Remarkable Occurrences In The Ministry

Someone said to me one time, Brother, I'd like to talk to you. He took me aside and he said, I think a lot of your praising the Lord is put off. You're always doing it, he said. And sometimes I can't stand it. I said, dear brother, listen. I spent 32 years in the service of the devil. I have 32 years to serve the Lord. I told him I would praise him. Don't stop me. I will praise him. God just gave him such authority, such clarity, such utterance, and such an ability to magnify Christ. I mean, it's like when he was done with his sermon, every tree in the forest was chopped down except one. Just one was left standing. It's like he just cleaned the slate and knocked down every idol, rotted every sin. Christ alone was left standing. And I still remember a young man getting up in the meeting while I was preaching, and he just stood up on one side of the church. There were a lot of people there. And he cried out, Mother, Mother, where are you? And she stood up. She was on the other side of the church. I just stopped preaching. And he said, Mother, I've been a rotten son. Can you ever forgive me? And he broke down weeping, you know. And she said, I forgive you, son. And they both met in the middle aisle there with their arms around each other weeping. My, the place came apart, you know. People were just weeping and coming to the Lord in marvelous fashion. Well, the name Keith MacLeod is not very familiar to most Christians these days. Brother MacLeod was a Canadian pastor and evangelist and a true man of God who had a huge impact in my own early Christian life. Keith, along with his brother Bill MacLeod, were involved in the Canadian Revival back in the early 1970s. But during the years that I knew him, he was a pastor of a small church in Kenora, Ontario. But in addition to his pastoral responsibilities, he would, from time to time, take evangelistic trips. And one year, in the providence of God, that one of his trips included my parents' church in rural Missouri. And it was during that week-long series of meetings that the spirit of God came in an unusual way. Multiple people were converted, including, by God's grace, myself, and many Christians present were deeply affected and revived. It was a special time that I've never experienced the likes of since. And after that special series of meetings, it seemed like Brother MacLeod would come and visit us every year or two in the following years. And so we developed a long-term relationship with him that continued until his health failed in the mid-1990s. Keats' ministry seemed to always emphasize the same big themes. He talked a lot about holiness, that God is holy, and that Christians, all Christians, must be holy. We must be consecrated to the Lord Jesus. He talked about putting all the parts of ourselves on the altar, as it will, being fully surrendered to the Lord. And then he talked a lot about faith, that we, as Christians, need to simply believe God, believe His promises in the Scripture. And we need to be men and women of prayer. We need to pray the promises of God and expect that the Lord will answer our prayers in mighty ways. And Keith did not just talk about intercessory prayer. He lived a life of mighty intercessory prayer for many years. The probably most unique feature of Keith's preaching was that it was filled with personal stories, firsthand accounts of answers to prayer, these different ways that he or his brother had experienced God working. As they had prayed, God had worked. And just hearing those stories filled those who heard with a sense of faith and a desire to pray more ourselves, a desire to live consecrated lives where we might experience the spiritual power that brother Keith spoke of. Anytime Keith preached at your church, he wanted there to be a significant amount of corporate prayer. And so there were extra prayer meetings, prayer times with him, and it was a great joy to just hear brother McLeod pray. He addressed God in such a simple, direct, warm, confident, matter-of-fact way as one who knew the Lord intimately and just simply walked with God throughout his life. And there was much lasting fruit from brother McLeod's ministry. When he preached at your church, you expected people were going to be saved whenever he came. And it was not so much you expected them to be saved because the gospel would be preached in some kind of unusually eloquent way, but it was more that the spirit of God seemed to accompany this brother in such a way that the things of eternity, the weighty, glorious realities of God just pressed in upon your soul. They were real. They were real in those meetings. And there was an impetus for everybody there to get serious about God, to seek the Lord with a whole heart in those times. And so yes, lost people ended up being saved, but Christians were deeply affected by those times. And our own walk with the Lord was changed going forward through that ministry. Now you might imagine that this kind of man of God who emphasized prayer and holiness and so forth, you might imagine that he would be kind of intense or even dour in his personality. But such was not at all the case with Brother Keith. In fact, it was just the opposite. He was a jolly man. His eyes were full of laughter and even mischievous laughter. He enjoyed the occasional practical joke at somebody's expense. And that also was a help to me, I think, over the years to realize that one could be a serious Christian absolutely sold out to Christ and that would not make you grim and grouchy. But instead, if one was filled with the Holy Spirit, it should have the opposite effect. It should make you full of joy and overflowing gladness in the service of Christ because that's what we saw in Brother McLeod. So anyway, as I think of people in heaven that I'm really looking forward to seeing again someday soon, Brother McLeod is high up on the list. I thank God so much for his life and his ministry and how God graciously used Brother Keith to help my own needy soul over the years. The following is a clip from 2009 of Bob Jennings sharing about his time with Keith McLeod. I was up there with Keith McLeod for eight months, I believe it was, and we made it a practice to meet for open-ended prayer every day if not twice a day. And there was about four of us and so it was just sort of a log cabin Bible school type of thing. But it was just a matter of meeting every day for preaching and prayer. That's all it was. And so in the middle of that time, Keith accepted an invitation to hold meetings at a big evangelical Mennonite church. And so we began to pray regularly for those meetings that were coming up. I suppose we prayed for maybe four months every day. And when the meetings began in Weimark, Saskatchewan, God came in power in the very first meeting. I mean, in the very first meeting, God was there in power. People were weeping. People were coming to the front. He never gave any altar call. He didn't believe in an altar call. But people, they couldn't take it. They could not keep their seats. They got up and they went to the front and they were confessing their sins. And every night, as I recall, there was probably 20, 30, 40 people up front there doing business with God. Every night the meetings lasted until 1, 2, and 3 o'clock with people asking for help. They were in distress of soul. I remember one young girl. She was about 12 years old. It was ten minutes before she could even talk. She was under such deep conviction. And so we got to bed like at 4 o'clock every night. And sometimes people couldn't wait even until the sermon was over. They were crying out under conviction of sin and he would have to stop preaching and ask the pastor to take them to the basement. I remember one fellow, he was under such conviction of sin, it was like he was just screaming. And as the pastor took him to the basement, you could hear him crying down there like an animal going to the slaughter. And so it was a very powerful time. People were starting to come from many miles away. The report was spreading. I know Keith McCloud said if he had any regrets, at the end of the time, if he had any regret, it was that he didn't continue the meetings longer. And so at the end of the time, it was estimated that half of the church, there was probably 300 or 400 people attending, half of the church either had a fresh or a new meeting with God. Brother McCloud, he said that every night, it was like he could hardly wait to get into the pulpit. He was full of unvented wine. God just gave him such authority, such clarity, such utterance, such an ability to magnify Christ. I mean, it's like when he was done with his sermon, every tree in the forest was chopped down except one. Just one was left standing. It's like he just cleaned the slate and knocked down every idol, rotted every sin. Christ alone was left standing. I remember one time, one woman right in the middle of the sermon, she was under such conviction, she just stood up and called out across the aisle and asked somebody else for forgiveness in the middle of the sermon. It was holy chaos. Brother Keith's messages were never recorded. However, cassettes were found from a home church meeting in 1995 where Keith was sharing testimony to what the Lord had done. Scribbled on the cassette was the title, Remarkable Occurrences in the Ministry. The audio from those cassettes forms the rest of this video. The starting point for everything and the starting point for me, that is as far as I am concerned, has to do with Isaiah 64. And that's why we read it to you at the start and we would like you to turn there. If you're not there in your Bibles, you can turn there and consider that there was a day, a night actually, a long time ago now. I couldn't tell you how long ago. It's about 37 or 38 years ago, somewhere around there. And it could be even longer ago than that when I think of it, probably 40 years. But I was reading through the Scriptures at nighttime after the family was all in bed. And I would start reading around 10 o'clock at night after everybody was tucked away for the night as it were. And I would spend long seasons in reading the Word of God and in prayer. And time meant nothing to me. If I could stay and pray for half the night, I would do it. And if I could stay and pray all the night, I would do that too. Time meant nothing to me. But this particular night, I was reading in Isaiah and I got to Isaiah 64 and started to read. Now, it would be around 11 o'clock at night and I was sitting in a chair like that one there and I was reading Isaiah 64. And I got down to verse 4. Verse 4. For since the beginning of the world, men have not heard, neither perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen of God beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. And it was revealed to me as I was reading it that there was something very precious and powerful in this that I was reading. And I broke out weeping. And before I knew it, I was on my knees before the Lord and eventually laying full length on the floor before the Lord and pleading with him to allow me to read this scripture because I couldn't read it. I was weeping so much. And so, it came to a place where, and I'm just telling you the way things were, that I was sure that the Lord Jesus was standing right before me and that if I reached out my hands, I would have touched his feet. That's the way I felt. And I felt so completely unworthy of his presence there that I can't describe it to you except that all I could do was weep. And I wept for several hours like that before the Lord and begging and pleading with him that I might be able to read this scripture and finish it. And chapter or verse 4 is the verse that really got through to my heart. And I saw finally what God was trying to show us and that was that the Lord Jesus Christ was the one that was spoken of here. That one that was beside him. This is what it says. Listen to it again. For since the beginning of the world, men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen o'er God beside thee. Beside