Well, good morning.
You know, there was a time when I
could come up those stairs two at a
time, and now I just thank God when
I get to the top, you know.
I want to read just one verse from
Ephesians chapter 6, and
of course it's a very well-known verse,
praying always with all prayer and supplication in
the spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all saints.
And Paul adds, and for me, that utterance
may be given unto me, that I may
open my mouth boldly to make known the
mystery of the gospel, for which I am
an ambassador in bonds, that therein I may
speak boldly as it ought to speak.
Praying always with all prayer and supplication in
the spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all saints.
I'll get to that in a few moments.
I'll not start right there.
I moved from Winnipeg, or from Winnipeg to
Saskatoon in 1962, I guess it was, and
I pastored a small Baptist church, 175 members,
and numbers of people in the congregation were
Bible school graduates, was mostly young married couples
and university students, and everybody loved evangelism and
missions, but nobody did either.
And they were a nice congregation, but they
knew how to sleep, I mean spiritually speaking.
And they were kind enough to snore now
and then, to let me know they weren't
quite dead, but you know, they were nice,
really nice evangelicals.
And I wanted to get this church on
the road, and so, first of all, I
won't go into all the details why I
did it, but I had five teams from
the congregation, and one night we were to
go out as teams in house calling.
But I told the group, I said, now,
if you don't feel you're quite able to
handle this, you just stay home and pray.
Well, everybody went back home and prayed for
the people that didn't go out, because nobody
stayed to go out.
So I had to figure that out, and
I said, well, I thought to myself, I
know what the problem is, they just don't
know how to do it.
So we had eight weeks of classes on
soul winning and so on, good attendance, good
faithful attendance, and then another night we were
to go out.
And so I told them, I said, now,
if you don't feel that you can quite
handle this, well, just go home and pray.
They all went home and prayed, except for
two, and they were both shaking in their
shoes, you know.
Canadians call it conservatism.
It's not, it's fear.
Anyhow, at that point, I realized they didn't
have a heart to do it.
That was the real problem.
They never had a heart to do it.
And I began praying for revival, and I
began, apart from our own self, with a
deacons prayer meeting on a Saturday night, nine
o'clock.
We prayed, I had ten deacons, and we
averaged around seven or eight, and we prayed
for revival.
That's how we started, about five years before
the revival came.
And then our weeknight prayer meeting, Wednesday night,
we were running around 25 with 175 members,
and I really pushed, oh, I prayed and
prayed and prayed and talked about the prayer
meeting and urged the people to attend.
And I used to tell them, listen, you
can miss Sunday mornings if you have to,
and miss Sunday evening if you must, but
don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're
dead.
And you know, it began to grow.
And it grew up to 50, we got
to 75, we got to 100, and then
we got to 150, and the odd meeting,
we were up to 170 or more.
We only had 175 members.
And it became the hottest meeting of the
week.
It wasn't revival, but it was certainly a
step towards revival.
When I saw they were supporting a prayer
meeting well, then I suggested we'll have a
children's prayer meeting too.
And so we'd have 30 or 40 children
in a separate prayer meeting, with one or
two adults looking after them.
But the adults were told, now, you're not
to lead the meetings for them, you're to
train them to lead their own meetings.
And the kids just loved it.
This meant a few more adults could attend
because their kids were in the prayer meeting.
And that was good.
And then, praying about it, the Lord showed
me to do something else, cottage prayer meetings.
So we started cottage prayer meetings.
Saskatoon at the time was not a big
place, 120,000.
And so we had some cottage prayer meetings.
Then later on, now, if I put this
on the people all at once, it wouldn't
have gone, they couldn't have handled it.
But there was a spirit of prayer developing.
And the book of Zechariah talks about God
pouring on his people the spirit of grace
and supplication.
One translation says, the spirit of grace to
supplicate.
So there is such a thing as a
spirit of prayer.
Now, Finney made much of that.
He said if he ever lost the spirit
of prayer, he couldn't converse with anybody individually
or preach publicly if he ever lost the
spirit of prayer.
I know what he's talking about because God
gave us a spirit of prayer.
And every new idea for prayer I gave
the people, they just jumped into it.
I suggested, for example, why don't you at
night, as you go to bed, why don't
you pray and ask God to waken you
through the night, to get up for a
little while and pray for revival.
And people started doing that, and I heard
things like this.
Brother McLeod, you know, I used to be
prayed out in five minutes.
I prayed last night for 50 minutes.
I could have prayed all night, you know.
It was a supernatural thing.
It was not a natural thing at all.
And then after a while, we tried something
else, and we had a thing on the
bulletin board, big circle marked off in 15
-minute slots like pie-shaped wedges.
And people were to pray about this and
look at this thing and decide which time
slot would they take to pray every day.
And pretty soon we had the whole 24
hours taken up, and in some cases, some
of the wedges had more than one name.
And so we did nothing but pray.
I was talking one time to a missionary.
I mentioned our seeking revival.
He said, why don't you invite Ralph and
Lucifer?
I said, who are they?
He told me.
I contacted them.
They couldn't come for several years, so that
gave us more time, of course, to prepare.
We didn't do any advertising about the meetings.
We just figured that God's in this thing
and we're going to trust God.
When they came, they brought a great big
van.
It was about three feet this way and
eight feet that way.
Had big words on it about revival, and
they wanted to stick this up on the
end of the church.
Well, we did.
But that very night, we had a rainstorm
and a big wind, and it blew it
down in the mud, and we never, ever
used it.
God didn't even want that, you know.
So we're just waiting on God.
You know, I used to walk, I lived
a mile from the church, and I used
to walk there every morning, try and get
there at least by seven o'clock, and
I'd have a couple hours and the phone
wouldn't be ringing, and I'd just lay on
the floor and pray.
And prayer, people were always talking about what
God was doing.
In the prayer meeting, we'd run it like
this.
We'd sing it.
You know, there was a time when I'd
preach for 40 minutes in the prayer meeting,
and we'd pray for 10 minutes and call
it a prayer meeting.
We'd quit that.
I'd preach for 10 or 15 minutes, and
then we'd pray for maybe 40 minutes.
And we'd do things like this.
I'd say, now, have any of you haven't
answered the prayer this last week?
Please tell us about it.
Never mind if it's a small thing.
Just tell us about it.
And people began doing that.
