Panel Discussion At Revival Forum 89

Why don't we begin by introducing, again, each of these individuals. For those of you that came in late to the conference and for anybody to be watching my video, here in this end and just joining us this morning, actually, is Ralph Zatara. God used he and his brother as tools in the revivals that began in the early 70s in western Canada and then ultimately ended up in lay couples going out across Canada, making a major impact back in that decade. In addition, he was strategic in founding the Canadian Revival Fellowship. So Ralph Zatara is based out of Mansfield, Ohio. Manly Beasley is a leading Southern Baptist revivalist. I believe he told us for, what, 30 years, Manly? Thirty-five years. Revivals throughout the world, actually. Leonard Ravenhill, a well-known author, a number of books on the topic of revival, strategically used as a guide in promoting, stirring up the importance, giving them a vision for revival, and calling the church of this generation and this era to revival. Bill McCloud was a pastor of the church of Saskatchewan, Canada, where the revivals in the 70s began. Then God called him out of that church and began to travel again throughout the world, proclaiming the message of revival. Then on the end, Bill Faisenfeld, the founder and director of Life Action Ministries, and leading revival ministry for some 18 years. God has brought together, I believe in my heart, by his doing and not ours, even being here this week, to have these men here this week at the same time. I'm confident they have never been together at the same time anywhere that I'm aware of. From our perspective, these men have had a great impact on our lives, that have motivated us and stirred us before the Lord by his spirit, just using them as tools in the whole cause of revival. Perhaps much of the insight that I know Life Action Ministries has gained over the years has come from the heart of God through the heart of these men. Let me begin with a question that would have to be on your heart, and you probably all have a burning in your heart to address anyway. But what key truths or emphasis do you believe the church in North America needs to hear and respond to today? What key truths does the church in North America need desperately to hear and respond to today? You're going to narrow it down to several. What would they be? Can I start off? Sure can. You said respond to. I like that word. I think in the ministry of revival and in the pastoral ministry, the tendency is to let people off easy and merely be maybe satisfied to just share truths and lose the sense of urgency of response. And I feel that as we minister these truths, it's not enough for people to know that they have heard something good from the Bible. But there needs to be a sense of urgency in our spirit that there has to be a response to every truth that God is trying to share with his people. So I like that. Respond to. That needs to say something to us the way we minister. If I were to boil down some key truths, I would start out with the character of God. I believe that his attributes, his holiness need to be utmost and foremost in the hearts of our people. You see, I'm convinced that revival starts in the character of God, not in merely man having his own needs met or trying to find a utilitarian God who can just supply everything we have to have in life. Rather, revival must flow from the character of God. And when we start there, then something very deep can take place. And that bears with it the fear of God or fear of judgment because of sin. I don't believe we as Americans have much of fear of God in this day. So the fear of God and the lordship of Christ, the reality of the truth of the lordship of Christ must be supreme. Then from that perspective of God and Christ being supreme, then we begin to see ourselves as the spirit of pride being the biggest sin that we're committing, the spirit of pride, which basically is a God complex or a God philosophy where we think we are as big as God. And if ever there's a problem in our nation, it's that spirit of pride. Revival begins in the character of God. When we see that, we begin to see our sins. And we begin to recognize how devastating the self-life is. And we relate to those truths. And then I would probably say to tie it together, let's not forget the tremendous ministry of the Holy Spirit. That it is not just to deal with the negatives of getting rid of those things, but then the positive, the power of God to anoint our lives and to fill us with God himself. And that's why I personally believe that the truth of being filled with the spirit and walking with the spirit must be elevated above and beyond merely another scriptural or spiritual principle. It is beyond that. It is the very source of the power through which everything else in our lives must take place. And in a day where we have shied away from the ministry of the Holy Spirit because of the extremes, God keep us from going the other direction and losing sight of where the real source of power is. I think since that question is at the foundation probably, it would be good if maybe each of you could respond to it. What is the greatest need for God's people, the church, to hear and to respond to? Maybe you want to underline something he said, highlight it, expand on it, emphasize it. Maybe something else came to your mind. What would the rest of you, as Revivals, perceive to be the greatest need in the church today? Well, I couldn't add anything to what he has said. Also, the best thing I think I can say is that we need to teach the people to learn how to be before they start doing. And of course, what he said is preparing us to be. And because you wouldn't want to take away from what he has said, our brothers have said. Teaching them how to be before they do. Because this is a society that really is motivated on do, do, do, do before you be. And you're not going to teach anyone anything if you're not that yourself too much. And so with what he has said, I think we need a great deal of emphasis on being saints and living it. Live out what we preach. And let our lives be a demonstration of that truth. Power to life's message. Yes. Dr. Ravenhill? Care to expand maybe? Or greatest need in the church today? Okay. I think the greatest need in the church today is to get rid of carnality. Dr. Ruffin said, you don't have too much difficulty to get a man to go to the cross. Your problem is to get him on the cross. I've met many people who can't get a kind of a cross. I understand where at the moment they can't tell you the day or the time that they