In this sermon, the speaker discusses the story of Hannah from the Bible and the elements of true intercession. Hannah faced adversity and had an adversary, but she remained committed to prayer. The speaker emphasizes that true preaching goes beyond mere rhetoric and surface emotions, and requires a broken heart. The sermon also includes personal anecdotes and reflections on the importance of prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit.

So let's start with this song. He sang it when there was one day of... Sing it again, come on, it's beautiful. And you were singing, they are weak. Forget it. Sing, we are weak. That may injure your pride, but sing it. We are weak, but he is strong. Okay? Jesus loves me. For the Bible tells me so. We are weak, but he is strong. We are weak, but he is strong. Like to hear Mike sing it himself. He wasn't here when we sang. One fellow here says... He's the one that heard Mike sing before. Good. Father, we thank you for loving us. Lord, I've never seen a ball of clay that I could love. And we were as clay in the hands of the potter. Without shape, without character, without value. But Lord, we thank you, you are the master potter. And Lord, we want to learn still how to be in subjection to your moulding. To the shaping of our lives. To the pruning of our lives. To the discipline of our lives. Lord God, move us out of immaturity. Move us out of childhood. Lord, make us worthy of carrying the burdens of the Lord. Make us worthy of being flung into the forefront of the battle. Lord, take us out of the nursery into the armoury. Teach us what it means, Lord, to put on the whole armour of God. And fight the good fight of faith. We have more assailants, we have more opposition, I believe, to the gospel now than any period in history. Lord, outside in the world we have wars and rumours of wars. In the spiritual realm we have heresies and strange doctrines. Opposition of men and opposition of devils. But we thank you for Jesus this morning. Lord, we are baffled when we think that for two thousand years you have been making intercession at the right hand of the Father. Listening every day to millions of confessions of sin, confessions of failure and all these things. And yet somehow you carry all this awesome load. Lord, we thank you that with confidence we now draw nigh. And Father, Abba, Father, cry. Lord, we bless you for giving us this title. I don't remember Abraham ever used it, or Moses, or David. But we're allowed to call you our Father who art in heaven. And we bless you this morning, Father. We'll never be worthy as long as we're in the flesh, as long as we're in this mortality. But Lord, we're glad one day we shall say farewell mortality and welcome to eternity. We bless you, we have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that fadeth not away. Reserved in heaven for us. Lord, I bless you for this. Quicken our hearts this morning, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you. Be seated. Okay. These would be better if they were red, white and blue. But anyhow. When we were living in Ireland, we lived in a house about 200 or 300 years old. It was part of an old castle. And the forefront of the castle had been taken away. We had lived in the servants' quarters. It was very, very beautiful. But across the field from us was a gorgeous castle. And a young man by the name of Lord Belmore lived there. I went across to see, not to see him one day, but to see the place. He had a lot of exotic beasts and birds. But I went into a room about half the size of this, which was his study. I'd like a study like that. But anyhow, it was very beautiful. There were two chairs there. And I noticed a little tab on the corner of each chair. So I said to his butler, I like these chairs. He said, well, you know, when our present queen was married in Westminster Abbey, there was seating for 3,000 people, and then they put chairs down the aisle. And the people who sat in chairs down the aisle were allowed to buy them. So Lord Belmore brought one home and he brought one for his wife. So it said, on one Lord Belmore, on the other Lady Belmore. That was very interesting. I came to America and they were showing again the film of, in black and white there, of the wedding of the queen. And as we sat at supper, the lady at the table said, Mr. Raidenhill, if you had been in England today, would you have been at the royal wedding? I said, no, I wouldn't. She said, why not? I said, because my name is Raidenhill and not Churchill. So she said, well, that's interesting. I guess you'd love to have gone. No, I wouldn't. I said, well, if I'd gone up to the door and said I want to see the royal wedding, they'd say, well, I looked down the social register, there's a Lord Raiden Scar, there's a Lord Raiden C, but there's no Lord Raidenhill, so you can't come in. Wouldn't you be disappointed? I said, no, I'd just say bye, thank you. Why? She said, you might have bought a chair, and brought it home for your children and grandchildren to see. Very wonderful. You'd have seen all the celebrities of the world there, kings and rulers, presidents, and what have you got. I said, wonderful. And you really wouldn't be envious? Envious? I said, lady, I'm going to a royal wedding soon, which will make this wedding look like the dishes in the kitchen sink. And I said, I'll tell you something. It says in 1 Peter 1 that there's a seat reserved in heaven for me. Billy Graham isn't going to get in. And somebody else isn't going to get in. It's reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God, through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. And it says that you and I have an inheritance incorruptible beyond the reach of death, that is, undefiled beyond the reach of sin, that fadeth not away beyond the reach of time. So I've got a home eternal in the heavens. So do you think I envy anybody else down here? It doesn't matter how big your home is. You may live in a palace like Mike and some of the others. They're going to have to leave it all behind. My precious wife has no jewelry. She gets some very expensive clothes, usually given. But I said, she said, I think I need a little brooch. I said, we're going to town to one of the greatest, best-known shops in America. And dearie, don't think about the price. Anything you want in Kmart you can buy. You know, I'm very sorry for most ladies. I really am. I stayed in a home in Chicago, a very close friend of Dr. Tozer's. And the lady on the Friday picked up a Bible and a note. She said, I'm going to the beauty shop. I looked at her. She said, I've been going to the same beauty shop for 20 years. I thought, woman, what were you like when they started on you? Isn't it amazing what emphasis we put on externals? The king's daughter is all glorious within. I'm going to preach in a minute. In Bradford, Yorkshire, I remember going to Bradford for the simple reason that I met Smith Wigglesworth there. Now everybody called him the apostle of prayer. And he was an amazing man. He was in a meeting in, I forgot the name of the town. Anyhow, I was watching, there's a woman on the front row with a big, big tummy. So while they were singing, he went down, he's bald in the rear, you know, they were all singing. He said, are you pregnant? Oh no, no, I'm not pregnant. He says, close your eyes. He closed her eyes. He took his fist and slammed her in the stomach. He said, you're healed. Well, she was either healed or dead. He had some ways that nobody else could copy because he was a man of faith. But you know, he did the same thing in Australia. So, Tim, when you, Mike, when you go, don't you try it. You just kill the woman, you don't have the faith. But you know, by the same token, when people would say to him, you're the most remarkable man of faith since the apostle Paul. He'd point to the platform and say, that demon has followed me around the world into whatever number of countries we've been in. Ten or fifteen. That demon, who did he mean? His daughter. His daughter couldn't hear any more than this table could hear, this wood could hear. And he prayed and prayed and prayed and she never got healed. And so, I think that's a lesson for us. We despair sometimes. You know, like people say, I want, young men say to me, I want to be like Finney. He walked into a building and the machinery stopped. And people, he did it once in his lifetime. He didn't do it every day. He had his tough times like everybody else. Because you see, that's how God makes character. Oh, well, I've got to watch my reputation. If you look for that, well, you'll be working twenty-eight hours a day. I was praying once in a situation, the Lord showed me very clearly, reputation is what men think I am. Character is what God knows I am. You can't change God's mind about me. I'm the only way that can change God's mind. You can gossip and slander and ridicule and lie about me. You won't change God's mind. So, why should I worry about you? You can't