And then we'd put a chair out to
the front, which, you know, if you have
a personal need, you'd like us to pray
for you, just let us know.
Just come and kneel to a chair and
we'll come and help you.
And this began to happen.
And people began talking about how near God
was, and how God was answering prayers like
he'd never done before, and went on and
on.
And then on a Wednesday night, October the
13th, a Wednesday night, Ralph and Lou came.
First meeting, 150 people, and I think five
stayed behind for prayer.
By Saturday, we couldn't get the people into
the church.
The building was seated about 350.
We were packed right out.
So we had to move to a neighboring
Anglican church, like the Episcopalian churches, and the
pastor, you can have it as long as
you want.
Well, it was only good for two nights.
It would seat 600.
We had 700 there the first night.
So then we had to move.
We moved to the Alliance Church, seating 1
,000.
That only lasted two nights.
We had to move to a larger, the
largest church building in the city would seat
1,700.
I'll never forget the first night in there.
We were packed to the doors, people trying
to get in, and the caretaker came running.
He wasn't a Christian, and he got swearing
and said, you've got to get some of
these people out of here, or the fire
marshal will close this place down.
So I went to the pulpit and asked
my people to leave and go down to
the Alliance Church, which was just a couple
of blocks away.
And I had a meeting with them there.
But after they went out there, people in
the street trying to get in, they still
had the same problem.
But you know what happened?
The caretaker got saved.
And then he said, hang him on the
legs, get him in there.
It was great.
Well, then that building was too small, so
we had to start having double services each
night, and we did that.
And then that got to be too small,
so we engaged the Centennial Auditorium, which seats
2,200 or more.
And we had to have double services there.
We had planned to go for a week
and a half.
We had to go for seven weeks altogether.
And people started coming in from all over
the country to see what God was doing.
That was an unusual time.
I remember one time a ladies meeting.
Eight hundred ladies showed up.
The meeting went on for hours, sharing, praying,
going off to the prayer room for help.
It was a marvelous time.
And our song leader, Dr. Virgil Brock, some
of you may know who he is.
He wrote the song Beyond the Sunset, Sing
and Smile and Pray.
He was our son, 85 years old.
He was off key a little bit, but
nobody minded.
He was so full of God, you know.
Did a marvelous job.
And I remember after that ladies meeting, he
said, Brother McLeod, we have witnessed strange, strange
things today.
We'd all agree to that.
I mean, the things that were happening, the
way God was working in people's hearts.
At my own church, there were two young
men, about 18, 19, very athletic, much involved
in sports.
And they didn't want to go to the
meetings, but their parents were after them.
So the two of them were talking on
the telephone one day, and the mother of
one was listening in.
She shouldn't have been, but she was.
And they promised each other, you're not going
forward, right?
No, we're not going forward.
No matter what happens, I'm not going forward.
So they planned just to sit there and
turn off their ears, make their parents happy.
The one fellow sitting on the left side
of the church got saved that morning.
The other guy on the other side, the
deacons brought him into my office afterwards and
said, Phil, I don't know what's wrong.
He's just saying something funny.
So I got him into my office, and
we knelt there, and he was shaking his
head, and he was saying, no way, never
again, never again, never again.
I said, Phil, what's the problem?
He said, never again can I doubt the
reality of Jesus Christ.
He said, he tore my heart wide open.
He revealed himself to me, and he was
saved on the spot, you know.
Thank God.
The other boys, a civil engineer in the
Denver, Colorado area now, I checked them out
a couple of years ago, doing fine.
Thank God.
So a lot of things like that were
going on.
Many people, they just, they stayed away, and
sometimes they couldn't stay away, and they'd say,
I don't even know how I got here
tonight.
I didn't want to come, but just had
to come.
And so every night there were people saved,
and every night there were Christians revived.
And you know, it seemed to start with
the Christian, the Christian workers, pastors, evangelists, missionaries,
Sunday school workers, and so on.
These were the people that first of all
seemed to be responding.
And naturally when that happened, the other people
felt quite free to respond also.
Ralph and Lou were a great couple.
They never pushed people.
They just preached.
And God worked.
And we prayed.
We didn't stop praying when the revival began.
We kept praying.
It was a wonderful, wonderful time of blessing.
And then teams began going out.
We visited every province in Canada.
I had crusades in every province except two
small provinces in the east, and I made
places in the states.
A fellow from Portland, Oregon, he pastored a
Baptist church.
He showed up in the meetings I was
holding in Winnipeg right after Saskatoon.
And he said, I have a great need
in my life.
I'm just not right with God somehow.
And so we talked together, and we prayed
together, and we knelt at a chair, and
I led him in three simple steps of
revival.
When he got to his feet, here's what
he said.
I don't feel one bit different now than
I did before I knelt at the chair.
But when I knelt at that chair, I
gave God everything I am, everything I have.
I gave everything to God.
He went back to his church in Portland,
Oregon, began to preach, and a revival erupted.
They had to have meetings for 11 weeks,
11 weeks.
They prayed with 3,000 people over that
period of time.
They set up a revival center in Portland.
They sent teams into other neighboring states and
so on.
It was just another revival in another place.
And things like that were happening.
God was so good.
And, you know, we get requests constantly from
all over the country.
Send us a team.
It got to a place where we never
had any teams left.
They were all busy.
All the preachers were busy.
Some were preaching, you know.
In one case, it was in the Denver,
Colorado area.
They wanted a team.
They said, we have 10 days.
We've got a bunch of churches together.
Please send us someone.
So we sent them two revived farmers.
They were just farmers, you know.
And they had wonderful meetings, revival meetings.
People were saved.
People were blessed.
And so things like that were happening, too.
The lay people got deeply involved in many
of these teams.
I thank God for what I saw happening.
In my office one day, during those revival
times, the telephone rang.
It was a man from my church who
worked in the university.
And he was crying.
I couldn't make out what he was saying,
except he wanted to see me.
I said, well, come.
Fifteen minutes later, he ran into my office.
He found his knees at my desk and
put his head in the desk and just
cried and cried.
I said, one of his kids has been
killed or something terrible has happened.
Then he told me what happened.
He said I was sitting on my office
desk and he said, well, all I can
say is the spirit of God tore my
heart wide open and showed me every sin
I'd ever committed from the time I was
a child.
He said, Pastor, it was like looking into
hell.
He said it was awful.
