I went to Dr. Charles' office one day.
A friend of his was coming out and
he said, the doctor's in there and he's
so happy.
He's got a little piece of paper, it's
rather dog-eared and it's from a black
man, a very, very black, black man down
in South Africa.
He lives in Durban.
His name is Duna, D-U-N-A.
When I saw this story up in the
Carolinas four or five years ago, a man
at the back kept nodding his head, nodding
his head, and afterward he said, my, I
like the story on Duma.
I said, have you heard it before?
He said, no, but my dad, he was
the pastor you were talking about.
Duma came in the church and heard the
gospel for the first time, and he ran
to the altar.
And when he got up, he was like
Bunyan's children, the burden loosed from off his
shoulders, fell from off his back into an
empty sack or two, and he ran down
the aisle praising the Lord.
Well, that's not, I mean, you know, that's
not really the thing to do in a
Baptist church.
Well, leaping down the aisle and praising God.
The pastor of the door said, well, how
are you?
Did you enjoy the service?
He said, yes.
Can I do anything for you?
He said, yes, give me a shirt.
The pastor said, give you a what?
Two years old?
Well, you've never been in a church before?
No, I haven't.
Ah, you're the man that went to the
altar.
No, I'm not.
Yes, you are.
No, no, no, no.
He said, one man went down to the
altar.
I'm a new man.
I'm not the man that went down to
the altar.
Isn't it terrible when you get so excited
about being saved?
You know, the first six months you're saved
are God's chosen people.
And after that, we're God's frozen people.
Oh, have you any education?
No.
Have you been to Bible school?
No.
That was a big advantage he didn't know
about.
Nobody brainwashed him.
I can't give you a talk.
The man turned up again a month after.
Going out, the pastor said, well, how are
you?
Should I help you?
He said, yes, give me a shirt.
Oh, now I remember who you are.
Well, you haven't been in this church for
over a month, have you?
No, sir.
You haven't been in any other church.
Where did you go?
I went up the road outside of Durban,
and I came to a forest, and I
found a footpath, and then I found a
stream, and then I found a cave, and
I took a rock, and I made a
mark on the wall, and I went in
that cave for 21 days and nights and
said, Lord, you tell me whether I'm going
to preach.
I don't want to listen to men.
Either you tell me I am, or I'm
not.
If you tell me, all hell won't shake
me.
And he said, the Lord said, I've called
you to preach, and I'll give you a
healing ministry.
He'd look, what?
Give you a healing ministry?
Well, I talked to the deacons about it.
And the deacons said, you know, across the
patch we have a little county.
It's just made of metal, and there are
only five people go there.
So, we let him preach to them, because
after all, he's no education, and no training,
and, you know, in three or four weeks,
he'll be fed up of listening to anyone
in the church.
The strange thing is, that church is growing
even today, forty years after, tomorrow morning, maybe
tomorrow morning, over there in South Africa.
And, you know, they'll have fourteen hundred people
there listening to this amazing man.
Yet, God healed a pig through him.
He called the elders, meet me at the
hospital, we need to pray.
He called the elders when they meet me
at the hospital, and they checked in with
the lady at the desk, you know, and
said, a pastor said, I want to pray
for someone.
So, she said, yes, he's in ward 13.
What did he say?
He can't remember, he prayed for someone.
Ward 13, ward 13 is the morgue.
The pastor just walked down the aisle, and
the deacons went to say, pastor, pastor, this,
this, this, this, this is, this is the
morgue.
He said, yes, we've got to pray for
the right man, number 21 here.
So, they pulled the screen over, and there
was a man lying, you know, so still
and tired.
And little Juno pulled the cloth off him,
and then he climbed on top of the
body, just like Elijah did later, and put
his hands on the body.
And he said, in the name of Jesus
Christ, who is the resurrection and the life,
rise and walk.
And the corpse went, ahem.
Well, if the corpse had done, ahem, with
me on top of it, I'd have hit
the ceiling, I'm sure of that.
But, you know what happened?
The corpse got down and walked home.
A little black man, who had no preaching
certificate, and no background, poor soul, he only
had God.
Isn't it terrible when you've only God?
You know, when you can't look on your
diploma and say, that's where I say, I
mean, that's where I, I got my diploma.
