Revival Conference 2007 - Don Courville - Part 1

Let's have a word of prayer, then I'll introduce myself, and Garrett left me up here to do that. We're supposed to be moderating together, sharing, but somehow or another he keeps putting me up here. Let's pray. Dear Father, thank you for the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for all that you've done for us at Calvary, and thank you for these wonderful speakers that you've sent. We recognize this is an unusual gathering, and we've been excited about the possibility of you visiting us in an unusual way. It has been a long time since you visited our country in revival, and we do just cry out to you to have mercy upon us and our churches and our nation, and Canada also. Now, Father, I just commit myself here to you for you to lead and use me how you want, in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I'm Don Corville. I pastor Maranatha Baptist Church out west of Springfield, Missouri. We meet at a Bible camp near Mount Vernon, Missouri. We've been meeting there several years. They're happy to have us, and we're happy not to go into a million dollars debt on a building. We just believe God would just give us a building if we need a building. We've been meeting there many years. I'm supposed to share with you about revival. I just maybe call it some of the nuts and bolts of it, experiencing it to the degree that we did. There's all types of experiences that we can have in revival, and we can have just revivals where nobody is a speaker, just the Spirit of God is there working in hearts. We happened to have a revival where we had an evangelist in that was, at that time, working through Canadian Revival Fellowship, to some extent, especially with the youth, by the name of John Musser. He came into our area, and before I forget that, I wanted to tell you, Herob Long offered you something free, and I want to offer you, this is The Masters in Dwelling by Andrew Murray, and this is If Ye Shall Ask by Oswald Chambers. They're not very pretty, but they're powerful inside, and there's other books on the Keith Daniel table out there that you can just have if you'd like them. What happened, I'm going to just go through this, and I'm going to say this, that revival to me was a gateway, and I haven't got over it. Twenty-two years ago, it's just changed my whole life, and I don't think that you will ever really get over meeting Jesus in such a way as you do in revival, and those that get over it, you wonder how much of it they really got. So it was a gateway, and I can just say this to you, do you want it? Do you want it? I was desperate to have God in a fresh way, and so I just want to encourage you that you can have it, and through that meeting God in revival, God gave me a tremendous burden for pastors. As a matter of fact, the revivalist tried to get me to go with him and his ministry for five years. I just kept telling him, John, I just can't do it, and I would have been traveling over to India or Africa or someplace like that, but I said it's just my burden for America, the pastors, because I know what it's like being a pastor and going through the up and down experiences, going through the school systems and being programmed to have a fat head. Not all of them are like that, but a lot of that happens. You come out and you've got all this stuff in your brain, but you haven't really met God in such a way you come out broken. As a matter of fact, most of the time you come out the other end of it. Then God asked that he had to take me and unwind me. It took about 15 years to really get me around to learn the ways of the Holy Spirit. The ways of the Holy Spirit, I've learned, are very offensive to the flesh and to men that are used to operating by the flesh, because the Spirit of God just doesn't check with us and tell us why he's doing things, so it sort of drives us crazy. What happened? Coming into my second church back in the early 80s in western Nebraska, I came into the typical old church scene. They'd had a church split, not too nice, left a little small group of people with a brand new building with $60,000 in debt and hadn't paid a cent on it in a year with $8,000 in interest with one very nervous banker. That was the first problem, the split and then the debt, and then I got in and found out the bad stuff. The bad stuff was the main deacon, when I came in, he proceeded to go out and divorce his wife and marry his nurse. He happened to be a leading surgeon in the area, and everybody knew him and everybody knew everything in a small town of 2,200, you know how that goes. Then I found out the bad stuff, why the pastor had left real quick before, leaving a Sunday school teacher with a baby. So, I come into that situation with those four problems. Other than that, we didn't have any problems. But what happened is when I come in, the people were so loaded down, this little group of people that were left with this thing, that some of the leadership was really not geared to be leadership, and they sort of backed off and said, here, you run with this thing. Brother Shipley out here, he's smiling. And you know what happened? I would look sometimes down the road, prayer meeting night, and well, there's one of the deacons down there going to play basketball. Lawrence, we need to be praying, we're in bad shape. And do you know what happened? I just sort of began to get bitter, just in a little time, I began to get bitter over this thing. This isn't fair, Lord. I come into this thing, and they jump all this on me, and now, and even on top of that, we've got to pray without everybody here. Just one little old thing like that. So what happened, I was just that little seed, that's all it is, just a seed planted by the enemy. You know, I hadn't learned yet to just give it to God. A few weeks ago, I was just going around giving God all my problems, and I got down, and I said, well, Lord, I don't have nothing to do but just praise you and work for you. You've got all my problems. Isn't that great? Well, I hadn't learned that yet, that God can take care of those things. I thought I had to be bitter and worry about it and get all stewed up, you know, inside. Nobody knows those things are going on inside. That doesn't happen to you, does it? All right. But anyway, what happened was I was just sort of a typical Christian at that time, been pastoring for about, I don't know, started in 75, and had already preached 10 years before that, and had some experiences, preached in some other countries and stuff, but had something to learn about God. And I was honest enough to come to God and say, God, there's something wrong in my life. I shouldn't be up when we've got big crowds and then discouraged when we don't have many crowds. Preachers go through that, you know, they resign every Sunday night and then that type of stuff. Pray for your pastors, your elders. So what happened? A friend of mine, a pastor, we began to pray for revival, and he experienced it before I did. God got his attention one day when he rolled his vehicle down a hill seven times, and God had his attention. Wes Lambery was his name. He was invited to go down to some Canadian Revival Fellowship meetings down in Arizona, Phoenix, I think seven weeks down in Phoenix. While he was down there, God worked him over, jerked him inside out and got him straightened up, and he'd come back and we got together praying for revival. I remember him sharing what God had been in his heart, and I remember sitting there across the couch looking at him, thinking, why, you young whippersnapper, you know. I was ten years older than him, so now, let's see, I'm 61, he'd be 51 now, and I'd say, what are you doing preaching at me? We weren't preaching, he was just sharing, but I was under conviction because he had something and I didn't have it. But we began to pray for revival. We prayed for several months, starting probably the first part of 85. We'd get together, our wives would get together, and we'd pray for revival. I didn't even know what I was praying for, it just sounded like something I needed. And so what happened? We lined an evangelist to come up, he was going to come into Wes's church for a week, my church for a week, and then his brother-in-law's for a week. And his brother-in-law was an organizer type, me, I'm the opposite end. We'll put it together 30 seconds before it's supposed to go.