The Canadian Revival - Part 9

So people, get together and pray and hang in there. Eventually you'll see it. You have to stay with it.

Pay the price and let God lead. I used to think, you know, back in Saskatoon, if my church finds out how little time I spend doing normal church business and how much time I spend in my face in prayer, they're going to fire me. I didn't really care, you know.

I used to try and get to church at seven o'clock in the morning. It was about a mile from where I lived. I'd walk there, and then for two hours until nine o'clock, there'd be no phone calls or anything, and so I'd pray the whole time.

And then the burden for prayer got heavier, and I spent hours often daily in prayer. But you see, in every church there's... We sometimes speak about the church being a sleeping giant, and I don't like the term. It may be true, but I don't like it, because people who seem satisfied just be a sleeping giant, you know.

Why not wake up? Three times in the Old Testament, people are calling on God to awaken, you know. Awake, O Lord, why sleepest thou? And we know God isn't asleep, but it looks like He is. Nothing is happening, so He's concerned.

But in the New Testament, it's God calling three times for Christians to awake. Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.

Wherefore, be you not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is, and be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit. Be not drunk with wine, win as excess, but be filled with the Spirit. So He's talking about revival.

Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead. Awake to righteousness, and sin not, for some have not the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.

So, you know in Matthew 25, while the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. That's the wise and the foolish versions. That's a picture of the church.

It's asleep. And then some people get concerned about revival and pay the price, and God revives. But it's not, it doesn't come easy.

Like Paul spoke about travailing in birth again until Christ be formed. He was really praying for revival among those Christians in Galatia, that they might experience revival again. They slipped away from that, and he wanted to bring them back.

So, I did a special study, you know, on Spurgeon, and I did a lot of notes on that, and I got eight or so books on his life, and then three or four shelves of his works. And I had no idea until I finished that study on his biographies that he understood the revival concept completely. Absolutely completely.

And he had, in my opinion, the greatest church that the church ever saw in the last 2,000 years. He had 44 organizations in the church, all of them geared to soul winning and helping people. He had an orphanage with 400 kids.

He had almshouses for older people that had no money, they didn't have any government support. He had a preacher's lending library. Preachers had little money, so his wife began a lending library, and they loaned books to preachers and Christian workers.

He had a Christian college. Before he died, that church, that college graduated very close to 1,000 soul winners. Like, they went out to start churches all over the British Isles.

And he had, every Sunday evening, he had 800 people that went out soul winning. He had a bunch of people, they called them co-porters. It's a French word, and it really referred in France to people who went door-to-door selling wares and stuff, you know.

And he had co-porters. He had about 50 of them, and one year between them, they made about a million house calls. And he had one saying, he said, if you want to get started soul winning, pick the dirtiest street in the city where you live, and then find the dirtiest house on that dirty street.

Then beat on the door and get inside and preach Christ. He said, that's how to start. And it's a wonderful story, though, the way that God used his church.

Man, it was. One of the newspapers, literatures, after he'd been there and he saw what was happening, he said, this Essex country bumpkin, that's what he called him, see, has done more to revive South London than all the established churches put together, which was probably true. And he had revival the whole time, but he constantly urged his people to pray for God the Holy Ghost to work.

He was constantly begging them to pray, pray for God the Holy Ghost to come, that he'll do the work. So although he was a great orator and a great preacher and had a tremendous mind, that was not the secret. He knew what the secret was.

He had open-air meetings. His brother used to set up these meetings for him. And I have a book here that talks about his brother, what he felt about those open-air meetings.

And he said, he can never forget them. He said, the power of the Spirit was so great in those meetings, he'd be preaching, and sometimes the people he saw would come with the nearness of God, they'd start just to praise God. In the middle of the sermon, he'd stop preaching for five minutes maybe.

And sometimes they'd just clap and cheer and whistle. The Spirit of God was working so powerfully. And he said, he couldn't explain it.

He said it was just awesome to watch God work in those open-air meetings. Ten, 15, 20,000 people, you know, and no PA systems and no big singer or anything, just preaching the Word of God. Somehow we've lost that, the glory of God.

We're trying to do it with big programs and big speakers and big choirs and big singers, big frantic antics, you know. It doesn't work. Curiosity, did I read somewhere that men that were revived in the Hebrides Revival were praying for your church at the time? Well, there's a group of men in the Hebrides Revival, and Duncan Campbell, who was the man God used in that awakening, he was in our church in 1969, two years before the Revival.

So he spent a lot of time together and he told me about things that happened. And there was a group of men in a place called Barvis in the Hebrides. That's an island.

There was Lewis and Harris and Skyler, three islands, and the Revival swept in those islands there. And these men were called the Praying Men of Barvis. And he told me about them.

He said they come home from their jobs and they have supper and they go to bed until 9 o'clock at night. They get up at 9 and they pray until 2 o'clock in the morning. Then they go to bed and get up at 7 to go to work.

They do that every night of the year. They were called the Praying Men. And he told me he'd gone to the Isle of Skye to open a church that had been closed for many years.

So he started on Sunday, five people showed up, nothing happened. Monday, nothing happened. Tuesday, nothing happened.

Wednesday, nothing happened. So he phoned the Praying Men and asked them to take this burden down their heart. And the next night there were 200 people in San Marico saved, you know, and a revival broke there.

So I asked Duncan if he would contact the Praying Men and have them pray for us. So I presume he did, you know. And then there was a Gideon team in, where was this now, in the Philippines? No, in India, in India.

And they mentioned in their speaking, they mentioned to this group that there had been a revival in Saskatoon, Canada, and he saw a corner light up and a bunch of men began to talk very excitedly. And they came running up after him and said, Tell us about the revival in Saskatoon. So he did, and they said, Why are you so concerned? They said, Listen, three years ago God led us as a praying group to pray for revival in Saskatoon.

We didn't even know where Saskatoon was. Just the name was clear to us, but we didn't know where Saskatoon was. And then in another place in India, I don't know if it was the same group, but somebody from Canada talked about revival in western Canada.

The same thing happened. A bunch of men came up and said, God gave us a burden three years ago to pray for revival in western Canada. So there may have been a lot of that kind of thing going on.