Then you look at the other one, and
that's where I got my PhD, and that's
where I go to study now.
Hey, but wait a minute.
Are you suggesting that man has run 30
years on one cylinder?
You've got a new automobile, you expect it
to last with one cylinder of gas till
you die.
The trouble with most people, they had appendix
of 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the
fire's gone out.
I forget the day, it was maybe the
17th of November, when the little black man
went into that cave.
Do you know what the smart man did?
Every year since then, he's gone back in
that cave for 21 days and nights, along
with God, to get a new anointing, to
get a new vision, to get a new
friend.
He just wanted to go and get blessed
in hell.
You say, I remember when I quit smoking
and I quit drugs and prostitution.
Well, that's great for the heaven's sake, don't
build a tent then.
Go up and possess the land.
Go hide thyself.
And yet people say, well, I can't take
part in that.
You don't have a church to start with.
No, I don't.
How do you live?
I live by faith.
One woman came to one of our meetings,
she said, oh, I like to hear Brother
Abraham teach in the morning.
He's great in the morning, but at night
he gets so noisy, I don't like him
at night.
So she said, I enjoy him in the
morning, she said, and I don't think I've
enjoyed anybody better.
She said, I'm going to write him a
nice check tomorrow and bring it.
The other lady said, don't do that.
Why?
She said, because he lives by faith.
Isn't it amazing?
Go hide thyself.
That's a hardy thing to do.
I guess when you're tied, maybe all of
you are tied.
Tied what?
Your money?
That's easy.
Take your notebook out, write the check.
That's tied to God in the notebook.
You tied your time.
The scripture says, bring all your tithes.
That's the problem, you see.
Bring all your tithes.
And if you give God a tenth of
every day, that's 24 hours, that's 2 hours
and 24 minutes every day.
And then on top of that you give
him nothing.
I'll tell you what, if everybody tied their
time and tied their tongues as well, the
Church of God would be in vastly different
shape than what it seems to me.
Go hide thyself.
He lives by faith.
I see Elijah so big, he doesn't even
get into Hebrews 11 where all those giants
of faith are.
And if ever you feel you need to
get proud, you know, some people say, well
you can't live without sin, everybody needs a
little bit of sin to keep you humble.
Well why not have a lot and keep
you real humble?
When you sin to keep you humble, all
I need to do to get my face
in the dust is read Hebrews 11 where
men and women subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained
promises, sought the mouth of life, and not
one of them ever had a Bible.
Look how much they did without the Bible.
You and I have got 66 volumes.
We've brought them to church with you tonight.
So much they did without the word of
God.
You and I have the complete revelation.
God hasn't another word to say to humanity
that will last a million years.
He said it all.
The old hen house on the foundation says,
what more can he say than to you,
he has said.
Elijah the man of faith.
The ravens fed him in the morning and
fed him in the evening.
Maybe that means you should only eat two
meals a day, I don't know.
But what might happen, the brook died up.
Before the ravens start bringing the food, the
brook died up.
The natural resources died up first.
And then he heard the voice of the
Lord saying, get up and go.
Where do I go?
Go down the road, you'll meet a woman
there.
A widow woman, and tell her to feed
you.
Oh Lord, I can't do that.
This is a test of humility, isn't it?
I mean, who wants to sponge on a
woman, apart from rabios handling?
You don't even ask a little widow woman
to feed you, are you?
I'll put your pride in your pocket.
Meet the little woman and say, you'll make
me a cake.
And keep it as well.
And if it wasn't as well, die today
as tomorrow.
What did he say?
He said, I'll make you a little cake.
I was going to make one for my
son and myself.
We were going to eat it and what?
Die.
This man's death would mean the death of
thousands of people.
Faith's right on heaven, there are no traps.
You want revival without any suffering?
Maybe revival will only come to America through
revolution.
Maybe our option really is this.
Either we concentrate in prayer, or we pray
in concentration camps.
Which do you want?
God isn't concerned about Standard Oil or anybody
else.
You can say, well, if we can't have
money, the missions are going to fall down
together.
All the streamlined, evangelism you see tomorrow on
TV.
Almighty God passed it, passed back all our
computers and all our Bible schools and all
our seminaries, and sent revival up in northeast
India.