were born again of the spirit of God. I've never met a person yet who didn't know when they had a crisis experience after that. He admitted he had it. Judson founded a college on the west east coast. He very definitely stands for that. There's a book that most of you may know called the Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. Every man God has used in history has had a crisis experience after salvation. I don't care what his terminology is. A hundred years ago, Andrew Bonner, there were three Bonner brothers in Scotland. They were all marvelous preachers, all marvelous poets. And Andrew Bonner said, over a hundred years ago, I looked for the world and found it in the church. I looked for the church and found it in the world. The church, average church has never been more worldly than now. The average preacher knows more about Channel 5 than he knows about Matthew 5. They're best informed. If your local sports director can't work on his job, just call on the local pass and give you a batting average of everybody. Tell you what they're doing on the ice skating in Canada. You know, the biggest, these guys can't pull down strongholds and can't even turn TV off. Amen. I believe we're going through a right now that God Almighty counts us as going through revival. And I'm in historic revival. I don't mean this thing that begins 7 o'clock Sunday night and finishes next Sunday night. Who dares serve notice on the Holy Ghost? Amen. Dr. Tolzer told me not long before he died, he said, Brother Len, I've accomplished something wonderful. I said, what is it? He said, I've preached myself off every convention platform in America. Well, I'm just about too short of that. I've already got a platform in Canada. About last year, I think I had invitations to about 12 conferences of prophets. The year before, I was invited to join 120 select men from all over the world. They were going to meet for a prayer meeting on Mount Carmel. Well, I have a prayer meeting Friday nights. People drive four, five, six hours to come. We finish 10 o'clock at night. They get home at three or four or five in the morning, even if it's snowing. And I said to my class that night, hey, I shouldn't be here. I should be on Mount Carmel. What do you mean, Mount Carmel? I said 120 prophets, 119 besides me are meeting on Mount Carmel. I said, as a matter of fact, they're staying in the same hotel that Elijah stayed in. Our ideas of revival are so distorted. Let me say this. Leckie is a secular historian, not a religious historian. And he says when the bloody revolution swept over France and France was washed in blood, when they kicked the monarchy into the garbage can, when they put up the tricolour of red, white and blue and put on it, what was it put? Liberty. Thank you, my secretaries. Liberty, fraternity and equality. And then he says that that river of blood was going to engulf England and two men stood up. No, three. Martin Lloyd-Jones said to me one day, why did they give so much credit to Wesley? He wasn't the key of revival. He was. The key of revival was Charles Finney. No, no Charles. No, who was he? Good for you, thank you. I thought he couldn't be American. I told Wilkinson face to face in my office, I said, neither you, and at that time Swaggart was going strong, neither you, Swaggart, Billy Graham, anybody. You've no biblical authority for going to a city for one night and having a revival. You have big advertising, big crowds, big offerings, you leave nothing behind. I don't care how long you stay. The result is not how many you pack them in. What's the result six months after? I went to a wedding a while ago, a celebrity wedding, and people said, oh, what a wedding. Oh, they're so happily married. Dear Lord, if you can't be married that happy that day, when would you be happy? I said, check on them six months after. Don't tell me what kind of a revival you had. Is he a revival? Oh, we had a good revival. Six couples in our ministry got put back together, I mean, in our church. Let me say this and shut up, which would be difficult. I was thinking about the difference again between revival, true revival, thank you, and I thought you were going to take it away. The difference between true revival and evangelism. It's good if there's a stir-up in a church and marriages are put right, but that didn't go to the tavern across the road. It didn't stop the kids around the corner with drugs. It didn't stop the folk up there in their London lying. There's a church, I've prayed for it, and I've met the pastor once. His name is Jim Wright, and it's in St. Albans, and I think the church is the church of God. Well, the right opposite them was a tavern that's a noisy, lousy, wicked place, a threat to the whole community. So, they needed extra room in the church, so they said, why don't we pray that place would be closed down. That place? It's the most popular place in town. Well, as Del has said to us a few times these days, God delights in the impossible, not the possible, Miller, the impossible. I'm looking for a revival that no man can stick his name on it. Not even... Okay. He got the message. Well, they prayed and prayed, and you know, the tavern closed down, and the church was closed down. So, then they tackled a shop at the end of the road selling pornography. Oh, boy, that's the most popular place in town. Well, Lord, shut it up. He shut it up. Now, that to me is revival. Dear Toto was right when he said, true revival changes the moral climate of the community. It doesn't just change the people inside church who get more loving and kind. You get a burden for the lost. You start raiding hell, preaching that doesn't terrify the devil in a rotten hail of beans. And I'll tell you what, we're running out of preachers. Everybody's teaching. A guy came in my office, 22 years of age. Mr. Raiden and I have one of the best collections of tapes. I have over 2,000 tapes, $5 each. He won't live long enough to hear them at an hour a time. We need preaching, some thundering preaching. Some men that have been with God. Like old Ebenezer Brown. Years ago in America, he said, I live six days a week in eternity, and I come down the seventh day to tell people what I've seen and heard. Dear God, many preachers snatch something Saturday night. Or they're preaching sermons they preached 50 years ago. I preach one or two sermons I've preached over 40 years, but they're reborn every time I preach them. If they don't move me, they won't move you. The most perilous job in the world today is to be a preacher. The Church of Jesus had better wake up, stand up, speak up, or shut up. So I