So let's start with this song.
He sang
it when there was one day of...
Sing it again, come on, it's beautiful.
And you were singing, they are weak.
Forget it.
Sing, we are weak.
That may injure your pride, but sing it.
We are weak, but he is strong.
Okay?
Jesus loves me.
For the Bible tells me so.
We are weak, but he is strong.
Like to
hear Mike sing it himself.
He wasn't here when we sang.
One fellow here says...
He's the one that heard Mike sing before.
Good.
Father, we thank you for loving us.
Lord, I've never seen a ball of clay
that I could love.
And we were as clay in the hands
of the potter.
Without shape, without character, without value.
But Lord, we thank you, you are the
master potter.
And Lord, we want to learn still how
to be in subjection to your moulding.
To the shaping of our lives.
To the pruning of our lives.
To the discipline of our lives.
Lord God, move us out of immaturity.
Move us out of childhood.
Lord, make us worthy of carrying the burdens
of the Lord.
Make us worthy of being flung into the
forefront of the battle.
Lord, take us out of the nursery into
the armoury.
Teach us what it means, Lord, to put
on the whole armour of God.
And fight the good fight of faith.
We have more assailants, we have more opposition,
I believe, to the gospel now than any
period in history.
Lord, outside in the world we have wars
and rumours of wars.
In the spiritual realm we have heresies and
strange doctrines.
Opposition of men and opposition of devils.
But we thank you for Jesus this morning.
Lord, we are baffled when we think that
for two thousand years you have been making
intercession at the right hand of the Father.
Listening every day to millions of confessions of
sin, confessions of failure and all these things.
And yet somehow you carry all this awesome
load.
Lord, we thank you that with confidence we
now draw nigh.
And Father, Abba, Father, cry.
Lord, we bless you for giving us this
title.
I don't remember Abraham ever used it, or
Moses, or David.
But we're allowed to call you our Father
who art in heaven.
And we bless you this morning, Father.
We'll never be worthy as long as we're
in the flesh, as long as we're in
this mortality.
But Lord, we're glad one day we shall
say farewell mortality and welcome to eternity.
We bless you, we have an inheritance incorruptible
and undefiled that fadeth not away.
Reserved in heaven for us.
Lord, I bless you for this.
Quicken our hearts this morning, we pray in
Jesus' name.
Amen.
Thank you.
Be seated.
Okay.
These would be better if they were red,
white and blue.
But anyhow.
When we were living in Ireland, we lived
in a house about 200 or 300 years
old.
It was part of an old castle.
And the forefront of the castle had been
taken away.
We had lived in the servants' quarters.
It was very, very beautiful.
But across the field from us was a
gorgeous castle.
And a young man by the name of
Lord Belmore lived there.
I went across to see, not to see
him one day, but to see the place.
He had a lot of exotic beasts and
birds.
But I went into a room about half
the size of this, which was his study.
I'd like a study like that.
But anyhow, it was very beautiful.
There were two chairs there.
And I noticed a little tab on the
corner of each chair.
So I said to his butler, I like
these chairs.
He said, well, you know, when our present
queen was married in Westminster Abbey, there was
seating for 3,000 people, and then they
put chairs down the aisle.
And the people who sat in chairs down
the aisle were allowed to buy them.
So Lord Belmore brought one home and he
brought one for his wife.
So it said, on one Lord Belmore, on
the other Lady Belmore.
That was very interesting.
I came to America and they were showing
again the film of, in black and white
there, of the wedding of the queen.
And as we sat at supper, the lady
at the table said, Mr. Raidenhill, if you
had been in England today, would you have
been at the royal wedding?
I said, no, I wouldn't.
She said, why not?
I said, because my name is Raidenhill and
not Churchill.
So she said, well, that's interesting.
I guess you'd love to have gone.
No, I wouldn't.
I said, well, if I'd gone up to
the door and said I want to see
the royal wedding, they'd say, well, I looked
down the social register, there's a Lord Raiden
Scar, there's a Lord Raiden C, but there's
no Lord Raidenhill, so you can't come in.
Wouldn't you be disappointed?
I said, no, I'd just say bye, thank
you.
Why?
She said, you might have bought a chair,
and brought it home for your children and
grandchildren to see.
Very wonderful.
You'd have seen all the celebrities of the
world there, kings and rulers, presidents, and what
have you got.
I said, wonderful.
And you really wouldn't be envious?
Envious?
I said, lady, I'm going to a royal
wedding soon, which will make this wedding look
like the dishes in the kitchen sink.
And I said, I'll tell you something.
It says in 1 Peter 1 that there's
a seat reserved in heaven for me.
Billy Graham isn't going to get in.
And somebody else isn't going to get in.
It's reserved in heaven for you who are
kept by the power of God, through faith
unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the
last time.
And it says that you and I have
an inheritance incorruptible beyond the reach of death,
that is, undefiled beyond the reach of sin,
that fadeth not away beyond the reach of
time.
So I've got a home eternal in the
heavens.
So do you think I envy anybody else
down here?
It doesn't matter how big your home is.
You may live in a palace like Mike
and some of the others.
They're going to have to leave it all
behind.
My precious wife has no jewelry.
She gets some very expensive clothes, usually given.
But I said, she said, I think I
need a little brooch.
I said, we're going to town to one
of the greatest, best-known shops in America.
And dearie, don't think about the price.
Anything you want in Kmart you can buy.
You know, I'm very sorry for most ladies.
I really am.
I stayed in a home in Chicago, a
very close friend of Dr. Tozer's.
And the lady on the Friday picked up
a Bible and a note.
She said, I'm going to the beauty shop.
I looked at her.
She said, I've been going to the same
beauty shop for 20 years.
I thought, woman, what were you like when
they started on you?
Isn't it amazing what emphasis we put on
externals?
The king's daughter is all glorious within.
I'm going to preach in a minute.
In Bradford, Yorkshire, I remember going to Bradford
for the simple reason that I met Smith
Wigglesworth there.
Now everybody called him the apostle of prayer.
And he was an amazing man.
He was in a meeting in, I forgot
the name of the town.
Anyhow, I was watching, there's a woman on
the front row with a big, big tummy.
So while they were singing, he went down,
he's bald in the rear, you know, they
were all singing.
He said, are you pregnant?
Oh no, no, I'm not pregnant.
He says, close your eyes.
He closed her eyes.
He took his fist and slammed her in
the stomach.
He said, you're healed.
Well, she was either healed or dead.
He had some ways that nobody else could
copy because he was a man of faith.
But you know, he did the same thing
in Australia.
So, Tim, when you, Mike, when you go,
don't you try it.
You just kill the woman, you don't have
the faith.
But you know, by the same token, when
people would say to him, you're the most
remarkable man of faith since the apostle Paul.
He'd point to the platform and say, that
demon has followed me around the world into
whatever number of countries we've been in.
Ten or fifteen.
That demon, who did he mean?
His daughter.
His daughter couldn't hear any more than this
table could hear, this wood could hear.
And he prayed and prayed and prayed and
she never got healed.
And so, I think that's a lesson for
us.
We despair sometimes.
You know, like people say, I want, young
men say to me, I want to be
like Finney.
He walked into a building and the machinery
stopped.
And people, he did it once in his
lifetime.
He didn't do it every day.
He had his tough times like everybody else.
Because you see, that's how God makes character.
Oh, well, I've got to watch my reputation.
If you look for that, well, you'll be
working twenty-eight hours a day.
I was praying once in a situation, the
Lord showed me very clearly, reputation is what
men think I am.
Character is what God knows I am.
You can't change God's mind about me.
I'm the only way that can change God's
mind.
You can gossip and slander and ridicule and
lie about me.
You won't change God's mind.
So, why should I worry about you?
You can't make your mind up twice a
day, so why should I worry about you?
Character is something that God is going to
develop in us.
Okay.
Fifty-five years ago, when most of you
are not around, I guess, I was pastoring
a church in England.
It was the largest holiness church in the
British Isles.