That's a very repetition of the acts of
the apostles.
Signs and rumbles and miracles have never been
raised.
And I like the phrase that Paul Copeland
gives there.
He says, this was not imported.
It wasn't imported.
Nobody told him about gifts of the Spirit.
Nobody told him about speaking in tongues.
Nobody told him about miracles.
Nobody told him about interpretations.
Nobody told him about signs and rumbles.
God came in his sovereign right, and this
is the only answer.
He's not an alternative, it's the only answer
for our day.
And God has said, he has poured out
his Spirit on all flesh.
Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
Your young men will see visions.
Your old men will dream dreams.
And on my servants and handmaids, not my
bishops, not the leaders of our Bible schools.
Where did Jesus go for his disciples?
Did he knock on the door of the
Sanhedrin?
Did he go to the temple and ask
the high priest, or the best and most
protective scholar he had?
No, he went to a fisherman and a
tax gatherer.
God takes the things that are not.
So many people have said to me, did
you ever meet Smith Wigglesworth?
Yes, I did.
He was a character.
So we read his books, and we read
the Smith Wigglesworth.
You know who he was, don't you?
He was the loudest character in the room.
He was in a meeting not far from
my home.
There was a lady at the front there,
she had a big tummy on her, and
he thought, well, that old girl can't be
pregnant, she's far too old.
So while they were singing, he went down
and he blabbered in her ear, are you
pregnant?
She said, I didn't want it.
He said, close your eyes, she's dead.
He took his fist, he kicked her in
the stomach like that, he said, you're healed.
Well, if she was rather dead, one of
us would have, I mean, you don't need
a woman in the stomach like that to
see if she's been kicked by a mule.
There's no way of repeating it.
On four occasions, people raised from the dead
for that man.
And yet I want to tell you tonight,
I've seen signs and wonders and miracles.
I used to go off with Miss Truman,
I took her Bible classes a number of
times in the Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh, talked
with her many times, with J.
Wilkinson, I'd dinner with her, supper with her,
breakfast with her, talk with her.
We saw some great miracles there, and then
I'd run the ministry over there, blind people's
up to see, cripples walked in, what have
you.
But that's not the answer for America today.
America has had more healing in the last
30 years than all the nations under heaven
put together, but where are we?
You know what the greatest miracle is that
Almighty God can do?
The greatest miracle Almighty God can do is
take an unholy man out of an unholy
world, make that unholy man holy, put him
back in an unholy world, and keep him
holy.
It takes all the power of the Atonement
to do that, plus the indwelling of the
Spirit of God and all the promises of
God.
What God is looking for in this day
is not people with accurate theology.
He's looking for people with pure hearts.
He's looking for people that are totally selfless
in their desires.
He's looking for people who want to be
God glorified.
All right, let me hurry here.
He went and the lady made a cake,
and then he said, make yourself a cake,
and she goes back to the barrel and
finds it full to the top, and this
little oil can is shooting like an Oklahoma
gusher.
No, I don't think so.
I think she took the last handful of
meal out of that barrel every day and
put the last pot of oil.
That's the way God tests faith.
I guess I know 20 millionaires and multi
-millionaires.
Many of them tell me I've opened sesame
to their bank account.
Anytime, I've never asked anybody for a penny
since I left a very fine church in
1949, and that's a few years ago.
It's over 30.
And I got my boy through school and
college and university and never asked for a
dime.
I never will.
I believe every time we ask for money,
it's a slap in the face of God.
He's promised to supply our needs.
Not what I think I need, but what
he thinks I need.
You don't have to trail God's name in
the dust.
They built some monument to send you tithes
to keep somebody's private jet up in the
air each day until God sent her harvest.
She made a cake.
And one day Elijah came in and he
said, and now, now I found you out.
I see who you are now.
You come into my house and my baby
died.
Oh, he said, don't worry about that.
I didn't like to tell you this, it's
rather egotistical, but I'm the greatest preacher in
the world.
I'm the greatest miracle worker in the world.
Oh, we can take holy things and make
showmanship out of it.
To me, the holiness of God is too
great to go on TV programs.
Tell me this, when you come here tomorrow
or the church you go to, are you
going there to meet God or are you
going to hear a sermon about him?
