In this sermon, the speaker shares his experience of organizing a group to go out and talk to people about God. Despite having a good enrollment and consistent attendance for eight weeks, only two people showed up when it was time to hit the trail. One of these individuals, named Arnie, had a troubled past and began pouring out his bottled-up wickedness during a prayer session. The speaker also discusses his efforts to encourage the church congregation to engage in cold calling and soul winning, but unfortunately, no one showed up or seemed interested. The main theme of the sermon is the need for believers to step out in faith and actively share the message of God's love with others.

It's good to be here. I want to begin by asking an embarrassing question. How many of you took some time, somewhere this morning, to pray for this meeting? Let me see your hands. Well, I guess probably less than half, so if the rest of you don't get anything out of it, you know who to blame. You know, just a word here. No matter what's going on, when you're going to the house of God for a meeting, make time to pray. Make time to pray. Paul wrote, 1 Timothy 2.8, I will therefore let men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting. And he meant men in a specific sense, because the next verse speaks about the women being adorned in modest clothing. So again, I will therefore let men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting. In 1962, I moved from Winnipeg to Saskatoon, 500 miles west of Winnipeg. Winnipeg is about 400 miles northwest of Minneapolis. And I became pastor of a Baptist church, 175 members, which in Canada is about an average size. We are only in Canada about 7% evangelical. Here in this state, you are 30% evangelical, so you have to keep that in mind when you're thinking in terms of what happened in Canada. I had a good church. I thought we had some university people in the church, a lot of university students, Bible school graduates, quite a few that had graduated from Bible college. And so when I got there, I thought, boy, if we can just get this church on the road. You know, they love God to a point, and they serve God with some reserve, and they praise God with a lot of restraint. But they were an average church, you know, and after I had been there long enough to get to know the people, I divided the church into five groups and published this on the bulletin board with a log at the side and explained to the people that all of you are on one of these teams, so figure out, check the board, figure out which team you are on. Once in five weeks, your team will be on deck to do some cold calling. But I left the door open and said, you may not feel able to do this, or perhaps spiritually or something, you know, so feel free to stay home and pray. So all of them stayed home and prayed. I mean, nobody showed up, and I don't think they were even praying at home, you know, they were just at home. Then it dawned on me, well, the problem really was they didn't know how to do it, and so I had classes in how to do it on soul winning, and we had a good enrollment, and people hardly ever missed a night for eight weeks. Then I announced to the group, I said, now next Monday will be the time that we're going to hit the trail and ring doorbells, talk to people about God, but again I left the door open. If you feel you're not quite ready to do this, you stay home and pray. So guess what happened? Well two people showed up, both of them shaking from head to foot, you know. Then it dawned on me what the problem was, they didn't have a heart to do it, and I started praying for revival. Five years before the revival in 1971, I got our deacons to meet. We'd meet every Saturday night at nine o'clock for an hour or so to pray for revival. We had ten deacons in the church. We averaged about seven in attendance at those Saturday night prayer meetings, and the first night we did this, the next day was Sunday, and Sunday morning in the church, with a powerful moving of the Spirit of God, people were leaving the congregation during the service and trying to find a room where they could be alone to pray. It was as if God was saying, you're on the right track, stay with it. That was five years before the revival. On another occasion at a deacon's meeting, I think all I said was something like this, we're going to have a time of prayer, and I just said, Brother, you know it's not much use to pray if we have unconfessed sin in our hearts. And God just broke in on the brethren and was weeping and crying and making things right with each other. One deacon grabbed another, dragged them out of the room into another room where they made things right. One deacon came, put his head on my shoulder and wept for a while. He'd been criticizing me, wanted to be forgiven, and I didn't know what to do with it. But God was working, we were praying. I used to tell the people about the prayer meeting, miss Sunday morning if you have to, miss Sunday evening if you must, but don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're dead. And you know, people