thee. What he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. And we were waiting for him. That is waiting for the Lord Jesus Christ. And about five o'clock in the morning, I finally finished reading the scripture and the Lord had blessed my heart in such a powerful fashion. I remember getting up from the floor and just walking over to the sofa and laying down on the sofa. I thought, well, I'll get a little bit of a sleep here because we had a prayer meeting at 6 o'clock in the morning. And I was going to be at that prayer meeting and we had two prayer partners that would be there at 6 o'clock. So I just laid down and I'm telling you the way things were. I'm not trying to say these are things that you should do or anything else like that. But I had my Bible open as I laid down and I just laid it on my chest. And as I did, I was saying, praise the Lord, over and over and over again, very quietly. And I fell asleep and woke up about a quarter to six and I was still saying, praise the Lord, praise the Lord. And so I got up and went and got in my car and drove to a place for a meeting for prayer and shared with the brethren what God had shown me. I should go back and tell you something else. When I got up at 5 o'clock, that is, got off the floor, I went and opened the drapes on our big living room window that we had and looked out. And the northern lights, which we have up north in beautiful fashion sometimes, covered the entire sky from as far north as you could go all the way east and as far south as you could look. And they were just flashing in every direction. I never saw anything like that in my life, never. We've had them where you'd see them just really going beautifully but not covering such a large area. It just seemed to cover the entire sky. And the Lord said to me that he was going to send revival and it would cover the land. That was the thing that came to my heart. Now, when I informed the brethren what had happened, we had a great time together just rejoicing in what the Lord had shown to this man. Now after that, things started to happen. I was going out preaching but on a very limited basis. I was still in the Air Force at the time. But wherever I went, God broke through a great power. It just seemed it was going to happen, that's all. And you had no control over it and I didn't want any control over it. I remember one of the first things that God did was I was invited to speak at the Manitoba Home for Boys which was a reformatory. And these boys were in there from age 11 to 17. And they were in there for various crimes that they had committed. And I was asked to speak to them every Tuesday night for the next year. And I took up that as a challenge that God wanted me to do that. And I remember when I first started speaking to these boys, they were the most unruly boys I ever met in my life. They would laugh and giggle and poke one another while I was preaching and it just seemed like a total waste of time. But after about three months like this, I started to really get concerned for them. And as I was telling it somewhere else at home not too long back, that it just seemed as if the Lord gave me these children as my own and they became a part of my family. And I prayed for them like I would pray for my own family. And I was praying with many tears for their soul's salvation. Nothing was happening at all. But one night, one Tuesday night when I went there, I was talking with the one boy, Dave McKinney, his name was. And he was the oldest boy in the group, 17. He was a big kid and he was a ringleader of several breakouts they had there and so on. They considered him incorrigible. There was no way that he could be helped at all. And he was not allowed even outside the building. That's how things were with him. So I took him on in a special way in prayer. And this particular Tuesday night I talked with him and said, Dave, I'd like to come and visit you next Sunday afternoon if I could. And he just stared at me and he said, you would come and visit me? I said, yeah, I'll do that. Now I should say something else. The superintendent of the home had told me that these boys never ever had a visit from anyone from their home, that is, from their families. This Dave McKinney, that was his third trip in there. This would make six years behind bars as it were. And his family had never visited him. In fact, his father disowned him. And he said, you would visit me? And I said, yes, I would do that if you'd let me. And he said, well, certainly. So I came on a Sunday afternoon and the superintendent allowed me to take him out of the buildings and he said, but you're totally in charge. If anything happens, you're it for him. And I said, that's fine. And we went out in the car on the grounds and I started talking about the Lord and he turned to me and he said, you know, he says, I've been listening to what you're saying. And he says, I want to be a Christian. And it was a tremendous thing when he said that. So he really came through for the Lord in a marvelous fashion right then. Woken, weeping, confessing sin and so on. And then he started a prayer meeting and I'd given him a Bible because he didn't have one. And he started a prayer meeting and a Bible study with the rest of the boys there during the week. Every day they would meet at a certain time in a laundry room there and they would discuss the Word together and pray together. But these other kids didn't know the Lord. Then the following Tuesday night, when I was driving over to the home for the meeting, the Lord came with power. And I found that I couldn't drive. I stopped the car and just sat there and wept. And I don't know how to explain this to you, but if you haven't been there, it's impossible to explain it to you. It wasn't normal crying. It was strong crying and tears. And I thought I could die, that they might live. So I went there that Tuesday night, got there finally. And as soon as I started speaking, I noticed a difference in the meeting. There was total silence, absolutely total silence, and everybody was listening very carefully. And after the meeting was through, there was six of the boys came to me immediately and asked if they wanted to be Christians. In a very short while we had 19 boys saved, and they were really saved. I mean, they were really transformed by the power of God. So that's really how the ministry started. More there than anywhere else. And I saw the possibilities of God and what He could do if we were totally surrendered to Him. And to just sense again the power of God coming upon you and then on a meeting is a marvelous thing. After that I was invited to go to a number of different churches just to hold sometimes just a one-meeting thing on a Sunday morning. And I went to a place, a Christian Missionary Alliance church, on a Sunday morning. A pastor was away and he asked me if I'd go and preach to him. Just a small group of people, about 35 people they had. And I preached on holiness unto the Lord. I found out, by the way, too, that the one message that God gave me that was more predominant than any other over those many years was holiness unto the Lord. And I preached more on holiness than any other thing. And it was always through that preaching that God would break through a great power, always. And I remember here at this particular church, just one service, that's all we had, and I preached on holiness unto the Lord. In that day it should be written upon the bells of the horses, holiness unto the Lord. And so as I was preaching, I hadn't been preaching that long when I was up on the platform, of course, and I felt the pulpit starting to shake. I didn't know what that was, and I thought, my, what's going on here? So I sort of grabbed the pulpit tightly there, it didn't help any, and then I noticed the whole platform was shaking. I thought, what's going on here? And then I turned and looked, and there was a fellow there that played the piano, and he was sitting up on the platform on the piano stool or the piano bench. He never left there. Like when I started preaching, he just sat there with his back to me. He weighed over 300 pounds, he was a great big man, and he was just shaking uncontrollably. I mean, he was just shaking, just violent shaking under conviction of sin. And so I just kept on preaching, and I wasn't halfway through the preaching when somebody let out a cry. An old man at the back turned out, he was about 86, and he just got up and ran to the front and fell on his knees and started crying out to God. In a matter of just a couple of minutes, the whole group was on their knees, and I was just behind the pulpit with nothing to do. God was doing everything. This old man had been a member of the church for a long, long time, I forget how many years now, but he said afterwards that God showed him he had never been born again of the Spirit of God. So he was wonderfully saved by the grace of God and was baptized the following week, not by me but by the pastor. So we were seeing in small, isolated places great movings of the Spirit of God. And sometimes it would be almost as if when I was going to go someplace and preach, I expected that God was going to do these things. Not just that there was going to be a blessing, but it was going to be an overwhelming thing. And I was always backed by the same thing, and that is an awful lot of prayer. I did a lot of praying. Praying was just a normal way of life for me. I would pray by the hour. If it was early in the morning when I'd get up and I could pray for two or three hours, I would. During the day when I had a break, I would pray again, and at night again I would pray. It just was always praying. It just was a way of life. And with that, I had the Word of God. I would read the Word constantly, even while I was in prayer, because I'd open my Bible and start reading, the Lord would lay something on my heart, and I was so filled up with the Word of God and messages to preach. And I remember pleading with God to open a door so I could go and preach these messages. I had them all built up in me, and I couldn't preach them, except in this isolated way, because I was still in the Air Force. But eventually I got out of the Air Force to go preaching, and that's another story, and it's too long to get into here right now, but my, how the Lord did some great and wonderful things. Immediately, that is, the ministry was opened up. And I remember a preacher phoning, yeah, a preacher, he phoned me from Thompson, Manitoba. I didn't know him at all, and he said, Brother McCloud, he said, was informed by so-and-so that you've been doing some preaching. I said, well, yes, but I'm not out preaching full-time yet. Well, he said, we'd like you to come and preach to us for two weeks. And I said, well, right now I'm working. There's just no way until the door is wide open for me to go. There's no way I can go. About a week later, the door was opened wide for me to go, and I found myself going up there and holding two weeks of meetings, and God blessed in a marvelous fashion. It just seemed like one thing after another just fell into place so beautifully, and God was doing great and mighty things. Again, up in those areas where I went, usually a very isolated thing where you'd have 25 or 30 people, and God would break through in those little groups and do great things. But sometimes in one place, a small church building that they had way up north, Indian people, and they said there was around 80 people in that building. I don't doubt it, because they sat squeezed like sardines. They sat up around the pulpit behind me and all over the platform, a little platform they had, and it was quite a thing. But God was doing great things there. And that's the first time that we saw evidence of tongues in a meeting in a different way than tongues are mentioned today, totally different from that. I was preaching in English, naturally, and I had preached from John 3:16. I remember it clearly. And after the meeting, this elderly lady was sitting there just near the front, elderly Indian lady. And I went over and started talking