I believe 99% of people who go
to church tomorrow are going to want to
hear a sermon about God, not me as
a holy God.
Elijah said, give me the child.
And he prayed and nothing happened.
He prayed again and nothing happened.
The third time he prayed, he ran up
into a loft.
Have you got a loft in your life
or a basement and an old chair where
you always feel you're nearer to God than
any other place?
He ran up into a loft and he
prayed.
Now this time he laid himself on the
corpse, a sign of his compassion and love,
and he prayed and the child's spirit came
into it again.
My eye would have pained, so I'd like
to paint that.
I'd like to paint the man coming down
that staircase outside the house with a little
laughing child in his arms and the woman
there.
Do you think he went up to the
lady and said, excuse me, the kid's alive?
Hmm?
I think he went down so full of
joy and said, hey look, here's some liver.
Do you remember what she said, by this
I know the heart of man of God,
not by the barrel of meal, not by
the oil, by this.
By what?
By the fact that he brought life where
there was death.
Isn't that the business of the church?
You happy, quick and doer dead in trespasses
and in sin?
Jesus didn't come into the world just to
make dead bad men good, he came into
the world to make dead men live.
Well, that looks great, doesn't it?
By this I know the heart of man
of God.
Who's the greatest man of prayer in the
Old Testament?
Jacob?
No.
You say he prayed all night, he didn't
intend to.
He prayed all night because he was in
a gang.
Wouldn't you pray all night if your brother
was coming to murder you?
You'd have a police escort round the house.
I've seen a crowd of men coming.
One of my scouts came and told me
it's your brother.
No, no, tell me my brother.
The last time I saw my brother he
said, I'll kill you next time I see
you.
Now look, get all the cattle here.
Get him just a few of the sheep
and if he's pacified, he didn't want to
give too much away.
A few sheep if he'll take them.
And if you have to get him, get
him them all.
And then the camels.
But you know, if you can pacify him,
do your best.
And then he sent his wife and family
away.
And then he stepped over a brook and
he got behind a rock.
And just as he got behind the rock,
somebody jumped on him.
Now who do you think he thought it
was?
Huh?
His brother.
My brother killed him.
Boy, I'm going to die fighting.
That doesn't sound like a church prayer meeting.
Sounds like a church business meeting, but not
a church prayer meeting.
And the more he thought, the tighter the
grip got on him.
And suddenly he realized, this is not my
brother.
You know what I learned out of that
situation?
That when Jacob went into that night of
prayer, he was a tall, handsome prince.
And after a night of wrestling there, he
dragged his leg the rest of his life.
He was a cripple.
And the reason we don't pray is the
flesh is too weak to pray.
The body gets tired.
What's another petty excuse?
The rest of his life he dragged a
wizard's leg.
But he was changed to being a prince
with God.
I think the greatest man of prayer in
the Old Testament was Elijah, or pardon me,
was Moses.
You know, America has a very vivid, strange
history.
It's been such a blessing to the world,
it's been such a curse to the world.
A curse?
Well, Mormonism was born here, and that's cursing
the world.
Jehovah's Witnesses were born here, and they're cursing
the world.
Spiritism was revived here, and that's cursing the
world.
Man alive, we talk about the Pentecostal revival
in Brazil, but brother, there's a shocking revival
of Spiritism and Buddhism in Brazil right now,
and in some of those South American countries.
We've cursed the world.
You know, in Hitler's chaos the other way,
we have had some of the greatest men
of prayer in modern history.
Just the other day, my dear, wife and
I were in a shop, and a lady
came up, Hey, Miss Brady, how are you?
I've heard you preach a number of times.
She said, I've got a collection of old
books.
In one of your books you quote David
Patience, and she has a great library, and
she said, nobody has ever quoted David Patience
except you.
And I've got a volume on his life.
Would you like it?
I said, sure.
I've been writing to my son.
David Patience.
I call him praying Patience of Portland origin.
He had a bedroom like, the floor like
this, you know, not that nice wall-to
-wall rug like you have.
Hard like this.
And when he died, they found a groove
in the floor, and a few inches away,
another groove in the floor.
And they found out that when he prayed,
he used to pray with his hands, he
used to pray like this, and he walked
through grooves in the wooden floor of his
bedroom with intercessions.