make your mind up twice a day, so why should I worry about you? Character is something that God is going to develop in us. Okay. Fifty-five years ago, when most of you are not around, I guess, I was pastoring a church in England. It was the largest holiness church in the British Isles. It wasn't great by numbers, as you would count numbers. Sunday night we got maybe five hundred people, but a quarter of a mile from us was the gorgeous cathedral. They got fifty people, we got five hundred. And that whole meet, that whole church thrived, expanded, and became the most powerful unit for many miles around for one reason only. We had seven prayer meetings a week. And one Sunday morning, when I was preaching, I was sure I heard a voice, so I turned to look. There was nobody there. And the voice said this disgusting thing. I assumed after a minute it must have been a deacon. Because the voice said, You're not the most important person in this church. You're not the most spiritual. And I looked round and thought, Well, who in the world is? Then I saw a little old lady and she had a bonnet on, she had strings and tied it under the chin. Lovely little old thing. And the Lord said, That woman is the power in your church. I'd just taken over as the pastor, though I'd been one of the founders of it years before. And I discovered that she belonged to a group of about eight people who for forty years had prayed for revival in that city. My precious wife is a state certified midwife. She was director of one of the largest hospitals in England. She has lots of qualifications that she doesn't talk about. But she's delivered hundreds and hundreds of babies. I'm glad she didn't bring them all home. You know, often we evangelists, we go to a church and there's a moving of guard. Somebody comes and says, Why don't you stay here as the pastor? The only reason we have a good time, we deliver the babies. Somebody's been praying for years in that church. And the same is happening in here. And it's going to happen. And I discovered that about six or eight of those people had met not every morning, but nearly every morning in the week. And they'd believed God. And as a result of that, there was a moving of the Spirit of God forty years afterwards. Well, we're going to talk this morning about a very wonderful woman in the scripture, in the first book of Samuel, and the first chapter. This is one of those wonderful stories. You get in the Bible, many of them, where a man has two wives. Oh boy, what an affliction. But you know, that's changed now. They used to have it in the Old Testament. It didn't work. So, in the New Testament, it's not legal to have two wives. Well, it doesn't say so. It does. It says no man can serve two masters. So, it says in this first book of Samuel, in the first chapter, this man had two wives. Verse two says he had two wives. The name of one was Hannah, the name of the other was Penina. And Penina had children, but Hannah had no children. And he went up, notice what it says, he went up yearly to worship. That interprets the rest of the chapter to me. Every year, he went all the way. Remember, there's no mass transport. It was very dangerous. You could hardly go down the road, otherwise you'd get mugged. The scripture shows that very clearly, like the man that was beaten up at the side of the road and the Samaritan came. But yearly, they made that tremendous trip. There were no fast food services, no transport. It was a tremendous, difficult trial to go. They went up yearly to the house of the Lord. Verse four says, When time was come, the Lord gave to Penina his wife and to all, notice all her sons and her daughters' portions. But Hannah, he gave a worthy portion for he loved Hannah, but the Lord had shut up her womb. Now, all the qualifications, I almost said ingredients, but that sounds too much like a cake mix. But all the ingredients of true intercession are in this chapter, more I think than any other chapter in the Bible. It says in verse six, her adversary. She had an adversary. If you want to prove what kind of an adversary you have, you begin to design your day, the day you live, and you design the time you'll give in prayer. You'll discover the world of flesh and the devil in a way you've never known them before. Our phone rings hours and hours a day. I usually go after breakfast. My darling wife and I have an hour together. Then I go to pray for some time and the phone will ring and visitors will come. They drop in on the doorstep. I've come from Africa. I've come from India. I've come from somewhere and I'm rude enough to tell them to wait because my time with God cannot be in any way interrupted. There's a jealousy that God has. I understand that Brother Paul has some tapes on the jealousy of God, but God is a jealous God and the jealousy of God, there's a carnal jealousy I'm jealous for the Lord God of hosts. They've pulled down your altars and the gates are burned with fire and God is a jealous God. So here it says she had an adversary and an adversary provoked her to make a threat because the Lord had shut up her womb and he did so and he did so, listen again, year by year. Every time she went up to the temple to worship, she met provocation. She had a partner in the house with a bunch of children around her skirts and this woman has none. So every time she goes up they say there she is, there's Hannah again. She's not pregnant. The Lord is displeased with her. It's amazing how you can find out what's wrong with other people, isn't it? And you can't find out what's wrong with yourself. It's like the woman looking out of the window she says, you know, if those kids next door were mine I'd know what I'd do with them. And just as she did it, she can bring somebody else's up easier than yours. You've got the wrong ones. But it's never easy to raise children and it's never easy to raise a spiritual family. Okay. And so as he did so year by year she went up to the house of the Lord and she provoked her until she wept and did not eat. So there's provocation. It's mentioned twice. Verses 6 and 7 she had provocation. Now verse 10 says she was in bitterness of soul and prayed unto the Lord. Verse 7 says she wept. Verse 10 says she wept until she was sore. And then it says over in the leave over leave for me in verse 15 Hannah answered and said I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit so she has provocation and she has sorrow because she's barren. I'm a woman of a sorrowful spirit. I've drunk neither wine nor strong drink. You see a difficult thing is when you start to move in spirituality it's very easy to bear the criticism of the world the roughness of the world. It's a criticism of sense that gets you down. Somebody says oh don't do that you're getting too serious. You know our people will warn you don't get too spiritual. You never heard anybody say they don't get too rich. Don't get too much education but don't get too spiritual. You know why? Because they've been dragging their feet for the last 10 to 20 years and they're afraid you'll get ahead of them. All are born equal. That's not true. It's not true in the physical sense it's not true in the social sense it is true in the spiritual sense. I'm glad that nobody is born handicapped when they're born again in the spirit of God. We have a friend who was born with a lot of money and they had a child and it was born with what do you call it? Down syndrome. Well everybody is amazed he's such an athletic fellow and she's such a charming lady. So anyhow about four years afterwards they've been all over America and they've studied I don't know gynecology but they could. They said this can't happen it's a 10 million to one chance for these two little children that need almost 24 hour a day attention. But people are not born like that spiritually. We're born heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. The trouble is most of us don't inherit what we've got. You know I've prayed 500 Friday nights with some teams of men and women in a little place a bit of property that last days have and almost every Friday night I would cry out in my grief God at the judgment seat of the prison hill when you were on earth living there in Texas I had many things to tell you but you couldn't bear them. God I'd be disgusted. You see we all have this little place called time it's a little island called time and it's surrounded by an ocean of eternity. In the 1500s John Donne wrote a statement that's been quoted millions of times no man is an island. Well I reverse that every man is an island and that's a relief to me to know that. We couldn't put up with two like you. Every man is an island. Every man is an entity. And sometime if we come back again if you don't ask us we'll invite ourselves anyhow. I've turned over in my mind so much in the last few weeks where Paul says that Christ may be magnified by my brains by my ministry by my miracles no by my body whether by life or by death. If I live I gain if I die