He said I was familiar with a woman,
not my wife.
I've got to go make it right with
my wife.
I falsified a workman's compensation form.
I got thousands of dollars for something that
didn't happen on the job.
I got some friends just where it happened
on the job.
I got all this money falsely.
I've got to go to the government and
confess this.
Then he said this.
He said, I don't care if I lose
my money.
I don't care if I lose my wife.
I don't care if I lose my job.
I don't care if I go to jail.
But I've got to be right with God.
I can't stand this.
And God gave him a great gift of
counseling.
Sometimes, you know, they'd be in, if I
was in meetings where they could drive, they'd
be there.
And they had a great gift for counseling.
And one time he said, and they'd sit
on the platform with me and I'd have
them give their testimony.
And he said, Pastor, do you know why
I sit there smiling?
I said, no, why do you?
He said, because I know what's going to
happen down there and they don't know yet.
And it was so exciting though to see
God moving congregations and blessing certain people.
So many pastors and Christian workers got turned
inside out and just on fire for God.
And people who had left the ministry came
back into the ministry.
And many ordinary people became extraordinary people.
And we saw that in meetings.
I went to Woodstock, New Brunswick.
It's a small town, maybe 5,000 people.
We have 50 churches in the area, came
together for the meetings.
And we had a wonderful time.
It spilled over.
We're supposed to start in Denver, Colorado.
We couldn't because we spilled over in Woodstock,
New Brunswick.
And we had the same manifestations of the
power of God in those meetings as well.
One Sunday morning, I preached in a neighboring
church about 20 miles away.
And the pastor of the home church where
I was holding the meetings, he said, Bill,
you've got to be back here at least
by 1130 because what are we going to
do if you don't?
So I said, we'll get back.
Don't worry about it.
I almost didn't get back because of ice
on the curve, but I made it OK.
But when I got there about 25 to
12, there was about 30 people standing on
the platform.
And what's going on here?
And there were people who wanted to give
their testimonies to what God was doing in
their life.
And many of them were old.
It was an unusual crusade in this that
you see old people coming down the aisle
at the time of invitation.
They walk three steps and then hold on
to a pew and get their breath.
And then they walk three steps more and
hold on to the pew and get their
breath to get to the platform to give
their testimony, you know.
And then the pastor said, oh, see that
girl coming down the aisle?
A girl with flaming red hair.
So what about her?
He said, she's the shyest person in the
world.
And she couldn't talk to herself in front
of the mirror without blushing.
I don't know what she's going to say
when she gets up here.
And she got up there.
I think it took her about 10 minutes.
We usually stop people who gets to be
too long.
We simply had to listen.
She'd been so touched by God, so transformed.
She was filled with the spirit of God
and told us all about what a time.
And then I never got to preach until
about 12 o'clock that day, you know.
And you don't worry about things like that
in the time of revival.
You just, you move with what the spirit
of God is doing.
In some cases, the odd case, we had
no preaching at all.
That wasn't normal.
We, they usually had satirical preach 40 minutes.
If I preach, I preach 40 minutes at
least, you know.
And so some rumors were being spread abroad
that there was no preaching in the revival.
That was entirely untrue.
In the seven weeks, we only had two
nights where there's no preaching.
And because of the heavy sharing going on,
people, we'd have people come for somebody, have
a lineup from here.
Where were they?
The wall and over here.
And they had to do it as we
invited them.
We say, listen, be short.
Don't tell your life history.
Get to the point.
Two minutes.
Try and be short because there's other people.
And we told them, if you can't find
the landing field, we'll help you come down.
And sometimes we had to do that, you
know.
It was such a great time, though.
I've heard, you know, 40 people giving their
testimony one night, filled with the spirit of
God, changed, telling you what God had done,
what God had done.
Not what we had done, what God had
done.
That's revival, you know.
It's Christians coming up to a New Testament
level.
That's all it is, revival, you know.
And it was a marvelous time.
Well, we want to talk about all prayer.
You remember that we have the text of
Ephesians 6.18, but in 1 Timothy 2
.8, Paul said, I will therefore that men
pray everywhere, everywhere, lifting up holy hands and
doubting.
Do you pray everywhere?
No, we don't do that.
I mean, two Christians meet, they talk about
the crops, they talk about the latest sports
event, latest political furor, whatever, you know.
But we don't pray, no.
I pastored a church years back in a
place called Berto, Manitoba, and one day a
lady phoned and wanted me to come and
see her.
She was an older lady.
She was born in Wales, and she, as
a young girl, had seen a revival.
And she said, in those days, I remember
I'd be walking down the sidewalk, and here
would be six or eight men kneeling on
the sidewalk with their arms around each other
praying.
And she said, oh, how those men prayed.
And she said, I've known ever since, and
I never had what they had, and I
want to have whatever it is.
I want to have it.
And she accepted Christ that day.
Those men would never have known that the
little girl walking past them was going to
find Christ as a result of them praying
on the sidewalk, you know.
We were asked to come on the team
from Saskatoon to Winnipeg, 500 miles, and we
had five guys in the car, and people
was a prayer meeting the whole way.
We didn't see that wonderful herd of black
Angus cattle in the field.
We didn't see some big outfit went rolling
by on the highway, or some car, some
home costing a million dollars.
We didn't see any of that stuff.
It was all pray, pray, pray.
I know a missionary.
Oh, and they pray for him.
I know a fellow, and we pray for
him.
Whatever it was, went on and on for
ten hours.
When we got to Winnipeg, we got into
a motel, and then we said, now let's
have a prayer meeting.
So we had a great prayer meeting, and
then we had a meeting, and the place
was packed to the doors.
And there's a fellow there who later on
became my song leader.
Six foot four, Howard.
His name was Howard Gardner.
And he was quite critical.
He said, when I heard that you, it
happened in your church, I knew it wouldn't
be emotional because you're not an emotional person.
So he felt it was safe to go,
you know.
That was his undoing.
He was sitting there, and I was preaching
on the text, let each esteem other better
than themselves.
He said, at that moment, everything changed.
It was like God was standing in front
of me.
He said to me, do you live that
way?
And he said, yes, Lord, I do.
And God said, what about George Bell?
Now, George Bell was a fellow pastor.
He couldn't stand.
And he said to God, he's such a
big windbag.
I don't know how you can bless him
the way you do.
That's what he said to the Lord.