took it to heart. The prayer meeting went from 25 to 35 to 55 to 65 to 70, kept climbing. We started children's prayer meetings, and we had 30 to 40 children, so we had to divide that into two groups, and we had a leader that was an adult with each of these groups, and their job was to train the kids to run their own programs, and the kids did a marvelous job. They loved it. This meant, of course, more people could attend the adult prayer meeting, and they did. We'd get up to 100, get up to 125. We'd get up as high as 170 in the prayer meeting. Now remember, we only had 175 members in the church, and I think that's a pretty good record. We put up a prayer wheel thing on the broken board with pie-shaped wedges, 15-minute wedges, slots of time. And we asked people, if you'll pray for a Bible once a day for 15 minutes, just sign your name in the time slot you'd like to have. So pretty soon we had the whole 24 hours taken up, and sometimes two or three names in one slot, which meant, of course, that any time of the day or night, it was people from our church on their knees calling on God. Now Finney the evangelist said something about prayer that's very interesting. He said, if I ever lose what he called the spirit of prayer, I can't converse with people privately or publicly with any effect whatever. And he based it on a verse in Zechariah, which speaks about God pouring upon His people the spirit of grace and supplication. One translation says the spirit of grace to supplicate. We've lost that somehow. But you know, when God saw we meant business in the area of prayer, He began to give us as a church the spirit of prayer. And people are telling me, you know, last night I was to pray for 15 minutes. Pastor, I prayed for 45 minutes. I lost all thought of time. And this is very common. More and more we're hearing from people, they're having such a wonderful time just praying, just calling on God. We started cottage prayer meetings. They never really took off. But everything else we did in the area of prayer did. We used to have, like every Sunday night, for about a year or a year and a half before the crusade, every Sunday evening we ended with a half hour of prayer. And I would invite the people to stay. We'd have 30, 40, 50 people stay, and I'd let them know it'll be half an hour, we're going to do nothing but pray for revival in the congregation. Then Saturday nights we used to go into the church and kneel at the end of every pew and pray for God to bless the people who sat in that pew the following day. And I used to ask the people, look, when you ask a blessing over the food, why not take a few minutes longer and pray for revival in the congregation? And people started doing that. So we prepared as best we knew how. We did very little else but pray. I mean, by way of preparation. Two years before the revival, I was talking to a missionary we had in the congregation, and I told him how I felt about the church and what we were trying to do. He said, why don't you invite Ralph and Lucita? I said, who are they? So he told me, I contacted them, they couldn't come for two years, their schedule was full, and so we had it arranged. And they began with us on a Wednesday night, October the 13th. Not Friday the 13th, that wouldn't make any difference to me, shouldn't make any difference to any Christian, but anyway, it was October the 13th. And we had, I guess, the first night about 150 people, four or five people responded, and the revival was on. By Saturday night, it was hopeless to move in the church. And the Sunday night was worse. And so we contacted a neighboring Anglican church, and they opened their facilities to us as long as they didn't have evening services at all. So we stayed Monday night, I think, well, it would seat about 600, and we were packed out Monday night. And Tuesday night was even worse. We had to ask all the young people to come forward and sit on the platform on the floor to make room for people. And so we were only there, I think, two nights. Then the Alliance Church, and they were just in the throes of a missionary conference, which to them is something you never wash out for anything. But they sensed that God was doing something unusual, so they opened their church, they washed out their missionary conference, and they opened their church to us. You could probably pack a thousand people into the Alliance Church. We were there, I forget now how many nights, several nights. It was too small. And we moved to the largest church building in the city. It would seat 1,600, I think, or 1,800. And I remember one of the first services we had, we were packed to the doors, and the caretaker came, and he was very excited, and he lost his cool, and he even got swearing. He told us, you can't, you've got to get rid of some of these people. You can't have all these people in the building. You've got to do something about it, or the fire marshal will close this place down. So I asked my people to go down to the Alliance Church, and I had a meeting with them down there, and Ralph Luke carried on, but when my people went out, as