Revival In The Church

These sessions wouldn't be complete, in my opinion, if in addition to those who have been active in revival over the years as folks, people, revivalists, we didn't have in addition to a businessman or a layperson, a pastor of a local church who prepared his people, at least God used him to prepare his people. And experienced, at least in this era, a very unusual move of God in a local area, in a local church. Six complete weeks, God wouldn't let go. Our team just happened to be the instrument that was there at the time, and I can say there were several times during the course of those six weeks, Brother Miles, that we tried to leave. I remember phone calls late at night saying, Byron, pray, what do we do? Man, we just can't keep going on. We have commitments, and God kept saying, if I tell you to go on, you can go on. I'll take care of the rest of it. Don't stop what I've begun. And so I'm so thrilled today that we can hear from the heart of the pastor, at least in our opinion as a ministry, was there when God was pleased to visit in what we would define as an extraordinary way, where the presence of God was so real and so alive that people couldn't escape it if they tried. So Brother Miles Seaborne is pastor of Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Thank you for joining and sharing out of your heart today. It's a real joy and privilege and praise, and tremendously humiliating in some ways to come and try to say anything. After all we've heard this week, we've been on holy ground, haven't we? And as I share with you today, I'll be talking about some things, and I'm speaking out of the context of my heart, and I think you know me already well enough just in this encounter that I'm going to share some things with you so you can understand from whence we speak and from whence we come. Preparation. How do you prepare? There's no earthly way to prepare for one of the plagues of Egypt to drive up on your parking lot in the form of about 27 team members and counting women and children, 54. And I thought I was prepared for that, but I saw this entourage pull into there, and I thought, what is all of this? God had made preparation in our heart in other ways. He had made preparation through the reputation of this team through Dr. Tom Brandon, who's a very personal friend of mine in the First Baptist Church of Sherman. We vacationed together and go to conventions and things together, and Tom said, Miles, this is a team that you need to have in your church. And so I asked him to come to one of our staff meetings that we have on Monday afternoon. We try to gather all of our 23 employees in there at some degree in time, and I asked him to make a total presentation of Life Action Ministries to our whole staff so that we could all weigh it and evaluate it and think about it, and so Tom did. Then we just kept waiting for the Lord to provide an opportunity, and he did that. And there was a rapport between the scheduling group and said, we feel like this is an apropos time. So the reputation of this team preceded them, and I'm going to be saying that again and again as a pastor. There's so much involved in my life in reputation. When I know that someone preaches the whole counsel of God, when I know that their hands are clean and their ministry is clean, then I can invest with confidence the life of our church in them. How did we prepare? One thing that we did is that we cleared our church calendar. In some churches that might not be difficult, but in a Southern Baptist church with six ordained ministers and multiple staff, it's extremely difficult. We had a full orchestra, and we're going to present the Messiah at Easter, a dramatization of it. We have a world mission banquet that happens in November with around 400, 500, 600 people attending. We had all of these things stacked up, and I said, well, we can make the supreme sacrifice and lay the schedule out for two weeks and possibly three weeks. That was unheard of in our area for us to do that, literally unheard of in Southern Baptist churches, because more and more we'd come to one-day meetings, one-week meetings, and then three-day meetings, and then there are many churches now that are having one-day revival meetings. We decided to clear the calendar, and so as we laid all these things out before our staff, we made that commitment. We committed ourselves to God, and we said, the Lord has brought Delfazenfeld and these men with us, and so we're going to submit ourselves. So I said to the staff, I said, now, we're going to be asked to do some unusual things and some things that we're not accustomed to. As your pastor, I'm saying to you as a staff that I prayed this thing through, and so I'm submitting myself to the leadership of these men when they come. And if they don't ask us to do something unscriptural or undoctrinal, as I understand it, we're going to do what they ask us to do. And so I said exactly the same thing to our church family. Now, I've been there 21 years, and so I can say some things that perhaps other people might not, and through these years I think I've gained a measure of confidence with them. I just simply said, now, church family, we're going to eliminate our Sunday school. We had dual Sunday school and dual preaching