to her, and she started to talk to me in Cree, which I don't know at all, and did a lot of preaching amongst the Cree people, but I never learned their language. It's a very beautiful language. And when they speak, you know, it's beautiful. It really is. They got some long, long words. I mean, they're that long. They're huge. But it's beautiful. It's a beautiful language. But like I say, I never learned it. But anyway, she was speaking in Cree. So I called a brother over, Percy Lobman, who was an elder in the church there, an Indian man, and I said, Percy, ask her what she wants. And so he did, and she immediately started talking very rapidly and pointing to me like this as she was talking. And then he turned to me and he said, Brother, she's from Split Lake. She just flew in today. The aircraft brought her in today to visit her sister. She didn't know the meetings were on. And her sister said, Well, the meeting's on. And she came, and she says, I don't understand a word of English, but I understood every word he said clearly. And then she started telling the message that I had preached. It's marvelous. And I don't know how she heard it, whether she heard it in Cree or what. I have no knowledge. But she said she didn't understand a word of English, but she understood every word that was said. She was 76 years of age. And then she turned to him and she said, Now, you get the Cree Bible, and you read to me the same Scripture that he read from John 3, 16. She told him. She knew. It's marvelous. And she said, And don't fool me. Don't try and fool me. She said, I'm an old lady. I'm 76. I'm going to die any day, and I want to know where I'm going when I die. And God did a marvelous work, and she was gloriously saved. Another time, not too long after that, I was in a sanatorium preaching to native people and Eskimos. And, well, that's another story, too. We went there to see the head man of the sanatorium. And the lady that was his secretary, we talked to her first. And she said, well, she was a Plymouth Brethren, a really lovely woman. And she'd been there 25 or 26 years. And we asked if we could have a week of meetings in there. And she said, It's impossible. We only allow the Roman Catholic priest and the United Church minister. They're the only two that have ever been in here in the last 26 or 25, 26 years since she had been there. And they just don't allow anybody else in. And I said, Well, I'd like you to go and ask the boss man and see what he said. And she said, I'm sorry, brother. It's just impossible. He'll just say no. I said, But we have prayed. And God has told he's going to open the store here. And she said, Well, I'll go and talk to him. And she went in the room and came out a few minutes later. She just stood there like she'd been hit with an axe or something. And she said, He says, Come in and hold the meetings. And you can stay as long as you like. And I said, Well, that's what God had said. And the Lord really broke through there and did some wonderful things. And one night there was a... I had prayed because there were so many Indians and Eskimos there that I thought, Well, some of these people are going to have difficulty picking up the English language. So I prayed deliberately that God would make it real to their hearts, however he did it, either to make them understand English or bring it to them in their own language. And that night there was two people that stayed behind in their seats. Not a great thing, but just two people. And one was a young man, about 25, and he could speak English. And the other was a lady, 55, and she could not. But both were Cree Indians from up north. And so I asked her first what she stayed behind for, and she spoke to me in Cree. And I was lost, of course. I couldn't pick it up. So I turned to him and said, Would you please ask her what she has got to say? So I'd like to know what it's all about, what she's doing. So he talked with her, and then he said to me, I can tell you the message I preached there too. Many messages I preached over the last 40 years, I can remember them. And some of them are crystal clear. This one is one of them. And I had preached from the second chapter of Acts. Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made this same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. And I preached on the Lordship of Christ. And here was this lady, and she says to him, I don't understand English at all, she says, but I understood everything he said. And the one thing that was emphasized to my heart was that Christ must be the Lord of my life, or he can never be the Savior of my soul. Marvelous, you know. How did she pick this up? How did she pick it up? She had no contact with church or anything else. So it was just the Spirit of God working in her heart. And she was wonderfully saved that night. And I had some little Bibles at that time. I was passing out to everybody that I could. And so she came to me the next evening, because I was there an hour ahead of time to do some praying. And she pointed at the little Bibles that I had, and I said, here, help yourself, and gave her a whole pile of them. And she just took off like a rabbit, and she went all through the sanatorium handing them to people there. And the next thing I knew, she was pushing people in wheelchairs in there, and then she'd run away and get somebody else. She was just active for the Lord right away. Her name was Martha Knott, K-N-O-T-T. But my, she was just a transformed lady. Her face was just lit up with the presence of God. And the young man, too, was wonderfully saved. This 25-year-old man was also saved. They both came from the same place, that is, pretty close to the same place. One was Nelson House, and I think the other at God's River. But anyway, whatever, God was doing great things. And I would see these in isolated ways, time after time after time. And my heart was blessed, but I never saw it in a large fashion. That is where, you know, there was a 50 or 100 people come through for the Lord. I never saw that. These were just small movings of the Spirit of God. And I wondered about it and kept praying that God would break through with real power in larger ways than he had been doing. A brother had asked me the other day to talk about the moving of God at a camp that we were at, and so we'll do that right now. I said we'd wait till Saturday, and that's Saturday now. I'd been asked. Now, I should say something here that in probably 90% of the places that I was asked to go and preach, I never knew a living soul. I didn't know any of the people at all. They were totally foreign to me, from the pastor right on down. And I'd get a phone call from a pastor or a letter inviting me to come and hold meetings, and I don't know how they got ahold of my name or anything else about it, but I would go. And I got this invitation to speak at a Mennonite camp, camp grounds, to a junior camp, a senior camp, and a family camp. Now, the junior camp were kids from 13 to 18 years of age. The senior camp was single people from 18 and up. They had to be single, or they weren't married people. And then, of course, the family camp was family. So, it lasted two and a half weeks, almost three weeks. And so, when I first met with the man that was a director and his wife, they were actually from Africa. They were missionaries, returned home on furlough. And I met with them and with the different counselors that they had, the people that were the workers. There was about, I'm going to guess and say it, I'm not sure, 18 or 20 of them. And we met at a place before we ever got to camp. It was prearranged. And, by the way, we did a lot of praying for about four months, that God would break through there with great power, and God answered prayer. But we met together, and I opened the word of God to them. Can't remember at the moment what I said to them from the word, but I asked them if they believed that God would come with such power that not a living soul that came in the camp would leave unsaved, but they'd all be saved by the grace of God. And I said, if you believe that, would you raise your hand? And nobody raised their hand except myself. And I said, I believe God is going to do that in this camp. Now, when the last meeting came in the camp, one of the men that was in that little meeting was leading the singing, and he was from the United States. I don't remember his name right now, but he got up in the pulpit and he said, when we met that first day, Brother McLeod had mentioned that he believed that God would save every living soul that came in unsaved, and they had an awful lot of unsaved people there, both younger and older. They would all get saved by the grace of God. And he said, that's exactly what has happened. There has been one left out, not one. And I hadn't known that because I didn't keep track of anything, but they had been keeping track. So God did a clean sweep in the camp there. And in the first camp, that's where the first breakthrough came, and it came in a very remarkable manner. There was about 110 or so of these kids there. And the man that was leading the singing, the very first service, he got up there and he said, we're going to have a great time here. And he's clapping his hands and he says, and we're going to tear the roof off this building, so let's get at it. And I thought, well, now, Lord, it's time you stopped all that foolishness. So I just sat and prayed that God would stop this kind of foolishness. And he did right away. So at the very next service, this young man got up in the pulpit and apologized for what he had said. Without me saying a word to him, he said, that was over the flesh. It had nothing to do with God. And he asked forgiveness. And that's quite a thing, you know. So we saw the Lord just doing great things like that all the way through, just day after day after day. But about halfway through that camp there, we had a boy there. He was 14 years of age. I'm trying to remember his name, and again, names sort of escape me. But this young boy was a big kid. He was 14 and he was like a man. He was six foot tall and weighed 200 pounds. And he was strong and he was beating up on kids. That is, he was pushing them around. He wasn't beating them up, he was pushing them around. And the kids were terrified of this guy. So one day I was in prayer at the cabin that I was in. I had a cabin way back in the bush by myself, which was really good. And I could spend a lot of time there with the Lord. And I was praying when there was a knock at the door and the director was there. And he said, Brother McCall, we've got a problem with this young boy. And he said, I felt the only one thing we can do is take him back to Saskatoon to his home. So I'm going to take him back today and get rid of him because he's just disrupting everything in the camp. And so I said, well, I'll tell you what, before you do that, go to him right now and take him to his cabin alone and talk to him about the Lord. And he says, we've done that, he said, but he just laughs at us. He just mocks and makes fun. I said, no, but while you're doing that, I'll be praying. And I'll pray that God will break through in his life. He said, no, you go and do that. Before we ever take him home, we're going to see what God will do in his life. And so I got on my knees and poured out my heart to God. And I must have prayed for about an hour. Didn't know what was happening there. But I went to the dining room for lunch. And as I was sitting eating, the door burst open at the back and in came this kid. And his hair was all over the place. And he looked like a wild man for a minute. And he comes charging up the aisle. So I got up and stepped right out in the aisle in front of him. And he stopped in front of me and he was weeping. And he said, Brother McLeod, can you forgive me for being such a rotten kid? And he wept and threw his arms around me. And I threw my arms around him. And he said, I've given my heart to Jesus. He said, I'm a different man. And he was. He went to everybody there. Went to the cooks and all the workers begging