It wasn't great by numbers, as you would
count numbers.
Sunday night we got maybe five hundred people,
but a quarter of a mile from us
was the gorgeous cathedral.
They got fifty people, we got five hundred.
And that whole meet, that whole church thrived,
expanded, and became the most powerful unit for
many miles around for one reason only.
We had seven prayer meetings a week.
And one Sunday morning, when I was preaching,
I was sure I heard a voice, so
I turned to look.
There was nobody there.
And the voice said this disgusting thing.
I assumed after a minute it must have
been a deacon.
Because the voice said, You're not the most
important person in this church.
You're not the most spiritual.
And I looked round and thought, Well, who
in the world is?
Then I saw a little old lady and
she had a bonnet on, she had strings
and tied it under the chin.
Lovely little old thing.
And the Lord said, That woman is the
power in your church.
I'd just taken over as the pastor, though
I'd been one of the founders of it
years before.
And I discovered that she belonged to a
group of about eight people who for forty
years had prayed for revival in that city.
My precious wife is a state certified midwife.
She was director of one of the largest
hospitals in England.
She has lots of qualifications that she doesn't
talk about.
But she's delivered hundreds and hundreds of babies.
I'm glad she didn't bring them all home.
You know, often we evangelists, we go to
a church and there's a moving of guard.
Somebody comes and says, Why don't you stay
here as the pastor?
The only reason we have a good time,
we deliver the babies.
Somebody's been praying for years in that church.
And the same is happening in here.
And it's going to happen.
And I discovered that about six or eight
of those people had met not every morning,
but nearly every morning in the week.
And they'd believed God.
And as a result of that, there was
a moving of the Spirit of God forty
years afterwards.
Well, we're going to talk this morning about
a very wonderful woman in the scripture, in
the first book of Samuel, and the first
chapter.
This is one of those wonderful stories.
You get in the Bible, many of them,
where a man has two wives.
Oh boy, what an affliction.
But you know, that's changed now.
They used to have it in the Old
Testament.
It didn't work.
So, in the New Testament, it's not legal
to have two wives.
Well, it doesn't say so.
It does.
It says no man can serve two masters.
So, it says in this first book of
Samuel, in the first chapter, this man had
two wives.
Verse two says he had two wives.
The name of one was Hannah, the name
of the other was Penina.
And Penina had children, but Hannah had no
children.
And he went up, notice what it says,
he went up yearly to worship.
That interprets the rest of the chapter to
me.
Every year, he went all the way.
Remember, there's no mass transport.
It was very dangerous.
You could hardly go down the road, otherwise
you'd get mugged.
The scripture shows that very clearly, like the
man that was beaten up at the side
of the road and the Samaritan came.
But yearly, they made that tremendous trip.
There were no fast food services, no transport.
It was a tremendous, difficult trial to go.
They went up yearly to the house of
the Lord.
Verse four says, When time was come, the
Lord gave to Penina his wife and to
all, notice all her sons and her daughters'
portions.
But Hannah, he gave a worthy portion for
he loved Hannah, but the Lord had shut
up her womb.
Now, all the qualifications, I almost said ingredients,
but that sounds too much like a cake
mix.
But all the ingredients of true intercession are
in this chapter, more I think than any
other chapter in the Bible.
It says in verse six, her adversary.
She had an adversary.
If you want to prove what kind of
an adversary you have, you begin to design
your day, the day you live, and you
design the time you'll give in prayer.
You'll discover the world of flesh and the
devil in a way you've never known them
before.
Our phone rings hours and hours a day.
I usually go after breakfast.
My darling wife and I have an hour
together.
Then I go to pray for some time
and the phone will ring and visitors will
come.
They drop in on the doorstep.
I've come from Africa.
I've come from India.
I've come from somewhere and I'm rude enough
to tell them to wait because my time
with God cannot be in any way interrupted.
There's a jealousy that God has.
I understand that Brother Paul has some tapes
on the jealousy of God, but God is
a jealous God and the jealousy of God,
there's a carnal jealousy I'm jealous for the
Lord God of hosts.
They've pulled down your altars and the gates
are burned with fire and God is a
jealous God.
So here it says she had an adversary
and an adversary provoked her to make a
threat because the Lord had shut up her
womb and he did so and he did
so, listen again, year by year.
Every time she went up to the temple
to worship, she met provocation.
She had a partner in the house with
a bunch of children around her skirts and
this woman has none.
So every time she goes up they say
there she is, there's Hannah again.
She's not pregnant.
The Lord is displeased with her.
It's amazing how you can find out what's
wrong with other people, isn't it?
And you can't find out what's wrong with
yourself.
It's like the woman looking out of the
window she says, you know, if those kids
next door were mine I'd know what I'd
do with them.
And just as she did it, she
can bring somebody else's up easier than yours.
You've got the wrong ones.
But it's never easy to raise children and
it's never easy to raise a spiritual family.
Okay.
And so as he did so year by
year she went up to the house of
the Lord and she provoked her until she
wept and did not eat.
So there's provocation.
It's mentioned twice.
Verses 6 and 7 she had provocation.
Now verse 10 says she was in bitterness
of soul and prayed unto the Lord.
Verse 7 says she wept.
Verse 10 says she wept until she was
sore.
And then it says over in the leave
over leave for me in verse 15 Hannah
answered and said I am a woman of
a sorrowful spirit so she has provocation and
she has sorrow because she's barren.
I'm a woman of a sorrowful spirit.
I've drunk neither wine nor strong drink.
You see a difficult thing is when you
start to move in spirituality it's very easy
to bear the criticism of the world the
roughness of the world.
It's a criticism of sense that gets you
down.
Somebody says oh don't do that you're getting
too serious.
You know our people will warn you don't
get too spiritual.
You never heard anybody say they don't get
too rich.
Don't get too much education but don't get
too spiritual.
You know why?
Because they've been dragging their feet for the
last 10 to 20 years and they're afraid
you'll get ahead of them.
All are born equal.
That's not true.
It's not true in the physical sense it's
not true in the social sense it is
true in the spiritual sense.
I'm glad that nobody is born handicapped when
they're born again in the spirit of God.
We have a friend who was born with
a lot of money and they had a
child and it was born with what do
you call it?
Down syndrome.
Well everybody is amazed he's such an athletic
fellow and she's such a charming lady.
So anyhow about four years afterwards they've been
all over America and they've studied I don't
know gynecology but they could.
They said this can't happen it's a 10
million to one chance for these two little
children that need almost 24 hour a day
attention.
But people are not born like that spiritually.
We're born heirs of God and joint heirs
with Jesus Christ.
The trouble is most of us don't inherit
what we've got.
You know I've prayed 500 Friday nights with
some teams of men and women in a
little place a bit of property that last
days have and almost every Friday night I
would cry out in my grief God at
the judgment seat of the prison hill when
you were on earth living there in Texas
I had many things to tell you but
you couldn't bear them.
God I'd be disgusted.
You see we all have this little place
called time it's a little island called time
and it's surrounded by an ocean of eternity.
In the 1500s John Donne wrote a statement
that's been quoted millions of times no man
is an island.
Well I reverse that every man is an
island and that's a relief to me to
know that.
We couldn't put up with two like you.
Every man is an island.
Every man is an entity.
And sometime if we come back again if
you don't ask us we'll invite ourselves anyhow.
I've turned over in my mind so much
in the last few weeks where Paul says
that Christ may be magnified by my brains
by my ministry by my miracles no by
my body whether by life or by death.
If I live I gain if I die
I gain.
There's nothing to gain in this life in
one sense and yet there's everything to gain.
We're heirs of God and that stops me
dead in my tracks but we're not all
heirs of God we're joint heirs with Jesus
Christ.
Why don't we use our resources?
Can't God trust us?
Are we too immature?
Are we too longing to be a personality
not to be liquidated not to be lost
in him not to die and rise in
resurrection life?
You see there are two great things in
life the two difficult things in life number
one is to find the will of God.