service for 10 years. We put up 700 chairs in the gymnasium. We totally relocated the plant over the course of 10 years, all on a cash basis. So we put up 700 chairs and we'd have a preaching service and a Sunday school and a preaching service and a Sunday school. And I said, we're not going to do that. We're all going to... Well, preacher, we can't all fit in here. Well, we're going to put up... We have a television system, so we hooked up closed-circuit television. And so until you see our facility, it's hard to imagine. We crammed all those people in that building around it. Here's the free-flow circle right in front of the altar, and here's the scoreboard right over here on the side. And you crank the goals up, and we've even had people say, I can't come to church here. It smells like sweat every time I come in this building. But for 10 years, on a cash basis, we built unit of unit. So we were there, and I said, we're going to do what we need to do. And so we prayed about it and committed ourselves in spiritual leadership and submission to these men that came. And so we began to pray. Now, let me say that we talk about prayer. But in the fellowship of Birchman Baptist Church, about two and a half years ago, one of our men who is a printer and another man who is a colonel in the Air Force and several other men, just on their own, said, Pastor, we want you to know that every Sunday morning at 6 o'clock, we're going to be in the church parlor, which is a central area, and we're going to be praying for you and the services. And so for two and a half years, they have been praying every Sunday morning at 6 o'clock, diligently, faithfully, whether it was two of them there or ten of them there, they've been praying that God would speak to us and open up his sweet will in our lives. So when I look back on it, I feel like that's as much preparation as anything that we do. And then we committed ourselves, when we got the life action plan in our church with our several ministers, it's just my policy, I'll say, OK, Ron Wicks, you're going to be the revival coordinator. And Ron Wicks totally relates to the staff. I stay out of the thing and I try to give myself to prayer and fasting and direction, and one of these staff members leads this. And so we just happened to pick an organizer, and we needed one with all that went on in six weeks. And Ron did a tremendous job of laying that thing out. And I said, Ron, you submit yourself to these people, you interface with them, you meet those needs. And then, of course, with the gift of service, I try to infuse our staff with the idea that we're here to help people succeed in the Lord's work. So we made this preparation. We tried to do everything under the leadership of the Lord that was laid out in that action plan. We believed that it was of God. We just had enough confidence in these people that if it hadn't been, and they hadn't seen it work, that it wouldn't be there. So if it was there, we were going to try it and attempt it. So we did it. All the jot and the tittles, we crossed all the I's, we tried to do every single thing that they asked us to do. And when we had a question, we deferred to them. I believe in spiritual authority. I believe in the principle of submission. I've taught it in my church for 21 years, and I believe it works. I believe when God invites people into our fellowship with gifts, if their life rings true and they're true to the scripture, then I can submit myself to their spiritual leadership. So we tried to do that. Now what were the needs in our church? There were many needs. I'm going to describe things, and again I want you to know my spirit enough that I'm quoting things that are not bragging things. There are things that many pastors would say, listen, that sounds like heaven to be in a church like that. But I've been there for 21 years. I pastor two to three hundred seminary students every Sunday morning. I pastor a church that with regularity has baptized at least a hundred people and two to three hundred people by letter. That might not sound much, but out of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, there are two hundred that baptize a hundred people a year. And so God had flowed the money into our church. We do everything on a cash principle. We teach Christian principles of finance. And so in 21 years we've never been below our budget, never. And so we've always been above. Our church, because I was a missionary in the Philippines, I think has a unique flavor. We came home for health reasons, but God has kept that flame alive in my heart. Our church has appointed more missionaries out of our church family than any other single church in the Southern Baptist Convention. There are 230 former members now serving on the foreign mission field that are members of our church. I'm saying all that to say to you, along with the million dollar budget and the million and a half dollars that come into the building program year by year and all these other things, that we had a church that many people said, man, I'd love to pastor that kind of church. We don't have any division in our church. We never had any rending fellowship disputes in our church. But we needed revival. And so part of the need in my life was that for all the time I'd been