(Clip) Testimonies and Stories of Revival

to do it in you, he will change you, and you will never, ever be the same. That's my experience of revival. That's where the beginning stages were. Now, I moved from there to a pastorate in Atlanta, Georgia, a suburban church. It was my contact with Leonard Ravenhill for the first time. I'd heard him, I'd met him, I'd gone to a prayer retreat down in South Florida where he had preached one night for an hour and 45 minutes on revival praying, and then he prayed longer than he preached. And none of us wanted to go home. God came, and the glory of the Spirit fluttered in, and we never got over it. I invited him after he had spent a week with old Dr. Charles Stanley at First Baptist Church, a month with Dr. Stanley at First Baptist to come out to our little church. He taught me more theology in the two weeks he was with us, and I got my four years of seminary. Gotta quit saying that. And I'll never forget, I had, by this time, God was giving me young men like Malachi, and they were coming out of the woodwork. And one Tuesday morning, he was speaking, and I had 11 young preacher boys, high school and college kids. I could name them today. One of them's a medical doctor in Honduras. Another one's a pastor of a big vineyard church in Atlanta. Another one's a pastor of a First Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina. One of them is right now in the House of Representatives, Dr. Jody Heiss in the U.S. Senate, in the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. These were all young men. And I remember, I remember Raven Hill saying to that bunch of young men, he looked down at them, and he said to that bunch of young men, he said, young men, with all your getting, get on with them, or for God's sake, get out of this pulpit. And I began to understand there was a difference between theology and neology. Theology is what you understand about God. Neology is when He comes to reveal Himself to you and define who you are in Him, and He changes everything. Oh, I had to go through all the arguments. You remember then, Douglas, how the Pentecostals and the Evangelicals were struggling and battling and having wars over, you know, the gifts of the Spirit? You know? I went and people tickled my throat, and I tried to speak in tongues, and it just wouldn't come. I gagged and coughed and hacked. One night, a little church in southwest Georgia, a Baptist church, I was praying by myself, and all of a sudden, God gave me something I'd never, I didn't tell anybody about this for years. I was serving Baptists, they'd have fired me. God, I'm on God's payroll. And God just changed everything. During the course of those days, we began to see revival. I went to the North American Mission Board and pioneered the Office of Prayer and Awakening. Henry Blackaby followed me there.