many more people came in off the street who were trying to get in, so they had the same problem. But you know what happened? The caretaker got saved about a week later, you know? Well, then he said, hang them on the lights, you know, put them anywhere, see? So, you know, that was inevitable, considering what God was up to. Well, that building became too small. We started having double services in the building, an early service, a later service. Then Sunday evenings, we had to move to the Centennial Auditorium, which would seat, I think, about 2,200, and there we had to have double services. Instead of going as planned for a week and a half, we had to go for six or seven weeks altogether. And this included not just the services themselves, but afterglows, smaller meetings, where maybe 30, 40, 100, 200 people might gather in a circle of chairs and share and pray for one another and share their needs. And in those afterglows, there were hundreds of people who met God in a very, very powerful way. Backsliders were restored. There were people in my congregation, there was one gal in our church, she was a beautiful singer, a soloist. She sang at funerals, she sang at weddings, and during the crusade, she discovered she'd never been born again. And another lady in our congregation, who seemed to be a stalwart evangelical Christian, found Christ as her personal Savior. And a man who had been an assistant to me as a pastor several years before the revival, we asked him to go because there seemed to be something wrong, he just wasn't producing, he made a few friends in the congregation, and never seemed to be really doing what he was supposed to do. And so we simply asked him to go, and he went, and then he heard about the revival in Saskatoon, and he phoned me one night, he said, Brother Bill, last night in the prayer of God showed me, I've never been saved, could I come to Saskatoon, would you help me out? And I said, you come, I've got some preachers together, and we had a wonderful time. He got on his knees, you know, he started to pray, he burst into tears, and finally he hollered, he said, God's real! God's real! Dennis Johnson, his family found it very hard to believe because he had worked with this child, or this, they call it evangelism, something, I forget now, with the General Baptist Conference in the States and Canada, and he had led these groups, and he trained people in evangelism. But he said, I knew the language, but I never knew God. And my daughter Joanna, she'd been baptized, a member of the church, and she came to me during these meetings, and she said, you know, Daddy, I've never been saved. I said, what? You know, she used to go to school carrying her Bible on top of her school books and all this, and the principal of the school where she attended said, we're sure glad to have Joanna in our school. And I said, why? Oh, they said, if there's any hanky-panky going on in the school, she blows the lid off. She said, but Daddy, I've never known the Lord. She said, I've known the language, I know all about being born again, but I've never known Christ. And she accepted Christ, and today she has a master's degree in Christian counseling. She's employed by the church in Ontario. Her husband is a pastor in Ontario as well. So thank God for that, and many things of this kind were going on. Broken homes were restored. I remember one gal, her husband had left her with three kids, I think it was, and she was just an emotional wreck. She was seeing psychiatrists, and they were doing all they could for her, she was almost like a walking post, and she met God in those meetings, and a few days later her husband dropped in to see the kids and took one look at his wife, and he says, what happened to you? So she told him, and he started attending the meetings. And six or seven days later he got saved, and the home was restored. No teens began going out. Dr. J. Edman was asked at a gathering of pastors in Minneapolis after the revival, like he talked about the Korean revival and this revival and that revival, and so somebody said, what about the Canadian revival? Well, he said, I don't think it's a genuine revival because it never moved out of Saskatoon. Well, he didn't know about the teens that went out. We quit counting when 2,000 teens had gone out. We don't know how many teens went out, they're still going out. When he found out about this, he apologized publicly in Canada for what he had said before in Minneapolis. He was at the Regina Bible College in the Lyons School, and he tested the waters there. A friend of mine was in the meeting, I was not, and he asked how many of students or staff could say that their life was being profoundly affected by the Canadian revival, and this friend of mine said, as far as he could see, every hand on the place went up. And he said, Edwin Orr took a step backwards, and he cleared his throat and said something like this, well, I see I'll have to rethink some things. A team of 85 German-speaking people from Winnipeg, Canada, went to Germany at that time. There was Baptists, there were