there, it's 21 years, whenever we've had some of the greatest evangelists that we have in Southern Baptist life, and we've had fruitful revival meetings, but we'd come right up to a point and we'd stop. And my heart was so grieved. And I talked to the former pastor, Brother Bo Baker, who in effect really started the church, and he said the same thing happened. We'd have marvelous results, but there was a quenching of the Holy Spirit. So there was a need in the overall life of the church and the spiritual pride that had crept in. Now let me tell you about me. In the midst of all of this, I've got the spiritual gift of service. And I've gathered around me a marvelous staff. But in 21 years I'd come to the point where I can prepare a sermon pretty well on my own. I mean, I'm not a scholar, but I study. And I preach fresh messages. I can prepare a sermon without really getting down and saying, God, I want you to infuse this, I want you to give me direction. I can lead a staff meeting. Six ordained ministers, 23 people in there. We have staff meeting, we know what we're going to do, we organize it, we try to eliminate mistakes, we try to do everything with a standard of excellence without waste. And so I had rolled along for so many years and just said, listen, you kind of get in the groove, you know, and you roll. And God began to deal with me in this revival meeting about my hand on the life of that church, that I could do things without God, that I could prepare a sermon, that I could give an invitation, that I could baptize these people, that I could minister and all these things. And I could do that and not really be totally, completely dependent upon God. And so one of the first things that happened is Brother Dale began to preach to us about repairing the altars and began to preach to us about pride. That was the area that God began to speak to my heart. Now, I think I can share with you Dale's testimony, he said, I was excited about coming to Birchman from the background and some of the other things, but he said the first two or three services were two or three of the most difficult services he's ever preached, and Tim could bear witness to that. We had an innate spiritual pride in the life of our church. We, I don't know if you know anything about the Institute and Basic Youth Conflicts, but I've helped write much of that material you're reading. Much of it was planned out in the life of our church and demonstrated in the life of our people. And so we had a form of godliness, but not the power thereof, as the scripture says. And God, from that first service, began to deal. Now, we were in service several times on Sunday, seven hours on Sunday, jammed in there like sardines. And I'll never forget when Dale preached, the first person that came that pricked my heart was the most least likely person in the whole church to make a decision. And he talked about pride. And one of our deacon's wives that I baptized in years past, meek, quiet, spirit, gentle, you know, humble, came weeping. And she said, God's convicted me of my spiritual pride. She said, I teach your children, but I've taught them in the flesh. She said, I haven't prayed about those lessons. I haven't prayed over those children. I haven't laid God's Word. I've just come in and taught because I've got the mental acumen and ability to do. And she wept. I'll tell you, that was that one thing, the most, you might think of some other dramatic thing that would trigger what happened, but God used that to begin a flood. And so as God began to speak and different people began to come, I stood up, and I think Tim could remember this, and I was broken. Here we had a measure of grace, but we came to the same place again. And I said to the church family, I said, listen, let me tell you what's happened in 21 years and then in the life of another pastor. And I said, I've asked God, I'm willing for God to do whatever he needs to do. If he wants to remove me, if he wants to take my life, if he wants to break me in some way, if I'm in any way a hindrance, I'm willing for God to do whatever he needs to do in my life, for God's Holy Spirit to be able to break into our lives and break our hearts and take us where he wants us to be. Well, one thing that I shared with the church family, I said, God has helped me understand my little bitty compromises. Those were my terminologies. I said, you know, I've got little holes in my umbrella. Not big things, just little things, these little holes in my umbrella, little holes of compromise. And so we went on, and now I have a wife that next to her father is the best Christian I've ever known anywhere in the world, one of the most godly, precious, disciplined, lovely, gracious women in the world. And so we were at home at night and never got home less than 10.30, because the services went from 7 to 9.30, and we were sitting there one night kind of unwinding, and she said to me, Honey, what are those holes in your umbrella? Man, I got so mad, I'm telling you, I said, that is one of the most impertinent things in the world. I mean, we got into a good old verbal knock-down and drag-out. And she's not giving the tears, and she began to cry, and I got so angry, and I said, I've shared with the church that I've made little compromises in my