You know you get people telling you how
to find the will of God they've been
trying to find it for themselves for ten
years and never found it.
They'll tell you in ten minutes how to
find the will of God.
That's number one difficulty the second difficulty is
doing it.
And you see when you do the will
of God it's not what it costs you
it's what it costs other people.
I gave up a fine church to start
going around the world so I had to
leave my dear wife and boys at home
with no financial backing.
Money came very very slowly somebody said to
me the other day you know money talks
I said it does all it says to
me is goodbye.
But you know in the place of prayer
money doesn't count prestige doesn't count brilliance doesn't
count it's something in here.
Okay let me just take another phrase here
in this 15th verse again Hannah is criticized
by the priest and she says I've drunk
neither wine nor strong drink but I've poured
out my soul before the Lord.
Do you remember it says I read it
last night or maybe two o'clock this
morning about two o'clock this morning in
the 53rd chapter of Isaiah I have poured
out my soul unto the Lord.
Jesus walked into the garden of Gethsemane then
he knelt then he prostrated himself and in
that awesome time he says I poured out
my soul unto the Lord.
But you see all these ingredients are in
the person of a person or in the
nature if you like a character of a
person who desires to be an intercessor.
If I see two people talking I interrupt.
If two people are doing something I can
intervene.
But when I'm an intercessor I stand between
a certain situation and God himself.
And God said he wondered what?
That there were no intercessors.
As I said last night isn't it amazing?
The disciples heard the greatest preacher that ever
lived preach the greatest sermon ever preached the
Sermon on the Mount but they never said
Lord teach us to preach.
They saw the miracles even raising the dead.
They never said Lord teach us to do
the miracles but they said Lord teach us
to pray.
And no man is greater than his prayer
life.
So what's the problem with this woman?
Just one thing.
It's the problem with the Church of Jesus
Christ today.
Barrenness.
She had everything else.
There's a corresponding story to this I think
in the 30th chapter there.
I think it's the wait a minute 30th
chapter yes of Genesis.
Again you have a man with two wives.
Rachel is the man that he served God
for served the Father for for two periods
of seven years.
And she gets everything.
I can imagine her coming to her husband
one day and say you know darling you're
getting more and more famous out there in
the market out there in the in the
bazaar.
People talk about three persons Abraham Isaac and
Jacob.
You know isn't it time we improved our
lifestyle?
Aren't you tired of going out on a
camel?
Why don't you get one of those gorgeous
black Arabian stallions like some other people?
Or my clothes aren't right or some other
things.
She doesn't say that.
One day she forgets to put her hair
neatly and she comes down and so she's
had a sleepless night maybe she had threw
herself herself at the feet of Jacob and
she didn't say you know darling I've been
reconsidering this.
You know I feel so embarrassed we have
no children.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had some
children?
She doesn't do that.
She's in despair.
There's a place where despair has a place
in prayer.
She throws herself at the feet of her
husband and says give me children or I
die.
I can't live without this.
And you see why those people we had
revival in that town it was a time
of poverty unemployment all the difficulties you could
imagine that people for 40 years had been
waiting day and night in a certain place
praying and making intercession.
We can't live unless revival comes.
I can remember they'd come up after the
power of God broke on the town they'd
give us a hug you know and say
oh brother this is wonderful for 40 years.
You should have heard so and so she
died so many years ago.
Boy she could pray she could intercede.
I said I remember meeting that great man
of prayer of faith he was Smith Wigglesworth
but in the tent we have a woman
came to us one day dear Lord she
was a sight.
She lived about the most poverty poor poor
poor poor poor poor
poor
poor poor
poor
poor poor poor poor
poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor
poor Stop
it.
Accept interceding people.
Accept people who would rather die than live
like this, without the presence of God.
So Rachel throws herself at the feet of
this man and she says, give me children
or I die.
Hannah isn't content to go and meet all
the nice people at the conference twice a
year.
She isn't happy to get out of the
house and take this long journey to the
sacred city, where David walked and Isaiah walked
and Zechariah walked and Jeremiah walked.
That doesn't interest her.
She's not interested in geography or topography.
She's interested only in one thing.
God has not allowed her to bear a
child.
You know, when they had the revival, they
had an amazing revival in 1905, away there
in Korea.
And it was by the power of the
Spirit of God.
I was preaching in Lake Okoboji some years
ago.
A very charming lady, like my sweet wife,
had white hair.
And she stopped me in the street the
next morning and she said, oh Mr. Regner,
that meeting was so good last night, you
reminded me of my daddy.
Did you know my daddy?
How in the world do you know the
daddy of a woman you've never seen in
your life?
I said, no.
Was he a footballer or what was he?
My daddy?
My daddy was Jonathan Goldforth.
Jonathan Goldforth had had a revival in China,
yes.
And she said, you preach just like that?
Well, that was wonderful.
He must have been a great preacher.
You see, there are times when God will
come in certain ways.
And He comes on certain people at certain
times.
Boy, I've gone to other places where I
stumble.
I've had three strokes and so I'm even
fortunate to have a voice.
My cords are supposed to have failed.
Some people wish they had failed altogether, but
they're not.
They're still there.
So anyhow, this is how it worked.
They had a revival in a church.
And then in order to become a member
of that church, you must bring to birth,
bring a person that you personally have birthed.
I was in Australia, I was in New
Zealand too.
Australia, what, New Zealand, what, 70 million sheep?
And I'd been speaking about the 23rd Psalm.
And, no, I'd been speaking about Abraham.
And now that ram got caught in the
thicket.
And this old guy came up and he
says, listen, you didn't say, there are lots
of things you didn't say in that story.
I said, yes, he said one about the
ram caught in the thicket.
He said, you know, that ram wasn't there
when he went up the hill.
I said, no, it wasn't there when he
built the altar.
No, it wasn't there when he wrapped the
boy and fastened him up, so he couldn't
get away.
I said, well, I said, how do you
know that?
It isn't in my Bible.
If it's in yours, tell me and I'll
get one like yours.
No, he said, I've been a shepherd for
50 years.
I know all the things about sheep.
He said, I'll tell you what, when a
ram gets caught in a thicket like that,
it will either pull its horns until it
uproots the bush or it will pull until
it pulls its horns off, but it won't
stay a captive.
And I said to him, well, so you've
been a shepherd.
And I said, could I ask you a
question?
Yes.
I said, how many sheep did you give
birth to?
How many lambs did you give birth to?
He said, what?
I said, how many lambs did you give
birth to?
He said, where are you from?
I said, America.
Oh, well, that explains it, he said.
We do everything by machinery.
But you see, you could not be a
member of that church until you personally had
birthed somebody and said, I've prayed for so
long and this person is my spiritual offspring.
And then when they got that going, every
church had to give birth to another church.
They wouldn't have these mega churches, whatever in
the world you call them, fastest growing churches.
Some of them are going to be the
fastest declining before long.
When the economy hits the dip, they'll be
in trouble.
They'll have millions of dollars in debt, and
they won't be able to handle it.
But anyhow, this woman is concerned about one
thing only.
She's concerned about barrenness.
And not only concerned, she said, I wept.
And then she said, I wept until I
was sore.
It wasn't something that happened one night and
she forgot about it until she went to
another conference.
It was an aggravation.
It was a day by day humiliation.
People say, isn't she charming?
Isn't her husband very rich?
Isn't he very famous?
You know, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
They're a marvelous family, but she has no
children.
You see, the anger of God is against
that woman.
And so there she is, praying.
Year by year she goes up.
And year by year she's tormented until eventually,
as it were, God gets through to her.
And finally she says, look, give me children
or I die.
And she's weeping and she's grieving.
Wasn't it the psalmist said, store my tears
in thy bottle?
Didn't Jesus weep in Gethsemane?
You know, I've been reading, reading, and rereading,
and rereading the first and second epistles of
Paul to Timothy.
Here's a brilliant old battle-scarred warrior pouring
all his life into this young man.