shut up. Brother McLeod, what's on your heart in relation to the greatest need in the Church? I agree 100% with what Brother Ralph said at the beginning. And he made a statement, too, about the positive as well as the negative. And I was thinking particularly of the positive. Paul prayed in Ephesians chapter 1 that the Christians at Ephesus would know the exceeding greatness of God's power to us who believe. And I think there's a tremendous need in the churches for people to know what the power of God is, what the power of God can do. And most of them are totally ignorant of this. And I think we need to direct our preaching to some extent to this area. A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation. I, the Lord, will hasten it in His time. That's the last verse of the chapter in Isaiah. The first verse of the next chapter says, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. And I think we need to challenge our people, particularly our young people, but all our people, to understand, regardless of their age really, God can use them. Most Christians don't think God can use them. And they have this little humble thing, you know, God can't use me. Poor little me, God can't use me. They're absolutely right. He can't. He can, but he can't when they have that attitude. I remember when Dr. Brock was with us in Saskatoon back in 71. He was, what, 84 then, I guess? 83. 83 and just on fire for God, you know, right across the street from our church. There lived an elderly gentleman. He was about 90, I think, not a Christian. And I asked Dr. Brock if he'd like to go over and share him. Sure, let's go, you know. So we went. And I wish I had a tape, you know, a movie of the thing. He stood there and he presented the gospel to him. Then he walked over to this man who was seated in a chair and said, Now, will you rise to your feet and take me by the right hand? And by that say, I am receiving Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord now. And the man said, I will. And he got to his feet and took Dr. Brock's hand. We're never too old to be used of God and never too young. By the way, in the early days, and Ralph will remember this, of the movement in Saskatoon, a kid about 10, remember, he came running up on the platform. We were in St. Timothy's Anglican Church. The place was back to the door. And this kid came running up on the platform. I'm not sure, was it you, Ralph, or a little bit moved away? And this kid took over the microphone and began to preach with tears, calling on Christians to get right with God and sinners to get saved. The whole thing. And it certainly wasn't out of place. It was something that the Spirit of God did. And so we need to pray as Paul prayed that our people will come to know something, catch a glimpse of what God can do through individuals and through churches. Because I think it's very important. Everywhere you meet people that are totally defeated, struggling with sin, saying, God can't help me, struggling with a thousand things, and they don't think God can do anything for them. And we've got to shell them out of that somehow. Blow them out of the water and help them to see that God can do anything. He fills the heavens and the earth. So that's a burden on my heart. Almost 20 years now, Del, of your Bible ministry. During that period of time, what have you seen in the church that indicates a desperate need for revival? I'm the youngest here on this panel. And you're welcome, Dr. Ravenhill. And I guess all I can do is stand on the shoulders of the men who sit to my right. I would concur, and I think Ralph probably spelled it out in last night, Dr. Ravenhill, as you preached from Isaiah. There's a desperate need for a new concept of God. We have humanized God, deified man, and minimized sin. And I think there's a desperate need for us to see the God that Isaiah saw in Isaiah 6. As Dr. Ravenhill preached on the glory of God and the holiness of God last night, I was overwhelmed. And we sense the presence and the moving of God's spirit here in this place because we took, I believe, a glimpse last night of the living God and all of his awesome holiness and fury against sin. When Isaiah records there in Isaiah 6, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord. It doesn't say he saw a convention or a program or a denomination or a new method. He said, I saw God, the living God. And when I caught a glimpse of the living God, the next thing that happened was that he caught a glimpse of himself. And I don't believe that we're going to be able to convince most of the people in our churches of their exceeding sinfulness until they see a living God for who he is. When they see God as he is, then they can see themselves for what they are. I cried over here at a chair last night and sobbed and wept and cried out, I believe I am probably more undone and in worse shape than most of the people in this auditorium. Those were not just words. For the last few weeks, God has been showing me himself, and in the process he's been showing me the total helplessness, the total powerlessness, the desperate condition of my life. And I believe that that comes when we see God for who he is. We get a new concept of God. We get a new concept of self. We get a new concept of sin. He said, I am undone. I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips. And then we get a new cleansing. And God took that fiery coal off the altar and purged and cleansed, and I believe the desperate need of this hour is for the purging fire of the living God to come through the church and through the hearts of men and women and purge us and break us and cleanse us and bring us to a new level of brokenness and humility and transparency like we've never known before. And in that cleansing and in that brokenness, get this, Isaiah got so close to the heart of God that he actually overheard God talking. You know what happened? God said, who will go for us? Have you ever gotten that close? So broken, so surrendered, so cleansed, so humble, so dead to self that you literally overheard God talking? And God said, who will go for us? And Isaiah said, send me, Lord. We've got the whole thing in reverse in the church. Our philosophy is win them, wet them, and work them. Get them won, baptized, and plugged into the machinery. God's order is not commission first. God's order is conversion and seeing God for who he is, then cleansing and brokenness, and then comes commission. And I believe that those are the truths that God's got on my heart, Byron, in the church today, the need for the church. Characteristics of revival. Dr. Ravenhill talked