life, and I said, Who are you to ask me this? And so through her tears she said, Well, you know, why are you so angry? If your heart is clear, why are you so angry? Well, we were able to pray before we went to bed that night, and I took a day and a half to write out my holes in my umbrella. And I sat down with her the next night, after the revival service, and I started out with number one. And I said, Hon, you know, we've been married 38 years. And I said, I've tried to be clear with you, and I've never rented an X-rated film, I've never gone to a pornographic movie, but I have to confess to you that in my life there's not moral freedom. I have people that are accountable to me for moral freedom, but in my thought life there have been times that I was in somebody's home and they had something on, and I watched longer than I needed to watch. And there were times that I might have been someplace and I looked at something longer than I needed to look at it. And I do not have moral freedom in my thought life that I'm accountable to you about. And I want to promise you, I want to ask you to forgive me first, and then I want you to feel free, and I'm going to feel free to share with you times that I am tempted, and times that I might compromise my own, my eyes. Well, then I went down through a whole list of them. I'm a very impatient thing. I want it to happen yesterday. That's the way I've always been. I'm an impatient person. I want to get it done, and I can remember things. And I get impatient with people who don't remember things, little details. You come to my house and I have a meal and I can remember whether you like cream in your coffee or not, or sugar, or whatever. And I get impatient. Can't you remember that? Don't you know those things? I'm sharing with you a little insight into motivation. Servants can remember those sort of things. And I just went down that list, and then we got down on our knees and prayed and asked God to forgive me. Then I came before the Church family and I said, God's helped me see that those little holes aren't so little after all. And I've asked my wife's forgiveness. I want to ask your forgiveness. Now, my family, all four of my children are married. All four of them live within a mile of us. All four of them are directly involved in our Church. One son is a full-time minister on our staff as our preschool and singles director. One son is a deacon, my namesake, and a Sunday school teacher, sings in the choir. Son-in-law is a deacon, new son that's just married, son-in-law is enrolled in seminary and God's redirected his life from CPA work. And they're a delight and a joy. But I want you to know that God, when he worked on my life, began to work on their life. And him can remember, and Nancy, they came before our Church broken, one by one. And I mean they poured out their hearts. My son, Neil, who's gregarious and outgoing and never met a stranger, got up sobbing and he said, you know, I realize that I've stolen from the Lord and from this Church. He said, I work with the Benevolence Committee, I work with singles, and he said, you know, sometimes I've got three or four different kinds of money in my pocket. And he said, I haven't been careful about how I account for that. And he said, God's convicted my heart. And he said, I've got to go to my savings account and kind of estimate at that money and I need to put it back in there. And I want you to forgive me. And then one by one, our children came. And I mean, I'm not talking about just came and said, I'm sorry. I'm talking about broken before the Lord. My son-in-law was as broken as anybody I've ever seen for his spiritual pride. I mean, he'd come to those morning prayer meetings and he'd just weep over his pride. Well, God began to work in the life of my sweet daughter-in-laws and in the life of my daughter. She came and said they live close by and that's good and that's bad. She said, Mom, you know, I have to confess to you, there are times that I came and took some meat out of your meat freeze and I didn't tell you about it. And I thought, well, they wouldn't care if I didn't tell them, you know, those little subtle things. So I'm just simply saying God began to work in the life of my family, openly before the church family. God began to work in our spiritual leadership. Now we were praying for our deacons and I want to share with you the men that came were our young deacons, broken before the Lord. Young dentists coming and saying, listen, I've cheated on my RAS, I've lied to the government and I want you to forgive me. You know, I could just keep you at infinium of them coming broken before the Lord. Basically our deacons, our younger deacons, just spoken to and smitten by God in their hearts. One of them said, who is in full-time counseling ministry with RAFA and had started a whole adolescent drug rehabilitation program, said, you know, nobody knows this, but I've compromised. There are times that I've been out and I've drunk wine and I've even looked at one of our church members in the eye who said, boy, I thought you were a deacon. And boy, this guy just came and sobbed out his heart to the Lord and said, I've compromised. I've compromised in so many ways. God then began to do amazing and marvelous things. I think one of the