He says, what I've done for you, you
do for somebody else.
Just the other day, it kind of jumped
off the page and grasped me.
He says many things.
I remember the unfeigned faith which is in
thee, which dwelt first in thy mother Eunice,
thy mother Aloys, and then thy, which way?
Which way, though?
Which is mother?
Eunice.
Eunice, you're sure that's right?
No.
What does it say in the Greek?
Well, it says I remember your mother, your
mother, your grandmother, anyhow.
But then he says, and this really got
hold of me, this is the young man
he's poured his life into.
Can you imagine living with Paul?
And he says, Timothy, I'm mindful of thy
tears.
Dear God, one of the most awesome things
I think in the whole of the Word
of God, at least in the New Testament,
is, I think, the ninth chapter of Romans,
where Paul says I could wish myself accursed
for my brethren.
In essence, he says I'll be damned if
need be.
Lord, I don't care what you put on
me.
You can tear up my body.
You can bring me burdens, oversized burdens.
You can give me revelations beyond anybody else.
You can give me grief beyond anybody else.
I don't care.
You see, dear friend, you've only from here
to eternity to build your character.
It's too late.
There'll be no soul winning in heaven.
There'll be no prayer in heaven.
There'll be none of the heroics that we
spend our time with.
They won't be of any value.
But dear God, when God opens...
It says the books are open.
Boy, that's going to be wonderful.
I can't wait to see the glorified edition
of Why Revival Tarrys.
I'm going to say to Peter, I want
to see the library.
But look, when God opens the book of
prayer, suppose he opens it right after he's
just given the reward to one of America's
greatest men, David Brainard, the man who says
he went out in the snow, I knelt
in the snow up to my chin, he
says, at sunrise.
And I had to press into the snow
in order to get some comfort.
And I stayed there till sunset, a half
an hour before sunset.
And by the time I got up, I
couldn't touch the snow with the tips of
my fingers.
He'd spent 12 hours in intercession, in prayer.
And you can't do it in a lovely
room with wall-to-wall carpeting and air
conditioning.
God help us.
Where are we?
He gave his life for America, praying Payson
of Portland.
His life is just out.
Until recently, Ian Murray, the president of...
What's that called now?
Banner of Truth.
Banner of Truth, thank you.
Good, you're getting marks this morning.
Just showed you what a good night's sleep
can do for you.
Until recently, the three great volumes on the
life of Payson were collector's items.
Ian Murray lives in Edinburgh.
He's the president of Banner of Truth.
He had a set of them.
But they've been published.
A friend of mine published them last year.
They're $76, but right now they're half-priced.
Do you sell them at the school, Sean?
Oh, you're going to.
He's prophesying.
So, well, get them.
They'll never be printed again.
I don't think anybody will print them because
they won't be bestsellers.
But there you say again, praying Payson of
Portland.
The floor of his bedroom was like this.
When he prayed, he prayed this way all
the time.
So he wore grooves, hollows at the side
of his bed as though you ploughed them
or chiseled it out.
When they dressed him to bury him, his
knees had great big calluses.
Like tradition says, James, the man of prayer,
had.
You see, you've got an amazing inheritance here.
You've got David Brainerd, and you've got praying
Payson of Portland, and you've got John Hyde.
The man that was insulted when somebody told
him he needed to be filled with the
Holy Ghost.
A man asked me one day, you've been
to many countries, you've been to India, yes.
Did you go to the Cyclops Convention?
No.
He said, well, a friend of mine went
some years ago.
And to his amazement, when he got there,
John Hyde, praying Hyde, was there.
And he said, I said to him, Mr.
Hyde, it would be the thrill of my
life, the joy of my life, it would
be the greatest tuition I could ever have,
if I could spend a time in prayer
with you.
So he said, all right, brother, meet me
in the morning at, I think it was
nine o'clock.
And he said, we'll pray a little while.
So he said, I went in, and I
waited and waited and waited.
And he said, oh, he's waiting for me
to pray.
And he said, I didn't pray.
And then he said, John Hyde began to
pray.
And he said, when he prayed, I then
thought, my eyes.
I thought God was at the side of
us.
And he said, he just poured out his
soul for India.
And then there was a knock on the
door.
And he said, I said to myself, listen,
nobody's stopping this prayer meeting with me.
This is once in a lifetime, I'm not
going to the door.
A little while after, a knock at the
door.
A little while after, a knock at the
door.
So he went.
He was going to the door.
A man put his head round the door.
And he said, brother Hyde, you're speaking at
three o'clock, and it's a quarter of
three now.
The man said, it's what?
I came in this room at a quarter
of nine, to a quarter to ten, to
a quarter to eleven, to a quarter to
twelve, to a quarter to one, to a
quarter to two, to a quarter to three.
Six hours?
You see, when you get lost in the
presence of God, whether it's the ecstasy, or
whether it's the grief.
As I said yesterday, remember, Moses had been
on the mountain with God.
And what did he discover?
He didn't come back saying, you know, God
is love, God loves us, God loves us.
He came back saying, God is angry.
And he pleaded with God.
Well, listen, I quoted half of this last
night.
One of the most wonderful things in the
world is when God, the omnipotent God, reaches
down and gets hold of a man.
There's one thing more wonderful than that.
It's when a man reaches up and takes
hold of God.
What did God say when Moses went to
see Him?
He says, leave me alone.
Does God ever say that to you?
Does He ever say that to me?
You're praying for something you can't bring to
birth.
You know, there's a saying in England that
if a married couple, if the wife had
the first baby and the husband had the
second, there'd never be a third.
Because we don't know a thing about travel.
But I believe that spiritual travel is more
intense than physical travel even.
So, one thing, this woman gets pregnant.
We would read in the newspapers in England,
the Queen has given up, cancelled all her
engagements for the next year.
Oh, she's pregnant.
I remember in America, they said in the
newspaper, John, the President's wife, has cancelled her
engagements.
She loves to ride horses.
She loves water sports.
She's particularly smart, as she was, in water
skiing.
But she might be skiing, and that skink
come up and hit that unborn baby, and
so she sacrifices everything.
Well, immediately that wonderful little creature comes there
into the tummy of that woman, and it's
a fantastic thing that a child can be
born.
There are 2,000 possible risks with a
baby that's born physically.
But taking it spiritually, or take it physically,
that baby gets there in the tummy of
the woman, and as it grows, it begins
to put pressure on.
It's normal, and it's abnormal.
That little thing there is pushing the walls
of the womb, and other things are bearing
the pain.
And as you go further on, she's changed
her social life.
She changed her physical life.
There are things she's loved to eat she
doesn't want to eat.
There are things she didn't like, and she
wants.
She craves them.
She goes to bed at night.
The old boy's in bed too.
One o'clock.
Two o'clock.
Three o'clock.
There he is.
And she's in pain, and he doesn't care
a hill of beans.
He's dreaming he's golfing or something.
And there she is with pain, and the
nearer it comes to the time of deliverance,
the more the pain comes.
It gets more acute.
You know, lots of time, God got us
almost to the place of deliverance, and we're
like the Old Testament.
What do they say?
Zion traveled, but she couldn't bring forth children.
She brought forth wind.
She never accomplished that which God desired.
But the intensity comes, and she doesn't argue
about it.
She knows that once she gets pregnant, everything's
going to change.
You know, when we get spiritually pregnant like
that, when your social life doesn't matter, when
what you eat doesn't matter too much, when
how you sleep doesn't matter too much.
When it comes to this, God give us
revival or we die.
In America 60 years ago, a man put
an order outside of his church.
This church will either have revival or a
funeral.
It had revival.
Why?
Because he put his house in order.
There are conditions that we have to meet.
And when you get to the place where
you say, I can't live any longer.
My daddy and mummy are unsaved.
My husband's unsaved.
Somebody else is unsaved.
And you say, Lord, this is the one
treasure I ask of you, to give us
deliverance, give us salvation.
Let them be born.
