Title:- Lydia E Pinkham’s, Vegetable Compound
Acts 8:18,19
And when Simon saw that through the laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Spirit was given, he offered them money, saying, “Give me this power also, that anyone on whom I lay hands may receive the Holy Spirit.”
After her husband went bankrupt, in 1875 Lydia Estes Pinkham started what was probably the first widely successful business run by a woman in America. Her product was a medicine for “All those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population.” It claimed to remove among other things, “faintness, flatulence, bloating, headaches, nervous prostration, debility, depression, back-ache, kidney complaints, and even dissolve and dispel cancerous tumors from the ovaries.”
Lydia E Pinkham’s vegetable compound was a concoction of various weird herbs, but her main and secret ingredient (which she said acted “as solvent and preservative”) was in fact 22% pure alcohol! It has been said that by having the morals of a saint and the business practices of a bootlegger, Lilly the Pink achieved her greatest success during the prohibition era!Bootleggers totting large cases full of spiritual snake-oil are with us still today. Even from the beginning, God the Holy Spirit has been viewed as a commodity to sell in some form or fashion. God however, is not for sale. He cannot be forced to jump through doctrinal hoops, or emotional ones for that matter. He is not the God of a sanitised and systematised theology; neither is He the God of good business ideas or the next seven-step process! He is not a drink to be dispensed by some bewitched bartender, or a fix, or a hit from some baldy shouting ‘boom’! Yes, neither magician nor motivational guru, God is rather the Lord, the Most High God, the Maker of heaven and earth, in whom we live and move and have our being; who has chosen, through Jesus Christ His lovely Son, and our Lord and Saviour, to encamp, in all His fullness amidst our meager littleness. Repentance, faith, humility, and an open mouth, are all He seeks and the cries of pleading forgiveness for all our sins, are all we have to freely offer, (and that is enough!)
The Holy Spirit will solve all of our problems. Baptising us into the body of Christ through the washing of us in the precious and shed blood of Jesus, we find that stinky and sorry stain on our soul, placed there by the puking of our sickly and selfish sin, permanently, yes permanently and once and for all dear friends, totally and absolutely removed. Gone forever! He will also preserve us in this washed and waiting state, until the time to come.
Ladies and gentlemen, yes sir indeedy, may I present to you, heaven’s strongest solvent and heaven’s prime preservative, God the Holy Spirit, 100% proof of the faithfulness and goodness of the Father. You cannot buy Him friends, yet if you repent of all your sins today, He shall freely make you His! So, if you are consumed with the cancer of your sin, shaking in fear of judgment, full of nervous and farting flatulence, perilous of mind and prostrate of position! Then step right up and buy something that will cost you both nothing and everything all at the same time. Now lean on back and just open your mouth wide and He will fill it.
Listen: “if you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” Luke 11:13
Pray: Majestic and Holy God give me the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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