know, the nicest way to do it, but somebody probably wanted to sleep.

But this woman came down, and I remember the same principle, that it was a distraction.

The way it was done, how it was done, it was a distraction.

I remember preaching at Compton and a man standing up in the audience and arguing my sermon and in the middle of what I was preaching, and again it was the same spirit that clothed in the garb of Christianity, someone would challenge or come against.

So that the appeal, the process of calling people to God would be watered down or it would be distracted.

Ah, now, because it's obvious when it's like that.

So I set that up so that you can see that it's obvious.

Paul and Silas were, they were doing a good work.

I want to read, I want to read what she was saying again.

A certain damsel with the spirit of divination, verse 16, met us.

Now she was someone who predicted the future and made her master's money.

I'm gonna quote the book A Trip into the Supernatural again by Roger Murneau that if you read it that was the power he asked the demons for.

When he was a demon worshiper he asked for the power to predict the horses.

And he made so much money that in the book or in the videos he tells that he eventually got kicked out of some of the betting houses in French Canada because he was winning so much.

The demons have the ability, not so much in my opinion to tell you the future, but they are very wise and can analyze what is most likely to happen.

And of course the devil can predict what he can then make happen.

So the devil can pick the horse to win and cause that horse to win Because God isn't into horse racing That's why I would never gamble on sports because I don't know who does whose side the devil might really be on I'm not picking sides So he was able to do that.

So this this is not that she was just a lucky person or something, she truly had a spirit in her.

There was a demon at work in her and the demon saw that Paul's preaching was a threat to his is his anti-christian anti-biblical influence that he was having on the area.

He had the people in a lot over money and over the power to divine the future and so he did not want Paul to come in and mess that up.

But the demon was wise enough to know that if the demon came out and said these are the enemy these are our enemies they are of God we should destroy them that somehow people would have probably sided with Paul so instead the woman says in verse 17 she followed and said these men are the servants of the Most High God would show us the way of salvation.

That's exactly what they were trying to do.

Yet Paul, if you just go down a little bit more, after many days Paul being grieved, he was patient with her.

I did too, a half a sermon in Birmingham.

I tried to hint, but eventually he turned and said to the Spirit, he didn't speak to the woman, he said to the Spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.

So here she is saying the right things under the unction of the enemy.

The right words are being spoken but they don't come from a converted heart.

The words are correct but they are coming, literally coming, from the enemy.

Ah, so let me fast forward because we're talking about the high price of holiness this morning.

And I want to tell you that it's the same principle I believe being used, the same efforts are being exerted against the Church of God in the last days.

I believe that when we look at some of what we call now called contemporary Christian music and recent gospel music, I believe that a lot of it functions under the same type of spirit.

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Series

Eric Walsh: Must Be the Music

Countdown to the Showdown

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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