I really believe, friends, that revival is possible,
improbable, if we can only get honest enough
with God.
If we can get to the place of
transparency with God, in desperation before God, in
confession of sin to God, then God can
go to work.
Let me give you an example.
My homiletical mentor, Dr. Stephen F.
Olford, shared his story about the campus revival
that occurred under his preaching at Wheaton College
in January of 1948, and one of the
students in attendance was Jim Elliott, the missionary
martyr to the Yawka Indians.
Well, Stephen Olford's story of the Wheaton revival
is a remarkable one, where a God consciousness
permeated the entire college campus to the point
that the college president ordered all campus classes
canceled so that the students could attend to
the things of God.
It was a cold winter in Chicago in
1948 when a 29-year-old Stephen Olford
was invited to preach at chapel services during
the day at Wheaton College during January 11th
through the 18th, but the breakthrough occurred at
the large and prestigious Wheaton Bible Church at
night.
Here are his words.
Please pay attention to his story, friends.
That Sunday night, my theme was the blood
of Christ.
I poured out my heart.
What I felt was the essential gospel message
and sensed unusual resistance.
I can only describe it as hitting a
tractor tire with a sledgehammer.
The harder I swung the hammer, the harder
the words bounced back at me.
I was disappointed and somewhat discouraged.
I gave an invitation and I was never
more shocked in my life.
The devil just howled at me.
There was indifference and absolute deadness.
I pressed the invitation and no one responded.
As I walked home with Dr. Joseph McCauley,
I said to him, what's going on here?
You invited me to preach and I have
a fight on my hands.
Brother, let's spend the night together in prayer
till God shows us what to do.
And as we laid hold of God, it
became very apparent that the Holy Spirit was
leading me to change my whole strategy.
So I stopped praying and looked into Joe
McCauley's face and said, would I betray you
if I ministered to believers rather than trying
to reach the unconverted?
I don't believe there was an unsafe center
in the audience this evening.
And I feel that what God wants to
do here is a deep work in the
lives of Christians.
Dr. McCauley, who was a deeply spiritual and
sensitive man said, you do entirely as you
feel God is leading you.
And he got up and he left me
to continue to pray by myself through the
night.
Monday morning, I spoke in chapel session at
Wheaton College.
Then came the evening service at the Bible
church.
The church was two thirds full.
The message of the Lord laid on my
heart was, prepare ye the way of the
Lord and all flesh shall see the salvation
of God.
As I preached on what preparing the way
of the Lord entailed in terms of spiritual
issues in our lives, God broke in and
I had to stop preaching.
Every head was bowed.
Many were weeping.
And I just sat down and waited as
the minutes passed, several prayed and broke down.
The first man to walk the aisle was
Peter Joshua, the brother of Joshua, who was
so mildly used in the 1904 Welsh revival.
He said, Mr. Alford, I want to say
something.
God has revealed to me the sin in
my life.
I have been preaching for years, but I
am a hypocrite.
I have been told by God to confess
my sin.
Well, that broke up the meeting.
Dr. McCauley stepped up to the pulpit and
said words like this.
I rise to my feet to confess my
sin to you, my people.
I invited Stephen Alford to be our evangelist
for an outreach to the lost, but I
have to state that we haven't prayed or
prepared as we should have done.
I doubt if we have even canvassed the
area to invite the lost to attend these
meetings.
I also have to admit in my own
ministry, I haven't had a passion for souls.
I've been merely occupied in dotting my theological
I's and crossing my theological T's to please
the professors and the students who attend my
church.
My messages have not carried the burden and
passion of an evangelist, and I feel I
have failed my dear brother in asking him
to do what is virtually impossible.
He had hardly finished that sentence when his
wife came down the aisle and stood alongside
him and simply said, I confess my sin
also.
I've encouraged him in his pursuit of popularity
in this college community rather than in seeking
to reach the untold numbers who are out
of Christ in this town.
With that, a preacher in the audience rose
to his feet and made a similar confession,
and that led to a time of unbelievable
confessions throughout the entire congregation while we were
there for hours.
God had brought us all to the place
of repentance, brokenness, and readiness for cleansing and
renewal.
We went to bed very late that night.
The revival carried over to Wheaton College Chapel
Hour the next morning.
I did not even finish the message when
God moved in and brought us all to
our knees in repentance and confession.
The acting president, Dr. Roger Voskell, came to
the podium and announced that all classes were
canceled until further notice and that professors and
students were to form groups across the campus
and engage in prayer and personal examination.
I will stop there, friends.
That revival that swept Wheaton College in 1948
all began with a broken Stephen Oldford out
of bed and on his knees all night
before God in desperate prayer.
Brother pastor, when was the last time you
stayed out of bed all night in intercessory
prayer for your congregation?
When was the last time you had personal
examination before God in prayer?
Well, that's my little introduction, friends, to my
message this evening.
My message is entitled Tonight, I Washed My
Hands in the Mississippi River and Got a
Touch of Heaven.
I believe this will be a transformational message
to some.
You know, friends, God is looking for the
Moses who will take the time to turn
aside and encounter him so God can send
that man to deliver a nation.
My text can be found in the book
of Ezekiel in chapter three.
You can turn in your Bibles there now,
friends.
We will be in verses 16 through 19.
Here now is the word of God and
may the spirit of the Lord attend the
reading of his holy word.
And it came to pass at the end
of seven days that the word of the
Lord came unto me saying, Son of man,
I have made thee a watchman unto the
house of Israel.
Therefore, hear the word at my mouth and
give them warning from me.
When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt
surely die.
And thou givest him not warning, nor speakest
to warn the wicked from his wicked way
to save his life.