And so the Lord said, I want you
to go to the altar.
And he, I see him coming down the
aisle.
I'm in the middle of a sermon.
He's coming down the aisle, faces white as
snow.
And I can't explain what he said.
I can only tell you what he said.
You'll have to figure it out.
He said, as I was walking down the
aisle, Jesus Christ met me in the aisle,
put his hand on my head, and reduced
me to absolute zero.
He said, when I got to the altar,
I couldn't find myself.
There was nothing there but God.
And he gave his life totally to God
at that moment.
He was such a beautiful character to work
with.
He prayed by the hour.
He wanted people to Christ.
He had such a tender, loving spirit.
We had a wonderful time.
And then later his health broke down and
he couldn't be on the road.
And so I missed his companionship very, very
much.
I don't know what happened when he walked
down the aisle.
I can't explain it.
But Christ met him in some way, and
he knew it was the Lord.
And things like that were happening.
We heard it again and again.
I will, therefore, that men pray everywhere, without
wrath and without doubting, it says.
Okay?
Without doubting?
You pray in doubt?
You better quit praying in doubting.
All things whatsoever you shall ask in prayer,
believing you shall receive.
And we certainly learned that in a powerful
way in those days.
What things, whatever you desire when you pray,
believe that you have received them, you'll have
them.
And you know these just as well as
I do, and many others like them, telling
us.
Ask in faith, nothing wavering.
Free the wavers like a wave of the
sea, driven by the wind and tossed.
Let not that man think that he shall
receive anything of the Lord.
Unbelief kills it.
We have to pray in faith.
That means, of course, you have to be
careful before you pray, that you're praying for
something that is the will of God.
I will, therefore, that men pray everywhere, everywhere.
Remember that word.
Then there's a word in Luke, or in
Ephesians 6, 18, persevering, persevering.
Christ told a parable, Luke 18, that men
ought always to pray and not to faint.
They asked George Muller one time, do you
ever give up when you're praying for somebody
or something?
And he said, George Muller never gives up.
He prayed for two men for 40 years,
that they might be saved.
One was saved a year before he died,
and one was saved something like a year
after he died.
Persevering, with all perseverance it says, that word
all.
We read about Anna in Luke chapter 2,
it says, she never left the temple.
She served God with fastings and prayers, night
and day.
I'm sure that there were people that said,
or at least thought, what's Anna doing in
the temple all the time?
Why doesn't she get out and help the
poor?
Why doesn't she get out and preach the
word of God?
What is she doing in the temple?
But she was serving God, fasting and praying.
And God made sure that in the Bible,
so we'd understand, there is this kind of
ministry, and it's important, and we need it.
Now the apostles said, we will give ourselves
continually to prayer and to the ministry of
the word.
We don't do it that way.
We give ourselves to the ministry of the
word in a hundred different ways, and then
if we have a little time left over,
we'll pray.
I mean, that's how it goes, right?
That's what I see, that's what I hear,
that's what I did myself at one time.
We will give ourselves.
It means we'll just throw ourselves into this.
Prayer is the first thing and the most
important thing.
If you remember the story of Symbola in
New York, when he took over that little
church, 20 members, couldn't make payments on the
mortgage, no training for the ministry.
He said, I didn't know how to do
anything, but I knew how to pray.
That's how it started with 20 people, and
today they have four services every Sunday.
All of them are packed, apparently, 1,800
people.
I don't know how he does it.
You should pray for him.
We will give ourselves continually to prayer, to
prayer.
People, we've got to get God into the
picture, whatever the picture is.
He's waiting.
He's only moved by faith and holiness.
It is impossible without faith to please God.
Impossible.
So no kind of frankly activity will get
it.
Let me give you an example.
I was in a Southern Baptist church in
Rio Hondo, Texas.
Rio Hondo is about 1,200 people, and
he was running about 500 Sunday morning.
The church would seat about a thousand.
And five weeks before I came, he had
an evangelistic crusade.
He rented an auditorium, seating a couple of
thousand, in a high school.
And then he did something he'd never done
before.
He invited a rock band to come so
he'd get the kids in there, you know.
So it was packed night after night for
a whole week.
And they sent a record for Southern Baptist,
apparently.
They had 1,800 professions of salvation in
that one week.
Five weeks later, I was to come.
He had phoned me, talking about the wonderful
things that God did.
When I got there with my song leader,
he met the plane.
And he was one of the saddest looking
people I'd ever seen.
And he said to me, I have a
great need.
And I said, well, come on.
And he came into the motel.
He fell on the floor.
He began to weep.
Then he told me what had happened.
He hadn't baptized one of those converts.
He never had one of them attending his
church, even.
Not even one.
And his wife was very angry with him,
and almost destroyed their marriage, because she said,
you compromise your convictions.
I don't honor you anymore.
She just almost walked out on him.
She didn't, thank God.
But it almost came to that.
See, God wasn't in that.
He was anxious to get a crowd in
a worldly way.
He got a crowd, no doubt about that.
But he didn't get anything from it.
And we've seen things similar to this in
Canada and other places, where they use methods
to get a crowd that meant nothing.
So we have to be careful.
We will give ourselves continually to prayer and
to the ministry of the Word.
Paul wrote to the church at Rome, among
other things, Romans 15, 30.
He called on that, he said, to strive
together with me in your prayers to God
for me.
He called it striving.
And prayer at times will be striving.
Your physique gets involved.
You have to give it all you have.
And especially in times when God draws near,
and you begin to see how empty you
are, and how sinful you have been, and
all of this.
All right.
Striving in prayer.
Striving.
2 Corinthians 1, 11 says, you also helping
together by prayer.
Now, there's a gift of helps in the
New Testament.
It's not spelled out.
It's just called the gift of helps.
It's a gift that any Christian can have.
And we should be alert and aware to
the possibility any day that God may call
me to help somebody else, and maybe lead
them to Christ.
The gift of helps.
And here he calls it, you also helping
together by prayer.
You know, nobody ever convenes a conference where
they're going to seek to get the gift
of helps, right?
You never hear of that.
They convene conferences to get more of the
Holy Spirit or something, you know.
What about the gift of helps?
They're never going to write a book about
you if you have a great gift of
helps, you know.
You'll never have anybody invite you to speak
and share in a meeting, you know.
The gift of helps, what did you do?
Well, that's not important.