about a change in moral climate. He talked about brokenness, honesty, transparency. What other indications and characteristics would there be, evidence, if God were to send revival, whether it be in a local body, or whether it be in a broader scale, in a corporate sense, or even in a national sense of revival? What do you perceive as being some key indications and characteristics of God sending revival? What changes will take place? Well, in the Denver newspaper, the Denver Post, from 1905, I forgot the date. It says that the Spirit of God came on this city, and business closed down in the middle of each day. Business houses closed. Everybody went to prayer. I doubt if as a person I've ever seen revival. You've seen good meetings. But I mean, when God comes down, and as in the days, for instance, of Jonathan Edwards, you could look across the street, men's faces were drawn. Spurgeon himself said, I had seven weeks of awful misery, under conviction at 15 years of age. Our kids don't have seven minutes. Come to the altar. They've been to the altar 50 times. Every rally, a woman, I was preaching on the new birth. A woman came down the aisle. Boy, she was something big. Her doing all that. I said with my breath, Lord, if God gets hold of you tonight, you'll be a mess. And sure enough, when I said, come forward if you want to be born, men go in that room, women in theirs. I stayed an hour with the men. The pastor knocked on the door. This woman came in. He said, will you pray with this woman for an hour? I said, I will if you stay. So he stayed. And as soon as she hit the ground, she burst into tears. She said, this is the 14th time I've come out of what you talked about tonight. Every time I come, somebody puts their arm around my shoulder and says, Jesus paid it all, dearie. He understands your tears. Just say you're sorry. And she said, this is the 14th time. And if it doesn't work tonight, I'm through. We stayed an hour with her. Two years after I was passing that church, as I thought, left, and I said to the man that was driving me, I mean in another church, there was a woman came out that last night. She's a tremendous character. I said she was mad at preachers and everything. And she said, if it doesn't take tonight, I'm through. What happened? Is that her coming out? And she was coming out with a Bible. She's the finest character, the finest soul in who we have. Why? Because a miracle took place in her life. And she had to tell it. You don't have to train her. I was standing one day with Duncan Cameron and those came. And she said, there's been a big crusade in the city of London. Five of us went forward. My former friends and I went forward. It didn't take five minutes. They said, take this liturgy home. She said, Mr. Cameron, nothing ever happened. What do you do for follow-up? And it is Scotch Broadway. It said, ah, woman, when the Holy Ghost speaks to people, you don't need to train them afterwards. God teaches them. But in our churches, they do. People say folk in America are choked with the Gospel. Most people in America have never heard the Gospel. There has to come a revival where people get miserable about sin. It takes away appetite. It takes away their interest in sport. Your husband thinks you're going mad. Your wife thinks you're crazy. We haven't had Holy Ghost. We go to meetings and clap. Dear God, I've been to revival meetings. Three months after in that church, they're still trying to drag people out. We're going to sing Just As I Am once more. Then, oh, no, it became Just As I Am once more, Just As I Am once more. Come on. When a man's coming to the altar, you're going to have to ask him. He's running. He's dying. He's lost. He cries out with Top Lady, Thou lie to that fountain fly. We're not preaching Christ. We're preaching forgiveness. We're preaching pardon. I was going to say this tonight. Let me say it here and quick. Charles Wesley said, well, John Wesley says in his diary over and over again, I went to Leeds. I went to Sheffield. I went to Manchester. And what? And offered men Christ. We don't offer them Christ. We offer them pardon. We offer them peace. Charles Wesley says my heart is full of Christ and longs this glorious message to declare. Our hearts are not full of Christ. They're full of theology. We didn't step over the line. Preach the Holy Spirit, but don't preach about gifts. They were for yesterday. Listen, if you're going to go to the coming of the Spirit, you're not going to lecture him. You're going to take him as he says. And people are going to be in miserable conviction as though they knew that a thousand cancers. So you pray tonight for me, because I'm going to be real hot, I hope. Now if we can cool off just a little bit. Let me say that the characteristics and what you can anticipate or the groundwork for God to work, it's very significant that in Saskatchewan, Bill will tell you that there was definitely a distress among the people, even economically. There were hard times. God had been bringing the people to nothingness, where their total dependence on human resources was stripped from them. And there was such a sense that something supernatural had to take place, that they were candidates for that heaven. Am I right, Bill? Absolutely. We had a recession like in the province of Saskatchewan at the time. They had about 950,000 people in the whole province. 40,000 left in one year looking for jobs. I had 100 people leave my church just looking for jobs, moving to other places. And so the economic situation was very unstable. And the result was that God began looking up. And I really think that's what's happening in western Canada again. We've had three years of drought. Thousands of farmers have gone bankrupt. We've had the worst forest fires in history, both in our province and Saskatchewan. We had 205 forest fires burning when I left to come here. They said the whole north was just one big blaze. They airlifted 25,000 people, mostly Indians, out of isolated reserves. Many places they couldn't even drive on roads where there were roads because of the smoke. And they're in there with helicopters and all this kind of thing. You know what's happening? God is answering the prayers of the ungodly. They're asking God to damn the bush and damn the lakes and damn this and damn that and God is doing it. And we're in rough times now. And I think God is, I don't know, something's going to happen. I can just sense it. Because everything's upside down there now. And these are things you can't control. So in the midst of that, the question was, what are the current conditions of the church? Well, we