You know, people are not being born in
America.
They come to the altar, they're lost when
they come, and they're lost when they go.
They're not born again of the Spirit of
God.
The most amazing miracle in the world is
a new birth.
Oh, we think it's for the down and
outs.
It's for the up and outs too.
It's for the hippies and the yuppies.
Whosoever will may come.
You know, there's a little book.
Do you sell that book, The Life of
God in the Soul of Man?
You will before I come again.
You'll be in trouble.
It was written in the 1500s.
Who wrote it there?
You've forgotten?
Martha, you've forgotten?
Dear, dear.
I bring my spare brains and they don't
work.
Oh, I know.
His name was Henry School, S-C-O
-U-G-H.
Henry School, The Life of God in the
Soul of Man.
I'll tell you what happened.
One of the most wonderful women in history
was Mrs. Wesley.
She had 17 children.
They weren't all living at once.
But, you know, she used to get up
early in the morning and spend an hour
with the family.
And then after she prayed with them at
night, she took each one separately, a different
night, and prayed with them.
One day she got a copy of a
book called The Life of God in the
Soul of Man.
She gave it to John Wesley.
She gave it to Charles Wesley.
Charles was going down the corridor in Christ
Church in Oxford.
And he saw this man in the window
there, this big old mullion window.
And there he was with his knees up
reading a book.
And he said to him, George, you need
to read this.
My mother says it's the best thing ever
written.
Read it.
And he threw the book into the lap
of George.
George who?
George Whitefield.
And George read it.
And on the cover of the new edition
it says, I never knew what Christianity was
until I read this book.
And the title is again, The Life of
God in the Soul of Man.
A man isn't born again because he confesses
his sins.
He needs a miracle.
It's the work of the Father, the work
of the Son, and the work of the
Holy Spirit of God.
And then George Whitefield proclaimed that message.
Dear God, there's a book.
I don't know if you fellas have enough
appetite to read it.
I call it the Bible of Revivals.
It's by Gillies.
Do you have that?
If he gets all going to us, he'll
need a U-Haul trailer to go home.
But it really is a magnificent book.
It's the invasion of God into my personality.
That's what Paul says, The hope of glory.
Again, just skip over it.
I won't mention it.
I'll leave that for tonight maybe.
Anyhow, what am
I thinking of here?
Talking of tears and travail, I had the
privilege, and I think it was a privilege,
to pray on quite a number of occasions
with Duncan Campbell, the man that God used
in the revival in 1949, away there in
Scotland.
You may remember the fact he was in
Ireland, sitting on the platform, fingering through his
Bible, and he said to the chairman, I'm
going.
So the chairman thought he was going to
the bathroom or somewhere.
He said, we'll sing till he comes back.
I'm not coming back.
Where are you going to?
I'm going to Scotland.
Out of this meeting?
There's a thousand people waiting.
This is the final meeting of the conference.
But you see, when God speaks, you obey
Him.
It doesn't matter who you offend.
So he got up, carried his Bible, went
to the boat, got off the boat, took
another boat, took off the boat, got off
the boat, took another boat over to what
we call the Hebrides, the New Hebrides in
the southeast.
Anyhow, he got a boy to row him
across from one island to the other.
When he got there, he said, Laddie, in
his Scots way, who's the senior elder of
the Kirk?
And he said, oh, he lives up there.
His name is Brown.
He said, would you tell him that Duncan
Campbell has arrived?
Campbell of the Argyle Revival?
So he went and he said, this big
gangling highlander, a helander as they say, came
down.
Brother, glad to meet you.
Glad to meet you, brother.
You see, the building up there, that's a
Kirk, the church.
And we don't use it.
It hasn't been used for years.
But this morning, brother, he said, I got
on my bicycle and I went round the
town and said, come to the old Kirk
tonight at six o'clock.
There's going to be a service.
A man called Duncan Campbell will be there.
There'll be no communication.
So Duncan looked at this fellow, and Duncan
was a pretty tall guy, looked at this
tall man, and he said, he said, brother,
you've been round the island and told them
I was coming to preach?
Yes.
He said, how did you know I was
coming?
He said, how did you know to come?
The Lord only speaks with one voice.
So what happened?
There's now pouring of the Spirit of God.
The two classical stories out of that that
he told me, every time we'd talk, we'd
talk between five and six in the morning
and pray, and the tears would come to
his eyes.
And I knew he wasn't in that room
in England.
He was away there in Scotland, reliving that
revival.
Particularly at the time when he went in
a meeting and there was a stillness, nothing
was happening, and he said to a laddy,
a sixteen-year-old high school boy, stand
up and pray for us.
And the laddy stood up, and the Scots
people know the book of Psalms inside out
almost.
And the laddy stood up and he said
in his disdainful way, ach, he said, what's
the good of praying if we're not right
with God?
And then he began to quote that 24th
Psalm again.
Who shall ascend him to the hill of
the Lord, he that hath clean hands and
a pure heart?
And he said he prayed, and then he
pointed like that and said, devil, get out
of this area and don't come back.
Get out of this area.
I claim it in the name of the
Father, Son, the Holy Ghost.
I plead the promises.
I plead the blood.
I say go.
Do you know the moment he said that,
the Holy Spirit dropped at the other end
of town?
People stopped smoking and dancing and fooling and
sinning, and the revival broke.
There were maybe fifty men there with their
clerical collars on, some of the best preachers
in Scotland with their degrees.
He didn't say, hey, Dr. so-and-so,
will you pray?
Bishop so-and-so.
He got a boy, a teenager, and that
boy had so lived with God and prayed
with God.
He'd already learned to pray hours a day,
that the glory of God fill the place.
The great old lady in the story there,
of course, was one of the smiths.
The Miss Smith was 84.
Her sister was younger.
She was 82.
And they sent a letter to Duncan Campbell.
God wants you in this area.
So he gets the letter, reads it, very
sorry, writes back, I have a full engagement
for this year.
So when the letter got back, his reply
got back, the postman brought it, and the
younger lady, 82, that could see, she says,
ah, there's a letter here from Brother Duncan
Campbell.
And the blind lady, 84, said, well, that's
good.
She said, but wait a minute.
He cannot come.
He cannot come to this place.
She said, my dear, that's what he says.
And so he went.
Those two women had prayed for years until
they were 82 and 84 years of age.
I will not let thee go unless thou
bless me.
I don't take any notice of circumstances.
I don't care where the dead are.
But dear God, what's better than raising the
dead?
And we've millions of people in America that
are not saved, they're religious, they're good, they're
kind, they're moral, they support missions, they're going
to hell themselves.
But you see, once we get hungry, and
we say, my daddy's not going to die
unsaved, my sister's not going to die unsaved,
my children are not going to die unsaved,
something will happen in us and something will
happen in them.
So Duncan, the old lady, sent him one
day.
She says, laddie, as she called him, laddie,
get on your bike.
He had an old broken down, about one
and a half horsepower.
It'd take one and a half horses to
push it nearly.
Great big old motorcycle.
He got on it, put his scarf around
his neck.
He goes up the hill and doing the
grey and so forth.
And he saw a girl at the side
of the road.
And she had an elbow and knees, and
she had a nice plaid skirt, and she
was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
So he turned off the gas, put the
bike at the side of the road and
went back to her.
And he said, hey lassie, she didn't look
up, she sobbed.
And he said, lassie, she didn't look up.
And finally he just touched her, you know,
she seemed to be almost sleeping.
He said, lassie, what's the problem?
And with the long drawn out, oh, that
they use in Scotland, don't say God, they
say God.
She said, mister, you can't help me.
Only God can help me.
So he began to rejoice.
Oh, this is prevenient grace.
This is God working in her before I
get here.
He said, well, how could God help you?
She'd never seen him in her life, and
he'd never seen her.
She said, mister, you cannot help me.
She said, over the mountains, she said,
over the mountains, there's a man by the
name of Duncan Campbell.
And God has been saving people.
And I want Duncan Campbell to come down
here to the village.