Mennonites, there were Pentecostals, they got together, forgot their differences, and they went as a group over to Germany, and were all over the country there sharing the message of revival and the gospel with people there. Dutch people from Canada went to Holland, and people were going from different parts of Canada, because Canada is a mix, much like the States is, we have people from all around the world. Winnipeg, where I live, is a city of 700,000, there are 50,000 Filipino people in Winnipeg and 8 evangelical Filipino churches, and they're having a great time. One of my granddaughters married a Filipino boy because one of my daughters is a missionary in the Philippines, and she married a Filipino boy who was a youth pastor in the Philippines, and he's in Winnipeg now, and he's working in one of the churches there as a youth pastor, one of the best sinners I've ever heard. We did one crusade together, and I'll tell you, heaven just came down. And I hope we can do some more in the future. What did it do? What did the revival do? In Saskatoon, Canada, there is a group called the Western Track Mission, and they have about 3,000 people who are signed up as track distributors. And track sales and distribution increased almost 300% in the first 12 months after the revival. That's one thing. The last denomination in Western Canada reported a 100% increase in souls saved in their churches in the 12 months after the revival. Now remember, teams were going out of the country. Ralph and I went from Saskatoon to Regina and further west, Alberta and British Columbia. I went east, and God was doing the same thing wherever we went it seemed. So there are very few evangelical churches that were not touched in some way or other. One of the Baptist groups in Western Canada reported that for the first time in their history, they went right over the top in their budget. They'd never done this before. They always had a healthy budget, and they'd aim at it and never hit it. And they went right over the top, past the budget that first 12 months after the revival in Saskatoon. Let me tell you about Gordon Bailey. Gordon was the deacon in my church, and he was the head of the ushers. And he was always there. He told me after the revival came, he said, you know, Pastor, I used to sit in church Sunday after Sunday in a cold sweat. I was so afraid you might call on me to lead in prayer. He said, Pastor, if you'd ever done that, I think I would have dropped dead. Well, during the revival, one Sunday morning in our church, he came to the front, stood by the communion table, and kind of laid his heart on the table, and he said, you know, people, for three years, I've been sitting in the back pew. The reason I sit in the back pew is because I don't like some of you people, and I used to sit there and shoot arrows of hatred at the backs of your heads. And God has dealt with me, and I want your forgiveness. I want to be right with God. So when he was through, I asked some of my men to take him into my office and pray with him, which they did. And Gordon went home. He told me later on what happened. He got his family together. He set out the chairs. I think he had four kids and his wife. So there's five. He's sitting here. And he said, I asked each one to forgive me for being such a poor Christian, such a poor daddy, such a poor husband. Oh, Pastor, he said, you know, it was the hardest thing I ever did in all my life. But you know what happened that night? He had a herd of Black Angus cattle, about 50 beasts, and he was working in the barn that night. And here's what he said. I've heard him say it. He'd been with me in crusades different times, and on his own much in crusades. And he said, I was working in the barn when suddenly God the Holy Spirit filled me from toe to toe. He started so many. He won 35 people to Christ in the next nine months. He got a meeting going on an Indian reserve, a Sioux Indian village not far from where he lived on the farm, and about 35 Indians found Christ. Then he began getting invitations. I know one year he preached 105 times in different churches around the country. He started getting invitations from stateside. And the hand of God was on him in a very wonderful, wonderful way. He only had grade 8 education. He never seen the inside of a Bible college. But I'll tell you, he could preach. I gave him the New Testament on tapes. And since he traveled a lot as a cab inspector for the Saskatchewan government, he was listening to tapes all the time. I asked him once, I said, Brother, do you have any trouble getting messages? No, he said, not at all. I'll tell you what I have trouble with. I said, what? He said, I have trouble keeping my heart right. If I have a tiff with my wife, and I don't make it right, and I go have a crusade, nothing ever happens. And I've got to get on the telephone and phone home and make things right with my wife. And when I do that, the blessing of God returns. I'm so glad he shared that with me because it was a challenge to my heart. And I share it wherever I go. God called him home. Recently, a sudden heart