Praying Hyde.
I preached in a conference in Lake Okoboji
in Iowa some years ago, in 1951 actually.
A dear mystery came.
He said, did you ever meet Praying Hyde?
I said, no, I'd like to.
Oh, I heard him there in the convention
in India.
A friend of mine said to him one
day, Mr. Hyde, could I pray with you
tomorrow?
Just let me pray with you once.
He said, all right, meet me at 9
.30. And he said, my friend went to
the back room at 9.30, and there
was John Hyde, and we knelt down to
pray.
And he said, for 15 minutes, it was
total silence.
I didn't pray, he didn't pray.
And then he said, I prayed.
But he said, at the end of 10
minutes, I prayed all I knew how to
pray.
And then John Hyde started to pray.
And he hadn't been praying very long when
there was a knock at the door.
And this man said, well, I'm not going
to the door.
This is the only chance I'll ever get
to pray with this man.
I'm not going to the door.
And there was a loud knock at the
door, and a loud knock at the door.
Finally, somebody pushed the door open and said,
Mr. Hyde, you have a schedule at three
o'clock to preach on praying.
And it's now a quarter of three.
His friend said, it can't be a quarter
of three.
He started praying at 10 o'clock.
It can't be a quarter of three.
And he looked at his watch and found
it was a quarter of three.
They had been praying for five hours.
Portland of Patience, John Hyde, E.M. Bounds.
You can buy seven volumes of E.M.
Bounds.
They cost you about three or four dollars
each.
You can buy them all in one book.
I put them all together.
You can buy them as you leave.
It's called the Treasure of Prayer.
And we think all the great men of
prayer lived a hundred years ago.
There's a man who lives 50 miles away
from where I live.
He's 32 years of age.
He prays 10 hours a day.
Here in America right now.
Come on you fellows at Pompeiian and show
your strength.
How much stamina do you have to pray?
How much vision?
How much passion?
How much burden?
There's a man outside Waco, 60 years of
age, who prays six hours a day.
Again, I live in an area of celebrities.
David Wilkerson lives behind us.
The Agatha Force just up the road.
Kenneth Green.
Keith Green lives down the road.
Barry McGuire lives just up above us.
Dallas Holm lives just behind us.
Dave Wilkerson's building his new place on Miles
Palmer.
Second Chapter of Acts have just bought 10
acres by the side of us.
Jimmy Oiner's just bought 10 acres.
Second Chapter of Acts have bought 100 acres.
Jimmy Oiner.
You know the most attractive thing is we
have a prayer meeting on Friday nights in
a mansion across the road from where we
live.
A Quaker family, very lovely people.
And we get 100 to 120 students.
And you know how far they come?
They come as far as 250 miles round
trip every Friday night just to pray.
Not to hear celebrities sing.
What have you got singing upside down?
Did the disciples say, Lord teach us to
sing?
Did Jesus say my house should be called
a house of song for all nations?
Did Paul say, sing without ceasing?
Did Jim Dent say, if you're sick sing
one to another?
Did Jesus say my house should be called
a house of song for all nations?
Do you know how sick the church is
that you can put a show on and
charge five dollars and you can get two
or three thousand people to go and they'll
go a hundred miles to the concert and
it'll cost them a lot in gas and
they have to eat when they go and
they go to the show and and then
it's over and they get back two o
'clock in the morning and they'll go by
the thousand and you book the same hall
for a prayer meeting and charge them nothing
you get nobody there.
That's how sick the church is.
And nobody loves singing more than I love
it.
I finished where I began.
No man is greater than his prayer life.
The greatest living expositor in the world.
I talked with him in London a few
years back and he said to me, Brother
Abner, I don't have any trouble.
I don't have any trouble writing commentaries on
the bible.
I have no trouble.
The hardest thing in my life is prayer.
Prayer.
I found it so difficult to pray.
I think that a prayer closet should be
the most magnetic place in our lives.
One single simple thing.
You know in England, in society, the greatest
honor is to be invited into the presence
of the Queen of England.
And when you go, you receive instructions how
to go, what kind of clothes to wear,
how to observe the right manners.
Or you just don't go in your old
clothes.