I gain. There's nothing to gain in this life in one sense and yet there's everything to gain. We're heirs of God and that stops me dead in my tracks but we're not all heirs of God we're joint heirs with Jesus Christ. Why don't we use our resources? Can't God trust us? Are we too immature? Are we too longing to be a personality not to be liquidated not to be lost in him not to die and rise in resurrection life? You see there are two great things in life the two difficult things in life number one is to find the will of God. You know you get people telling you how to find the will of God they've been trying to find it for themselves for ten years and never found it. They'll tell you in ten minutes how to find the will of God. That's number one difficulty the second difficulty is doing it. And you see when you do the will of God it's not what it costs you it's what it costs other people. I gave up a fine church to start going around the world so I had to leave my dear wife and boys at home with no financial backing. Money came very very slowly somebody said to me the other day you know money talks I said it does all it says to me is goodbye. But you know in the place of prayer money doesn't count prestige doesn't count brilliance doesn't count it's something in here. Okay let me just take another phrase here in this 15th verse again Hannah is criticized by the priest and she says I've drunk neither wine nor strong drink but I've poured out my soul before the Lord. Do you remember it says I read it last night or maybe two o'clock this morning about two o'clock this morning in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah I have poured out my soul unto the Lord. Jesus walked into the garden of Gethsemane then he knelt then he prostrated himself and in that awesome time he says I poured out my soul unto the Lord. But you see all these ingredients are in the person of a person or in the nature if you like a character of a person who desires to be an intercessor. If I see two people talking I interrupt. If two people are doing something I can intervene. But when I'm an intercessor I stand between a certain situation and God himself. And God said he wondered what? That there were no intercessors. As I said last night isn't it amazing? The disciples heard the greatest preacher that ever lived preach the greatest sermon ever preached the Sermon on the Mount but they never said Lord teach us to preach. They saw the miracles even raising the dead. They never said Lord teach us to do the miracles but they said Lord teach us to pray. And no man is greater than his prayer life. So what's the problem with this woman? Just one thing. It's the problem with the Church of Jesus Christ today. Barrenness. She had everything else. There's a corresponding story to this I think in the 30th chapter there. I think it's the wait a minute 30th chapter yes of Genesis. Again you have a man with two wives. Rachel is the man that he served God for served the Father for for two periods of seven years. And she gets everything. I can imagine her coming to her husband one day and say you know darling you're getting more and more famous out there in the market out there in the in the bazaar. People talk about three persons Abraham Isaac and Jacob. You know isn't it time we improved our lifestyle? Aren't you tired of going out on a camel? Why don't you get one of those gorgeous black Arabian stallions like some other people? Or my clothes aren't right or some other things. She doesn't say that. One day she forgets to put her hair neatly and she comes down and so she's had a sleepless night maybe she had threw herself herself at the feet of Jacob and she didn't say you know darling I've been reconsidering this. You know I feel so embarrassed we have no children. Wouldn't it be nice if we had some children? She doesn't do that. She's in despair. There's a place where despair has a place in prayer. She throws herself at the feet of her husband and says give me children or I die. I can't live without this. And you see why those people we had revival in that town it was a time of poverty unemployment all the difficulties you could imagine that people for 40 years had been waiting day and night in a certain place praying and making intercession. We can't live unless revival comes. I can remember they'd come up after the power of God broke on the town they'd give us a hug you know and say oh brother this is wonderful for 40 years. You should have heard so and so she died so many years ago. Boy she could pray she could intercede. I said I remember meeting that great man of prayer of faith he was Smith Wigglesworth but in the tent we have a woman came to us one day dear Lord she was a sight. She lived about the most poverty poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor poor Stop it. Accept interceding people. Accept people who would rather die than live like this, without the presence of God. So Rachel throws herself at the feet of this man and she says, give me children or I die. Hannah isn't content to go and meet all the nice people at the conference twice a year. She isn't happy to get out of the house and take this long journey to the sacred city, where David walked and Isaiah walked and Zechariah walked and Jeremiah walked. That doesn't interest her. She's not interested in geography or topography. She's interested only in one thing. God has not allowed her to bear a child. You know, when they had the revival, they had an amazing revival in 1905, away there in Korea. And it was by the power of the Spirit of God. I was preaching in Lake Okoboji some years ago. A very charming lady, like my sweet wife, had white hair. And she stopped me in the street the next morning and she said, oh Mr. Regner, that meeting was so good last night, you reminded me of my daddy. Did you know my daddy? How in the world do you know the daddy of a woman you've never seen in your life? I said, no. Was he a footballer or what was he? My daddy? My daddy was Jonathan Goldforth. Jonathan Goldforth had had a revival in China, yes. And she said, you preach just like that? Well, that was wonderful. He must have been a great preacher. You see, there are times when God will come in certain ways. And He comes on certain people at certain times. Boy, I've gone to other places where I stumble. I've had three strokes and so I'm even fortunate to have a voice. My cords are supposed to have failed. Some people wish they had failed altogether, but they're not. They're still there. So anyhow, this is how it worked. They had a revival in a church. And then in order to become a member of that church, you must bring to birth, bring a person that you personally have birthed. I was in Australia, I was in New Zealand too. Australia, what, New Zealand, what, 70 million sheep? And I'd been speaking about the 23rd Psalm. And, no, I'd been speaking about Abraham. And now that ram got caught in the thicket. And this old guy came up and he says, listen, you didn't say, there are lots of things you didn't say in that story. I said, yes, he said one about the ram caught in the thicket. He said, you know, that ram wasn't there when he went up the hill. I said, no, it wasn't there when he built the altar. No, it wasn't there when he wrapped the boy and fastened him up, so he couldn't get away. I said, well, I said, how do you know that? It isn't in my Bible. If it's in yours, tell me and I'll get one like yours. No, he said, I've been a shepherd for 50 years. I know all the things about sheep. He said, I'll tell you what, when a ram gets caught in a thicket like that, it will either pull its horns until it uproots the bush or it will pull until it pulls its horns off, but it won't stay a captive. And I said to him, well, so you've been a shepherd. And I said, could I ask you a question? Yes. I said, how many sheep did you give birth to? How many lambs did you give birth to? He said, what? I said, how many lambs did you give birth to? He said, where are you from? I said, America. Oh, well, that explains it, he said. We do everything by machinery. But you see, you could not be a member of that church until you personally had birthed somebody and said, I've prayed for so long and this person is my spiritual offspring. And then when they got that going, every church had to give birth to another church. They wouldn't have these mega churches, whatever in the world you call them, fastest growing churches. Some of them are going to be the fastest declining before long. When the economy hits the dip, they'll be in trouble. They'll have millions of dollars in debt, and they won't be able to handle it. But anyhow, this woman is concerned about one thing only. She's concerned about barrenness. And not only concerned, she said, I wept. And then she said, I wept until I was sore. It wasn't something that happened one night and she forgot about it until she went to another conference. It was an aggravation. It was a day by day humiliation. People say, isn't