What's important is the public thing that goes
on, you know.
And oftentimes, I'm sure, as far as God
is concerned, he's very unhappy.
All right.
You also helping together by prayer.
Paul said, travailing.
Galatians 4, 19, my little children of whom
I travail and birth again until Christ be
formed in you.
So he likens prayer to having a child,
you know.
It's a painful thing.
Travail.
And it's used that way, I mean, in
relation to prayer in a number of places
in the Word of God.
It's work.
The Bible speaks about fighting a good fight
of faith.
It's a faith.
It's a work.
Faith is a work.
It's a fight because Satan is opposing us.
He doesn't mind what we do, but he
hates it when he sees us on our
knees.
And we need to shake him up more
than we do.
Pray, like it says, without ceasing in everything.
Give thanks.
Travailing.
Remember, Paul said, you did run well.
Who hindered you?
One translation says, who drove you back?
What happened here?
When he left, the last he'd seen these
people, they were doing well, walking in the
Spirit, things were great.
He comes back, and all of this is
ended, and they're back in the flesh.
He said, I'm afraid of you, lest I
have bestowed upon you labor and vain.
You observe days and months and times and
years.
They were going back to the old Jewish
ways, you know.
Paul was greatly disturbed.
And so, the only way you can correct
this is not by talking, it's by praying.
There'll be some talking after prayer, perhaps, but
prayer is the main thing.
I prevail in birth again, which means he'd
done it before when he was there, when
the churches were established through his ministry.
Now he's doing it again to bring them
back to where they should have been and
were not.
The Bible speaks about like, watch in the
same, watch in the same with thanksgiving.
He's talking about prayer.
In my church in Saskatoon, we had a
fellow, he taught psychology in the local university.
His name was Harold Kellman.
He was a very faithful church attender, never
said much, never did much.
Came to me one day and said, Brother
Bill, can you recommend some book or books
that would help me?
I'm low spiritually.
And I recommended the two books by Dallimore
on Whitfield's life.
Some of you have read those, I'm sure,
powerful books.
And he read those books and he was
absolutely transformed.
He became one of the most powerful prayers
I ever knew.
Hours every day.
He was never in the service.
He was always upstairs in the prayer room,
praying the whole time through the service.
If he said to you, would you like
to pray with me a little bit?
Make up your mind, it's going to be
two hours.
And he'd say something like this, now, I'll
pray, you watch.
And he'd pray for maybe half an hour
and then he'd say, now it's your turn,
you pray and I'll watch.
And pray and watch, pray and watch, it'll
go on for two hours, perhaps.
He had a wonderful understanding of the will
of God and power in prayer.
He's still alive, I saw him not long
ago.
Still walking with God.
What happened?
Something he saw, he said, when I saw,
when I read those books, I saw the
possibility of a Christian life that I'd never
seen before.
And I came to understand that prayer is
the number one thing in the Christian's life.
And of course, he had it right.
Watching, waiting.
Mark 13, three times Christ spoke about watching,
watching.
Waiting, Isaiah 40, they that wait upon the
Lord shall renew their strength, they'll mount up
with wings as eagles, they'll run and not
be weary, they'll walk and not faint.
Wait on the Lord.
Have you ever done that?
Got alone with God, forgot about the clock,
and just prayed?
You don't have to be asking all the
time.
No, I like to spend the time just
thanking God for who he is, thanking God
for what he is, thanking God for what
he's going to do, praising God.
I will bless the Lord at all times,
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
And so many verses of this kind, especially
in the Psalms.
Prayer, watching and waiting.
Paul spoke in Colossians 4, 12 about a
man, Epiphras, and he said about him, laboring
fervently for you in prayer, laboring fervently.
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man
avails much.
Billy Sonny said, you know, some people, they
pray like a jackrabbit nibbling at a cabbage.
You know, we say our little prayer and
then we're up and away.
That's not prayer.
Laboring fervently in prayer, Paul said.
And we need that so much in our
churches today.
I don't know, you can't talk people into
it.
It's something God has to do, and we
have to, whatever church we're in, we've got
to believe God that he'll give us that
spirit of prayer I mentioned a while ago.
Because when people have that, you don't have
to beg them, they just love to pray.
They're finding time through the day, wherever they
are, whatever they're doing, just to pray.
And it's wonderful.
Laboring fervently.
Paul spoke about this same man, Epiphras, and
he said that he has great zeal in
prayer.
If you heard about a Christian that had
great zeal, what would you think about, what
do you think?
He gives out a lot of tracts, you
know, he witnesses to everybody, means he's a
real zealous Christian.
He's talking about a person who is zealous
in prayer.
We never think like that.
Even if we knew a person was praying
a lot, we probably would never say he
has great zeal in prayer.
But this man had.
Think about it.
Writing to Timothy, Paul said, I remember you
in my prayers, night and day.
And that phrase occurs in Psalm 81, 88,
1, and other places.
Night and day, praying exceedingly, that I might
see your face, and might perfect that which
was lacking in your faith.
I think that's 1 Thessalonians chapter 2.
All right, this is part of the story.
Night and day.
I have cried day and night before you,
David said.
And so, it's not, we cannot pray all
day and all night.
They don't mean that, of course.
It's a way of talking about the necessity
to give quality time to prayer, not to
make it an appendage we stick on sometimes.
Making the main thing in your life as
a Christian, to spend all the time you
possibly can calling on God.
You know, when Wilbur Chapman first pastored a
Presbyterian church, he hadn't been there long before
the board had a meeting with him.
They said, Brother Chapman, you can't preach with
a hill of beans.
How would you feel if you were told
that?
But they said, we're going to pray that
God will make a preacher out of you.
They prayed so well, they lost him.
He became a world-famous evangelist back in
those times.
They prayed, God answered.
And often we've prayed with people.
I was in meetings in the Midland, in
the Michigan, in Saginaw, and one morning we
had a men's prayer meeting in a church
in one of the other towns there.
There was a, I don't know, maybe 80
men in this prayer thing.
Started at 8 o'clock in the morning,
didn't end until 2 in the afternoon.
And what a time we had.
And men meeting with God.
Finally it was over, it was time to
go home, and a man came up and
said, Bill, I'm married to a witch.
Would you come home and talk to her?
I thought he meant she was into witchcraft.
He didn't mean that.
He meant she had a witch-like nature,
you know.