heard this morning, wealth. Wealth is not Scripture teaching that as they increase, so they sin. So easy. Wealth. I put down self-sufficiency, apathy, Revelation 3. Thou knowest not the condition. Adulterous situation where know ye not that friendship with this world is enmity with God. Ye adulterers and adulteresses. The connotation is that we're married to another one rather than to the God of the universe. Hollowness, compromisingness and prayerlessness in the true sense. And I want to relate to Brother Leonard Ravenhill for a moment along this line. Because here's something that he probably has not heard from me. And that is that a number of years ago, Lou and I were having vacation in California. And we were asked by a pastor who heard we were out there to come and have some meetings. And we said, well, we only have five days to be able to be with you from Tuesday through Sunday. And this was just the week before. So no time to advertise. No time to do anything. But for us to come in on Tuesday night and start to preach. We preached for those five days from Tuesday through Sunday. And had the privilege of seeing 50 people respond to God for personal salvation. To meet the Lord. Well, that was wonderful. We were thrilled. No advertising. Nothing. Just went and started preaching. God be in work. Well, you say, that's one church and it's wonderful. We were called back to that same church a year later. And we said to the pastor, how are things going here? Where are the people who responded last year? He said, you'll be interested in this. 48 of the 50 people who responded when you were here a year ago are in this church and are walking on beautifully with God. I said, what made the difference? No evangelist. Nobody in the ministry talks about percentages like that. What made the difference? And he said, oh, well, what we did not tell you was that a year or so before you came last year, Leonard Ravenhill was here in this church. And he got our people to pray. And he said, some of the people in our church pray from 10 o'clock in the morning until sometimes 1 o'clock in the afternoon, two and three days a week, calling on God for the salvation of these people. So that when you came, all of those people that have been prayed for are now coming to the meetings and finding the Lord. And then he said, because they had that kind of a spiritual burden of prayer and travail for those people, when you left, every one of those homes had one of our people in their homes praying with them weekly for at least six months, building them up in the Lord as newborn babies. Why, after they had prayed for so long and interceded so long and saw the birth take place, you better believe that they were not going to let them grow lightly. And I said, amen, there it is again. That prayer ministry, a sense that God has to do it, not human methods, but God on the scene, and then even the concern that now we want to help bear these newborn babes into spiritual maturity is a natural outgrowth. It's not something forced. It's a natural outflow of parents giving birth to children and seeing to it they're going to be fed. Amen. The question that we were dealing with deals with what characteristics or indications would there be of God working in the next great move of God perhaps in the decade to come or whenever it is that God chooses to move across our nation. What would be the characteristics of that move of God? Our staff met with Richard Owen Roberts. Those of you who are familiar with him, he has an 11,000-volume library, as I understand it, on the subject of revival. He has read it all, as I understand, and we asked him that same question. And without blinking an eye, he said, chief characteristic of revival, if it came to America, is that most of our church members would get saved. And I have believed because I was a lost church member. I grew up in a home with a godly mom, an evangelist for a father, and I believe with all of my heart that the majority of people who are professing to be Christians in the church today are not born-again believers at all. And one of the reasons it's difficult to have revival in the church today is because you are dealing with so many lost people. But revival is the quickening, the bringing back to life. That which once lived. And those people have never lived. They've never experienced the reality of God's life. I remember a statistic I read about the revival in Wales, if I'm not mistaken, that the critics of the revival in Wales, five years after the revival in Wales, some 100,000 people had professed faith in Christ, as I remember. And five years later, the critics were still at it, trying to discredit the reality of the move of God. And one of their bits of ammunition was that five years later they could only find 70,000 of the 100,000 still standing, still living for God. So we're forth today with the kind of cheap evangelism that we have going on in America, if we can find one out of 100 two weeks after the crusade is over. And I believe that one of the greatest needs of the hour is for genuine conversion to occur within the hearts of many of the people who are professors but not possessors of eternal life. One of the characteristics also of revival, and by the way, I believe that more people will get saved, genuinely born again, accidentally in the wake of a revival, a genuine move of God's spirit, than all of our church services without the power of the Holy Spirit in them in this century combined. Somebody said that in the unrevived state of the church, we are spending millions of dollars and multiple millions of manpower hours trying to convince a lost world that they need Jesus. But in the revived state of the church, empowered with the life of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit of God, lost sinners would be crawling over the saints desperate to find the Christ that we proclaim. And so in Wales, getting off that subject, one of the characteristics, as Dr. Ravenhill pointed out, was that the moral climate was changed. Let's get practical. Where the rubber hits the road. How did it affect Wales? I'm told that they presented white gloves to the magistrates, to the judges, because they had no cases to try. The policemen sat around with nothing to do because the jails were emptied. Crime just totally catapulted. It fell. They had to retrain the mules down in the mines because they were not used to being treated with such kindness, nor were they used to proper language. And so they had to retrain the mules after the revival came to Wales. Just dream for a minute. Just dream. Somebody said, I've got a dream. I