Episode 362: The Family Altar Audio Devotional – Day 328

Episode Summary:

And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live. (Jonah 4:2-3)

35 I was standing not long ago at My Old Kentucky Home. I was born not far from that, and I had my hand laying on the desk like that. The—the inspiration come to Stephen Foster where he wrote Old Kentucky Home. I seen his picture, and the Angel that was supposed to have touched him and give him his inspiration and so forth. And after the guide had went through, I was setting alone, and I thought, “Mr. Foster, you had it in the head not in the heart.” Cause every time he’d write, get inspiration, write a song, he’d go off and get on a drunk afterwards. Then finally, you know how he ended his life after getting up in that inspiration: he come back down, called a servant, took a razor and committed suicide; Stephen Foster’s end.

36 I thought of William Cowper, you’ve heard of him, that wrote that famous hymn:

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Dawn from Emmanuel’s veins,

When sinners plunge beneath the flood,

Lose all their guilty stain.

37 A few… About two to three years ago, I stood by his grave in England; read his history there. And William Cowper after writing that song, when he was up in that inspiration writing; he was considered a neurotic, and when he come out of that inspiration, he got a cab and tried to find the river to commit suicide. Didn’t know where he was at, what he was doing or nothing. See? He’d been up somewhere.

38 Look that’s—that’s poets. Look at prophet: Look at Jonah when he was on his road to Nineveh and taken a boat to Tarshish, and he… God… He disobeyed God, and he was throwed out of the ship and a whale swallowed him, and—and he was brought back to Nineveh, and he gave his prophecy, so much, with a city the size of St. Louis, Missouri, over a million population. Some of them didn’t even know right and left hand. But that prophet walked the streets screaming his prophecy like that until the people repented in such a way they put sackcloth on their animals.

39 And then when the inspiration left him, he set under a little gourd tree and prayed God would take his life. Is that right? See, you don’t understand it. He was up somewhere, and while the inspiration was on him, all right, but when it leaves him then what? See?

40 Look at—look at Elijah, the prophet, who stood on Mount Carmel that day and called Fire out of Heaven, called rain out of heaven at the same day, and then run out into the wilderness after the inspiration left him at the threat of Jezebel. Run out into the wilderness and wandered around out there in the wilderness for forty days and nights, and God found him. He’d crawled back in a cave somewhere. That right? See?

41 No need of trying to explain it. It’s just a life alone. See? When you’re in there, it isn’t bad, when you’re out; but it’s coming between that. See? And you’re just, you don’t know where you’re at and what you’re doing. What does it speak? It speaks one thing. Brother, there’s a Land beyond the river. We reach up into It there somehow. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But I know some glorious day, when I come to the end of my journey, which I’ve got to some of these days, I suppose, as an old man, I hope to be, if Jesus tarries.

53-1129a – “The Faith That Was Once Delivered To The Saints”
Rev. William Marrion Branham

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