attack, he was gone. They had a meeting planned even that night. His wife, Edna, pray for her if you think of her. She's a stalwart, a wonderful Christian, wonderful help to Gordon, a great soul winner, just like Gordon. But what happened? Did he learn how to do it? Did he read a book on how to do it? No, it wasn't that at all, dear people. He had a meeting with God, an honest meeting with God. And then he got honest with the people of God. And God came to him and filled his life. And he had what many preachers don't have, the blessing of God in his ministry. You know, he was in Vancouver. He told me, he said, God was working so powerfully in those meetings. Pastor Billy said, I was frightened when I saw what God was doing. He was in a meeting one time. He gave an invitation. The entire church came to the front. He told me one time he was in a meeting in Saskatchewan, a place called Coal Lake, Saskatchewan. And a bunch of people were responding. He was counseling with them. And a lady was standing there when he was through. She said, could you come and speak to my husband? Well, so what's with your husband? Well, he's not a Christian. He's a rancher and all of that. And he hates the gospel. Well, Gordon said, if you'll go home and tell him that Gordon Bailey is going to come and talk to him about Jesus Christ, I'll come. She said, I'll tell him. So he went. Well, the guy was a rancher. Gordon was a cattle inspector. So they were on common ground. An hour later, Gordon said he climbed into his car and looked back. The two of them were standing in the stoop in front of the house, arms around each other, crying and waving goodbye. He got saved, you know. And Gordon loved to witness for Christ. But God did something dynamic in his life. We call it revival. You can call it what you want to call it. But his life was radically altered. And he became a New Testament believer, in fact. What else happened? Well, Chief Kettles was the chief of police in Saskatoon. And he issued a statement to the local daily newspaper. To this effect, he said, I'm not a religious person. But I do know the difference between ordinary church work and revival. And revival has come to Saskatoon. And we know that because we've had a lot of people coming and confessing to crimes they've committed. Well, that's interesting. And sometimes people flew into Saskatoon and they'd ask, like Christian people say, what's going on here? There seems to be something electric in the air. And there was. And it was God. We prayed. God answered. And it's still going on. What about today? Ebenezer Baptist Church. We had a building seating about 300. They built a building seating 800 or 900. The pastor, Wes Long, was touched by God in revival after revival in Saskatoon. And God's wonderfully using him there. Thank God for that. They started several other churches, two churches, I think, since the revival back in 1971. And God is still at work. You know, after the revival in Saskatoon, while before those meetings were over, I felt strongly that God wanted me in full-time revival work. But I made up my mind I wasn't going to beat down some door to make it happen. So I just prayed and said, God, if you'll walk me in this kind of work, please make it clear, make it plain. Within 24 hours, I got a phone call from my brother in Winnipeg. He was an evangelist. And he said, a couple of people, we've been praying together. We heard what's happening there. We wondered if you couldn't come to Winnipeg for some revival meetings. I said, okay, see if you can rent Elam Chapel. Elam Chapel is a building seating 1,200. And so with about four days' notice and no churches cooperating, you don't do that. But we did that, went to Winnipeg and started meetings. And it spilled over. We had to go for five weeks. And the same thing was happening in Winnipeg as it happened in Saskatoon. There were about 30 people went into full-time Christian service, as we found months later, or even a couple of years later, we heard about different people who were touched by God in those meetings and are in full-time service today. Thank God for that. But it was the same sort of thing. Deep, powerful conviction of sin and people honestly, humbly responding to God and then making things right with their family, first of all, and then with their neighbors, perhaps, with people they worked with or worked for or had people working under them, whatever, as God might lead. It was a wonderful time. Whenever I think of it, I just have to praise God. You know, we had two fellows from the congregation. I never even knew they used to sing duets together. They were both Bible school graduates. They were both in their 40s. They hadn't even spoken together for two years. Well, I didn't know this. I knew there was some tension there. The owner of the two came forward and God touched his life one night. And so I said to him, I said, You know, Sam, you ought to get a hold of your brother Arnie and make whatever is wrong between the two of you. He said, God's been telling me the same thing. So I got a hold of Arnie and the three of