want you to dream for a minute. Didn't Joel say that in the last days God would pour out His Spirit, young men would dream dreams and old men would see visions? Dream for a minute. What would happen if a wave of God's Spirit swept through the United States of America? What would happen to our media, to television and movies, to the music industry, to our educational system, to our political system, to our politicians, to our churches, to our religious institutions, marriages, child abuse, morals? Just dream. I want to tell you, it can be reality if God touches down and God shows up on the scene. Man can't manufacture those results. What can revivalists do, practically, to create a thirst, a hunger, to just be used of God practically, since God is the one that sends revival, what can we do as available servants, most effectively, to spawn that type of mood of God you just described? Some people have already said, I think, all of us as preachers need a new view of God. I mentioned the other night about Duhmer. William Duhmer. William Duhmer, you know him? I read his book. You read his book, yes. Well, that's a treasure. Okay, William Duhmer went into a Baptist church, cut the story short if I can. I was in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a few years ago and I told the story of Duhmer. At the back there's a big fellow with his arms like this and he kept going, hmm, yeah, yeah. I thought, who in the world is he? So he said, boy, you told the story of Duhmer very well. So I said, oh, I did. Had he heard it before? Heard it. He said, my daddy was the pastor of the church. This black man came to the altar. Going out the pastor said, well, I'm glad you've come. Oh, I know, I see you, yes, you're the black man. We don't usually have black people. He said, you're the black man that was at the altar. He said, I'm not. You're not? You're the only man that wears a blue suit with white stripes. Why do you say you're not? You were at the altar. You're the man that was at the altar. He said, I'm not. He said, well, I say you are. I said, well, I say I'm not. He said, he died at the altar. I'm a new man. So the pastor said, what can I do for you? Dinner he said, give me a church. He said, what? Is he that? You know, we say we've lost our first love. There's no scripture anywhere unless you read one of the stupid versions. You see, there were ten virgins and there are ten versions. Five are wise and five are foolish versions. It doesn't say they lost their first love. They deliberately left it. They went back to loving sports and TV and all the other junk. Okay, so this guy goes out. He went up the road, found a forest, found a path, went down the path, went by a stream, found a cave, took a rock and marked on the outside. He stayed in that place 21 days and 21 nights, a trained Baptist, as a seeking Baptist, shall we say. Lord, I want to preach. And I'm staying here until you tell me, you call me. By the 21st day, God called him to preach and told him, if it's difficult for some Baptists, you're going to heal the sick. He went back to the church. The pastor said, where have you been? So he told him. To take a long story into a short one, they gave him an old tin hat across the road that had five members and people said, he'll soon get rid of them. He did. He got so rid of them, they needed a building to seat 2100 every Sunday morning while the other guys walking around. So anyhow, as I told you, he raised the dead. Roger Vogt, some of you know Roger Vogt. Roger told me two years ago, he said, yes, I knew Juma. He came to my house and raised my daughter from something worse than death. A third of her brain had been moved. The doctor said she's a vegetable and William Juma prayed and she was healed. Roger Vogt said, a month before I left to come and see you, my daughter presented me with my first grandchild, the vegetable. God did a miraculous. Listen, you asked me, how do you maintain your burden? How do you maintain your vision? How do you maintain your tears? I'll tell you. I do it something like, I don't know what the day was that Juma went into that cave. Maybe it was the 17th of, what about November? Okay. He says to his church, remember, it's my annual vacation. And from that year until the year he died, he went back into that cave on the same date and stayed there 21 days and nights. He didn't go to some meeting on how to make you church. I'm sick of church growth. Give us a lecture on church death. Some churches growing so fast they're dying. Anyhow, Juma went and every year he got a fresh anointing. He waited on God as though he had no ministry and no power. And he said every time he came forth, you'd think he'd been to eternity. He got that priceless anointing of the spirit of God. And the smartest thing you can do, most of you guys don't need a vacation, you need a cave. You need to kiss the deacons goodbye, say goodbye, get along and wait on God for a new endowment, a new vision. Nobody's going to turn America or Canada around. Within 10 years we'll both self-destruct economically in every other way. And I've said the same as you just said now about the bill. Last year America had the greatest fires in history. She had the greatest drought in Kansas. We have a man thumbing his nose at us, Noriego, away there in Panama. We've got 20 captives away there in Lebanon. We've got another 20 outstanding men in Cuba that Cuba won't release. And dear God, what's all our praying doing? Every tick of the clock we go further down into depravity and wickedness. The obstruction to revival is not in the taverns, it's not in obscenity, it's not in abortion, it's in the church. We've no vision of loss. As I tried to say last night, maybe not too well, we need a vision of deity, we need inward vision of depravity, we need outward vision of duty. We need upward vision of holiness and inward vision of helplessness and outward vision of hopelessness. This is the most critical hour in not only American history, world history. Nobody's faced what we're facing with the cults and with the occult and all the devilry. And we don't have the answer. Why don't we get down and repent? We don't have it. We're saying the same thing in evangelism we said 10 years ago. There's no variation. One of the greatest men in America today said to a friend of mine who has a world broadcast every Sunday out of America. He said, brother, I didn't preach on hell. If I did, my offerings would go through the floor. Well, go through the floor, dear God. We just stand at the judgment seat. Don't get me preaching. I'd better quit. And the rest of you gentlemen, in relation