she charming? Isn't her husband very rich? Isn't he very famous? You know, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. They're a marvelous family, but she has no children. You see, the anger of God is against that woman. And so there she is, praying. Year by year she goes up. And year by year she's tormented until eventually, as it were, God gets through to her. And finally she says, look, give me children or I die. And she's weeping and she's grieving. Wasn't it the psalmist said, store my tears in thy bottle? Didn't Jesus weep in Gethsemane? You know, I've been reading, reading, and rereading, and rereading the first and second epistles of Paul to Timothy. Here's a brilliant old battle-scarred warrior pouring all his life into this young man. He says, what I've done for you, you do for somebody else. Just the other day, it kind of jumped off the page and grasped me. He says many things. I remember the unfeigned faith which is in thee, which dwelt first in thy mother Eunice, thy mother Aloys, and then thy, which way? Which way, though? Which is mother? Eunice. Eunice, you're sure that's right? No. What does it say in the Greek? Well, it says I remember your mother, your mother, your grandmother, anyhow. But then he says, and this really got hold of me, this is the young man he's poured his life into. Can you imagine living with Paul? And he says, Timothy, I'm mindful of thy tears. Dear God, one of the most awesome things I think in the whole of the Word of God, at least in the New Testament, is, I think, the ninth chapter of Romans, where Paul says I could wish myself accursed for my brethren. In essence, he says I'll be damned if need be. Lord, I don't care what you put on me. You can tear up my body. You can bring me burdens, oversized burdens. You can give me revelations beyond anybody else. You can give me grief beyond anybody else. I don't care. You see, dear friend, you've only from here to eternity to build your character. It's too late. There'll be no soul winning in heaven. There'll be no prayer in heaven. There'll be none of the heroics that we spend our time with. They won't be of any value. But dear God, when God opens... It says the books are open. Boy, that's going to be wonderful. I can't wait to see the glorified edition of Why Revival Tarrys. I'm going to say to Peter, I want to see the library. But look, when God opens the book of prayer, suppose he opens it right after he's just given the reward to one of America's greatest men, David Brainard, the man who says he went out in the snow, I knelt in the snow up to my chin, he says, at sunrise. And I had to press into the snow in order to get some comfort. And I stayed there till sunset, a half an hour before sunset. And by the time I got up, I couldn't touch the snow with the tips of my fingers. He'd spent 12 hours in intercession, in prayer. And you can't do it in a lovely room with wall-to-wall carpeting and air conditioning. God help us. Where are we? He gave his life for America, praying Payson of Portland. His life is just out. Until recently, Ian Murray, the president of... What's that called now? Banner of Truth. Banner of Truth, thank you. Good, you're getting marks this morning. Just showed you what a good night's sleep can do for you. Until recently, the three great volumes on the life of Payson were collector's items. Ian Murray lives in Edinburgh. He's the president of Banner of Truth. He had a set of them. But they've been published. A friend of mine published them last year. They're $76, but right now they're half-priced. Do you sell them at the school, Sean? Oh, you're going to. He's prophesying. So, well, get them. They'll never be printed again. I don't think anybody will print them because they won't be bestsellers. But there you say again, praying Payson of Portland. The floor of his bedroom was like this. When he prayed, he prayed this way all the time. So he wore grooves, hollows at the side of his bed as though you ploughed them or chiseled it out. When they dressed him to bury him, his knees had great big calluses. Like tradition says, James, the man of prayer, had. You see, you've got an amazing inheritance here. You've got David Brainerd, and you've got praying Payson of Portland, and you've got John Hyde. The man that was insulted when somebody told him he needed to be filled with the Holy Ghost. A man asked me one day, you've been to many countries, you've been to India, yes. Did you go to the Cyclops Convention? No. He said, well, a friend of mine went some years ago. And to his amazement, when he got there, John Hyde, praying Hyde, was there. And he said, I said to him, Mr. Hyde, it would be the thrill of my life, the joy of my life, it would be the greatest tuition I could ever have, if I could spend a time in prayer with you. So he said, all right, brother, meet me in the morning at, I think it was nine o'clock. And he said, we'll pray a little while. So he said, I went in, and I waited and waited and waited. And he said, oh, he's waiting for me to pray. And he said, I didn't pray. And then he said, John Hyde began to pray. And he said, when he prayed, I then thought, my eyes. I thought God was at the side of us. And he said, he just poured out his soul for India. And then there was a knock on the door. And he said, I said to myself, listen, nobody's stopping this prayer meeting with me. This is once in a lifetime, I'm not going to the door. A little while after, a knock at the door. A little while after, a knock at the door. So he went. He was going to the door. A man put his head round the door. And he said, brother Hyde, you're speaking at three o'clock, and it's a quarter of three now. The man said, it's what? I came in this room at a quarter of nine, to a quarter to ten, to a quarter to eleven, to a quarter to twelve, to a quarter to one, to a quarter to two, to a quarter to three. Six hours? You see, when you get lost in the presence of God, whether it's the ecstasy, or whether it's the grief. As I said yesterday, remember, Moses had been on the mountain with God. And what did he discover? He didn't come back saying, you know, God is love, God loves us, God loves us. He came back saying, God is angry. And he pleaded with God. Well, listen, I quoted half of this last night. One of the most wonderful things in the world is when God, the omnipotent God, reaches down and gets hold of a man. There's one thing more wonderful than that. It's when a man reaches up and takes hold of God. What did God say when Moses went to see Him? He says, leave me alone. Does God ever say that to you? Does He ever say that to me? You're praying for something you can't bring to birth. You know, there's a saying in England that if a married couple, if the wife had the first baby and the husband had the second, there'd never be a third. Because we don't know a thing about travel. But I believe that spiritual travel is more intense than physical travel even. So, one thing, this woman gets pregnant. We would read in the newspapers in England, the Queen has given up, cancelled all her engagements for the next year. Oh, she's pregnant. I remember in America, they said in the newspaper, John, the President's wife, has cancelled her engagements. She loves to ride horses. She loves water sports. She's particularly smart, as she was, in water skiing. But she might be skiing, and that skink come up and hit that unborn baby, and so she sacrifices everything. Well, immediately that wonderful little creature comes there into the tummy of that woman, and it's a fantastic thing that a child can be born. There are 2,000 possible risks with a baby that's born physically. But taking it spiritually, or take it physically, that baby gets there in the tummy of the woman, and as it grows, it begins to put pressure on. It's normal, and it's abnormal. That little thing there is pushing the walls of the womb, and other things are bearing the pain. And as you go further on, she's changed her social life. She changed her physical life. There are things she's loved to eat she doesn't want to eat. There are things she didn't like, and she wants. She craves them. She goes to bed at night. The old boy's in bed too. One o'clock. Two o'clock. Three o'clock. There he is. And she's in pain, and he doesn't care a hill of beans. He's dreaming he's golfing or something. And there she is with pain, and the nearer it comes to the time of deliverance, the more the pain comes. It gets more acute. You know, lots of time, God got us almost to the place of deliverance, and we're like the Old Testament. What do they say? Zion traveled, but she couldn't bring forth children. She brought forth wind. She never accomplished that which God desired. But the intensity comes, and she doesn't argue about it. She knows that once she gets pregnant, everything's going to change. You know, when we get spiritually pregnant like that, when your social life doesn't matter, when what you eat doesn't matter too much, when how you sleep