their forgiveness. Then he asked the kids, please forgive me for being the kind of person I was. Now afterwards I talked with the director. And he said, Brother, all I can say to you is I was talking to him. He was paying no attention, mocking and so on. And he says, finally, I just said, pack your duffel bag. We're going home. And he said, suddenly, he said, he just hit the floor like a ton of bricks. He said, he just dropped like an ox. And he started crying out to God for mercy. Now that was the start of great things in that camp. From then on, it was marvelous to see the workings of God, not only in that particular first week of camp, but in each camp afterwards too. Tremendous things were happening. And this one night, for example, when this boy was still there, we've probably told it to you before, but we had a bonfire down at the lake. And we had a regular service in the chapel. Then we came down there for another service. It was marvelous. He only said a few words with the tears running down his face. And one of the kids got up and ran off down the beach into the darkness. And one of the directors, or not one of the directors, one of the counselors was going to go after the kid. I said, no, leave him alone. Leave him with God. And a little while later he came back and gave a confession or a testimony of how he had been saved by the grace of God. Went down the beach and met with the Lord Jesus. With many tears. And this young boy got to his feet again and gave another short testimony with tears running down his face, begging kids to give their hearts to Christ. Seven times, seven times he stood up and gave a testimony. And seven times they ran off down the beach, different ones, and came back saved. It was marvelous. Man did nothing at all there. God did it all. And I remember the last time he gave a testimony, he stood up and he was weeping every time, just weeping. And he had to go forth weeping, you know. That's what he was doing. He looked across the fire and there was a boy sitting there, a boy about 14 or 15. And he said, there's my cousin Rick, he said. And he's lost and he's going to hell. And he broke down and he cried and cried. And that kid got up and tore off down the beach just like a rocket. And about 20 minutes later maybe he came back to the fire there weeping and said he had given his heart to Christ. It was a marvelous thing. God was just doing great things there at that camp. And it just became easy in a sense to preach because of the movings of God. One night there was a lady, the counselors and that used to meet for hot chocolate or whatever late at night, usually around 11 or 12 o'clock at night in the dining hall. And I was sitting there having some hot chocolate and this lady came and sat right opposite me and looked across the table and said, now, Brother McLeod, I can look you in the eye for the first time in a week and a half. I said, why, what's the problem? She says, I hated you. I hated everything you said. She said, I couldn't stand you for one minute. And so she just went on and on like this. She was about 35, you know. And I said, well, that is interesting. What's changed you? And she said, the Lord did last night. And she says, I just want to tell you I love you now with all of my heart. What a thing, you know. We don't have to do these things. God can do them. And he did it in a marvelous fashion with this lady. Then when adult Bible camp came, God just broke through in families in marvelous fashion. We just saw so many different things happening. Everybody was meeting with God. Everybody was praying. Everybody was weeping, this sort of thing. It was just a clean sweep. That's the only way you could say it, just a clean sweep. And one day, I used to have a lot of problems with dizziness. And I've got one of those there, what do you call it, very sensitive inner ear. And if I spin around fast, for example, it topples, and then I'm dizzy. I can't ride on swings or any of these things because immediately I'm just gone. That's all there is to it. Well, I got up out of bed this one morning early for prayer. And as I got out of bed, I got out too fast. Now, I normally know that, so I get up slowly, see. And I just shot out of bed on my knees, and boy, the whole room just went. And after a couple of minutes, I got violently sick. That's what happens. It goes to my stomach, then I get violently sick. It's like air sickness or sea sickness. So anyway, here I was, and I was really sick. I thought, now the chapel hour was from 10 to 11, and I'm supposed to speak at 10 o'clock, and there's no way I can do it. And I prayed as best I could, asking the Lord for help. And finally, I crawled back on the bed and held on for dear life. I thought I was flying through the air, you know, from this dizziness. It was real bad. And about 9.30, I was still there like that, sick as a dog. And I prayed finally. I said, Now, Lord, you're going to have to do something for me because I'll not be able to preach this morning to these people unless you do. And the next thing I knew, the whole thing was gone, just like that. Sometimes I'd have those things last for three or four days. I'm not fooling. That's the way it was. And it was gone just as quick as that. And so I got up and shaved quickly and cleaned up and got my clothes on and went to the meeting. And again, God broke through His power. And I think it was just the devil trying to stop me from doing something there. Well, that's another moving of the Spirit of God that was real. We went to a place in Saskatchewan again in a Mennonite church. And this particular Mennonite church had about 120 members in it. And the pastor, I had got to know at least something about him. And he was a godly man, really loved God. And he had phoned and asked that I come and hold a week of meetings. So I did. And it just seemed as if the Lord wasn't going to do much that week. And so there was some good things happened but no real breakthrough of any kind. And the pastor said, Would I come again? And I said, Yes, I would. So I came again about six months later, did a lot of praying about it. God would break through. Well, I can't remember what night it was. But after I sat down, I'll never forget it. I sat down and there was a silence in that room like you can't imagine. We mentioned it the other night, the silence of eternity. And there was not a move. I had dismissed the people, told them to go home. Nobody knew it. And the minutes passed by, five minutes, ten minutes, and everybody just sitting there. And so finally the pastor was sitting up on the platform next to me. And he leaned over and said, Brother, what should we do? And I said, Do nothing at all. Leave it with God. And so he took that and just sat still about 15 minutes. And then suddenly the whole congregation stood up like one person, went out to the aisle and walked out. Not a sound. Nobody spoke. It was an amazing thing. And so he said to me, Brother, what's going on? I said, God's at work. Don't worry about it. So the next day, next morning really, I came to the pastor's house for breakfast because I had been invited there for breakfast. And so he and his wife and I were just sitting there. The kids had gone to school. And they had three children. And so they were really silent, so quiet. I wondered, What's going on here? They're so quiet. Normally they were very talkative. And finally he said to me, You know, Brother, what happened last night? And I said, Well, I know God was working. Oh, yes, he said. He said, When my wife and I and the children got in the door after the meeting was over, they went home to the parsonage, he said, We just got in the door and we all fell on our knees crying out to God for mercy. I said, Is that right? And he said, Yeah. And I said, Well, praise the Lord for that. And he said, Yeah. He said, The Lord really met with us. So I went to a farmer's house for lunch that day, too. And he lived about 10 miles away. They had five children. They were all away at school. And I didn't know them at all. So I don't know what they were like before I met them there at the lunch hour. But we were sitting eating. And again, they were very quiet. And then he said to me, Brother, I'd like to tell you what happened last night. And I said, Well, that'd be good. And he said, Well, our children are very talkative. On the way home, there wasn't one word spoken by them or by us. It was just total silence. And he said, When we got in the door, we all fell down crying out to God for mercy. And we found out that had happened at home after home after home that particular night. So again, it's just the Spirit of God moving in wondrous power. We don't have to see everything that's happening. It's wonderful that he does these things. And we just praise God for it. And I remember, too, another night there, a man sitting still in his pew. After everybody had gone, he was just sitting there. And so I felt led of God to go speak to him. And I said, What is your problem, Brother? And he said, It's very simple. I'm lost in my sins. I said, When did you find that out? He said, Tonight. And he said, I've been a member of this church for 25 years. I'm a professing Christian, but I'm not saved. And I know it. And he was an older man. I think he was about 55 at that time. And I said, What do you want to do about it? Oh, Brother, I've got to get saved right now. And down we both went on our knees, and he poured out his heart. The Lord was doing some remarkable things, just remarkable. I can't explain it any more than that, but just remarkable and wonderful things. That same pastor left that church sometime after this. And he and his wife took the church at Weimark, Saskatchewan, where God did the greatest work I've ever seen. And so they weren't there very long, about a year, when he wrote me a letter and said, Brother, the time was right. Come for a week of meetings. When can you come? And so I looked to the Lord in prayer and gave him some dates, phoned him and told him. And I said, Now, before I come, though, we're going to pray, so I want you people to gather in prayer. Get your people to pray. I said, The elders, everybody else, get them to pray. He had eight elders. They had about 450 people in the church. And so he said, I'll get them praying. So they were praying and doing a good job of praying too. And I was praying at home, and then I went there for those meetings. And Bob Jennings was with me at that time, by the way, so he could tell you some of the things that happened there. But they were powerful things. We did mention, I think, to you, to somebody recently, anyway, maybe not to you here, about this one whole family that came to the Lord. Did I tell you about that? Maybe not. Well, it seemed night after night we'd get 30 or 40 people coming to the front without any invitation. I would just close in prayer, and as I was closing in prayer, people would get up and run to the front. And they just came every night, night after night after night. And sometimes while I was preaching, they would start crying out to God for mercy. It was very remarkable. And I still remember a young man getting up in the meeting while I was preaching, and he just stood up on one side of the church. There weren't a lot of people there. And he cried out, Mother, Mother, where are you? And she stood up. She was on the other side of the church. I just stopped preaching. And he said, Mother, I've been a rotten, I just forget how he said it, but a rotten son, can you ever forgive me? And he broke down weeping, you know. And she said, I forgive you, son. And they both met in the middle aisle there with their arms around each other, weeping. My, the place came apart. You know, people were just weeping and coming to the Lord in marvelous fashion. But this one particular night, I suppose there was maybe 40 or more people that came to the front. And included in it was a man and his wife and either four or five children. And I wish I could tell you exactly, but there was a number of them there. And so I had counseled a couple of them, but the others I hadn't