to what can be done to foster a spirit, an atmosphere, an environment for revival. I read a thrilling story out of Africa. A man got converted and shortly after, a couple of weeks later, came to the missionaries and said, give me a church. God's called me to be a pastor. They had a little private conf lab and decided it's crazy. He's a brand new convert, and he doesn't have any education. Well, he could read, but they said, we'll just put him off. Tell him to come back in six months, and he'll likely forget about it. Well, he came back in six months. So have you got a church? And they put him off another three months, and he came back in three months. Have you got a church? Have you got a church? So finally, and I use the term rascally, these rascally missionaries got their heads together and decided to really put him down, and so they had a church that had been fighting for so long, someone said they could have written their own history of the wars of the Lord. They were reduced to 12 members. So they said, let's give him this church. We don't have to tell him about its past history. It's going to go belly up anyway, and when it goes belly up, we can tell him, look, God never called you to be a pastor. But when this article was written, he was still a pastor of the church. The church then had 5,000 members, but here's what he would do. Every now and then, he would tell the church, God is calling me away to pray. I do not know, and I'll be back. And he found a cave in the hills, and there was a creek not far away. He'd take a sack of food with him. He might fast for a week or fast for two weeks. He'd eat sometimes. He'd read the Bible. He'd pray. And every time he came back, there was a new outburst of revival and evangelism. Now, if a pastor did that in America, the church would fire him. They'd say he's gone fishing or golfing. I think we're going to have to learn from the third world. There are many things happening there, very things we're talking about today, and leaders in many cases are aware of this. They're preaching this. Well, we've had some thoughts from the reverend here about communist countries, things that are happening there. That book by Tippett, what's the name of the book, do you recall? Sammy Tippett. Sammy Tippett, yeah. He talks here about going to one of the communist countries in Europe to preach to these people when he got there and saw the depth of their spirituality and their knowledge of God. And he said, what have I got to tell these people? And he expressed revival in his own heart as a result of being with those refined, spirit-filled people. I'd even pray that God would knock our economic system to pieces so we begin to look up and call on God the way we should. I'd like to add a word to the idea of what we can do as revivalists, more so than pastors. I think that we need to begin to live by faith with our ministry, the same way we tell our people and tell people to live by faith. And that is to give that ministry back to God in the truest sense. It was already said here that one night stands and short kind of ministries really do not produce that much. But I can tell you from a personal perspective that it was a great day in our own personal lives and ministry when God gave us the liberty to sit down and write to all the pastors that we were scheduled to be with for two years and cancel all the schedule. And say we're now giving our schedule back to God for him to rewrite it any way he sees fit. And I thought surely we were going to get a letter of rebuff from one pastor with whom we were to be as a part of a one month celebration, a hundredth year anniversary of the church. And they had things planned for four weeks and we were one of the weeks in an evangelistic crusade and that was just about three weeks away, three months away. And after being scheduled for two years to be there, then to say look we want to cancel our schedule. When we got the airmail special delivery letter back from him, I said to Lou, I said you better open this one. I thought surely we were really going to get it. But we got it all right. It was a pastor who said thank God it's about time some evangelists began to do what they tell the rest of us to do, to live by faith and give their schedules back to God and their calendars back to God and let God rewrite their schedules and let him rewrite the program and do whatever he wants to do with it instead of the pride that some of us have had in the ministry of telling people that we were scheduled for five years, we were booked up for five years ahead. Anybody can talk about that. But what a thing it is to say all right God we want to cancel it all and God you rewrite the schedule. Well what happened? Well we had to do something. It was seven and a half weeks in Saskatoon. The next week, the next crusade was four and a half weeks so we already had messed up the schedule. You know we were supposed to be in for ten or twelve days and then home for a few days and then out again and so on. It was interesting in Saskatoon there was an evangelist who lived in the city and he was there the first week we were there and then he'd go out for his eight days away and then he'd come back and we were still there. And he'd be in for that week and enjoy the meetings and then on the weekend he would go out for his next ministry, you know out for eight days, home for six and then he comes back and we're still there in his community. And he said God showed him that his schedule and his ministry was his rather than God's. And when he saw that the willingness to be flexible, to open up the schedule, to let God have whatever he wanted to do with it is what is necessary for us to show to God's people and to God that we mean business and we're willing to stay as long as God wants us to rather than taking pride in the fact that we're booked up for five years and making us feel so important because when everybody wants us to stay because God's just beginning to break through, they'll say we're sorry we're booked someplace else. Do you know what God showed us? That instead of building faith we were destroying faith. When God's people have prayed and believed and expected all at once, when God was just about ready to break through, we say I'm sorry God we've got another schedule, we've got someplace else to go to. I'm not suggesting God deals with everybody this way. Whatever it is, I believe that in revival there needs to be a flexibility of our schedules. Actually, personally, we schedule this way. We have starting dates and the congregation knows, the people know, that be ready if necessary to move those