My father is lost, my brother is lost,
and my uncle is lost.
And I want God to come.
And I've been praying that Duncan Campbell will
change his program and come to our little
village.
And he said, you've been praying.
Who's we?
Oh, me and Jenny.
How old are you?
Seventeen.
How old is Jenny?
Sixteen.
How long did you pray?
She said, we prayed the whole night through.
Two girls prayed all night?
She said, yes.
My daddy's deeing.
My brother's deeing.
My uncle's deeing.
You see, she got the hang of the
thing.
They weren't just lost.
They were dying without God, without hope.
They're going to fall forever and ever and
never reach the bottom.
They're going to burn forever and never be
consumed.
We don't preach about hell anymore.
It's not fashionable.
But God hasn't changed it.
I'll tell you what.
Men have changed their opinion about God, but
God hasn't changed His opinion about men.
He doesn't have to repair the system of
redemption.
It's already complete.
Once in the end of the age, Jesus
appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice
of Himself.
Anyhow, this girl wept.
And Duncan said, I stood there so embarrassed.
He said, I pulled my scarf down and
said, lastly, look.
And he pulled his scarf down.
Look.
And he had this clerical collar.
He said, look, I am Duncan Campbell.
And all she did, she put her hand
up, began to weep.
She said, oh, you're a...
And remember, there's no audience there.
All she said was, oh, you're a covenant
-keeping God.
You're a covenant-keeping God.
So Duncan went down to the village and
he preached.
Her uncle got saved.
Her father got saved.
And the two brothers got saved all in
the time that he was down in that
little place.
But you see, he brought them to birth.
This woman had done the traveling.
And she didn't understand why other people could
just not be moved.
She lived in the realm.
It wasn't emotion.
It's one thing to have tears, emotional tears.
You see, when you're deeply distressed, in grief,
the safety valve is you weep.
Well, when you're happy, you say, we went
to so-and-so.
Boy, we laughed.
We laughed till we cried.
What are you crying for?
People cry at weddings.
Well, do you wonder?
A man losing his life.
Sure, we laugh.
And there are times when the tears come.
But there's a very great difference I learned
60 years ago, almost 70 years ago, by
that book from E.M. Bounds.
Remember, he said, you may climb up to
a glacier on top of a mountain.
That frozen river may move only four or
five feet in six months.
But he said, if you step onto it,
it has about six inches of slush.
It has a surface of slush.
But beneath it, you may have 20 or
30 feet of ice.
There's a surface slush.
The other day when I was praying, I
got something that really staggered me.
I've been in meetings of brokenness.
Our Friday night meeting in the last year,
we were there.
We had it 10 years.
Particularly, there were three men.
One a Quaker, one a full-blooded Indian,
another a businessman in town.
And whenever those men prayed, they wouldn't pray
more than four or five minutes before they
begin to stammer and pray in tears and
brokenness.
And it was awesome.
As far as I'm concerned, it was awesome
anyhow.
And the other day as I thought about
this, you see, we've discovered by many reasons
now, preaching is more than flaming oratory or
if you like, rhetoric and surface tears.
It's one thing to get…
I can get moved on a platform and
preach maybe and some of the things stir
my heart like things I say to you
this morning.
But that doesn't mean I have a broken
heart necessarily.
But you know what?
The Swami says, store my tears in my
bottle.
I believe a cup full of tears in
grief when I have a broken heart over
a lost world.
A cup of tears at the judgment seat
will be worth an ocean of emotional tears
which are just stirred up on a platform.
As I was saying a minute ago, I
don't know if I went through with it,
I can imagine Timothy being in some periods
of prayer with the Apostle, particularly when he
says, I could wish myself a curse.
Here's a man, he's given us 14 epistles
if you think of Hebrews.
He's been in weariness, in fastings, in painfulness,
in perils of the deep, in perils of
dangers.
He could have written seven, eight books on
perils.
He didn't do that.
He summed it all up in perils.
And yet that is what breaks his heart.
He sees this nation that once was holiness
unto the Lord, now it's forgotten God, it's
lost its glory.
And this man is restless until the Spirit
of God comes again and moves over his
people.
And behind every revival in history somewhere there's
been praying people, broken people.
Father Nash and Father Cleary, they went to
hundreds of meetings.
When we went to Bolton, just outside of
Manchester in 1932, we had a
half night of prayer every week in that
tent.
An old lady came to me one morning
and she said, that prayer meeting last night
was awesome.
She said, it so reminded me of Finney.
I said, of who?
She said, I was in this town when
Mr. Finney came so many years ago, eighteen
-something, maybe now, from where we are about
this time, a hundred years back.
And she said, they brought Father Nash and
Father Cleary with him.
They were going down the street.
They stopped.
They saw the steps up to a little
house.
The houses were all in a row.
And on the side of the steps there
were some bars.
And they knocked on the door and said
to the lady, Do you have a basement
here?
We'd like to rent it.
She said, I don't have a basement.
I have a cellar.
Do you know those two praying men rented
that cellar for twenty-five cents a week?
No creature comforts, just a mattress to lay
on.
They prayed twelve hours a day each.
I said, it's almost, it's facetious, it's not
true.
If I could find a Father Nash and
Father Cleary.
I never took a song leader with me
anywhere.
I took a praying man.
I took John, I took, what was the
Irishman that went with me?
Tom Hare.
Thank you, dear.
Martha didn't know.
Tom Hare.
Do you know that the five nights previous
to when we jumped out of that burning
hotel, that man hadn't been to bed one
night?
For five nights?
Well, Father Nash and Father Cleary would go
actually under the platform or behind the platform.
And like Aaron and Hur, they held up
the arms of Finney.
And he knew that his strength was coming
from God.
And they, as it were, had one hand
on the throne and the other on the
pulpit.
And they prayed the life.
They knew sometimes when he kind of staggered
a bit, and they would pray for clarity
for his mind.
Or when he was weak, they would pray
strength and be an insurge of power.
As though somehow a mantle fell over him
and he'd have an ounce of authority.
Finney never made altar calls.
John the Baptist never made altar calls.
Altar calls are not scriptural.
Evangelists make altar calls.
Revival, people make altar calls.
They say, what shall we do?
What shall we do?
They can't stay in a state of vexing
God.
They can't stay in a state of conflict
with God.
And so they want deliverance.
And so they come down the aisle.
They don't have to be beckoned.
You don't have to squeeze them and there's
room at the cross for you and all
the rest of it.
Forget it.
I'll tell you, I guess most of us
have never been in a Holy Ghost meeting.
We've been in good meetings, nice meetings, meetings
where we were happy and clapped.
But how often have you seen a wave
of grief come over a congregation?
How often have you heard people say, I
can't go home, I'm so burdened.
I'll miss a meal, I'll miss some meals.
I want to meet the issue right ahead.
Anyhow, this woman prayed.
What did she pray for?
You say a child.
Well, I say she didn't.
What did she pray for?
She prayed for a man child.
What did she get?
Well, she didn't get a girl.
What did she get?
She got a boy.
She didn't.
What did she get?
She got a prophet.
You see, there are times when you pray
and you get out of a situation and
God isn't concerned that much about you.
He's thinking about His glory.
He's thinking about His plan of the road.
So what happens?
She goes back to the priest one day
and says, for this child I prayed.
Boy, isn't that exciting?
I wonder what the old boy felt like.
You know, he said she's drunk.
Do you know what?
The church never does anything when it's sober.
The trouble with the church is we're sober.
What did they say about those men that
staggered out of the upper room?
They've been having a haircut?
No, they said these men are drunk.
That's so unreasonable.
The first day of the war, I was
preaching in Scotland at the headquarters of the
Church of Nazarene.
The first, not First World War, though I
remember that, but in the, what was it
about?
September 1939.
And before we went in the church, the
announcement came blaring down the street.
The police came.
Everybody must pick up a gas mask.
Get off the streets as quickly as you
can.