So I said, I don't want to hear
anything about your wife.
I said, where are you at?
Well, I'm doing okay.
I said, what do you mean you're doing
okay?
Well, I've got a few problems.
What are your problems?
I said, brother, listen, would you get on
your knees and talk to God?
And he did.
And he broke.
He was committing adultery on a regular basis,
and I don't know what else.
He had a whole pile of things that
were wrong in his life.
He's calling his wife a witch, you know.
He got his life straightened up, and then
he asked me to go home and talk
to his wife, and I did.
She said when she saw me in the
car with her husband, she was frightened because
she knew something must have happened to her
husband, and she didn't know how to figure
it out.
Anyhow, he went in, grabbed his wife, hugged
her, got forgiveness from her.
And then he had two daughters, and he
called them, and their kids may be ten.
He sat them on two chairs, and he
sat there, and she and I were sitting
just over about 20 feet, watching.
And he asked these kids to forgive him
for being such a rotten daddy.
He said, I haven't really been a father
to your children, and I want you to
forgive me.
I'm a rotten person.
And he really poured his soul out to
the kids, you know.
They didn't know how to handle it.
They just stood there looking at their daddy.
He was crying as he talked to them.
And then she turned to me, and she
said, I don't know what's happened to him.
Can it happen to me?
I said, yes, it can.
Get on your knees.
So she got on her knees.
You know, the first thing she said when
she talked to God, oh, dear God, she
said, you know what a witch I'd be.
So I guess they had it right, you
know.
And she met with God.
And then they were leaving, this was a
Saturday, and that day they were leaving on
holidays, going up to Upper Michigan, which they
did.
And no, wait, they didn't go to Monday,
because on Sunday, they gave their testimony in
their local church, and the preacher never got
to preach that morning.
There was just a revival broke when the
two of them were finished.
Wednesday, the following week, I was in the
church in Saginaw.
The telephone rang, and nobody was around at
the moment, so I answered the telephone.
It was just a couple praying or phoning
from Upper Michigan.
And they told us what happened.
They'd gone to the prayer meeting in the
local Baptist church the night before, and they
were asked to give their testimony.
When they did, a revival erupted.
They said the whole church were on their
faces crying to God, you know.
And things like that were going on all
across Canada, some areas of the states, then
in foreign countries besides.
I must share something that happened.
You believe, I'm sure, in the sovereign will
of God.
I was going down to Argentina, and I
had a missionary friend, Lyle Eggleston.
He was a Kansas cowboy whom God had
called into the mission field, and he'd arranged
for meetings in Buenos Aires.
So, in Argentina, there were six groups of
Baptists, Southern Baptists and others, six groups.
They met once a year, different places, for
a weekend, and they compared statistical notes and
all this sort of thing.
The year before, when they compared notes, they
discovered that the average church of these six
groups had only one, two people to Christ
in the preceding twelve months.
They knew that was awful.
So, here's what they did.
They set up a committee to arrange for
the following year.
Now, they didn't know a thing about me.
I didn't know a thing about them.
But they were told, you're not to call
a speaker.
We're all going to pray that God will
send someone to us who knows what revival
is, who's been in revival.
So, they had a weekend.
I spoke in the Southern Baptist Seminary in
Buenos Aires, and one of the professors came
running up, and he said, Bill, what are
you doing on this weekend?
So, I got my book on.
Well, I said, over the two months I'm
down here, that's the only weekend I'm free.
Why?
Oh, he said, we want you to speak
at this conference.
That's how God put it together, you know.
What a time we had.
In Rosario, the building would seat probably 12.
It was packed.
There was people standing, people sitting in the
aisles.
I couldn't give invitations.
Nobody could move.
It was too packed, you know.
I had to preach to an interpreter.
I didn't know a word of Spanish except
C.
And so, I had to use an interpreter.
I had a wonderful time.
In the last meeting, I simply said, dear
people, if you need to receive Christ as
your Savior, if you're a Christian out of
fellowship with God, if you want to change,
just stay behind.
I guess there were 700 people staying behind.
The interpreter got so excited, he was jumping
off the floor.
Can you imagine trying to counsel these people
from the pulpit to an interpreter?
That's what I did.
It was a sweet time.
And one thing happened, among many other things.
A Baptist pastor from Buenos Aires, who was
at that meeting, he was there.
And God touched his life.
And he immediately, somehow, he got a hold
of this revival thing in a clear way.
He went back to his church.
He had 500 people.
And he said, I just made up my
mind, by the grace of God, we're going
to have a revival here.
And he prayed by the hour, and prayed,
and prayed, and a revival broke within two
weeks.
Now, that's unusual.
It swept the whole congregation.
It was a good thing he did, because
in the testimonies, one man confessed he'd been
planning to shoot the preacher.
I didn't hear why, but they'd have had
a dead preacher if they hadn't had a
revival, you know.
So, now listen carefully.
Here's what happened.
The whole congregation was swept clean by the
Spirit of God.
And then, immediately on the end of that,
God began saving sinners.
And 200 sinners were converted in two weeks,
with no preaching at all.
They were beating on the preacher's door, asking
him to show them the way to heaven.
And he had to call the previous pastor.
The two of them began gathering in this
harvest.
I was in the church a couple of
weeks after that.
They'd already baptized 80 of these converts.
There were classes for the others.
But you see, God has no trouble converting
sinners.
His problem is getting the church right, so
he can convert sinners.
That's why revival is so sadly and badly
needed, that we'd be right with God.
All right.
We've heard already in the conference about Christ
praying.
That's a wonderful story all in itself.
All night long, before he chose the twelve,
and on other occasions, rising up a great
while before day, and praying.
You may have heard of Abel, Clary, and
Father Nash.
Maybe not.
They were two godly men who lived in
Finney's day.
If Finney was going to some place for
a crusade, they would go before he got
there, ten days or two weeks.
They would pray eight, ten, twelve hours a
day for the upcoming meetings.
And Finney said, when I got there, the
revival had already begun.
And these men, for some years, they worked
for Finney that way.
Now, I'm well aware of the fact there's
some problems with some of Finney's theology.
Somebody once said, though, if you're thinking in
terms of raw spiritual power, you have to
think of Finney.
Who can duplicate what he once did?
He walked into a factory.
Eighty-five people were working in the factory.
He never uttered a word.
