The Code Of The Holy Spirit Order Printed Copy

Author: Perry Stone
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About the Book

"The Code of the Holy Spirit" by Perry Stone explores the mysterious and powerful work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. Stone presents teachings, insights, and supernatural experiences that reveal the secret messages and hidden codes found in Scripture related to the Holy Spirit. Through this book, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit's role in their lives and how to access His divine guidance and power.

Billy Graham

Billy Graham (born November 7, 1918, Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.—died February 21, 2018, Montreat, North Carolina), American evangelist whose large-scale preaching missions, known as crusades, and friendship with numerous U.S. presidents brought him to international prominence. Conversion and early career The son of a prosperous dairy farmer, Billy Graham grew up in rural North Carolina. In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, he underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ.” In 1936 he left his father’s dairy farm to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, but stayed for only a semester because of the extreme fundamentalism of the institution. He transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa, graduated in 1940, and was ordained a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. Convinced that his education was deficient, however, Graham enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. While at Wheaton, he met and married (1943) Ruth Bell, daughter of L. Nelson Bell, a missionary to China. By the time Graham graduated from Wheaton in 1943, he had developed the preaching style for which he would become famous—a simple, direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension. “Sincerity,” he observed many years later, “is the biggest part of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.” After a brief and undistinguished stint as pastor of Western Springs Baptist Church in the western suburbs of Chicago, Graham decided to become an itinerant evangelist. He joined the staff of a new organization called Youth for Christ in 1945 and in 1947 served as president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Evangelism Graham’s emergence as an evangelist came at a propitious moment for 20th-century Protestants. Protestantism in the United States was deeply divided as a result of controversies in the 1920s between fundamentalism and modernism (a movement that applied scholarly methods of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Bible). The public image of fundamentalists was damaged by the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools in Tennessee; in his writings about the trial, the journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken successfully portrayed all fundamentalists as uneducated country bumpkins. In response to these controversies, most fundamentalists withdrew from the established Protestant denominations, which they regarded as hopelessly liberal, and retreated from the larger society, which they viewed as both corrupt and corrupting. Although Graham remained theologically conservative, he refused to be sectarian like other fundamentalists. Seeking to dissociate himself from the image of the stodgy fundamentalist preacher, he seized on the opportunity presented by new media technologies, especially radio and television, to spread the message of the gospel. In the late 1940s Graham’s fellow evangelist in Youth for Christ, Charles Templeton, challenged Graham to attend seminary with him so that both preachers could shore up their theological knowledge. Graham considered the possibility at length, but in 1949, while on a spiritual retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, he decided to set aside his intellectual doubts about Christianity and simply “preach the gospel.” After his retreat, Graham began preaching in Los Angeles, where his crusade brought him national attention. He acquired this new fame in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist’s preaching and anticommunist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” The huge circus tent in which Graham preached, as well as his own self-promotion, lured thousands of curious visitors—including Hollywood movie stars and gangsters—to what the press dubbed the “canvas cathedral” at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. From Los Angeles, Graham undertook evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, eventually earning international renown. Despite his successes, Graham faced criticism from both liberals and conservatives. In New York City in 1954 he was received warmly by students at Union Theological Seminary, a bastion of liberal Protestantism; nevertheless, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union and one of the leading Protestant thinkers of the 20th century, had little patience for Graham’s simplistic preaching. On the other end of the theological spectrum, fundamentalists such as Bob Jones, Jr., Carl McIntire, and Jack Wyrtzen never forgave Graham for cooperating with the Ministerial Alliance, which included mainline Protestant clergy, in the planning and execution of Graham’s storied 16-week crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1957. Such cooperation, however, was part of Graham’s deliberate strategy to distance himself from the starchy conservatism and separatism of American fundamentalists. His entire career, in fact, was marked by an irenic spirit. Graham, by his own account, enjoyed close relationships with several American presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. (Although Graham met with Harry Truman in the Oval Office, the president was not impressed with him.) Despite claiming to be apolitical, Graham became politically close to Richard Nixon, whom he had befriended when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president. During the 1960 presidential campaign, in which Nixon was the Republican nominee, Graham met in Montreaux, Switzerland, with Norman Vincent Peale and other Protestant leaders to devise a strategy to derail the campaign of John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, in order to secure Nixon’s election and prevent a Roman Catholic from becoming president. Although Graham later mended relations with Kennedy, Nixon remained his favourite politician; indeed, Graham all but endorsed Nixon’s reelection effort in 1972 against George McGovern. As Nixon’s presidency unraveled amid charges of criminal misconduct in the Watergate scandal, Graham reviewed transcripts of Oval Office tape recordings subpoenaed by Watergate investigators and professed to be physically sickened by his friend’s use of foul language. Legacy of Billy Graham Graham’s popular appeal was the result of his extraordinary charisma, his forceful preaching, and his simple, homespun message: anyone who repents of sins and accepts Jesus Christ will be saved. Behind that message, however, stood a sophisticated organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, incorporated in 1950, which performed extensive advance work in the form of favourable media coverage, cooperation with political leaders, and coordination with local churches and provided a follow-up program for new converts. The organization also distributed a radio program, Hour of Decision, a syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer,” and a magazine, Decision. Although Graham pioneered the use of television for religious purposes, he always shied away from the label “televangelist.” During the 1980s, when other television preachers were embroiled in sensational scandals, Graham remained above the fray, and throughout a career that spanned more than half a century few people questioned his integrity. In 1996 Graham and his wife received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States, and in 2001 he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). Graham concluded his public career with a crusade in Queens, New York, in June 2005. Graham claimed to have preached in person to more people than anyone else in history, an assertion that few would challenge. His evangelical crusades around the world, his television appearances and radio broadcasts, his friendships with presidents, and his unofficial role as spokesman for America’s evangelicals made him one of the most recognized religious figures of the 20th century.