most dramatic things is one of our young men came one morning, he's a CPA, and he came up there with his son, Joshua. He said, Joshua never has understood why I've been so hard on him. I've been so strict and so rigid and so harsh. Here's a little old 13-year-old boy who's got one of the sweetest, most tender hearts in the world. And he said, Joshua, and I had to go back to the prayer room because he said, you know, we got married. We were pregnant when we got married. And he said, I looked at Joshua as a hindrance to my life, to my CPA degree, to my career. And he said, I've been so harsh and so judgmental on him because, Joshua, you messed up our life. And he said, I had to go back to that prayer room and ask his forgiveness and ask God's forgiveness. And my heart is clear before the Lord. Now, you'd think that didn't touch the heart of our church. And then to hear the CPA say, not only that, but I'm a thief. I keep my mother's books, and I've stolen from my mother. I borrowed money from her, and I'm ready to go back to the CPA, which he did. He went back to the CPA board of Texas and said, I took a list of questions into that CPA thing. Did you look at them? No, I didn't look at them. But I took them. Okay? Why did you do this? Because God told me to. We were in this revival meeting. And so again and again and again this thing came up. We had a fellow that had taken things when he got out of the Army. He was a nurse. He phoned Fort Sill, and they were in total pandemonium for an hour. Even called the Pentagon. He said, I've got all this stuff. And after an hour they said, listen, we don't have any means for you to give that back. You just keep it or give it to somebody. You've totally confused us. We had one of our engineers, among many at General Dynamics, we have employed 31,000 people. And one of these fellows had just received a top promotion to be kicked up the corporate ladder and moved to St. Louis, the corporate headquarters. He has five-level clearance, and that's top secret of the projects they're working on. And he had manipulated paper to the tunes of millions of dollars to make him look good. He didn't need that. He's a brilliant man. I want you to know he went to his superiors and said, I have manipulated figures and money. And they were dumbfounded. They were astounded. They yanked his clearance away from him, yanked everything else away, as they did many of our engineers who went and said, I've cheated on my expense account, I've lied about this. They didn't know how to handle it. They said, why in the world are you here? Because God has spoken to our heart, we're in a revival meeting, I'm a Christian, and I want, more than anything else, I want my heart to be right with God. And so all over our town there were people saying, what in the world is happening? People are going back to the IRS and saying, I've stolen from you, I've taken this from you. Going back to seminary, going back to college and saying, I've cheated on exams, and all these different things begin to happen in the life. Immorality. Now, you know, we try to deal with this in our church, and I preach about it. But Brother, I cannot tell you the filth that God washed up from the spirits of our people. I've seen men get up and sob, preacher boys, about pornography, hooked on it for years and years and years. Young wives seeking me out after church, Pastor, my husband doesn't know about it. But when we got out of the service and we were so broke, we both went to work and I had an affair. And I'm afraid to tell him. I don't know what will happen to him. So I didn't tell her she had to tell him, I just gave her some guidelines and I said, now let's pray. And you ask God. Well, she prayed herself into it. She said, Lord, I've got to make my heart right. And you know, she went home and the phone rang about 12 o'clock at night and it was this man. And he was weeping and laughing at the same time. He said, my wife came home, I knew something was wrong, and I pulled it out of her. And he said, I had to get on my knees and ask her forgiveness, because exactly at the same time, and I had told her this, see, God gave me a witness, he said, you know, you might find that this opens the door for your husband to share something he's never been willing to share for you. And so he said to her, I have to confess to you, almost exactly at the same time, I had a one-night-stand type deal, and God's had that on my conscience, will you? And he said, we have talked, we've prayed, we've wept in one another's arms, we are closer to each other in the Lord than we've ever been. That happened over and over and over and over and over again. The prayer room fell, brokenness. You know, we got down on that old gym floor and we prayed and prayed and prayed, and God continued to move and speak and bless in our Lord. Now let me tell you this as I move on. I had prayed, we were trying to build a 2,200-seat auditorium. Now for ten years we ran two complete church plants, two locations, trying to do this God's way, and that takes a great deal of patience. And so I wanted us to be in that beautiful building when we had Life Action Ministries. I wanted it so bad, but it had taken us two and a half years and three and a half million dollars to build that 2,200-seat auditorium