And I don't think you're beaten up all
shut or something.
You go there all neat and tidy and
everything and you're told when to bow and
what to say and how to do it.
Such an honor to go into the presence
of the Queen.
Do you ever visualize when you go to
pray that as you leave in your little
humble home or mansion that you're talking to
the same God that Elijah talked to?
The same God that Jesus talked to?
The same God that Moses talked to?
That little you, because of Jesus Christ making
us a kingdom of priests unto God, that
we can just go into his holy presence.
In the revival in Scotland, Duncan Campbell had
had a series of meetings where God invaded
the community.
And he was in one church and nothing
happened.
He said the heaven seemed like brass.
So he stopped the meeting.
There were a lot of preachers here, a
lot of church deacons there, a lot of
men in the clerical attire.
And he said, I do not sense God
in this meeting.
He pointed to a young man, Hamish, which
is Scottish dialect for John, Hamish, the person
or someone.
Ah, he said, laddie, would you stand up
and pray?
The boy was 16 years of age, 16,
had all the theologians, the preachers, the famous
dignitaries in the Christian world, and he called
on a 16-year-old high school boy
to pray.
A laddie stood up.
In Scotland, when they're contemptuous, they say, ah.
The boy stood there and said, ah, what's
the good of praying if we're not right
with God?
And he quoted Psalm 24, who shall ascend
into the hill of the Lord, he that
hath clean hands and a pure heart.
And he went on and recited it.
And then he prayed 10 minutes, 20 minutes,
30 minutes, 40 minutes, 45 minutes.
And as he finished praying, it was just
as though God pulled a switch in heaven,
and the glory of God came on that
building.
And he came on the dance hall at
the other end of town, and he came
on the tavern at the other end of
town, and they never opened after that.
But you know why?
Because when the boy finished praying with the
authority of a man that sounded like a
Jeremiah, or an Elijah, or Isaiah, he just
turned as though he could visibly see something,
and he said, Satan, get off this territory.
Go out of this community in the name
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost.
I command you through the blood of Christ,
and the power of the Spirit, and gone.
And as the devil pulled out, the glory
of God came down.
I get scared that God will keep one
of his promises, you know.
We like God's promises, if they're convenient for
us.
But remember, it wasn't for the Mormons, and
it wasn't for the Mooniites that God said,
I'll spew you out of my mouth.
It was to his lazy, backslidden church, the
Laodicean church, which is the day in which
they're I'll spew you out of my mouth.
And God said, hey Moses, come here a
minute.
I know you're discouraged.
I know you're wary of this people.
I know they've broken your heart.
You know, they've broken my heart too.
I'm as tired of them as you are.
Now look, you go tell them, I'm going
to wipe them out.
I'm going to wipe the nation out.
And out of your loins, I'm going to
raise up a new nation.
And if Moses had had half an ounce
of ambition for himself, he would have said,
Lord, I'm just so happy because I've had
headaches and sleepless nights with this bunch that's
so rebellious and lawless and disobedient.
I can't wait till I stand on a
rock tomorrow and say, look, the Holy One
of Israel is going to destroy you for
your abominations and your sin.
You're going to hell and you deserve it.
But I want to tell you something before
you go.
He's keeping me here because I'm so holy.
Do you know what Moses said in the
11th of Deuteronomy there?
He said, Lord, the weight of this nation
is so great upon me, you better do
something or else kill me.
In Romans 9, the Apostle Paul said, I
could wish myself a curse.
A plain translation from the Greek is this,
I'll be damned if they beat me.
It's my damnation, it's my destruction.
We'll release the mercy of God on my
generation.
And you go to your bed and sleep
nicely tonight.
They'll just be getting going around the casino
up there in Las Vegas and elsewhere else.
And the discos they'll be taking their clothes
off.
And the nakedness and the promiscuality.
And now they tell me in France, nobody
goes to see the girls strip anymore.
They go to watch acts of homosexuality.
Do you think God's going to put up
with a nation that has more Bibles?
We have 600 million Bibles in the nation.
And if you say there are 15 million
Christians, that's four Bibles for each person.
And we have more gospel radio broadcasts, and
we have more churches, and we have more
seminaries, and we have more Bible teaching and
Bible countries than all the rest of the
world put together.