had anything to do with. But this little girl, she was five years of age, and she was sitting on the front pew with her legs swinging back and forth like this. This was after the meeting was over, of course, and a lot of counseling going on. So I walked over to her and I said, Hi there, how are you doing? And she said, not bad or something like that. And I said, how old are you? She said, five. Tears run down her face. And I said, what are you sitting here for? And she says, I want to be a Christian. I said, what are you now? She said, a wicked sinner. I said, who told you that? She said, God did. When? While you were preaching. What did I preach? And she laid it out. Five-year-old girl. Just so beautifully, I would have thought it was some theologian laying it out. And she just put it out like that. This is what you're preaching on. It was marvelous. And so I said, well, let's go in this little room here. And we went up to this other room and did some praying. And then I said, now, you tell me the kind of sins you've committed. Oh, she said, they're bad. And tears still run down her face. She wasn't weeping, that is audibly, but the tears were running down. And she said, I've committed murder. And I said, now, hold on, hold on. How have you committed murder? And she said, well, there's a little girl in kindergarten that I can't stand. And I wish that she would drop dead. And she said, that's murder. I said, who told you that? She said, God did. When? While you were preaching tonight. Everything I said to her, I'd say, who told you that? She'd say, God did. She never once said the preacher did. I so appreciate that. It shows the spirit of God is working in her heart. And so then she mentioned stealing from her mother's purse some pennies. She said, that makes me a thief, she said. And they killed thieves in Jesus' day. You know, this sort of thing. And one thing after another, she just kept bringing it up. That was marvelous. Finally, I said, well, what do you want to do about it? She says, I want to make it all right with God. And this little five-year-old got on her knees and poured out her heart and confessed these sins. I didn't have to prompt her at all. And she repented of them, no doubt about it. And she got up, and when she got up, her face was just transformed. Tears were dried up, and she was just all so happy. And it was afterwards that I found out she was the youngest member of this family. The whole family got saved that night. It was a marvelous thing. So we saw the Lord do some great and mighty things there at Weimark. And one of the things that I think was most remarkable there was, we mentioned this. I think we mentioned it to you here. Maybe we didn't. But this man, the pastor came to me and said, Brother, we've got to pray for a certain man. He's in the church. He's a member of the church, but he's nowhere with God. And he hasn't been out to any of the meetings, and he won't be out until Friday night because he's away all week. He's a carpet layer. And as he's laying at carpets, he has to be away from home a lot. And he won't be here until Friday night meeting. And he said, Let's pray that God will really break through in his heart and life. I said, All right. So we did. And so he was coming on Friday night. I didn't know who he was. The place was packed with people. They had a huge foyer at the back, and that was filled with people completely, people standing because there was no place to sit. And so they were just standing there like sardines in a can. But this young man, I wouldn't have known him if I saw him because I had never known him before. And this is the way it worked with him. I had been praying that God would make his word, as he said it was, like the hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces. In particular, I emphasized that in prayer. We've done that many times over the years, and the Lord seems to honor that in a marvelous fashion. But I prayed that powerfully before the Lord. Oh, God, make your word like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces, and I would really pour it out. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, God says, and we have to remember that. So praying that way. This man came late to the service. I had been preaching for about an hour and a half. Sometimes I was preaching two hours and longer, and I didn't even know it. I didn't know the time was going by at all, and the people didn't know neither. They thought I'd only been speaking for about a half an hour. So God was doing great things. And here this young man comes in the door. I couldn't see him because the door was off to the side, and all these people are packed in there anyhow. But he told the pastor afterwards, he said, when I stepped in the door, I had about ten minutes left of the message to preach. He said the first words that I heard from the pulpit hit my heart like a hammer and smashed it. And he broke out weeping and confessing sin to God. It's marvelous, the things that God was doing. And all you could say, it is the Lord. It's not man. It has nothing to do with man at all. It has everything to do with God Almighty. And we saw these things happening. If it was just an isolated case, you could maybe write it off somehow, but when it happens so frequently, you couldn't do that. It would be impossible. Then at another place, also in Saskatchewan. The Lord did great things in Saskatchewan. I think one of the reasons God picked on that province in Canada more than any other that I know is they have a lot of good Bible schools there, a lot of good churches there for a long period of time. It goes back a long ways. The old homestead days and there's been really good work there. But anyway, I was way up in northern Saskatchewan for these meetings. Two Mennonite churches came together and they wanted meetings. Again, I didn't know any of the people at all. And I said I would come on one condition because it was about four months before I would be coming. I wanted them to pray the first month. I think I said to them three times a week to meet for prayer that God would break through amongst us. And when that month was up, I wrote them again asking to meet for five days a week. And then the third month, I asked them to meet every day in prayer with little cottage prayer meetings and so on. Well, anyway, when I got there to the place where I was going to stay, that is the home that I was going to stay in, there was a brother and his wife. They had no children. They didn't know me, of course. And he said, Brother, when you wrote that first letter and asked for prayer like that, I said to my wife, God's going to do something here. No evangelist has ever come here and asked for prayer like that. I don't know what these men do, how they can imagine God's going to do anything without prayer. But anyway, he said, God's going to do something here. When the next letter came, he said, now I know for sure He is. And God broke through with great power. And I remember many things that happened there. I asked for testimonies. It was a Sunday to Sunday set of meetings, eight days. And by Wednesday night, there had been no moving of the Spirit of God that you could see. But I asked for testimonies and just felt that of God. And a young man shot to his feet, and he was sitting beside his wife, and he said, my wife and I live 50 miles west of here. We're not associated with these people at all. But we heard that God was here, and we've come to meet God. And he sat down. Both he and his wife were gloriously brought to Christ that night. How they heard that, I don't know. I never asked them. And that night, there was a tremendous breakthrough amongst the people, too. And we saw some great things happen. But there were some strange things happen, too. And I remember on Wednesday night, or Friday night, rather, after the meeting, oh, the Lord had been doing some great things. But the pastor, the one pastor, he was an older man, much older than myself. And on Saturday night, I should go to Saturday night rather than Friday night, what happened happened on Friday night. And as I got in the pulpit to speak on Saturday night, he jumped off his seat and said, stop, in a big loud voice, and put his hand up. I hadn't said a word yet, so I just went and sat down. And he got in the pulpit, and he stood there, and he was shaking, and he was just shaking, and then he turned and pointed at me, and he said, that man, that man, that man. He kept saying, that man, you know. And I thought, why, what's going on here? And he said, when he first started preaching last Sunday morning, he said, I thought, oh, what have we got here. He said, this man is a psycho, and he's going to tear this place apart. And he said, so I thought, what are we going to do? He said, he got the elders together and said, what can we do? And they said, well, maybe we just tell him to go home. And he said, we can't do that, what will the people say? I mean, after all, we've been praying all this time and so on. He said, well, I guess we're going to have to fight it out, that's all. And then he said, when he preached on Sunday night, he said, I thought, this man's out of his mind. That's the way he's saying it. He said, I thought he's out of his mind. He said, he's telling us things that we never heard before. I was just preaching from the Word of God. And he said, then on Wednesday night, he said, I thought by that time, well, the week will be gone and then we can get rid of this guy and that'll be it. Because nothing was happening. But then on Wednesday night when this young couple spoke, I've got him, you know. He said, I couldn't figure that one out. And then an elderly couple in the church, they were in their 70s, stood up too and gave their testimony that night. And he said, that really shook me. Because they were such godly people and they needed a meeting with God. Where did that leave me? And so by Friday night, he was in a turmoil. And he said, when I went home Friday night, he said, I couldn't sleep. He said, all I did was pace up and down in the living room. And he said, I kept saying over and over again, Lord God Almighty, don't pass me by, don't pass me by. And he said, five o'clock this morning. He said, finally God got a hold of me and said, it's not me passing you by, but you are passing me by. And he said, I fell on my face and cried out to God for mercy. And he met with me. It was a marvelous thing. And then he turned and came and threw his arms around me. I can't explain these things very well. But he was weeping. And he said, brother, I love you. We had prayer meetings every morning and every afternoon there too, in the church building. And we had different numbers of people out for them. And one morning we had maybe 40 people out. And I just got in the pulpit to say something down in the basin. They had a lectern there. And as I just started to speak, this big farmer jumped up. Remember I mentioned it the other night. And then I said, I'll tell you about it Saturday morning instead. But anyway, this fellow jumped to his feet. He was a great big man and strong as a bull. I found that out. But he was shaking like a leaf. He was just shaking, something terrible. And he did almost the same as the pastor had done. He was pointing at me. And he said, that man, that man, several times, you know. And then he said, when he was preaching, I thought, there's a man that's insane. He's crazy. And all the time he was saying this, he was shaking and trembling like a leaf. And I just stood there and listened until he was through. And he did the same thing as the pastor had done, only this was before the pastor had his experience. And he said, last night, he said, when I got home, he said, I said to my wife that this man is crazy. I can't stand it, he said. And he said, I couldn't go to bed. So he said, I started pacing up and down saying, oh God, what's wrong with this man anyway? And he said, God finally got a hold of me and said, there's nothing wrong with him. The thing that's wrong is wrong with you. And again, it was early in the morning, he