doesn't matter too much. When it comes to this, God give us revival or we die. In America 60 years ago, a man put an order outside of his church. This church will either have revival or a funeral. It had revival. Why? Because he put his house in order. There are conditions that we have to meet. And when you get to the place where you say, I can't live any longer. My daddy and mummy are unsaved. My husband's unsaved. Somebody else is unsaved. And you say, Lord, this is the one treasure I ask of you, to give us deliverance, give us salvation. Let them be born. You know, people are not being born in America. They come to the altar, they're lost when they come, and they're lost when they go. They're not born again of the Spirit of God. The most amazing miracle in the world is a new birth. Oh, we think it's for the down and outs. It's for the up and outs too. It's for the hippies and the yuppies. Whosoever will may come. You know, there's a little book. Do you sell that book, The Life of God in the Soul of Man? You will before I come again. You'll be in trouble. It was written in the 1500s. Who wrote it there? You've forgotten? Martha, you've forgotten? Dear, dear. I bring my spare brains and they don't work. Oh, I know. His name was Henry School, S-C-O-U-G-H. Henry School, The Life of God in the Soul of Man. I'll tell you what happened. One of the most wonderful women in history was Mrs. Wesley. She had 17 children. They weren't all living at once. But, you know, she used to get up early in the morning and spend an hour with the family. And then after she prayed with them at night, she took each one separately, a different night, and prayed with them. One day she got a copy of a book called The Life of God in the Soul of Man. She gave it to John Wesley. She gave it to Charles Wesley. Charles was going down the corridor in Christ Church in Oxford. And he saw this man in the window there, this big old mullion window. And there he was with his knees up reading a book. And he said to him, George, you need to read this. My mother says it's the best thing ever written. Read it. And he threw the book into the lap of George. George who? George Whitefield. And George read it. And on the cover of the new edition it says, I never knew what Christianity was until I read this book. And the title is again, The Life of God in the Soul of Man. A man isn't born again because he confesses his sins. He needs a miracle. It's the work of the Father, the work of the Son, and the work of the Holy Spirit of God. And then George Whitefield proclaimed that message. Dear God, there's a book. I don't know if you fellas have enough appetite to read it. I call it the Bible of Revivals. It's by Gillies. Do you have that? If he gets all going to us, he'll need a U-Haul trailer to go home. But it really is a magnificent book. It's the invasion of God into my personality. That's what Paul says, The hope of glory. Again, just skip over it. I won't mention it. I'll leave that for tonight maybe. Anyhow, what am I thinking of here? Talking of tears and travail, I had the privilege, and I think it was a privilege, to pray on quite a number of occasions with Duncan Campbell, the man that God used in the revival in 1949, away there in Scotland. You may remember the fact he was in Ireland, sitting on the platform, fingering through his Bible, and he said to the chairman, I'm going. So the chairman thought he was going to the bathroom or somewhere. He said, we'll sing till he comes back. I'm not coming back. Where are you going to? I'm going to Scotland. Out of this meeting? There's a thousand people waiting. This is the final meeting of the conference. But you see, when God speaks, you obey Him. It doesn't matter who you offend. So he got up, carried his Bible, went to the boat, got off the boat, took another boat, took off the boat, got off the boat, took another boat over to what we call the Hebrides, the New Hebrides in the southeast. Anyhow, he got a boy to row him across from one island to the other. When he got there, he said, Laddie, in his Scots way, who's the senior elder of the Kirk? And he said, oh, he lives up there. His name is Brown. He said, would you tell him that Duncan Campbell has arrived? Campbell of the Argyle Revival? So he went and he said, this big gangling highlander, a helander as they say, came down. Brother, glad to meet you. Glad to meet you, brother. You see, the building up there, that's a Kirk, the church. And we don't use it. It hasn't been used for years. But this morning, brother, he said, I got on my bicycle and I went round the town and said, come to the old Kirk tonight at six o'clock. There's going to be a service. A man called Duncan Campbell will be there. There'll be no communication. So Duncan looked at this fellow, and Duncan was a pretty tall guy, looked at this tall man, and he said, he said, brother, you've been round the island and told them I was coming to preach? Yes. He said, how did you know I was coming? He said, how did you know to come? The Lord only speaks with one voice. So what happened? There's now pouring of the Spirit of God. The two classical stories out of that that he told me, every time we'd talk, we'd talk between five and six in the morning and pray, and the tears would come to his eyes. And I knew he wasn't in that room in England. He was away there in Scotland, reliving that revival. Particularly at the time when he went in a meeting and there was a stillness, nothing was happening, and he said to a laddy, a sixteen-year-old high school boy, stand up and pray for us. And the laddy stood up, and the Scots people know the book of Psalms inside out almost. And the laddy stood up and he said in his disdainful way, ach, he said, what's the good of praying if we're not right with God? And then he began to quote that 24th Psalm again. Who shall ascend him to the hill of the Lord, he that hath clean hands and a pure heart? And he said he prayed, and then he pointed like that and said, devil, get out of this area and don't come back. Get out of this area. I claim it in the name of the Father, Son, the Holy Ghost. I plead the promises. I plead the blood. I say go. Do you know the moment he said that, the Holy Spirit dropped at the other end of town? People stopped smoking and dancing and fooling and sinning, and the revival broke. There were maybe fifty men there with their clerical collars on, some of the best preachers in Scotland with their degrees. He didn't say, hey, Dr. so-and-so, will you pray? Bishop so-and-so. He got a boy, a teenager, and that boy had so lived with God and prayed with God. He'd already learned to pray hours a day, that the glory of God fill the place. The great old lady in the story there, of course, was one of the smiths. The Miss Smith was 84. Her sister was younger. She was 82. And they sent a letter to Duncan Campbell. God wants you in this area. So he gets the letter, reads it, very sorry, writes back, I have a full engagement for this year. So when the letter got back, his reply got back, the postman brought it, and the younger lady, 82, that could see, she says, ah, there's a letter here from Brother Duncan Campbell. And the blind lady, 84, said, well, that's good. She said, but wait a minute. He cannot come. He cannot come to this place. She said, my dear, that's what he says. And so he went. Those two women had prayed for years until they were 82 and 84 years of age. I will not let thee go unless thou bless me. I don't take any notice of circumstances. I don't care where the dead are. But dear God, what's better than raising the dead? And we've millions of people in America that are not saved, they're religious, they're good, they're kind, they're moral, they support missions, they're going to hell themselves. But you see, once we get hungry, and we say, my daddy's not going to die unsaved, my sister's not going to die unsaved, my children are not going to die unsaved, something will happen in us and something will happen in them. So Duncan, the old lady, sent him one day. She says, laddie, as she called him, laddie, get on your bike. He had an old broken down, about one and a half horsepower. It'd take one and a half horses to push it nearly. Great big old motorcycle. He got on it, put his scarf around his neck. He goes up the hill and doing the grey and so forth. And he saw a girl at the side of the road. And she had an elbow and knees, and she had a nice plaid skirt, and she was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. So he turned off the gas, put the bike at the side of the road and went back to her. And he said, hey lassie, she didn't look up, she sobbed. And he said, lassie, she didn't look up. And finally he just touched her, you know, she seemed to be almost sleeping. He said, lassie, what's the problem? And with the long drawn out, oh, that they use in Scotland, don't say God, they say God. She said, mister, you can't help me. Only God can help me. So he began to rejoice. Oh, this is prevenient