And yet we have more broken homes with
divorce, more broken bodies with drugs, more broken
bodies through venereal disease, more broken girls' bodies
through homosexuality, through childbirth.
Everything's broken.
This nation has never been so broken, but
do you know what the greatest tragedy is?
The greatest tragedy in the world tonight is
a sick church in the dying world.
The church of Jesus Christ isn't broken over
it.
He was born in Gethsemane.
And that revival, and I'm sure that revival
there, that inauguration, you know, I came to
the surface because for 20 years a hidden
group of people have been praying and travailing
for revival.
I know some of the greatest praying people
in the world.
You couldn't get them to come and stand
here publicly.
They won't let you write an article about
their prayer life.
You know, you can come on the platform
and strut and show your ability and your
scholarship, and how clever you can maneuver a
crowd, but I challenge you to start swaggering
when you shut the door and you're alone
with God.
You don't swagger in the prayer closet.
You can impress people, but nobody impresses God.
They're naked beforehand.
God says, I love to destroy these people.
You know what?
It's a very wonderful thing when God reaches
from heaven and takes hold of a man.
I only know one thing more amazing.
That's when a man reaches up and takes
hold of God.
And God says to Moses, leave me alone.
That's not Moses knowing that God has a
grip on him.
It's not Moses saying, God Almighty, take your
hand off me.
It's God saying, Moses, leave me alone.
And the old Methodist hymn book paraphrases that.
He says this, let Moses in the spirit
run and God cries out, let me alone.
That praying, our praying is so feeble.
Our praying has to close at nine o
'clock, tell the Holy Ghost to go home.
I don't believe you can run a healthy
church in America or anywhere else without that
church having at least one night of prayer
a week.
And the best time to have it usually
is Friday night because folk don't have to
go to work the next day.
Every church I've been in, I've been in
churches in the last three years, about four
or five, six, seven thousand members.
And my joy has not been to just
see altar still, but to establish a prayer
meeting on Friday night.
And in those churches, they pray from nine
o'clock at night to sometimes one and
two o'clock in the morning.
All earthly things with earth will fade away,
but prayer grasps eternity.
You can test your spiritual life not by
how much Bible knowledge you have.
I'm not concerned that you know the Word
of God, though that's good, but I want
to know, do you know the God of
the Word?
I'm not just concerned you run with every
burden to God.
Does God lay any of his burdens on
you?
His yoke is easy, his burden is light.
If one has got a hand-tapping time,
a good time, five minutes inside of eternity
again, we'll all wish we'd be more prayerful,
more sacrificial, more obedient, more submissive.
The government isn't going to get this nation
out of trouble, and the banks aren't going
to get us out, and the armies aren't
going to get us out.
It's going to take one great merciful act
of God or we are sunk.
We've had more light, more privileges the last
25 years than all nations in the world
put together.
People say, well, prayer can do anything.
Well, read the 14th of Ezekiel, where God
says, if the three greatest men that ever
lived make intercession, I will not hear them,
even for their own children.
They won't save their own children.
Never mind the nation.
If I could find God's timepiece and say,
do you know what time it is on
God's clock?
You know what?
I think we're not living in the last
day, not even living in the last hour,
not even living in the last minute.
I think we're living in the last moments
before judgment falls and before revival comes.
Father, we thank you tonight for this privilege
of being in your house.
We thank you for these precious friends that
the world didn't have any pull on them
tonight, or they wouldn't be here.
But Lord, many of us tonight have a
broken down prayer life.
Many of us know nothing of intercession.
We need to get our hearts cleansed from
selfishness and worldliness and carelessness and get centered
on God himself.
We need to be cleansed from all vanity
and trivia.
We need to get married to the will
of God.
We need to be totally spiritual.
We need to hear your voice.
We need to see as you see.
We need broken hearts for a broken world,
not just a broken nation, a broken world.
You think of the millions locked up tonight,
the Mohammedans and Buddhists and Confucianists and Muniites
and others.
Lord, we're not, we're not penetrating their kingdoms.
We're not, we're not entering into the devil's
dominion.
Have mercy on us.
Just with your head bowed and eyes closed,
ask God what he wants you to do
tonight and allow the pastor to come and
close the meeting.