unit on a cash basis. And I kept saying, Lord, why don't you get us into that building? And one time when we were talking between staffs and how precious that time was when we spent with Tim and Dale and Louie and the others and our staff in the morning, God said to me, listen, you keep wanting to fill that building with people, and I want to fill your church with the Shekinah glory of God before you get into that thing. You just wait on me. And I want to share with you. God did that. He filled our fellowship with his glory. Such joy, such peace, such ministry as I could not share with you. Then when we moved in that thing January 15, after the crusade, I want to tell you there was such joy, such excitement, such blessing, and we did all that we knew to do to give the glory to God. And every Sunday, God has continued this blessing of outpouring. On Wednesday night, many of the things that we do in this ministry have been a part of our church life for years, the public confession of sin, praying for people, that sort of thing. And so it was just a natural carrying on. The characteristics of that thing were patience before the Lord. Our people, I really believe, waited. We had over 200 children every night in those clubs, and they begged to come back. Mamas and Daddies couldn't figure that out. And we'd be there from 7 o'clock to 9.30, and people didn't want to go home. Patience before the Lord was one of the characteristics. Brokenness and confession, with God being, the Holy Spirit being the guide and the guard. There was nothing shared except one time, only one time was the word adultery used, and it needed to be used, because many people knew about it, and if that particular word hadn't been used, then that man would not have been accountable to the whole church family, which he is now. God was so precise. But there was such brokenness. There was bulimia confessed, you just name it and it came out. Brokenness and confession. Then there was prayer. Our men began to pray in the morning. They came on their way to work, never less than 15, sometimes as many as 30 or 40. Every morning they prayed. Every morning they were there. Every morning they shared, and they bore one another's burdens. The ladies met with Nancy, and so they'd have 30, 40 women many times in their prayer session, and really broken before the Lord. Our prayer room was filled with praying people, and then giving was a characteristic of the revival meeting. Brother Dale asked me one day, he said, what is your biggest intrepidation about having this ministry in your church? I said, Brother Dale, I've got to be honest with you. I don't harangue our people about money. I don't preach about money. I preach a series about stewardship during the fall time, but I said, our people have given. We're not a wealthy church. We have two or three people that have means, but we're just ordinary people. We've given millions of dollars to this building program and to missions. I said, I know how much it takes to have life action. I said, that's my biggest concern. He said, that's the least of our concern. Let's leave that in God's hands. I want you all to know that in those six weeks we had Brother Bill McCloud come and preach a week for us. We had Randy Hogue come and minister to us. I don't know how much other money changed hands. It was considerable. It changed hands and flowed to the staff and personal needs. But our church gave $58,000 to life action ministry without one offering being taken. Giving was blessed in many other ways. In the middle of all this, we had one great day of giving. For 21 years this has been something I've done. Many churches have a harvest day because they're behind in the budget. We never have been behind. We do it just to demonstrate to ourselves and to give glory to God what can be given. We call it one great day of giving or prove the Lord day. We came up to that time and I said to Brother Dale, I just don't know whether we all have this or not. He said, did you think God was in control and you put that on the calendar before we came? I said, yeah. He said, well, the same God is still in control. He said, for my witness you need to have that. This is in the midst of giving $58,000 and I don't know how many other thousands of dollars to individuals. So on that one day we did that, we all were packed in that gym again, and our people that day gave almost $69,000. Am I free to tell what happened, Tim? Our treasurer, our older people, got caught up in the revival. Our treasurer is a retired machinist, and Sunday night we had a glorious service and all this was done. He came up and there were tears streaming down his face. He said to me, he's the treasurer, he said, Pastor, I saw something today that I've never seen before in my life. I said, Brother Ralph, what is that? He said, when we counted the one great day of giving today, we found a check from Life Action Ministries for $5,000. That leads me to say that one of the things that blessed our heart, and I would say to you if you're an evangelist, is that these people came as givers and not takers. They gave and they gave and they gave and they gave. What's happened since then? Let me share with you that it is a glorious thing. I don't pastor a perfect church because I'm the pastor. That's