So, J.B. Metragon was the head of
the church there and he said, I'm going
in this place.
I'm going to get a gas mask.
So, I was teasing him.
I said, you're a Scotsman.
You're going in because they're free.
So, he said, well, when I come out
of the light, I won't be able to
say, you stand up against this lamppost.
So, I stood against the lamppost.
Streetcars came.
One stopped.
A man got off the car and his
rubber legs, you know, he was swaying one
way and the other.
And then he tripped up and he threw
his arms around the lamppost and me as
well.
And he says, Ach, who are you?
So, I gave him my name.
Where are you from?
England.
Ach, he says, Englishmen are no good.
I said, good.
And he pulled his sleeves up.
He says, can you fight?
I said, no, I can't fight.
Well, he said, can you sing?
I said, no.
So, he sang, Maxwell, Tom, Braes, and Bonnie,
wherever he falls.
The Jew, he said, it was the Jew,
but anyhow.
So, the first thing he did, he talked
with me.
The second thing, he went to fight with
me.
And then he put his hand in his
pocket and took out a stack of money
and offered it to me.
Now, you know a Scotsman is drunk when
he does that.
But I began to talk with him.
That was nine o'clock at night.
If I had met that man at nine
o'clock in the morning, he wouldn't have
spoken to me.
He might have said, hi.
But you see, when another spirit invades him,
he's prepared to talk, he's prepared to fight,
he's prepared to be generous, he's prepared to
look ridiculous.
And you know, when the Spirit of God
intoxicates us, was it Spinoza who talked about
a God-intoxicated man?
That's what we want.
We want people who are drunk with the
will of God.
We want people that God can share His
burdens with.
Oh, roll your burden on the Lord.
Who does He roll His burdens on?
Well, He says, my yoke is easy, my
burden is light.
And one favor of God is not that
you're getting more money than you got.
Maybe you're such a child, you're so retarded,
He won't trust you.
Get to the place where you say, Lord,
what's Your burden for me in life?
I don't want to get up there.
I said to a man the other day,
he comes to see me very often.
He's getting a bit of success.
I said, listen, you tell me I have
a burden for the Oklahoma Indians.
Get back and pour your life out.
I don't want to see you in eternity
and you walk around and say, you see
that man, he's wearing my crown.
What does the Scripture say?
Hold fast to that which thou hast, that
the devil doesn't take your crown.
No, that no man take it.
If God has given you a job and
you don't do it, in eternity you'll see
a man wearing a crown for ever and
ever that you should have had.
A hundred million years from now you'll be
grieving over it.
Oh, it isn't a spectacular thing.
Sure it isn't.
It isn't spectacular for the woman to have
a baby and cancel all her engagements and
be put out of order for a while.
And when the spirit of travail comes, and
do you know what, I'm praying that that
will come on this church.
Do you know what I felt last night
talking with Mike afterwards?
I felt God wants to get a womb
here in, where are we, Kansas?
He wants a womb to be formed in
which he can birth something that won't effect
just Kansas.
What did this woman pray for?
She prayed for what?
A child?
She got a man child?
No, she got a prophet.
Samuel.
Can you imagine she goes year after year
and she can't take him home?
Oh, he's going a bit much.
She talks to her husband and says, isn't
he going tall?
Isn't he handsome?
And year after year she has to go
and see that sacrifice that she's made.
She can't take him home and dress him
and feed him and so forth.
He's given to the Lord.
She can't take him back.
What did Rachel pray?
Give me children or I die.
So God gave her a son.
No, he didn't.
What did he give her?
He gave her a prime minister by the
name of Joseph.
One of the wisest men.
One of the most perfect characters.
Sure, he answered her prayer.
But he answered his prayer.
He answered his problem twenty years up the
road.
You know, you should be, if you're young
parents, and some of you are, you should
be so ambitious.
Spiritually say, Lord, I don't want to raise
normal children.
I want to raise abnormal children.
Abnormal in spirituality.
Abnormal in their love for prayer.
Abnormal for the Word of God.
I told you yesterday, two or three people
taught me about it.
The cooks that live not far from us
have six children.
He works in the oil fields.
He gets up at four o'clock every
morning with his wife.
He and his wife are one hour together
until five.
And then they awaken the children and they
pray and talk with the children until six.
They put the children back to bed for
a while because they're homeschooled.
And those children are absolutely awesome.
As I said, the boy, twelve-year-old,
has already memorized seventeen chapters of the book
of Proverbs.
The boy at nine or ten, he's in
the fifteenth chapter.
They've memorized the Lord's Prayer.
They've memorized the Sermon on the Mount.
They've memorized 1 Corinthians 13.
These little boys are almost walking Bibles.
Well, you know, that's what Mrs. Wesley did.
She didn't just pray for them, she took
them on one side.
The whole family, after supper, then she pushed
a lot of them off and took one
each night and dealt with them, taught with
them, explained the Word of God.
And they grew up in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord.
What does the psalmist say?
Thy word are thy head in my heart.
For what?
To memorize that I might not sin against
thee.
The Word of God is quick and powerful.
If your child comes into temptation and he
has the Word of God in him, right
there the Lord can spark that word and
bring it to his remembrance.
And it puts a fear in him against
sin and all the things which would corrupt
him.
Well, here we are.
This woman prays for one thing.
I think the secret of the Apostle Paul's
life is this one thing I do.
He didn't get diverted into anything else.
And she just prays, Listen to thy handmaid,
listen to thy servant, here I am.
I'm in this state of distress, deliver me.
Well, don't you think they had a wonderful
time of joy when that child came along
and she took him to the temple and
dedicated him?
And he was there all the days of
their life.
Don't you think she was amazed when one
day Eli took her on one side and
said, I want to tell you something.
I woke up in the night and your
little fellow came into my bedroom and he
said, I've been hearing a voice speak to
me.
And he said, the little fellow said, Eli,
why do you call me?
And he said, I didn't call you.
And he came back a second time and
said that.
And I said to them, Well, it isn't
me, it's God that's speaking to you.
You just say, I speak, Lord, for thy
servant heareth.
You know, God's going to bypass a lot
of our smart theologians.
They've had the Bible in their hands.
They've chewed it over.
They've decided what they believe about it and
what they reject.
God Almighty is going to reject them, leave
them high and dry.
God's going to raise up young men.
Some of them may be driving a bus
in Alabama this morning.
Some guy working.
It doesn't matter what he is.
God isn't concerned about the size of your
head.
It's the size of your heart that matters.
And when we get that passionate love for
him, the love like, what was it, George
Macdonald wrote, O love that will not let
me go, I rest my weary soul in
thee.
He was a brilliant scholar and he was
going to marry a beautiful lady and then
he was stricken with blindness and she quit
on him.
Then he wrote that hymn, O love that
will not let me go, I rest my
weary soul in thee.
And the last verse, O cross that liftest
up my head, I dare not ask to
fly from thee.
I lay in dust, life's glory dead.
And from the ground there blossoms red life
that shall endless be.
But he wrote another hymn, I think is
greater.
Make me a captive, Lord, and then I
shall be free.
You know the trouble is you're free to
do as you like and not a slave.
I want to be a servant of the...
He doesn't want servants.
He wants slaves.
A servant starts at a certain time and
finishes a certain time.
A slave doesn't.
A servant may have some choice.
A slave doesn't.
He's in the dominion of a master.
Make me a captive, Lord, and then I
shall be free.
Force me to render up my sword and
I shall conquer thee.
I think in life's alarms when by myself
I stand.
Imprison me within thine arms and strong shall
be my hand.
My heart is weak and poor until it
must find.
It has no spring of action, sure.
It trembles with the wind.
I only stand, I only stand, OK.
I only stand unbent amid the clashing strife
when on thy bosom I have lent and
found in thee my life.
You know, God doesn't hand treasures out in
a very easy way.
I haven't got a message on that.
I've been thinking of it that time and
again it says of the Lord Jesus, the
heavens opened.
