Before He could fill me with His Spirit, before He could fill me with this marvelous Spirit of Life and
Light... before – He put me thru a most grueling, terrifying consecration. This was
before. He was preparing the soil. People often say, “Why doesn't this person go, and why doesn't...
they've all been baptized.” I say, “Listen. Don't you know God has to have something to baptize when He baptizes.”
Don't you know He does? Yes, He has to have something to baptize. He couldn't baptize me if
I had come along that way. No. he shut me up till about three or four o'clock in the morning on the floor. I
had never seen anyone get on their knees and get down and pray. Methodists don't do that way. But
you know when the Spirit moves on you, how many know it doesn't matter about the posture of your
body. You can be flat on your back or on your stomach or almost anywhere. When prayer goes on in
you. And here was this “awful” groaning for God. I was saved, but God wanted to do something in
me before He could really fill me with the Spirit. And do you know what it was? It was just this, I had
never really related it before in my life. I had experienced, but I didn't know it had any relation to
anything in here. All thru that evening until two or three o'clock in the morning, down on my face
before the Lord, I was conscious of the Lord; I never knew He could talk to people, because I had
never been taught that. I didn't know about that, but I knew that if their was ever anything real in my
whole life, here was the presence of God dealing with my immortal Spirit. And when He began to deal
with me, it was not concerning sins, and failures, and all of that. That had been taken care of, I was a
Christian already. He was beginning with all the legitimate issues of living. All of the right things, all
of the correct things, and all of the good things to which I might become attached in some way.
Family– why during that period of those three, four, five hours that I was on the floor before God, I
buried everyone of my relatives. I wept all my tears for them right then. My heart was broken for them right then.