the beginning point. But I want to tell you, it is a glorious thing to pastor a church that's pure before the Lord. We've had people walk in our building and say, listen, this is not the same church. I said, amen, praise God. We made a commitment to God. The first Sunday we moved in that, and it's a beautiful building, it's not anything pretentious. Nancy's been there and we hoped him would get there, but it is a beautiful facility. God allowed us to have the finest of television lighting and sound and the whole arrangement. It's a dodecagon, a twelve-sided building where you've got 2,200 people right up against you to preach from the balcony. It's a glorious place. The one thing we said with tears and weeping before the Lord, Lord, we're not going to go back to what we were. And so we kneel to pray. We weep, we share, we confess, we rejoice in the Lord. Prayer has come out. Holy hour. Listen, I tell you, I had a wife say to me with tears, her husband owns a CPA business, and she said, listen, since that revival my husband has gotten up every morning for his hour with the Lord. And that spiritual pal, we've got two guys, one of them is a—somebody said I leak easily, if you don't mind, excuse me, I think God made me wrong, he put my bladder behind my eyes, but we've got two guys that drive, each one of them drives 30 miles each way to meet with each other three times a morning. They're spiritual pals three times a week. The prayer ministry. Our men now pray in four sections every Tuesday morning in four different restaurants, fellowship and prayer, at 6 o'clock every Tuesday morning. Then once a month we meet in the church in our activities building there for a breakfast of praying and sharing. We'll have 70, 80, 90, 100 men there. We've taken the prayer room into that beautiful parlor, and so every Sunday morning and every Sunday night we have that prayer room, we've used the prayer cards. There is such great love for God and such great love for the Lord's servants. And I want to tell you, when the real revival comes to God's people, God's people will love God's servants. And so we don't deify Dale Faisenfeld or Tim or Nancy or any of those precious people that came. But I'll tell you, there is a love and excitement like they're part of our family. And so we're concerned about them. We want to keep up with them, we want to pray for them. There's staff unity like never before. And that was another thing that happened, is the staff had to get together. They went to the prayer room and confessed differences and resentments and hurts and misunderstandings. And God's done a work in the life of one of our staff members that all of the team prayed about. And there's been again a brokenness that only happened several weeks ago, and so we're praying that God is going to use that. Let me prepare you to say that whenever God touches us like this, we can be sure that Satan doesn't like it. There were men, godly men, some of them fellows that cleared their heart, the deepest and the purest, lost a job just like that, were fired for no reason. The test came, the fire came. A fellow that confessed, a seminary student confessed his felony of mail fraud just to give things for his children because he didn't have any money, and is on a probated sentence and living in a halfway house, and our family has helped feed his family and mow their yard and love them and encourage them and pray for them in every way. Brother Ravenhill preached for us after the crusade one Sunday night, and then he and I went out and he said, before Dale ever got sick, he said, You know, you have to be so careful. When you wound the devil and when you get on the devil's territory, he'll try to kill you. Now, those were his exact words, and then he related the experience about jumping out of the hotel. Now, I'm just simply saying to you that with all the blessings that come, get ready. I said to our staff in staff meeting two weeks ago, I said, Now, I want to share with you, we made a commitment, we've raised a standard, and this might frighten some of you, but your pastor has made a commitment, so I'm trusting you to lift up my hands and to go with me, and if you don't, God, I'll understand, and that will be between you and the Lord. But I want you to know that there is spiritual warfare involved. Now, what would I do if I were to invite an evangelist again, a revivalist to our church? One thing, I'd want him to have personal integrity. You know, wouldn't it be a refreshing thing if an evangelist said, Listen, my heart's not right, I can't come. When my heart gets right, I'll come. Wouldn't it be refreshing for us preachers to say, Listen, I don't have a message from the Lord today, I can't preach. I had to do that last Sunday, I put in the church paper, God hasn't given me a word yet. I praise the Lord he did, and God used the message. But integrity, personal integrity in their life, in their family. And then clear expectations. Now, Bill McLeod is going to hold our fall meeting, and he's got a little brochure, and I want to tell you, he spells out in detail, as did Life Action, their expectations and their policies. And so an evangelist needs to make sure, a revivalist, someone who comes in that calling, needs to make sure that their expectations are