said, when he fell on his face and submitted to God and cried out to God for mercy and God met him. And then he cried out to me from where he was telling all this and he said, Brother McLeod, can you ever forgive me? And I stepped out from behind the pulpit and I said, brother, I forgive you gladly. And he come running up the aisle there and grabbed me, this great big man, you know, and he about squeezed the life out of me. And I was just gasping, I mean, he had a bear hug on him. And just weeping, broken before God. We saw this happen many times there. There was one other thing that happened. Sometime before that, I had been at another church in Saskatchewan and right across the road from the church building, they had a Bible school, which was not associated with the church that I was in. But anyway, they had a Bible school there and they had about 125 students and it was a small school. And the pastor had gone to the president of the school and asked if I could come and speak at a chapel hour. And he said, that would be a good idea. So I went and spoke at the chapel hour. And I'll never forget it because it was so unique to me. The place where they had the pulpit was about five or six feet above the people, so you're looking right down at them. And they had curved seats like this, you know, so you had an excellent view of the whole population. It was really good that way. But as I got in the pulpit, I looked around and I thought, it looks to me like only the odd ones got a Bible. So I said, how many of you have got your Bibles with you? And about maybe eight or ten of them put their hands up. And I said, well, how many have got the New Testament at least? Well, a few more hands went up. And I said, isn't this a Bible school? Don't you bring your Bibles to chapel hour? And I said, no, I'm going to be preaching from the word of God. And I said, I'm not preaching from the New Testament, from the Old Testament. So if you only got your New Testament, it's not going to help you at all. If you don't have a Bible at all, you won't be able to know whether I'm telling the truth or not. But anyway, I preached the message there. And after the message, well, the pastor and several of the professors were sitting up behind me on the platform. And as soon as I was through, they got up and started heading out the door. I mean, they were moving. And so the president, he tried to just walk right by me. And I reached out and grabbed him by the hand. And he just pulled his hand away like that, you know, and walked out. And then the last professor that was there, he came over to me with tears running down his face. And he said, Brother McLeod, that message has been needed here for many, many years. But he said, I'm afraid they're very angry with you. I said, no, not with me. They're angry with God's word. That's the problem. Well, anyway, there was a footnote to that because this place I was just telling you about where God broke through a great power. One night, I was standing talking with some people. It was very late at night. And the door of the church building opened up. And a young man came running in. And he came running right up to us. And he said, I've got to talk to you, he said to me. And I said, well, what have you got to talk about? And he said, well, he said, I met with the Lord Jesus, he said tonight. And he's totally transformed my life. And he reminded me of something, and I've got to ask forgiveness of you. I said, I don't even know you. No, he said, but I know you because you were at our Bible school a year ago. And he said, and when you were preaching and when you left, he said, us kids all got together and said, that guy's an idiot. He doesn't know anything from the word of God. And they were laughing. And he said, we all laughed and mocked concerning you. And God spoke to my heart. He said, tonight, he said, I was about 10 miles down the highway heading home to the farm. And he said, God said, stop the car. And he said, just like I heard a voice, he said, I slammed on the brakes. He said, now you turn the car around, you get back to that building, and you make things right with my servant. That's exactly the way he said it. And he said, I'd come back. He said, I wouldn't dare say no to God. So there was some wonderful things happen in marvelous fashion. Sometimes, when you see the Spirit of God moving like that, you wonder why he doesn't do that everywhere. Why not? What is it that hinders God from doing these things? Well, I think, again, the basic element in it is prayer. But along with prayer, there has to be a holy life. You can't just pray. You have to be men and women that are holy for God. And holy in two ways, W-H-O-L-L-Y and H-O-L-Y. That's the way we have to be, holy his and holy his. You see what I mean? And if we're not that, we can pray until we're black and blue in the face and God isn't going to do anything. He's not obliged to do anything. He's not obliged to bless us. But he will bless us when we mean business with him. He will do great things. And we have seen some things happen down here to prove the point. At Sedalion, at Kirksville, we've seen some mighty things happen. And even at Fayette, God broke through there with power. And at Eastman, Wisconsin, he did some wonderful things there too. But nothing like we had seen up north at all because some of the meetings there went on long. I mean, they were long meetings. But we never thought of time. Time was a strange thing. I remember one time at Weimar, I was staying in a farmer's house. He was an elder in the church. And that was another thing. They had eight elders, I think, or nine elders at that church. And they all came through for God in marvelous fashion. And that was another wonderful thing. But I was staying at this dear elder's house. And he was an elderly man too and really loved the Lord. And I had got back home to the farm at about 3.30 or quarter to 4 in the morning because there was just so much that God was doing. And so I was tired. I was tired, but I had my devotions and went to bed. And about 6 o'clock in the morning, I'd only been in bed about two hours, there was a knock at the door. And, boy, I came out of that daze that you're in, you know, and I looked at my clock and I said, Hello, who's there? And it was the man's wife. With God to her heart, and she came really right through for God. And when she left the room then, I thought, Well, I ought to go back to bed and get some more sleep. When in walked her husband, and he's just weeping. He said, Brother McLeod, I'm nowhere with God. Please help me. And so we prayed with him, and he was just rejoicing. And then they had a 21-year-old daughter, and she came in. And she said, I'm desperately in need of Christ. So, you know, the Lord was doing great things. And it was just like, you know, sleep left me completely. I wasn't tired anymore. And after I was through counseling her, her mother came and said, Breakfast is ready. And that was good for me. We went and had breakfast. So I never got much sleep that night. But it didn't bother me. Because the Lord was doing great things and was in charge, sleep wasn't all that necessary. Not at all. It's strange. I've stood in a pulpit for 10 or 12 hours at a time and never felt tired at all. That's true. Never felt one little bit of tiredness. But afterwards, when I'd climb into bed, I would just be out like a light. Just as quick as that, I was gone. But I never felt tired at the time. I just never did. And it was just like the Lord was undertaking in marvelous fashion. And I remember sometimes getting into the pulpit being very, very sick, whatever. I had maybe the flu or something like that. We do get those things, you know. And the Lord would undertake immediately. I got into the pulpit and the thing would be gone until I was through preaching and then it would come back on me again. Marvelous things. I can't explain these things, so I don't try. But in one place up in northern Manitoba, which is an Indian community, again, and occult things are very strong there, witchcraft and so on. But I wasn't paying any attention to that. I was staying in the missionaries' house and there was a front porch on their house, which they had winterized and that's where I slept. It got pretty cold some nights in the wintertime. Not as cold as a place where I was in Piccadilly, where the frost on the windows was about that thick and you couldn't see out the windows at all because they weren't these kind of windows, you know. They were the old-style windows and bitterly cold. Just the house was heated only by wood. And I had more blankets under me and on top of me than I ever had in my life just to keep warm. But I'm not complaining about it. I'm just telling you that's the way it is sometimes. Here at this one place where I was staying. In the mornings, I usually gave the morning time to reading the Word of God and prayer. But then in the afternoon, I really would get into the prayer time, laying the Bible aside, as it were. And in the afternoon, I would really get down to serious praying. And this particular time, this church, this community, this small community, about 500 people, when I would start to get down to serious praying, I started to get a headache. And the headache would just increase until it was just like I was getting hit on the head with an axe or a hammer or something. And I never had a headache like that in my life and it was terrible. And I'd plead with God to deliver me from it and it just wouldn't be delivered. And so I thought, well, that's all right. As long as I can get up and preach in the pulpit, I will. And by the time I got to the pulpit, I was in a terrible shape. I could barely make it to the pulpit. That's the only way to put it. And I would get in the pulpit and grab a hold of the pulpit and my head was just hanging. And I'd say, let's pray. And as soon as I started praying, it was gone. And it would leave me until I was all through. And then it would faintly come back and then it would just disappear. And so it would be gone. And then the next afternoon when I got down to the serious praying again, it would come back on me again. And I didn't seem at the time to be able to relate that to occult things. I knew the town was heavily laden with it, but I didn't think of it as being so satanic until about the fifth day. And then I said, this is satanic. This is not a sickness. It's not something that's happening medically. It's something that's coming right out of the pit of hell itself. And I remember praying and asking God to deliver me from the devil's attack on me and it was gone. But, boy, I suffered. I'll tell you, I suffered badly then. And then when I left the place and started driving home, I got about 20 miles down the highway and suddenly there was a sound like, whoosh, like that. And I felt absolutely free. And I said, my, I was under that tremendous attack of the devil all that time. And it was very real. You've got to be in those communities sometimes to know what we're talking about. And that followed me for about 20 miles down the highway. And then just, whoosh, it was gone. Marvelous. God has done great things. He wants to do greater things than what we have ever seen. And we have seen so many marvelous things that sometimes, again, I am amazed that the Lord should do anything at all through the ministry of any man. It doesn't matter who he is. You know, who are we anyhow? You know, we are bought with a price. We belong to him. We're no longer our own. So we can't make any claims on ourselves. The Bible is his word. We can't say it's something that I have done. That is, I've written this up or something like that. It's his word. Everything about it belongs to him. So how can we possibly drag or boast about it? So we're not doing that this morning, neither. We're just relating to you some of the movings of the Spirit of God that we have seen. And some of them have been extremely powerful things. Sometimes they have been in a very quiet way and sometimes in a very powerful way. The Lord doesn't always work the same way. But