starting dates back several weeks if God sees fit to break in on the scene wherever we are and we can't leave. Nothing has to be more important than to be flexible for wherever God wants us to be. I personally believe as revivalists we have cut God short. We've been abortive when God was just about ready to do something. It's hard to get churches and pastors to see that. I believe if we begin to move even in preparation in the way we schedule meetings of a certain sense that that's the way we're going to go. I'm glad that God has uniquely gifted Life Action Ministry to move in that direction and others as well. I believe it's a part of our showing people we're willing to walk by faith even if it means losing a few paychecks if we're not sure where we're going to go next. Amen. That's enough. Del, I want to give you an opportunity to respond to that as well. I know you're desiring to, but as soon as Del is finished, I want to open it up for any of you to ask any questions. Can I say something before you leave? Yes, why don't you do that and then Del and then questions. Why don't you be thinking of questions that you would like to direct to either any one of these individuals or the whole group of participants? We'll do that in just a moment. Manly, why don't you comment and then Del and then we'll open it up to the floor. I agree 100% with all these men. Of course, I'm in a place now where God has absolutely chosen the schedule. There's no question. When you have no choices, then you can really be assured. The key that we as individuals are totally responsible for and no one else is responsible for is the fact that we ourselves are men of God and faith. We have the message and we have it burning in our soul full of faith. I don't care what kind of method you use. If you're not a holy man, you're not going to have results. I think about William Dumas. He moved in realms that I don't pretend to even know anything about. Not only him, but little Sammy Marsh. He could walk in a place like this and everybody would fall on their face. What mythology did he use? He just was a boy full of God and faith. I agree with everything that's been said. The only person you are totally responsible for, first and foremost, is yourself. You're a godly and then there's mythology. The myth that said, of course, come in. Your question, what can revivals do to create hunger for revival and prepare for revival? One of the practical things that I would suggest is telling stories. Biblical stories, historical stories, experiential stories. I don't know about you, but sitting here and listening to Dr. Ravenhill talk about William Dumas. Bill McCloud talk about a pastor in third world. Ralph talk about giving his schedule to God. Watching the living illustration of a life message unfold before our very eyes with manly dwarfs me. But it doesn't make me feel like throwing my hands in the air and running out and saying, forget it, God, I'll never be like them. That stuff makes me so thirsty. Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth. Salt does all kinds of things. It kills weeds. It slays weeds in the driveway. It seasons food. It in the old salt houses saved meat. It did all kinds of things, but the biggest property of salt was that it did what or does what? It makes you thirsty. Jesus said, you are supposed to be creating thirst. You are. Your life is supposed to be creating thirst. What are you causing people thirst for? Are they getting thirsty for a five-year schedule? A big bank account? A nice car? Fancy clothes? Tanned phrases? A position in the denomination? What are you creating thirst for? When people get around you, do they thirst for Jesus? Are they hungering for the impossible? For the supernatural? The power of the living God to be a reality in their life? Telling stories creates thirst. Living illustrations. And I want to park just for a moment on that last one, and that is the experiential stories. I think it was Bill Gothard who said, A message prepared in a mind reaches minds. A message prepared in a heart reaches hearts. But a message prepared in the life changes lives. The reason the columns of the Bibles of most of the people in our churches are full, plus notebooks, and the shelves of their library are filled with tapes, is because that's what too many of us gave them. A message prepared in the mind just reproduces in the mind. A message prepared in the heart, some of us have really gotten stirred up about some things, and so when we go out and communicate it really stirs up other people. A message prepared in the heart reaches hearts. But we get frustrated because it doesn't seem to have the kind of power that is changing lives. I have a sneaking hunch that as God tutors me, I'm going to find out that there is some kind of a parallel, or some kind of an association between the anointing of God and the transformation of life. I don't know if I have a verse I can point to right now, but what I'm saying is this. Life messages change lives. Life messages create hunger, create thirst. The illustrations you need to be giving are life transforming experiences that you have had in the presence of God yourself. Paul said, follow me. He didn't say, follow my library. He didn't say, buy my cassettes. He said, follow me. You talk one inch farther down the road than you are actually walking in your life, and the power of the living God will depart you. You're a phony, a fraud, a hypocrite. The power of God rests on those who dare to pay the price and be real and let God build the reality of his life in them. And so my burden, as with Manly, is that you not come to a convention and pick up methodology and style. The world is drowning in information. It's drowning in style. It's drowning in methodology. What we need is a living demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit of God in reality in our lives. Follow me even as I am following Christ. Let me ask you a question. God's used it to convict me so often. If the only thing in this book that I could preach is that which I can demonstrate in reality out of my own life, I can illustrate it because God has made it a reality in me. How much of this book could I preach or teach? There's a book that's been mentioned. I think it's been mentioned by Brother Ravenhill several times that was so mightily used in my life in about 1955. It's Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians by Gilchrist Lawson. But it's exactly what Brother Dale is saying. It was just one story after another how these men met God and how God exploded in their life and did all kinds of things around them.