The same wicked man shall die in his
iniquity, but his blood will I require at
thine hand.
Yet, if thou warn the wicked, and he
turn not from his wickedness, nor from his
wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity.
But thou hast delivered thy soul.
I will stop there, friends.
The prophet Jeremiah had a call on his
life to be God's watchman and to warn
men of their danger of dying in their
sins.
He was God's man with God's message for
sinful man.
I believe you can be a popular preacher
and have a sincere heart, but still have
a wrong head.
There's nothing wrong with popularity in ministry, but
there is something wrong to the one who
is using his ministry to gain popularity.
Jesus had his crowds, but he was not
a popular preacher.
His first sermon divided his crowd, and they
tried to hurl him off a cliff.
His penetrating preaching and searching sermons angered the
lost religious crowd and led to his crucifixion.
I want to share with you, friends, the
following story, especially for my brother preachers, because
I know you will relate to it.
How you react to it is an entirely
different story.
When I was doing my research on my
biography of the Calvinistic evangelist Rolf Barnard, who
was used of God in several powerful revivals
over a 40-year itinerant ministry all across
America, I uncovered a story he told as
it was related to him personally by Dr.
R.G. Lee when they shared a Bible
conference in the South.
Dr. Lee was the pastor of Bellevue Baptist
Church in Memphis, Tennessee from 1927 to 1960.
He is known for his famous sermon, Payday
Someday, but here's a remarkable story about him
you probably don't know, and this is a
story that R.G. Lee told Rolf Barnard.
There was a member in Dr. Lee's congregation,
an attorney, and this man had to be
out of town a lot on business, but
no matter where this lawyer went, he made
sure to catch a train back to Memphis
on Saturday night so he could hear Dr.
Lee preach the next morning.
Why, that man just loved to hear R
.G. Lee preach, but one day this lawyer
got cancer, and he was in the hospital
dying, and he called for his pastor to
come to his bedside.
R.G. Lee entered the downtown hospital room
whose windows overlooked the Mississippi River.
As R.G. Lee sat by the man's
bedside, the man told him the following story.
He said, I want you to know how
much I've enjoyed your preaching through the years,
and I never missed a Sunday if I
could help it.
Now I lie here all eaten up with
cancer, and the doctors tell me I only
have a few weeks left to live at
best, but I didn't call you here for
that.
I want to chastise you, sir.
Your sermons were full of enjoyable stories that
kept me on the edge of my seat,
but I never knew how to be saved.
You never preached the cross to where I
could see it.
You never put the blood out there where
I could reach it.
Now I'm a dying, and I may die
in my sins, and I reprimand you, sir,
for your lack.
Well, R.G. Lee left that man's hospital
room with his head hung down low, feeling
berated and guilty as charged.
It was now dark outside, and he decided
to take a walk down to the banks
of the Mississippi River.
Once there, he got down on his knees
in the mud, getting his white suit pants
dirty in the process.
The river ran silent with a beam of
moonlight across the water.
R.G. Lee rolled up his sleeves as
he leaned forward and dipped his hands in
the cold, dark water.
He remained in that position for a while
as he pondered that man's penetrating words.
Looking up towards heaven, he promised God, right
there and then, that from that point forward
he would preach the cross and the blood,
and he changed his message that night.
And in a month's time, there was such
a move of grace at that church that
four blocks of downtown Memphis were shaken with
revival.
I love that story, friends.
I gotta confess, it gets to me every
single time, and that's the end of that
remarkable story, friends.
I know personally, I had to come to
the place in my own ministry where I
had to choose between two roads.
I could continue to preach the same kind
of sermons that made me a popular preacher,
or I could ruin my reputation and go
all out on a limb, preaching disturbing messages
by pointed preaching with uncomfortable search and sermons
that uncovered sin and exposed false foundations, losing
much of my audience and all my support.
But I had to ask myself, was I
preaching for acceptance, or was I preaching for
eternity?
There was a reason George Whitefield was pelted
with stones and had pieces of dead cats
thrown at him, and he was shut out
of the churches and had to preach in
the open air.
I faced that crisis in my ministry, and
a time came when I got serious with
God, and I washed my hands in the
Mississippi River, so to speak, and changed my
message.
And I've got the scars to prove it,
but I also know what it's like to
taste revival.
Brother pastor, maybe it's time for you to
grapple with what is between you and a
holy God in regard to your preaching.
Maybe it's time for you to come to
the river and get down on your knees
and get your suit pants dirty in the
process and get low before God as you
get honest with God.
Can you honestly say before God that you've
been his watchman, that you've been warning men
and women and boys and girls about the
dangerous damnation in a devil's hell?
Have you warned them about a future judgment
that awaits all mankind, or have you been
soft-soaping the gospel to grow your church?
Have you been warning men about the terrors
of the Lord?
Can you say that you have been active
in your ministry, preaching hard against sin and
warning against hell and informing men of their
duty of repentance and the rudder necessity of
regeneration?
Have you feared your deacons and wealthier members
more than God?
Are you preaching to impress others with your
acquired knowledge like that Wheaton pastor?
Are you preaching for acceptance in your congregation,
or are you preaching to be accepting before
Jesus Christ in heaven?
Can you say before a holy God right
now that you have been warning the wicked
to turn from the wicked ways so they
won't perish in an everlasting burn in hell?
If you were to stand before God's mirror
right now, would you look down on bloody
hands?
It is time to go wash in the
river like R.G. Lee and get a
touch heaven that will shake your church and
community with revival.
God gets serious with those who get serious
with him.
The sun is setting.
The day is far spent.
The night is at hand.
What will you do?
Let us pray.