iwo jima and the monumental sacrifice

“Some people wonder all their lives if they made a difference,” Ronald Reagan once said. Then he added, “The Marines don’t have that problem.” That was certainly true of the Marines who fought and died on a little island called Iwo Jima seventy years ago now. In the final phase of the war in the Pacific, Iwo Jima was strategic and essential to America and Japan — and it would cost them both dearly. Two out of every three Marines on Iwo Jima were killed or wounded before the Americans took the island. The fierce, heroic struggle was captured in what would become the most famous photograph of the war: Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. Joe Rosenthal’s photograph, like the larger-than-life men he captured on camera, became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Though dedicated to the service and sacrifice of the Marines in all of America’s wars, it is still often referred to simply as the “Iwo Jima Memorial.” It is the tallest bronze statue in the world. The soldier figures are each over thirty feet tall, and the rifles are sixteen feet long. Photographs, to use Lance Morrow’s phrase, “imprison time in a rectangle,” but they can never tell the whole story. Raising the flag on Mount Suribachi wasn’t the moment of victory — a triumphant point between war and peace. Three of the six men who raised the flag on February 23 would be killed in action on Iwo Jima in a battle that would rage on for another month. The flag represented hope when it was raised — it did not represent victory. Worthy Sacrifices The last time I visited the Iwo Jima monument, it was a lovely evening in Arlington. Visitors who walked around the base of the great bronze spoke with hushed voices. Even the selfie-snapping was reserved. The bronze giants basked in the warmth of the last light, and the flag snapped in the wind, much like the first time. It made me feel proud and humble at the same time. From the bluff, I could see across the Potomac the tops of America’s other monuments huddled along the great expanse leading to the Capitol. Marble and bronze — the stuff of enduring memory — worthy of the sacrifices they commemorate. At the time I was at Arlington, Christians were being shot, beheaded, even crucified by the Islamic State, and whole Christian populations were being utterly obliterated in Syria and Iraq. I thought to myself, “Where’s the monument to their sacrifice? What’s left for the generations to follow to remember?” Tragically, all that remains are smoldering ruins, bloodstains, and boot prints, as their killers move on. Sometimes, even less than that remains. In November, a Christian couple in Pakistan were incinerated. Here’s their story. The Barbarians Are Back Debt peonage has long existed in Pakistan, keeping generations of Christians in slavery working in the brick kilns. Once I walked through such a slave colony near Lahore when the master was away in order to hear the workers’ stories. Little children stacked bricks, men tended the massive furnace firing the bricks, and women washed clothes in a stream that doubled as the sewer. It was in this same area last November that two brick workers, Shahzad Masih and his wife Shama, were killed. They were in a debt dispute with their owner, and in order to settle the score, he accused them of blasphemy, of burning pages of the Koran. The blasphemy law in Pakistan is a convenient way of dealing with inconvenient people and usually works like this: kill first, then maybe ask questions later. The setting was readymade for a mob. Bricks were handy for stoning, the legs of the husband and wife were broken so they couldn’t escape, and then they were thrown into the furnace. Shahzad and his wife, who was five months pregnant, were burned to ash. This didn’t happen centuries ago in barbaric times — it happened in November. The barbarians are back. Tragically, the murders of Shahzad and his wife are just more of the same. In the past three years alone, between the work of ISIS and other al-Qaeda franchises, the number of Christians killed or displaced in Iraq and Syria is in the tens of thousands, including hundreds of girls taken as sex slaves for the fighters. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than seven thousand Christians have been killed by Boko Haram and al-Shabaab in the past three years. When We Hear of Persecution It’s understandable that these al-wannabes tend to sound alike — their handiwork certainly tends to look alike. After more than a decade in the new world disorder, they are just names and numbers on the news crawl, accompanied with a blur of blood and bombs, of gun-toting “spiritual leaders” doing selfies on YouTube as they crow about their latest kill. I think of the lines from a Patty Griffin song, “There’s a million sad stories on the side of the road. Strange how we all just got used to the blood.” The unspeakable seems unanswerable; and so we shrug. What can we say? What can we do that would make any difference? As Christians we must not look at persecution as just “bad things happening to good people.” And we shouldn’t look away either. Christian persecution is tied to the very work and nature of the gospel. Here are three truths to remember when we hear of Christian persecution, whether in distant places or when it comes to our own shores. 1. We are vitally linked to our suffering brothers and sisters. “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body” (Hebrews 13:3). This is why we pray, why we speak, and why we hurt alongside suffering Christians — they are family. Through the power of the gospel, our lives are forever bound up in Christ’s life and, therefore, forever bound up with all other believers as well. 2. God is glorified, and his gospel advances, when his people demonstrate trust, love, and grace as they suffer for him. “I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear” (Philippians 1:12–14). Persecution has many outcomes — sometimes they don’t make sense to us. But clearly, one of the outcomes is gospel advance. Saul-the-Persecutor-turned-Paul-the-Preacher was a powerful demonstration of this truth. In our day, he would have been the equivalent of an al-Qaeda commander; so his conversion was the talk of the town. “They only were hearing it said, ‘He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’ And they glorified God because of me” (Galatians 1:23–24). Samuel Zwemer, the apostle to Arabia, with his “Big God, Big Gospel” perspective on the long campaign of Kingdom advance could write, When you read in reports of troubles and opposition, of burning up books, imprisoning colporteurs, and expelling workers, you must not think that the gospel is being defeated. It is conquering. What we see under such circumstances is only the dust in the wake of the ploughman. God is turning the world upside down that it may be right side up when Jesus comes. He that plougheth should plough in hope. We may not be able to see a harvest yet in this country, but furrow after furrow, the soil is getting ready for the seed. 3. Persecution is linked to Christ’s persecution. “God is turning the world upside down that it may be right side up when Jesus comes.” “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:12–13). Suffering that comes for the sake of his name is Christ-like. And so there is, in fact, a monument to Christian sacrifice — it is the cross, in all its blood-stained splendor. Unlike the inspiring flag-raising on Iwo Jima, when the cross was raised, it seemed to symbolize only defeat and death. Yet, secured by Sovereign Love and the empty tomb, Christ’s work was so complete that everyone who comes to him will live forever. This is the reward of the Lamb’s suffering. Only he could heal the hurt of his people, turning their sorrow into song and their death into life.