he does do great and mighty things which we know about. And we've seen in Bible camp work, God breaks through with great power. I just want to relate one thing to you concerning that. It wasn't just myself. My brother Bill and I and other men were at a Bible camp that Bill had started. Before I was ever saved, the year before I was saved, he started this camp. And I entered into the work with him the next year when I got saved by the grace of God. But this one summer that we were there, the campgrounds that we had, we had about 160 acres of land right up in the woods, way up in the bush, a long ways from nowhere, but a beautiful spot. And there had been a lot of rain. And when you get a lot of rain up there, you get a lot of mosquitoes. And when you get a lot of mosquitoes, you get a lot of black flies. And then you get a lot of no-see-ums. No-see-ums are little tiny things. We call them sand flies, too, because they're like a speck of sand. But when they land on you, they can bite. I mean, they can really whine you. It's worse than any mosquito ever thought of. And they'll come in a swarm, you know. Well, it was so bad that the kids could not concentrate. And because, like these little guys, the little sand flies go right through screens. Screens don't stop them. Nothing stops them. And they were just driving the kids wild in the chapel. So we, the elders, we used to meet for prayer every morning at 6 o'clock. And so after a really bad night of these flies at us in the evening chapel time, as we met together, Brother Bill said, this has gone too far. We've got to stop this thing. Let us pray right now that God will deliver us from the flies and mosquitoes and everything else that's a bother to the kids. And so we did. And we went outside, and there wasn't a mosquito in sight. From then until the end of camp, there was no mosquito came on the grounds. We had an open area about 20 acres in size. You could stay anywhere in that 20 acres, and there'd be no mosquitoes, no black flies, and no little no-see-ums. Absolutely none. But if you stepped out of that into the bush, you'd get eaten alive. Just a marvelous thing. God took care of them. And I remember telling this in one place, and a preacher came to me after and says, that's just a lie. I said, I don't believe God ever does things like that anymore. I said, you can believe whatever you want. I said, but I was there. I saw what God did. Marvelous. God will do great things in answer to prayer. And there's another one there, too, at that particular camp. There was a red-headed boy who was given all kinds of trouble. He wasn't a big kid, but he was just a nuisance. That's a good way to put it. And so at the end of camp, we would select different kids in the camp that really meant business with God. And we had a camp at the end of camp, a week long, where we would instruct them for counseling purpose. That is where they themselves could later on take on counseling in Bible camps. And because these kids were 16, 17 years of age, whatever, and here's this red-headed kid, and he came and asked if he could be one of the counselors. Well, no way at all. And so Bill said, well, you just have not shown any life whatsoever. So he broke down weeping and begged that he might be able to attend that second camp. So finally, Bill and I were talking about it. Well, let's let him come. Let's let him come, see what happens. And he was totally transformed in the second camp. He's a preacher of the gospel now, has been for many years, really walking with God. But when you think of this kid and saw him as we saw him, you just said, forget it. There's just no way. But God knows. And God can do things in answer to prayer. Now, let's go back to this here scripture in Isaiah 64. Want to read it, make a couple of comments on it. And that'll be all for this morning. That'll have to satisfy you, I hope it does. Isaiah 64. Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence. As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence. When thou didst terrible things which we look not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence. Three times it's mentioned at thy presence. The one thing that is needed in the church is the presence of God. We need God in the midst of his people. We know that God is omnipresent. And he can be anywhere and everywhere at the same time. He can be in a meeting like this and be in a meeting a thousand miles away or clear across the other side of the world, doesn't matter because he's omnipresent. But he has to be there. And the prophet Isaiah is crying out to God to do something because he's saying, at thy presence. He knew that if God was present, everything would move before God. You and I can't move anything. Not for God. But when God is in the midst, the presence of God is so powerful, he moves people, he moves people. And time after time we heard this too in revival, movings of the Spirit of God and men would remark on this, that God's presence was so powerful, all they could do was weep before the Lord. And I have seen that myself personally many, many times. Sometimes just in reading the Word of God I would break out weeping in heavy fashion, as it were, because the presence of God was so real in the Word of God to my heart. That would happen many, many times. And many times over the years in going out preaching, even coming down here many times, I would pull the car off at some little park or whatever and just weep before God. His presence was so real with me. And it's like when you get into the pulpit to preach, one of the most remarkable things about doing that is that you know the presence of God is with you. There's no place like it on the face of the earth. Many years ago I was preaching in a little church, a German Baptist church actually. I did some interim pastor work there just at the time I was starting to go out. But anyway, I preached there for 11 months. God did some wonderful things. But one day I had taken some letters and put it on top of the pulpit, Holiness unto the Lord. So that each time I stepped into the pulpit I would see Holiness unto the Lord. We have that at home now too. It just says Holiness unto the Lord. So I'm always conscious of that when I get into the pulpit. And so one of the elders in the church, he was a really fine gentleman. I thought he was a blessed brother and everything else about him, a farmer. And so one day I asked him to come up into the pulpit and lead the singing and pray. And so he did. And I drove home afterwards to Selkirk, Manitoba. And about an hour later I got a phone call from him asking if he could come and sing. I said, certainly. So he came that afternoon and he said, I just want to sit in the car and talk to you. So I got in the car beside him and I said, Well, what's on your heart? And he just broke out and he wept and wept like a child. And finally when he could compose himself he said, When I got in the pulpit and saw that word there, Holiness unto the Lord, he said, I almost dropped right then. He said, I almost dropped. He said, I have to hold on to the pulpit. He said, I came under such conviction of sin. I was so unclean before God. And he was an elder in the church. And then he started confessing sin. The word of God is a marvelous thing. It really is. It can set people free just so quickly. It can convict them of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment by the Spirit of God. But again it's at the presence of the Lord. And when this man saw holiness unto the Lord, he saw something more than that. He saw God. That's what finished him. That really finished him. So it's right to pray and ask that the presence of God would come into a meeting, wherever that is. In particular, we're going to say it like this, for you as an individual, where you go into your prayer closet and pray, pray that the presence of God would come to you in your prayer time. Why, that's a marvelous thing. The greatest times that I have ever had have been in my prayer closet alone with God. No doubt about that whatsoever. It's greater than preaching. Even when you're seeing a lot of good things happen, there's nothing like being in your prayer closet alone with God and knowing His presence is there. There's nothing like that. And sometimes you just don't want to leave. You don't want to leave that prayer closet. You just want to stay there. And as I've said many times, I would stay there for hour after hour after hour because I didn't want to leave. It was just so precious a time. And sometimes with many, many, many tears. I think it seems to me that at times I was weeping buckets before the Lord. I couldn't explain it to a living soul, just telling you that that's the way it was. I did know something, and I say that in a very small way, I did know something of that scripture which tells us the Lord was strong in crimes and tears in the Garden of Gethsemane when He wept before God there. You enter into some of these things a little bit. You can't enter into it as He has, but you can enter it. And one time, a man, we mentioned him the other day, he was a man that was on my crew actually in the Air Force, and this was still when I was in the Air Force, and we had him meeting for prayer. He got saved, and he was a Roman Catholic boy. So they lived on a little farm near the airport. He wasn't farming. He was just living on the farm. And so I phoned him up one evening about 9 o'clock or so, I guess, and said, Lou, how would you like to spend some time in prayer? Oh, I'd love that, he said. We'd only been saved about a month. And I said, well, I thought if I come over this evening, we'd go up to the barn in the hayloft and we'd pray. And we'd pray all night. And he said, that sounds great. So we went over there. About 11 o'clock, we started praying. And sometime during the night, as he was praying, you could tell that there was something happening in him as he was praying very quietly before God. And then he reached out and took ahold of my hand. And we were kneeling against bales of hay. And he said, oh God, oh God, bless my brother with the blessing that thou art giving to me just now. But God never did. Because it wasn't meant for me. It was meant for him. And he told me afterwards, he said, I can't explain it. But he said, there was a taste come into my mouth like honey, he said. And he said the presence of God was so real, he finally could just weep before the Lord. And so at about 5 o'clock in the morning, we came out of the barn, got in the car, drove into town, because we had a prayer meeting at 6 o'clock. And at 7 o'clock, we had another prayer meeting. Air Force men that were Christians came to meet for prayer on Saturday morning. This was a Saturday morning. And we prayed through to 10 o'clock that morning. And then I went home and gathered my wife up and the children and drove into Winnipeg, 50 miles. And I wasn't the least bit tired. I hadn't slept all night. Just prayed. It was marvelous. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. That's all there is to it. And many, many times, that strength was renewed in wonderful fashion. The Lord has been so gracious. And we have evidence of it today, too, because there's no way I would be here without God answering prayers. Totally impossible. The situation in my, my physical situation, that is, is such that there's no way I could be here. Absolutely not. I was saying to somebody yesterday, that maybe it's a group here, that even a week before I came up here, I said to my wife, there's no way I can make it unless God does something real in this next week. And the Lord didn't do anything as far as healing is concerned, but he did lay it upon my heart that I should be willing to go no matter what. And I agreed with that. And said I'd go no matter what, even if it meant that I would die going, I would still go. And so we came. And I haven't died yet, but, you know, it's coming sooner or later. And you can't miss that. Wouldn't want to miss it, neither. But it's most remarkable because for eight months I have not been able to stand and speak to anybody. I've been always sitting down or lying down. That's all I could do. And so coming here is the first time I stood and preached in over eight months. So the Lord has undertaken in good fashion for me, although my legs tend to get a little strange feeling. Nevertheless, the Lord has undertaken. I want to say that I am so glad today that I am a Christian. I can't have anything but sympathy for those who are not. I see them lost in their sins and it bothers me greatly, but they're not Christians. We mentioned to you, and we learned a lot being in hospital, many different things, but when I would see these people in the Health Sciences Center in Winnipeg, and there's hundreds of them there, it's a huge hospital, and see them in their various sicknesses, in particular in the cancer unit there, that's devastating. I see little children, five, six years of age, under chemotherapy because of their cancer. They're going to die. They're not going to live. There's just no way. And you see these little kids playing with the games and so on. It can get to you. It really can. And when you see older men, I saw a number of older men, much older even than myself, and totally bald in their heads because they've had the chemo treatment and their heads enlarged. It's quite a sight, and you can't condemn men when you see them like that. You can't. We leave that up to God, but there's a great sympathy goes out from our hearts to such people, such as I never had ever happened to me before. I had to be in the environment to see it. God has just been so gracious. We'll share one other thing with you. Some have already heard, but when I eventually was sent into Winnipeg by ambulance so they could do a CAT scan on us to see what the problem was, and they found this tumor. This young doctor came into the room where Glenda and I were and said first the good news, it's not shingles, but the bad news is that it is a tumor and it's malignant, and it's on the base of your spine. It's wrapped right around the spine, and he just walked out. So we looked at one another and broke out weeping, the two of us, and my initial thoughts were this. We're not even married a year yet. I got cancer, and it's malignant, and it's in a bad spot in the one sense, and does that mean I'm going to die in the next few months and she doesn't have a husband? That bothered me initially for perhaps a minute or two, but after about three or four minutes of praying, not praying, but weeping together like that with our arms around each other, then a tremendous peace came over my heart, and from that moment until this moment now, I've not had an anxious moment at all, not one. Cancer means nothing to me anymore at all, absolutely nothing. When that peace of God came over my heart in such a settled fashion, it wouldn't have mattered if I had a cold. It would have been the same thing as cancer. That's remarkable, because most people when they hear of cancer, right away you know there's a scary thing attached to this thing. What does this leave me, or where does it leave me? But that was not the case with me, and I just thank God for that. And then when I was talking with Glenda just afterwards, she said the same thing had happened for her. God just came and brought that settled peace on her too concerning the same thing. So the Lord has been very, very precious to us, and we've had some wonderful times. When I was in hospital the first time, in particular four times, and two or three days I fell, because I couldn't really walk, and yet I had to get off to the washroom with a walker, and with a walker I tumbled too. I had no stability at all. And I fell heavy. I really did, and crashed. This one time the nurses came running from everywhere. They heard the crash, and they said, who was it, who was it? Finally one said, it's McLeod, Mr. McLeod. And they come running in the room there. Well anyway, at times I was just laughing, and they couldn't figure that out I guess. But I wasn't afraid of it at all. You know you fell, and sometimes you felt sort of stupid. Like I was in the washroom, and the towel was over here on a rack, and as I reached for the towel, I was holding on to the sink like this, and I reached for the towel, and I slipped and fell on the floor, and I thought, oh that's okay. So I reached down to pick it off the floor. I can't do that anymore. See I didn't know that. And as I reached down, my legs slowly collapsed, and I was going in circles like this, and I ended up sitting on the floor laughing, because I couldn't get up, neither you know. And I reached over and pulled the cord, and the nurses came running of course, and helped me to my feet, and they said, oh Mr. McLeod, you're not supposed to fall, you know, and I said, yeah I know I'm not supposed to, but you know, couldn't help it. But I learned a few things, and I learned that most nurses are very compassionate people, and that they have a very hard job. I learned that. I really appreciate nurses more than I ever did in my life, and the fact that they would go that extra mile as it were to help somebody, I saw that so many times, and it was a great blessing to my heart. The night we left hospital, or at least we were going to leave the next morning, the women that were on the night shift, there was four of them, came into the room, woke me up at midnight, and woke up the fellow in the next bed too, because he was leaving the next day too, and they said, we hear you're leaving tomorrow morning. Yeah, that's right, you know, just woke up. And, well, we've got a special treat for you. And one of the girls ran out of the room and came back with a bunch of ice cream. At midnight, you know, ice cream. I said, I appreciate that very much, but it's kind of late at night, you know. They said, yeah, but it's ice cream, because they knew we liked ice cream, this other fellow and I. And so we gobbled down a bunch of ice cream, and then the one nurse said, now you're going to get special treatment, we're going to rub your back too. And so I said, be my guest. So they went at that, you know, rubbing them back there with oil and whatever, I don't know what else. They're very, very good to us, really, really precious. And the Lord was there in so many different ways. Marvelous things God does. I should say something else too, that I was very much blessed by having Glenda as a wife, because she's been just absolutely excellent for me. And because of the nurse's training and so on, that helped immensely too. And, of course, when I was in the hospital in Kenora, she was there all the time, because she works right there in the hospital. And so she was in the room often. But I want to talk for a moment about two sons, Douglas and Stephen. And they came every day. They'd come in the morning, come in the afternoon, and oftentimes they'd come in the evening too. And they would come and sit down, say, now, Dad, if you want to go to sleep, go to sleep. Don't worry about a thing. We'll just sit here with you. And they did that for several weeks. And it was a marvelous thing to see my sons doing that. And Stephen has become a tremendous prayer warrior. He really does pray, a very fervent praying man. And he had all kinds of problems. His back is so bad anyway with this curvature of the spine. Now he's got arthritis in his neck, in his shoulders, in his elbows, in his hands, in his knees. And the pain is constant. And yet he would come into the hospital with a great big smile and come over to the bed and give me a hug or grab me by the hand and say, how are you doing, Dad? I said, well, I'm doing fine. How are you doing? Well, it's not a bad day. But it was a bad day sometimes, really bad. Very precious times, very precious. I thank God so much for those two boys, that they would be willing to spend so much time with Dad when he was not feeling too good. And now even at home, you see, children, how are we going to put this? When Mom or Dad gets older, they watch us pretty close. So, you know, I'm feeling pretty good in many ways. And yet every single day at home, my wife is at work. She goes at 8 o'clock in the morning. I drive her there. Drive home. A lot just started recently, by the way. But I said, hey, I'm going to start driving again. She said, you think you can? I said, sure. So I did. And I started driving her there, and then I'd come home. But anyway, about quarter to 9, Stephen would come in the front door and say, hi, Dad. How are we doing? I'm doing okay. And he would sit down and spend the next couple hours with me. And he does that still. Just come in and make sure everything's fine with Dad. And then Doug would show up in the afternoon for half an hour so he couldn't stay long because he's got his business to work with. But he would come in, too, and see how's Dad doing. They're watching over me pretty good. That's what I'm saying. And I appreciate that. I really do. I guess they're thinking, you know, well, Dad's getting up there in age. And you never know. He might fall and get hurt. And my doctor said, whatever you do, don't fall. Because if you fall and break a hip, you're going to be in trouble. Yeah, well, I guess that's true. And so don't fall. So I'm fine. I won't fall. So I'm walking with my cane in the living room one day there, and over I went. I got a ton of breaks. I went crash on the floor. And I thought, now, how did I manage that? I didn't remember doing anything I shouldn't do, but I went like a rock. And I couldn't get up because I can't bend my legs. I couldn't get up. So I had to drag myself across. Father, we want to thank Thee again this morning for this little time together. And oh, dear Father, we haven't told the half of what Thou has done over the years. We thank Thee for these things we have mentioned. And Father, so many individual cases that we could have gone into just in one place, but it kept us going for hours. Down on us, Lord. But it's just, Father, that You might make real to the hearts of Your people here, oh God, the possibilities of God, that there is nothing too hard for Thee. And Father, the things that are impossible of man is wonderfully possible of God. And there's nothing impossible. Remember Father, the Lord Jesus saying, have faith in God. We have no faith in man, no confidence in man, no confidence in flesh, but we have great confidence in God, great faith, dear Father, in God. Dear Father, be pleased to bless this people. Thank You for them, each one. Particularly we think again of the little ones, oh God, the little ones that have been brought up in a society, oh God, that knows not God. A generation and a time when men are wicked beyond description. God, it seems like it's the days of Noah upon the face of the earth just now, as it was in the days of Noah. So shall it also be in the days of the Son of Man, Father, we are seeing that today. Wickedness, gross wickedness in high places, in low places, in every place. In the churches and out of the churches, Father, it matters not anymore. But we're looking to Thee, oh God, by the power of Thy Spirit to break through mightily, to convince men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. Turn them, Father, from darkness to light, from the power of God, power of Satan unto God. And Father, remember again, too, that You lifted men up out of the horrible pit, that horrible pit, out of the miry clay, set their feet upon the solid rock, established their going, put a new song in their mouth, even praise unto Thy great name. We thank Thee, Father, for what Thou hast done. Man has done nothing, Father, but fail God. No, Father, for myself, I can say that honestly before Thee, with no sense, Father, drawing attention to self. Oh God, that I have failed Thee far more often, far more often than I care to admit. Oh God, but Thou hast been gracious and precious and forgiven time after time, and for this we thank Thee, Father. The failure to pray as we are, the failure to witness when we are, whatever it has been, Father, we fail God. We ought not to have done it. Thou knowest why. God bless us, each one. In Jesus' holy name we pray with thanksgiving. Amen.