AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
RON PHILLIPS: I want to talk to you for a few minutes. And I’m going to get to James 5 and we’re going to talk about anointing with oil. But I want to talk to you about the Latter Rain. It was one of the segments on the program we taped today but you didn’t hear that so it’s going to be some repetition for some of the staff. But I want to talk you about the Latter Rain and what it is and what its promise is for the Last Days. Now the first mention of the Latter Rain in the Bible is in the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 11, verse 11 and following. But the land which you cross over to possess is a land of hills and valleys which drinks water from the rain of heaven, a land for which the Lord your God cares, now that’s Israel, a land for which the Lord your God cares. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it from the beginning of the year to the very end of the year. And it shall be that if you earnestly obey My commandments which I command you today to love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul I will give you the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine and your oil. This is the first mention of the Latter Rain and one of the principles of understanding God’s Word is The Law of First Mention. When something is first mentioned in the Bible that will be its primary meaning all the way through the Word of God to the very end. And here God is talking about their possessing their land, going in, possessing that land, becoming fruitful in that land. So understand that the Latter Rain itself has to do with Israel, the people of God, and their possession of the land. So when you hear someone talking about well the latter rain’s about to fall always know that if they’re rightly interpreting what’s happening it has something to do with what’s going on in Israel. Now let me give you a little bit of history. The land of Israel, the Jews have just been back there since 1948 but the movement’s been going on longer than that and I’m going to show you a little comparison real quick with history and Israel. There have already been two Latter Rain movements in our history and because there are two of them people say well neither none of them are real cause Jesus didn’t come back. But I’m about to show you something if you’ll stay with me for about a half an hour. The first Latter Rain movement started about the 1880’s. Went to Azusa in the early 1900’s and it was powerful. The evangelists that came along and that were raised up in those days, I think of Richard Spurling, A.J. Tomlinson who founded the Church of God in Cleveland, the Baptists, the disaffected Baptists, the Methodists that were even before Azusa were speaking in tongues, the early Pentecostals in Kentucky and Arkansas and even some Baptists in the areas of Arkansas it was going on. At the very moment in 1898 that Latter Rain, they were calling it Latter Rain, a man named Theodore Herzl wrote a book, Der Judenstat or The Jewish State to come and so that was the beginning of Zionism. Latter Rain Number One. I could spend an hour talking about that history. It happened. And remember those of you who may be people of color that, that Azusa was an African-American movement but it’s connected with Zion. Unfortunately many people in some of the communities of faith whether they’re White Anglo, predominantly white, predominantly African-American or whatever, I believe we’re just one church now by itself by the way.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