grace. This is God working in her before I get here. He said, well, how could God help you? She'd never seen him in her life, and he'd never seen her. She said, mister, you cannot help me. She said, over the mountains, she said, over the mountains, there's a man by the name of Duncan Campbell. And God has been saving people. And I want Duncan Campbell to come down here to the village. My father is lost, my brother is lost, and my uncle is lost. And I want God to come. And I've been praying that Duncan Campbell will change his program and come to our little village. And he said, you've been praying. Who's we? Oh, me and Jenny. How old are you? Seventeen. How old is Jenny? Sixteen. How long did you pray? She said, we prayed the whole night through. Two girls prayed all night? She said, yes. My daddy's deeing. My brother's deeing. My uncle's deeing. You see, she got the hang of the thing. They weren't just lost. They were dying without God, without hope. They're going to fall forever and ever and never reach the bottom. They're going to burn forever and never be consumed. We don't preach about hell anymore. It's not fashionable. But God hasn't changed it. I'll tell you what. Men have changed their opinion about God, but God hasn't changed His opinion about men. He doesn't have to repair the system of redemption. It's already complete. Once in the end of the age, Jesus appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. Anyhow, this girl wept. And Duncan said, I stood there so embarrassed. He said, I pulled my scarf down and said, lastly, look. And he pulled his scarf down. Look. And he had this clerical collar. He said, look, I am Duncan Campbell. And all she did, she put her hand up, began to weep. She said, oh, you're a... And remember, there's no audience there. All she said was, oh, you're a covenant-keeping God. You're a covenant-keeping God. So Duncan went down to the village and he preached. Her uncle got saved. Her father got saved. And the two brothers got saved all in the time that he was down in that little place. But you see, he brought them to birth. This woman had done the traveling. And she didn't understand why other people could just not be moved. She lived in the realm. It wasn't emotion. It's one thing to have tears, emotional tears. You see, when you're deeply distressed, in grief, the safety valve is you weep. Well, when you're happy, you say, we went to so-and-so. Boy, we laughed. We laughed till we cried. What are you crying for? People cry at weddings. Well, do you wonder? A man losing his life. Sure, we laugh. And there are times when the tears come. But there's a very great difference I learned 60 years ago, almost 70 years ago, by that book from E.M. Bounds. Remember, he said, you may climb up to a glacier on top of a mountain. That frozen river may move only four or five feet in six months. But he said, if you step onto it, it has about six inches of slush. It has a surface of slush. But beneath it, you may have 20 or 30 feet of ice. There's a surface slush. The other day when I was praying, I got something that really staggered me. I've been in meetings of brokenness. Our Friday night meeting in the last year, we were there. We had it 10 years. Particularly, there were three men. One a Quaker, one a full-blooded Indian, another a businessman in town. And whenever those men prayed, they wouldn't pray more than four or five minutes before they begin to stammer and pray in tears and brokenness. And it was awesome. As far as I'm concerned, it was awesome anyhow. And the other day as I thought about this, you see, we've discovered by many reasons now, preaching is more than flaming oratory or if you like, rhetoric and surface tears. It's one thing to get… I can get moved on a platform and preach maybe and some of the things stir my heart like things I say to you this morning. But that doesn't mean I have a broken heart necessarily. But you know what? The Swami says, store my tears in my bottle. I believe a cup full of tears in grief when I have a broken heart over a lost world. A cup of tears at the judgment seat will be worth an ocean of emotional tears which are just stirred up on a platform. As I was saying a minute ago, I don't know if I went through with it, I can imagine Timothy being in some periods of prayer with the Apostle, particularly when he says, I could wish myself a curse. Here's a man, he's given us 14 epistles if you think of Hebrews. He's been in weariness, in fastings, in painfulness, in perils of the deep, in perils of dangers. He could have written seven, eight books on perils. He didn't do that. He summed it all up in perils. And yet that is what breaks his heart. He sees this nation that once was holiness unto the Lord, now it's forgotten God, it's lost its glory. And this man is restless until the Spirit of God comes again and moves over his people. And behind every revival in history somewhere there's been praying people, broken people. Father Nash and Father Cleary, they went to hundreds of meetings. When we went to Bolton, just outside of Manchester in 1932, we had a half night of prayer every week in that tent. An old lady came to me one morning and she said, that prayer meeting last night was awesome. She said, it so reminded me of Finney. I said, of who? She said, I was in this town when Mr. Finney came so many years ago, eighteen-something, maybe now, from where we are about this time, a hundred years back. And she said, they brought Father Nash and Father Cleary with him. They were going down the street. They stopped. They saw the steps up to a little house. The houses were all in a row. And on the side of the steps there were some bars. And they knocked on the door and said to the lady, Do you have a basement here? We'd like to rent it. She said, I don't have a basement. I have a cellar. Do you know those two praying men rented that cellar for twenty-five cents a week? No creature comforts, just a mattress to lay on. They prayed twelve hours a day each. I said, it's almost, it's facetious, it's not true. If I could find a Father Nash and Father Cleary. I never took a song leader with me anywhere. I took a praying man. I took John, I took, what was the Irishman that went with me? Tom Hare. Thank you, dear. Martha didn't know. Tom Hare. Do you know that the five nights previous to when we jumped out of that burning hotel, that man hadn't been to bed one night? For five nights? Well, Father Nash and Father Cleary would go actually under the platform or behind the platform. And like Aaron and Hur, they held up the arms of Finney. And he knew that his strength was coming from God. And they, as it were, had one hand on the throne and the other on the pulpit. And they prayed the life. They knew sometimes when he kind of staggered a bit, and they would pray for clarity for his mind. Or when he was weak, they would pray strength and be an insurge of power. As though somehow a mantle fell over him and he'd have an ounce of authority. Finney never made altar calls. John the Baptist never made altar calls. Altar calls are not scriptural. Evangelists make altar calls. Revival, people make altar calls. They say, what shall we do? What shall we do? What shall we do? They can't stay in a state of vexing God. They can't stay in a state of conflict with God. And so they want deliverance. And so they come down the aisle. They don't have to be beckoned. You don't have to squeeze them and there's room at the cross for you and all the rest of it. Forget it. I'll tell you, I guess most of us have never been in a Holy Ghost meeting. We've been in good meetings, nice meetings, meetings where we were happy and clapped. But how often have you seen a wave of grief come over a congregation? How often have you heard people say, I can't go home, I'm so burdened. I'll miss a meal, I'll miss some meals. I want to meet the issue right ahead. Anyhow, this woman prayed. What did she pray for? You say a child. Well, I say she didn't. What did she pray for? She prayed for a man child. What did she get? Well, she didn't get a girl. What did she get? She got a boy. She didn't. What did she get? She got a prophet. You see, there are times when you pray and you get out of a situation and God isn't concerned that much about you. He's thinking about His glory. He's thinking about His plan of the road. So what happens? She goes back to the priest one day and says, for this child I prayed. Boy, isn't that exciting? I wonder what the old boy felt like. You know, he said she's drunk. Do you know what? The church never does anything when it's sober. The trouble with the church is we're sober. What did they say about those men that staggered out of the upper room? They've been having a haircut? No, they said these men are drunk. That's so unreasonable. The first day of the war, I was preaching in Scotland at the headquarters of the Church of Nazarene. The first, not First World War, though I remember that, but in the, what was it about? September 1939. And