laid out to the church family. And the church family in turn needs to reciprocate, and if there's any question that they have about that, they need to do that. And then I think one of the most important things is the biblical concept of money. I think there's been more, that along with perhaps professionalism and some crassness that's happened, is the thing of money. There have been so many people greed. I had one of my closest pastor friends, we were missionaries in the Philippines together for 15 years, in one of the most dynamic churches in Texas. And he had one of our number one Southern Baptist evangelists that I know and love. But he said to me, Miles, he said, Boy, the money thing was a disaster. Our people were so grieved and so hurt and so wounded, you can't even mention that person's name. Well, that's a grief unto the Lord. And then that people would come, as I said, to be givers and not takers. If you could be wrung out for the Lord in that way, I mean literally expended. I'm not talking about something I don't know about, for as a missionary in the Philippines, in the most remote areas where there was some of the greatest response in the world, I know what it is to be wrung out. I know what it is as a pastor. I preached three times every Sunday and taught a fieldwork class in the seminary every Sunday for ten years. So we want people who are willing to be wrung out for the Lord. Then we'll protect you and encourage you. And then we want you to give time and instruction to our staff. Tim, I look back on that and I brought some of those notes with me. I think to me personally, as a pastor, that was some of the most helpful, refreshing, encouraging time is when Dale and the administrative or executive staff would meet with our staff in those mornings for an hour or two hours, and he would just probe in our heart and bury his own heart. And then we got off to three different times and just let him share with us from his heart what he would do in a situation like ours, how he would meet needs, how you keep the theme and the fire of revival going on. And then I think above everything else, the sweet spirit of Christ. That means so much. When you come away from the platform and your spirit's not sweet, or you get met in the middle of the day or the night or whenever, and your spirit's not sweet, an evangelist, a revivalist, needs to have a humble, sweet, broken spirit. And that means so much to God's people. So I could just share with you that the greatest encouragement to me is, we have a pregnancy help center in our church, marvelous ministry, and we hired a lady not very long ago. She began the pregnancy help center at the First Baptist Church of Euless, which is really used of the Lord, and since it left and came to us. So she's not a member of our church, she's a member of Dr. Jimmy Draper's church. And she said at our annual banquet, she said, you know, since I've come, she said all that people talk about is during the revival. And they didn't say when the revival was going on. She said they talk about during the revival like it's going on right today. And I say, praise the Lord, it is going on right today. Still brokenness, still confession, still repentance, still joy. A prominent doctor went to that prayer room not very long ago, two Sundays ago, and wrote out on that, he said, God's convicted me of my pride. He said, you know, the greatest times of joy in my life is when I've yielded that pride to God and I'm clean and obedient in my heart. So there's joy that comes with it. And we're just so grateful to have been a part of what God did then and is doing now. And to God be the glory in every way, every purpose, and may it happen again in every church. Such a hunger, Brother Brian, come on, such a hunger and thirst to share this wherever I go. And people say, tell me about the revival back during the meeting. And I said, I can't tell you about it, come and see. And I was amazed how many wouldn't. But praise God for those that did. Thank you. For those who didn't come see, and for many thousands of others across the United States, they heard in some very unique ways what God did. You didn't share this, I don't think, Brother Miles, but there was a gentleman in his church that got convicted during the crusade that he had stolen some books from a bookstore back when he was in college, up in Oklahoma University, or Old Bay, Oklahoma Baptist University, I believe it was, in Oklahoma City area, OSU, Oklahoma State University, made restitution. The college newspaper became aware of it, printed an article, of which then the Oklahoma City newspaper, as I understood it, saw the article, reprinted it, and ultimately, I read it in USA Today, how God moved on one individual to obey a principle of revival, and beyond the church walls of Birchman Baptist, God then took that testimony and principle of revival and exposed it to an entire nation. I don't know about you, but that tells me that if we'll be faithful at proclaiming the message that he has given us as revivalists, that we can just leave it up to him to take care of the breadth of our ministry. We take care of the depth, let God take care of the breadth. We couldn't have got that exposed in USA Today if we had tried to make it happen, but God made it happen.