He just walked slowly around, gazing at people
and revival.
People couldn't work.
They quit working and fell on their knees.
They called some preachers in, and there was
a real revival.
He was certain he loved Christ, and he
preached the gospel.
Anyway, Abel Clary and Father Nass prayed.
Duncan Campbell told me about some men in
Scotland.
They called them the praying men of Barvey.
And here's what they did.
These men, they come home from the job,
have supper, and go to bed right after
supper, and sleep till nine o'clock at
night.
They got up at nine o'clock at
night, and they prayed until two o'clock
in the morning.
And this was their program every day, five
hours praying.
Marvelous.
He told me, he went to the Isle
of Skye, Duncan Campbell did, to reopen a
churchman dead for years.
He started on Sunday with five people.
Monday, five people.
Tuesday, five people.
Nothing happening.
He got a message to the praying men,
and asked them to take it on their
heart.
The day after, the first time they prayed,
the church was packed to the doors, and
Campbell told me seven or eight people got
saved that night, and a revival erupted.
I can see that.
I don't know how these men did this,
how it all began.
It would be a wonderful story to hear
how they got into this.
But in the revivals in the Hebrides, it
was born there, so we understand.
You know, we think, sometimes I get to
a church, and I say to the pastor,
how did you prepare prayer-wise for these
meetings?
And he'll say something like this, well, Brother
McLeod, we had three extra prayer meetings, you
know.
And I say, three extra prayer meetings?
What are you talking about?
So they had three extra prayer meetings, and
they expect a revival, you know.
Back in the early 1800s, I remember reading
a story about a Baptist church, they had
a revival.
You know what happened first?
They had three prayer meetings a day for
two years.
Seven o'clock, and then in the afternoon,
then in the evening.
Three prayer meetings a day for a year,
two years, and then when the revival came,
hundreds were converted.
But that's how they prepared.
So when somebody tells me they had two
or three extra prayer meetings, I just go
on.
They expect somehow I carry a revival in
a pack sack or something?
I don't.
It's all prayer when we get right with
God and get alone with God and make
things right with other people and this kind
of thing, restitution.
It's always a big deal in revival when
people begin making things right, sometimes with the
police.
You know, the lady brought her husband after
one of the meetings, and she said, he's
not a Christian, but he said he'd come
tonight.
So I talked to him.
He said, oh, he said, I'm not interested
in this stuff.
I just came to please the old lady,
you know.
He didn't know what he was getting into,
you know.
I was preaching.
He suddenly grabbed his wife and he said,
honey, I'm slipping into hell.
She said, what are you talking about?
Oh, hell, I can see the flames of
hell.
And he began to swear me a handstand
to stop preaching so he'd get the altar
and pray.
I didn't see him.
There was a big crowd there, and I
didn't see him.
So I kept on preaching.
I see this guy coming down the aisle.
He was really moving, man.
He wasn't walking.
And he got the fontanel in his face
and cried to God.
In the book of Hebrews, there's a verse
that speaks about us insulting God, you know.
And he said, when you said that thing
about insulting God, somebody showed me something happened.
I said, the whole thing I've been insulting
the God of the universe.
He was soundly converted.
Strange how God works, things God does.
But he's able, if we're willing to pray,
all prayer, all prayer.
I just say it again.
I will therefore let men pray everywhere, everywhere.
When you meet with other Christians, have a
time of prayer.
Somehow have a time of prayer.
Sometimes in restaurants with God.
Now when you're through praying, everybody's watching, you
know.
And sometimes, I remember one case, this guy
and his, it wasn't his mother, probably.
He was maybe 30 or whatever.
It was no later.
They were sitting here.
And when they heard us talking, and then
all this kind of praying, you know, oh,
they turned on their seat and just stared
at us, you know.
And so we got up to go.
And I just walked over and offered him
a gospel tract, and he said, thank you
very, very much.
So, you know, sometimes when Christians are talking
together, if a sinner walks by, their voice
drops down to a tiny little whisper.
They don't want him to hear they're talking
about religion, you know.
People are converted sometimes when they hear Christians
talking.
And one of my churches, this man, he
was known as a dancer, and he was
trained in that from the time he was
four years of age.
And the army in Winnipeg, when they had
a special event, they'd send a car.
He never ever drove a car.
They'd pick him up and take him, and
he'd give him a shot of rye or
whiskey or something, and he could dance by
the hour.
And he could dance.
And he said, anytime I heard Christians or
anybody talking about religion, I stood as close
as I could so I could find out
how to be saved.
Now, he had a brother who was a
Christian who never talked to him about it.
Never said a word, apparently.
And so he was 55 years of age
when suddenly God moved in, and a young
man who was training to be a druggist
said to him, Jesus Christ means everything in
the world to me.
What does he mean to you?
And he got mad and walked away.
And he thought to himself, that young kid
talking to me that way, that was awful.
And he couldn't get away from it.
And all day long, what does he mean?
Christ.
What does Christ mean to you?
And that night he got saved.
He called on God.
He didn't know what to do.
He just dropped on his knees and started
praying and found the Lord.
He became one of the most faithful witnesses
I've ever known.
If you introduced him to somebody, he'd take
ahold of them by the hand or by
the lapel, and he'd start talking so sweetly
about Jesus, you know.
He had a wonderful way.
He was 75 going on 80 when he
had inoperable cancer.
And he had some people come in and
they prayed and he was healed and lived
for three or four years longer.
But he had such a want, and I
thought to myself, what happened to his brother?
And these other people that were Christians that
he moved with sometimes in the work he
was doing.
Nothing to say.
It's awful to think of it, you know.
Gospel?
Go.
That's the first part of a gospel.
Go.
And we don't do it.
I was in India and had some great
times there.
I was in an area where Praying Hyde
had lived, and they were still talking about
him.
You know, he prayed, apparently, eight, ten hours
a day.
He asked God for one soul a day,
and God gave it to him.
He asked for two souls a day, and
God gave him that.
He asked for three souls a day, and
he got that.
I think he stopped at four.
I'm not sure now, but it was something
like that.
And he'd never go to rest at night
till that last soul was saved for that
day.
But he prayed.
If the dinner bell rang, he would pray,
Dear God, do I go?
God might say no, and he'd just stay
and pray.
That's how he lived.
But he gave himself continually to prayer and
to the ministry of the Word.
