This sermon emphasizes the transformative power of surrendering everything to Jesus, as seen through a powerful testimony of a man who encountered God's presence and was convicted to surrender his self completely. It highlights the importance of purity in speech and the impact of our words on others. The sermon also touches on the necessity of self-examination, repentance, and restitution when God reveals sin in our lives, leading to a deeper walk with Him and a revival of spiritual fervor.

And I had my song reader share. I had spoken about 15 minutes when a pastor was sitting over to my left. He began to weep, and was weeping out louder and louder and louder, so I asked my song reader to take him into another room, which he did. They were gone a half an hour, and the whole time we could hear them weeping, wherever they were. They came back in, and so I stopped preaching, and I said, my brother, have you something to share? And he said, I was sitting there, I heard Howard's testimony, and Brother Billy was speaking, and here's what he said. Jesus came and stood in front of me, and he demanded that I resign and surrender everything to him. And he said, brethren, I didn't see him with my eyes, but he was there. I knew he was there. I've never had this kind of a meeting with God before, and God had just broken in. I don't know how to explain that. I suppose I could go on for a long while. One other thing might be of help to you. There's a verse in the Bible that says, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying. That is, be thinking of other people all the time you're talking. Don't say anything that's going to hurt anybody. No corrupt communication. Well, I had a man in one of my churches, and he was a deacon, but I didn't know that as a high school teacher he sometimes told dirty stories in the classroom. I didn't know that. If I had known that, he wouldn't have been a deacon. Well, I spoke at Three Hills Bible School in Canada one time, and somebody taped my messages and mailed them to this very person who is now a university professor. He told me later on, I was holding meetings in the area where he lived, and he came to see me one Saturday, and he told me what happened. He said, I was working in the garden, and just like a voice said, go and see what your wife is doing, sir, right in the house. Guess what she was doing? Why, she was listening to one of those five tapes. Guess which tape she was listening to? She was listening to the tape where I told the story about the high school teacher told a dirty story in the classroom. Guess where the tape was when he walked through the door? I just started to tell the story about the high school teacher told a dirty story in the classroom. So he said to me, Brother Bill, I don't know if you're talking about me. And since he didn't ask me, I didn't have to tell him, you know. He said, when you told that story, God flung not an arrow, but a spear into my soul. And he said, in 25 years, a high school teacher, a university professor, I've never been a blessing in and of to anybody, never led a soul to Christ. God has never used me. Nobody ever came to me. They knew I was an evangelical professor. Nobody ever came to me to talk about God or ask me questions. And so he said, my wife and I, ever since that incident where you preached that tape thing, my wife and I have been praying the prayer, and we've dealt with every sin God has shown us. But he said, that's not the problem. He said, what do you do with this big rotten self? You see, people don't understand what self is the factor that manufactures the sin. We keep dealing with a finished product. God wants to bomb the factory. And he does that through the cross. When I explained this to this man, and he began to pray, university professor on his face before God, crying to God, and dear people, his prayer, it went like this, dear God, only he was shouting, God, he said, kill me, kill me dead, kill me dead, this rotten self. Nail me on that cross. Kill me dead, I said. And he kept telling God, I want to be dead. I want to be dead to myself. Absolutely dead. Kill me, God, now. And this went on for about five minutes. And then I heard him say, oh, with peace, with peace. And he was flooded with the spirit of God. The very next Sunday, he preached in the Baptist church. He often preached as a layperson. In a revival book, when he was halfway through his message, a lady got up and she said, can you stop preaching? God has spoken in my heart. I must come to the altar and pray. And so he had a good sense to give an invitation. And people came and knelt at the front of the church in a revival book. And he told me this. He said, Bill, more happened in that one meeting than has happened in 25 years. He said, I know now why nobody ever came to me. I had nothing to tell them. I wasn't walking with God. The spirit couldn't use me. He kept a record, and he told me probably 18 months later that he personally prayed with 400 people in that period of time. He was out as a university professor holding revival meetings. Can you believe? And God's blessing him. He's retiring now, living in western Canada. Anyway, these are some of the things that God did, and I don't want to worry the congregation. What happened to our church afterwards? Well, the church, they started two churches in years following. They built a building seating 800. I think they could pack 1,000 in. They got a pastor in there named Wes Long, who met God in revival in Alberta in those revival days. And God used Wes in a wonderful way, and the church was built up. They've been doing very, very well. And we thank God. We thank God for that. But to God be the glory. We give him all the glory and the praise for what he did. There's 1,000 things he did we haven't mentioned. We haven't time for that. But maybe if you're watching this tape, when you get home, or perhaps you can do it where you are in the church, ask God to search your heart. Show your sin, but don't ask God to do that if you're not willing to do something about it. There may be some restitution you have to make. I had to make some restitution with a brother of mine and with some other people. It's hard to do that, to say, I was wrong. I sinned against you. Please forgive me. But you have to do that. Follow through whatever God may ask you to do. You may have to go to your boss and confess to him that you stole some of the petty money in the drawer in the office. People have had to do that we know about. Well, go and do that. You might lose your job. So what? If you honor God, God said, I'll honor you. Those that honor me, I will honor. Those that despise me will be likely esteemed, it says in 1 Samuel. And so let him search you. Take time. Not three minutes won't do it. We sometimes sing, have a little talk with Jesus. That isn't how it works. You've got to get alone with God, and you might have to spend a night in prayer, even, alone with God. J.B. Earle, that man, at one point in his evangelistic career, he was getting absolutely nowhere. He preached for ten weeks, and not a soul got saved. So one night he said, God, what's wrong with these people? And God said, there's nothing wrong with the people. There's something wrong with you. And he said, I said to God, just a minute, God. I often weep when I preach, and God suggests it's water off an iceberg. And so he tells how he, two o'clock in the morning, he got in the safe before God and stayed there. And after some hours, apparently, of prayer and supplication, he said, I was filled with the love of Christ. And before he died, 150,000 people found Christ as their Savior. So it's not just something that's happening today. It's something that's happened in the past. Finney testified of that. Moody testified of that. Torrey testified of that. The fact that there was a time in their life when they met with God and were filled with the Spirit of God in a deep and powerful way. All right. That's all. God bless you all. Thank you. Can I ask you to mention, too, just the things that you were doing in the church before the revival came, and you realized that, you know, this isn't going to work. And you brought in the fellows to speak initially in Saskatoon and, you know, regular meetings. Oh, yeah, we did that, too. I didn't say anything about that. This particular time, I did say something about the people not responding well. Yeah, like you had gone for a number of years and you finally promised God, I won't ever do that again. Yeah. It's pretty hard to dub that in now, though, isn't it? Well, I can do that. Can you? Yeah, I can put it in. You can dub it in.