before we went in the church, the announcement came blaring down the street. The police came. Everybody must pick up a gas mask. Get off the streets as quickly as you can. So, J.B. Metragon was the head of the church there and he said, I'm going in this place. I'm going to get a gas mask. So, I was teasing him. I said, you're a Scotsman. You're going in because they're free. So, he said, well, when I come out of the light, I won't be able to say, you stand up against this lamppost. So, I stood against the lamppost. Streetcars came. One stopped. A man got off the car and his rubber legs, you know, he was swaying one way and the other. And then he tripped up and he threw his arms around the lamppost and me as well. And he says, Ach, who are you? So, I gave him my name. Where are you from? England. Ach, he says, Englishmen are no good. I said, good. And he pulled his sleeves up. He says, can you fight? I said, no, I can't fight. Well, he said, can you sing? I said, no. So, he sang, Maxwell, Tom, Braes, and Bonnie, wherever he falls. The Jew, he said, it was the Jew, but anyhow. So, the first thing he did, he talked with me. The second thing, he went to fight with me. And then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a stack of money and offered it to me. Now, you know a Scotsman is drunk when he does that. But I began to talk with him. That was nine o'clock at night. If I had met that man at nine o'clock in the morning, he wouldn't have spoken to me. He might have said, hi. But you see, when another spirit invades him, he's prepared to talk, he's prepared to fight, he's prepared to be generous, he's prepared to look ridiculous. And you know, when the Spirit of God intoxicates us, was it Spinoza who talked about a God-intoxicated man? That's what we want. We want people who are drunk with the will of God. We want people that God can share His burdens with. Oh, roll your burden on the Lord. Who does He roll His burdens on? Well, He says, my yoke is easy, my burden is light. And one favor of God is not that you're getting more money than you got. Maybe you're such a child, you're so retarded, He won't trust you. Get to the place where you say, Lord, what's Your burden for me in life? I don't want to get up there. I said to a man the other day, he comes to see me very often. He's getting a bit of success. I said, listen, you tell me I have a burden for the Oklahoma Indians. Get back and pour your life out. I don't want to see you in eternity and you walk around and say, you see that man, he's wearing my crown. What does the Scripture say? Hold fast to that which thou hast, that the devil doesn't take your crown. No, that no man take it. If God has given you a job and you don't do it, in eternity you'll see a man wearing a crown for ever and ever that you should have had. A hundred million years from now you'll be grieving over it. Oh, it isn't a spectacular thing. Sure it isn't. It isn't spectacular for the woman to have a baby and cancel all her engagements and be put out of order for a while. And when the spirit of travail comes, and do you know what, I'm praying that that will come on this church. Do you know what I felt last night talking with Mike afterwards? I felt God wants to get a womb here in, where are we, Kansas? He wants a womb to be formed in which he can birth something that won't effect just Kansas. What did this woman pray for? She prayed for what? A child? She got a man child? No, she got a prophet. Samuel. Can you imagine she goes year after year and she can't take him home? Oh, he's going a bit much. She talks to her husband and says, isn't he going tall? Isn't he handsome? And year after year she has to go and see that sacrifice that she's made. She can't take him home and dress him and feed him and so forth. He's given to the Lord. She can't take him back. What did Rachel pray? Give me children or I die. So God gave her a son. No, he didn't. What did he give her? He gave her a prime minister by the name of Joseph. One of the wisest men. One of the most perfect characters. Sure, he answered her prayer. But he answered his prayer. He answered his problem twenty years up the road. You know, you should be, if you're young parents, and some of you are, you should be so ambitious. Spiritually say, Lord, I don't want to raise normal children. I want to raise abnormal children. Abnormal in spirituality. Abnormal in their love for prayer. Abnormal for the Word of God. I told you yesterday, two or three people taught me about it. The cooks that live not far from us have six children. He works in the oil fields. He gets up at four o'clock every morning with his wife. He and his wife are one hour together until five. And then they awaken the children and they pray and talk with the children until six. They put the children back to bed for a while because they're homeschooled. And those children are absolutely awesome. As I said, the boy, twelve-year-old, has already memorized seventeen chapters of the book of Proverbs. The boy at nine or ten, he's in the fifteenth chapter. They've memorized the Lord's Prayer. They've memorized the Sermon on the Mount. They've memorized 1 Corinthians 13. These little boys are almost walking Bibles. Well, you know, that's what Mrs. Wesley did. She didn't just pray for them, she took them on one side. The whole family, after supper, then she pushed a lot of them off and took one each night and dealt with them, taught with them, explained the Word of God. And they grew up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. What does the psalmist say? Thy word are thy head in my heart. For what? To memorize that I might not sin against thee. The Word of God is quick and powerful. If your child comes into temptation and he has the Word of God in him, right there the Lord can spark that word and bring it to his remembrance. And it puts a fear in him against sin and all the things which would corrupt him. Well, here we are. This woman prays for one thing. I think the secret of the Apostle Paul's life is this one thing I do. He didn't get diverted into anything else. And she just prays, Listen to thy handmaid, listen to thy servant, here I am. I'm in this state of distress, deliver me. Well, don't you think they had a wonderful time of joy when that child came along and she took him to the temple and dedicated him? And he was there all the days of their life. Don't you think she was amazed when one day Eli took her on one side and said, I want to tell you something. I woke up in the night and your little fellow came into my bedroom and he said, I've been hearing a voice speak to me. And he said, the little fellow said, Eli, why do you call me? And he said, I didn't call you. And he came back a second time and said that. And I said to them, Well, it isn't me, it's God that's speaking to you. You just say, I speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. You know, God's going to bypass a lot of our smart theologians. They've had the Bible in their hands. They've chewed it over. They've decided what they believe about it and what they reject. God Almighty is going to reject them, leave them high and dry. God's going to raise up young men. Some of them may be driving a bus in Alabama this morning. Some guy working. It doesn't matter what he is. God isn't concerned about the size of your head. It's the size of your heart that matters. And when we get that passionate love for him, the love like, what was it, George Macdonald wrote, O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee. He was a brilliant scholar and he was going to marry a beautiful lady and then he was stricken with blindness and she quit on him. Then he wrote that hymn, O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee. And the last verse, O cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee. I lay in dust, life's glory dead. And from the ground there blossoms red life that shall endless be. But he wrote another hymn, I think is greater. Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free. You know the trouble is you're free to do as you like and not a slave. I want to be a servant of the... He doesn't want servants. He wants slaves. A servant starts at a certain time and finishes a certain time. A slave doesn't. A servant may have some choice. A slave doesn't. He's in the dominion of a master. Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free. Force me to render up my sword and I shall conquer thee. I think in life's alarms when by myself I stand. Imprison me within thine arms and strong shall be my hand. My heart is weak and poor until it must find. It has no spring of action, sure. It trembles with the wind. I only stand, I only stand, OK. I only stand unbent amid the clashing strife when on thy bosom I have lent and found in thee my life. You know, God doesn't hand treasures out in a very easy way. I haven't got a message on that. I've been thinking of it that time and again it says of the Lord Jesus, the heavens opened. And then later you have the heavens opened in the case of Stephen. But when did the heavens open? When his bones were being crushed. When he was being put to death. On the Isle of Patmos, John saw the heavens open. Well, we want the heavens opening in a conference. When you open your Bible, you know, when you're sitting by yourself in a nice easy chair with your feet up and free toes on one hand and coats on the other. Really roughing it. That's not how God works. He works when we get in the desert. He works when we get alone. He works when we wait to be still and hear His voice. You know, I'm amazed right now at the number of men in the last six months, particularly that come to our house from all over the country that are meeting at four and five in the morning in twos and threes. The church isn't waiting with them. And they're discovering great things as they wait on God. And they've got to go. There's an undercurrent. Shall I put it this way? There's a remnant of God's people but there's a remnant inside the remnant. There are some that have said goodbye to the world, the flesh and the devil. The TV has no more dominion over them. They decide to walk with God. And as soon as you do, you get opposition from spiritual people. They begin to criticize you. You're a holy Jew or something. Who cares? Do you think this woman cared about all the criticism she'd had for years? When she went to the temple and someone says, did you hear the news? Because, you know, TVs and phones and all that junk in those days. Hey, did you hear the news? I can't wait to get to the temple. You know that little beautiful young woman, Hannah? Boy, for the last ten years we thought she might have a child. I hear she's going to present a child at the temple. Don't you think it brought ecstasy? Do you know what entertainment is? Entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy. And the more joy you have in the Lord, the less entertainment you need. The greatest thrill I know is at the end of a day on Sunday, people kneel at the altar. The church I went to, if you went to the altar to get saved, people would deal with you maybe half an hour or an hour. And then you got up and turned around to the congregation and say, well, you knew you'd pass from death unto life. You'd receive the witness of the Spirit. You'd receive the joy of the Lord. And once you get that, I'll tell you, there's nothing more exciting. You don't need concepts in the church. You don't need all the show stuff. We come on this, God makes the house of God the place where He manufactures saints. And as I said earlier, He starts with the raw material, the base material, and makes them what? Princes unto God. Well, now, let me see. You know that clarky out there, crazy? He goes twice as fast as any other clarket I've ever seen. It's a half hour slow. Now, what do you mean? I think a fellow's in trouble when he doesn't know whether he's coming or going. Well, it's a little thing, anyhow. I was in a college where there were 30 students, all men. And one day a preacher wrote, and he said, I'm dissolving my library. If you send 15 cents, I'll give you three books, make your choice, and I'll mail them to you. So, boy, I grabbed my pen. Boy, did I write. Put my 15 cents, it's all I had in the world anyhow. And so I wrote, and I said, I'd like three books. I'd like one on holiness, one on prophecy, and one on prayer. And when I opened the parcel, there at the top was a book in flaming red, and I remember it was ribbed, and in big gold letters it said, Power Through Prayer. So I got it, and in the school I was at, when we came down from our bedrooms in the morning, we weren't allowed to go up in the afternoon. Or you could go for half an hour, and then you couldn't go back until suppertime, and then curfew was at ten anyhow. So in the noontime, my boys went out. You couldn't have any sports there, that was all out, because people get too sports minded. But they'd tie a bundle of paper and, you know, kick it around. And I took this book upstairs, nailed to the side of my bed, and I remember distinctly as though it were now, I put the book down, I said, Lord, I'm going to go right through this book. And you know I didn't. The book went right through me. And I began to read about bounds and prayer, and I couldn't believe the things I read. Bounds himself was a great man of prayer. I did a month's meeting for Charles Stanley in that great church in Atlanta a few, four or five years ago. I said to him one day, Charles, let's go out into the country. E.M. Bounds is buried not far from here in Washington. We went into this lovely village, and here was a great big house, and somebody had told us what the house was like. So we went in and talked with E.M. Bounds' daughter, an old, old lady, and his grandson. And I looked at those rugs they were worn where he used to kneel, and it was hallowed ground as far as I'm concerned. But do you know nobody in the town even knew it was buried there? We went to those graves out there, and it was snowing like it is now, and I just felt a sense of awe that here the remains of a man that moved his generation, and a man that still lives in the hearts of many people because he wrote about six books on prayer. I put them all together in a book called The Treasury of Prayer, which is very handy and very good because I didn't write it. I only compiled it. But you see, these men again, they moved into a realm that not many people know. You know, some people want to come to a prayer meeting, say their peace, and off they go. But you know, once a woman has that baby, she stays with it till it's born. She can't say, well, I forgot. I have to go to a wedding in three months. I'll leave this burden on one side till I come back. She has to stay with it and carry it with all the pain and everything else that's involved. And very often, the devil cheats us. We get weary in well-doing. Somebody says, you've prayed so long. So what? So what? The best places that I know of in China today where there's revival were there. It's where Watchman Yu used to work and a man, I think, greater than Watchman Yu, John Sung, the greatest student that ever came to America. He could hardly speak English when he got here. He learned English. He took his Ph.D. in German. He learned German. He got his B.A. degree, his Master's degree, and he got a doctorate, all in about three and a half years. You know what happened? One night, when he was in the Union Theological Seminary, his roommate said to him, you know, John, you look far more like a preacher than a scientist. Now, how do you have to look like a preacher? Well, just look at Mike. Rich and prosperous. As this man spoke with him, suddenly the spirit came on John Sung. His daddy was a Methodist preacher way there in China. And the Spirit of God came and there, right there, he knelt at the side of his bed and cried to God. And just like that, he got released. The witness of the Spirit came. Like the man in Acts 3, he jumped through the door and he ran down the corridor leaping and praising God in a theological seminary. So what did they do? They very kindly had him certified the next day. It was insane. Isn't that nice? Oh, don't do that. Treat me. I'm a child of God. Be very careful. Keep your gloves on. Don't say anything harsh. I'm easily offended. I'm easily upset. Don't worry, friend. I'll give you a heart of steel before long to face the world of flesh and the devil. Okay. So they took him to an insane asylum. He goes in. A guy comes up to him and says, Hey, I haven't seen you. I'm Napoleon. A man comes up and says, He's a liar. He's not Napoleon. He's Julius. He's not Napoleon. I'm Napoleon. He's Julius Caesar. Boy, it's nice to have friends like that, isn't it? So what did he do? He said, Lord, how long do I stay here? The Lord said, Listen, I can get you out of here. That's no problem. But if you stay here, I'll teach you my word. Do you know what he did? He read the word of God through and without any tuition, he learned how to analyze a chapter of the Bible eight different ways. That was his Bible school. Dear God, some of us need to go to an asylum. You could go to church for eight years and not gain that. But there he was there he was, there he waited, just obedient to God. Oh, all the crazy things went on anyhow. He had his degrees and what not. He's going out to China. And before he, when he got in the China Sea, he had a bunch of keys, gold keys and diplomas. And he went to the edge of the boat and he dropped them all over the edge of the boat. He just kept a certificate he had for his doctor to show his daddy that he hadn't wasted his daddy's money. And when he got back home a neighbor came in and said, Well, we're so glad to see you, John. Dr. John, you're a credit to our district. We brought your wife. He'd never seen the girl before. Boy, that's tough when somebody else chooses a wife for you. Of course, you can always blame them after, but that doesn't help to.