Dear people, we started with this all prayer,
Ephesians 6, 18.
Praying always with all prayer and supplication in
the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all things.
What are you going to do about it?
Are you going to change your way to
the glory of God?
Are you going to get involved in it?
Ask God to forgive you if you're being
a prayerless person?
Many of you probably have been that.
Dear people, we have to get into this
as God has indicated so clearly in his
Word.
If we're not right in this area, we're
just not right.
God doesn't want a bunch of people roller
skating to heaven having a good time, you
know.
We have to learn to prevail in prayer,
to call on God, to ask him to
give us, ask God to give you the
spirit of prayer.
He'll do that if you really mean it,
and get into it.
I don't know of any problem in the
church that can't be healed where people get
into prayer.
You know, we had two men before I
closed, but two men in our church.
They were brothers, both in their 40s, both
Bible school graduates, both musical.
They used to sing duets.
They hadn't sung together for 10 years.
I didn't know that when I got there.
They hadn't spoken to each other for two
years.
I just heard about this before the revival.
Then the revival came.
The older of the two met with God,
and I said to him, Sam, you and
Arnie have to get your heads together, get
things straightened out.
And so one Sunday morning—see, Sunday mornings, the
people in the churches were all back in
their own church.
All these other meetings in the evening were
in large auditoriums, wherever we happened to be.
So it was Sunday morning.
I told the congregation, Arnie and Sam are
going to try and make things right.
And so I said, you people pray.
Now, Arnie was a tough guy.
I didn't know that he'd been disciplined by
an Alliance church on a very serious moral
charge years ago.
He'd never made it right.
And our church, before I was pastor there,
had taken him in as a member because
he had two brothers in the congregation.
So we went downstairs.
I took a deacon with me.
And Sam was standing there.
He walked over to his brother and said,
my brother, can you forgive me?
And Arnie was sitting like this, and he
said, yeah, it's about time you came.
And Sam said, I knew he wouldn't forgive
me.
So I unloaded a truckload of Bible verses
on him.
It didn't do a thing.
So I said to my deacon, let's pray.
So we got down and we prayed.
We ignored him.
We just said, God, break this man.
Break him, God.
Break him.
Melt him.
And suddenly God began to work.
And he ran to the wall.
People, he was beating the wall with his
fists and kissing him with his feet, crying
to God to have mercy on him.
And then he began pouring out a fountain
of wickedness and junk that had been in
his life for years, you know.
And he began running around us, crying at
the top of his lungs.
We just kept praying.
And finally, there was quietness.
And I looked.
He was sitting there with the light of
heaven on his face.
And I caught his eye and pointed to
his brother.
He ran to his brother and almost cracked
his ribs.
We went upstairs.
And as we walked in, the congregation stood
at the feet and turned around.
We were coming from the back end of
the auditorium.
And they were marching down the aisle arm
and arm to the front, told what had
happened.
Their wives came running because the wives were
in fighting too.
And the kids from both sides came running.
And they all knelt in a big circle
at the front of the church and had
a prayer time.
I was standing at the back, you know,
my heart was going thump, thump, thump.
And I thought, boy, this would be a
wonderful time to die, you know.
Oh, it was so good to see.
And I remember right after that, we were
in the Alliance Church.
And Arnie had been a member there, remember?
I said before he'd been a member of
the Discipline and Morals Church.
And he and his brother were going to
sing a duet, but he had to make
things right with the church, first of all.
And he did.
He asked the congregation to forgive him for
the person he'd been, what God had been
doing in his life.
And then they sang together.
It was a difficult situation, but we were
praying.
Prayer.
God.
It's not just prayer, it's God when we
pray.
All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer,
believing ye shall receive.
And let me add one thought before I
conclude.
There's a book called A History of Revivals
of American Religion by Calvin Colton.
I got it in a secondhand bookstore.
It was published in 1832.
I got it for 25 cents in a
secondhand bookstore.
I wouldn't trade it for $50, but don't
try 75.
Anyway, in this book he was saying, we
learn how to get God into the picture
in revival.
Fasting and prayer.
And then he said, we were never satisfied
with what he called insulated conversions.
We'd use the word isolated.
It meant the same.
Ones and twos, finding Christ.
That's fine.
That's not revival.
He said we fasted, we prayed, we preached
for revival.
And then he said this, and we believed
God for revival until the Holy Ghost came
and took the work out of our hands
and made the whole community aware of God.
And then hundreds found Christ.
And then he said this, this kind of
revival never came in our experience to a
church that didn't believe it would come.
And it never failed to come to a
church that believed it would come.
You know, Stoddard, who was related to Jonathan
Edwards, he had five revivals in 35 years
in his church.
Other churches were not having revival.
Finally, pastors had a meeting with Stoddard and
said, why is God blessing you and not
blessing us?
He said, brethren, let me tell you how
we prepare.
He said, we fast and we pray and
we believe God for revival.
We believe God is going to do it.
Now, you guys don't do that.
You hope God will send a revival.
You don't believe he will.
You hope he will.
He said, that's just the difference.
Five revivals, 35 years.
Other churches, no revivals.
And so we have to remember, it's not
just preparing.
It's a matter of believing God that he
will come in power, in answer to faith.
Let's pray.
Father, you're being so good to all of
us in this building.
If we're born again, that's a marvel.
Father, your grace.
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
himself.
Father, what a truth.
Thank you for remembering me.
Thank you, Father, for all you've done answering
prayer.
And thank you, Father, for the times you've
faithfully rebuked sin in my life.
Oh, God.
And I pray, Lord, you'll continue.
I don't have to ask you to be
faithful.
I want you to help me to be
faithful for your glory.
And Father, I thank you again for that
verse, all prayer.
And I will therefore that men pray everywhere,
lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting.
Father, you gave us that.
You're waiting now for us to respond from
our heart as individuals and as churches to
get it straightened out, Father, so that we're
not doing what we've always done.
We're waiting.
Father, the Bible says, how little a whisper
is heard of you.
But God, you made the universe.
You're mighty and powerful.
How is it that we're only hearing a
whisper of you?
We want to hear the shout of a
king in the camp.
And we're crying to you, Father, for that.
I need thee every hour, most gracious Lord.
No tender voice like thine can peace afford.
I need thee.
Oh, I need thee every hour.
I need thee.
Thank you for loving us and blessing us.
In Christ's name.
Amen.