And then later you have the heavens opened
in the case of Stephen.
But when did the heavens open?
When his bones were being crushed.
When he was being put to death.
On the Isle of Patmos, John saw the
heavens open.
Well, we want the heavens opening in a
conference.
When you open your Bible, you know, when
you're sitting by yourself in a nice easy
chair with your feet up and free toes
on one hand and coats on the other.
Really roughing it.
That's not how God works.
He works when we get in the desert.
He works when we get alone.
He works when we wait to be still
and hear His voice.
You know, I'm amazed right now at the
number of men in the last six months,
particularly that come to our house from all
over the country that are meeting at four
and five in the morning in twos and
threes.
The church isn't waiting with them.
And they're discovering great things as they wait
on God.
And they've got to go.
There's an undercurrent.
Shall I put it this way?
There's a remnant of God's people but there's
a remnant inside the remnant.
There are some that have said goodbye to
the world, the flesh and the devil.
The TV has no more dominion over them.
They decide to walk with God.
And as soon as you do, you get
opposition from spiritual people.
They begin to criticize you.
You're a holy Jew or something.
Who cares?
Do you think this woman cared about all
the criticism she'd had for years?
When she went to the temple and someone
says, did you hear the news?
Because, you know, TVs and phones and all
that junk in those days.
Hey, did you hear the news?
I can't wait to get to the temple.
You know that little beautiful young woman, Hannah?
Boy, for the last ten years we thought
she might have a child.
I hear she's going to present a child
at the temple.
Don't you think it brought ecstasy?
Do you know what entertainment is?
Entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy.
And the more joy you have in the
Lord, the less entertainment you need.
The greatest thrill I know is at the
end of a day on Sunday, people kneel
at the altar.
The church I went to, if you went
to the altar to get saved, people would
deal with you maybe half an hour or
an hour.
And then you got up and turned around
to the congregation and say, well, you knew
you'd pass from death unto life.
You'd receive the witness of the Spirit.
You'd receive the joy of the Lord.
And once you get that, I'll tell you,
there's nothing more exciting.
You don't need concepts in the church.
You don't need all the show stuff.
We come on this, God makes the house
of God the place where He manufactures saints.
And as I said earlier, He starts with
the raw material, the base material, and makes
them what?
Princes unto God.
Well, now, let me see.
You know that clarky out there, crazy?
He goes twice as fast as any other
clarket I've ever seen.
It's a half hour slow.
Now, what do you mean?
I think a fellow's in trouble when he
doesn't know whether he's coming or going.
Well, it's a little thing, anyhow.
I was in a college where there were
30 students, all men.
And one day a preacher wrote, and he
said, I'm dissolving my library.
If you send 15 cents, I'll give you
three books, make your choice, and I'll mail
them to you.
So, boy, I grabbed my pen.
Boy, did I write.
Put my 15 cents, it's all I had
in the world anyhow.
And so I wrote, and I said, I'd
like three books.
I'd like one on holiness, one on prophecy,
and one on prayer.
And when I opened the parcel, there at
the top was a book in flaming red,
and I remember it was ribbed, and in
big gold letters it said, Power Through Prayer.
So I got it, and in the school
I was at, when we came down from
our bedrooms in the morning, we weren't allowed
to go up in the afternoon.
Or you could go for half an hour,
and then you couldn't go back until suppertime,
and then curfew was at ten anyhow.
So in the noontime, my boys went out.
You couldn't have any sports there, that was
all out, because people get too sports minded.
But they'd tie a bundle of paper and,
you know, kick it around.
And I took this book upstairs, nailed to
the side of my bed, and I remember
distinctly as though it were now, I put
the book down, I said, Lord, I'm going
to go right through this book.
And you know I didn't.
The book went right through me.
And I began to read about bounds and
prayer, and I couldn't believe the things I
read.
Bounds himself was a great man of prayer.
I did a month's meeting for Charles Stanley
in that great church in Atlanta a few,
four or five years ago.
I said to him one day, Charles, let's
go out into the country.
E.M. Bounds is buried not far from
here in Washington.
We went into this lovely village, and here
was a great big house, and somebody had
told us what the house was like.
So we went in and talked with E
.M. Bounds' daughter, an old, old lady, and
his grandson.
And I looked at those rugs they were
worn where he used to kneel, and it
was hallowed ground as far as I'm concerned.
But do you know nobody in the town
even knew it was buried there?
We went to those graves out there, and
it was snowing like it is now, and
I just felt a sense of awe that
here the remains of a man that moved
his generation, and a man that still lives
in the hearts of many people because he
wrote about six books on prayer.
I put them all together in a book
called The Treasury of Prayer, which is very
handy and very good because I didn't write
it.
I only compiled it.
But you see, these men again, they moved
into a realm that not many people know.
You know, some people want to come to
a prayer meeting, say their peace, and off
they go.
But you know, once a woman has that
baby, she stays with it till it's born.
She can't say, well, I forgot.
I have to go to a wedding in
three months.
I'll leave this burden on one side till
I come back.
She has to stay with it and carry
it with all the pain and everything else
that's involved.
And very often, the devil cheats us.
We get weary in well-doing.
Somebody says, you've prayed so long.
So what?
The best places that I know of in
China today where there's revival were there.
It's where Watchman Yu used to work and
a man, I think, greater than Watchman Yu,
John Sung, the greatest student that ever came
to America.
He could hardly speak English when he got
here.
He learned English.
He took his Ph.D. in German.
He learned German.
He got his B.A. degree, his Master's
degree, and he got a doctorate, all in
about three and a half years.
You know what happened?
One night, when he was in the Union
Theological Seminary, his roommate said to him, you
know, John, you look far more like a
preacher than a scientist.
Now, how do you have to look like
a preacher?
Well, just look at Mike.
Rich and prosperous.
As this man spoke with him, suddenly the
spirit came on John Sung.
His daddy was a Methodist preacher way there
in China.
And the Spirit of God came and there,
right there, he knelt at the side of
his bed and cried to God.
And just like that, he got released.
The witness of the Spirit came.
Like the man in Acts 3, he jumped
through the door and he ran down the
corridor leaping and praising God in a theological
seminary.
So what did they do?
They very kindly had him certified the next
day.
It was insane.
Isn't that nice?
Oh, don't do that.
Treat me.
I'm a child of God.
Be very careful.
Keep your gloves on.
Don't say anything harsh.
I'm easily offended.
I'm easily upset.
Don't worry, friend.
I'll give you a heart of steel before
long to face the world of flesh and
the devil.
Okay.
So they took him to an insane asylum.
He goes in.
A guy comes up to him and says,
Hey, I haven't seen you.
I'm Napoleon.
A man comes up and says, He's a
liar.
He's not Napoleon.
He's Julius.
He's not Napoleon.
I'm Napoleon.
He's Julius Caesar.
Boy, it's nice to have friends like that,
isn't it?
So what did he do?
He said, Lord, how long do I stay
here?
The Lord said, Listen, I can get you
out of here.
That's no problem.
But if you stay here, I'll teach you
my word.
Do you know what he did?
He read the word of God through and
without any tuition, he learned how to analyze
a chapter of the Bible eight different ways.
That was his Bible school.
Dear God, some of us need to go
to an asylum.
You could go to church for eight years
and not gain that.
But there he was there he was, there
he waited, just obedient to God.
Oh, all the crazy things went on anyhow.
He had his degrees and what not.
He's going out to China.
And before he, when he got in the
China Sea, he had a bunch of keys,
gold keys and diplomas.
And he went to the edge of the
boat and he dropped them all over the
edge of the boat.
He just kept a certificate he had for
his doctor to show his daddy that he
hadn't wasted his daddy's money.
And when he got back home a neighbor
came in and said, Well, we're so glad
to see you, John.
Dr. John, you're a credit to our district.
We brought your wife.
He'd never seen the girl before.
Boy, that's tough when somebody else chooses a
wife for you.
Of course, you can always blame them after,
but that doesn't help to.