us. And I got one of my deacons, Ken Merritt. Mr. Taylor's a member of him. I think they stayed with him, Merritt. And we went downstairs. And Arnie sat down. Sam stood. He reached his hand out and said, My brother Arnie, can you forgive me? And Arnie said, Say like this. It's about time you came, he said. And Sam said to me, I knew he wouldn't forgive me. And he started for the door. And I just prayed and said, Lord, don't let him leave the room. And he didn't. He got to the door and just stood there with his back to us. And I dumped a truckload of Bible verses on him, you know. Didn't do a thing. He just sat there smirking. So I said to Ken, Ken, let's pray and ask God to touch this man. So we got on our knees and started to pray. And he gave a scream. And he ran to the wall. He began kicking the wall with his feet and beating it with his fists. And he began to pour out a fountain of wickedness that was bottled up inside. He had been disciplined by the Alliance Church years before. Before I was ever a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church. He'd been disciplined by the church. And our church took him in as a member. And there were no questions asked because he had two brothers in the congregation. And he began pouring this stuff out. He was running around the room at times. I thought he was going to jump on us at one point. We just kept praying. And then there was quietness. And I looked and he was sitting there with the light of heaven on his face. And I caught his eye and I pointed to his brother. And he got up and he roared over and grabbed him from behind and almost cracked his ribs, you know. It was grand. And then we went upstairs. The congregation knew it was happening. And so they were praying upstairs for us. And as the brethren came up they walked shoulder to shoulder down the aisle. And then their wives and kids came running because the families had been fighting too, you know. And they got on their knees in front of the church. I'm standing at the back of the church watching what God is doing just trying to stay out of the way, you know. Make it right with God. And right after that we were in the Alliance Church. And Arnie and Sam sang a duet. But before they sang he had to make things right with the Alliance Church. And he did that. He asked their forgiveness for what had happened in the past. You know what happened? Well, in the congregation there were Alliance people and Baptists and Pentecostals and all, Mennonites and all the rest of it. But one of the Alliance guys jumped to his feet and he said, I make a motion that we accept Arnie Dirksen back as a member of our church. Someone else got it and said, I second the motion. And the Alliance people didn't vote. The rest of us couldn't vote. And he was voted in. So he was a member of two churches at one time. And you know, the last time I talked with Arnie, which was probably six or seven years ago, I said, oh, Brother Bill, he said it's so great to be able to love people from your heart. I could never do that before, he said. As a matter of fact, one of my daughters said to me, I would never want to be alone with Arnie in a room, you know. And he was always criticizing the program. He told me one day, he said, my kids are all going to hell. You don't have a decent youth program going on in the church. I said, what about all the people in the church whose kids are not going to hell? And he just walked away mad, you know. And all that changed by the grace of God. I mean, only God could do it. But God can do it. I was in Thunder Bay, Ontario one time, and I was asked to deal with a certain pastor. Oh, he'd be making eyes at the ladies. And he had been taking money out of one fund and putting it in other funds. He'd been handling things very poorly. And the church was really upset. And so they asked me to deal with him. So I couldn't do anything with him. He was from Britain originally. And they talk about a British bulldog. That's what he was. I couldn't do anything with him. So I said, let's pray. When you can't do anything, pray, you know. So there was a pillar here. And he knelt in front of the pillar and I knelt beside him. And I began to pray for him. And there were people. Suddenly he gave a shriek. And I looked at him. He'd gotten up. He had both arms around the pillar. He was holding on for dear life. He said to God, don't kill me. Don't kill me. I'll make it right. Don't kill me. Afterwards he told me what happened. This is unusual. This doesn't normally happen. But he said the hand of God came around his body and started to squeeze him. And he thought he was going to die. It's amazing how we can pray and get honest when we're on a deathbed sort of thing, you know. In the Maritimes, the meetings there in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and the Satyrs have had meetings there since. Had great meetings there. We were back, I think, in 1972. And there were 50 churches in the area that went together and it spilled over. We had to go for five weeks there. Had some wonderful, wonderful things happen. There were two men in the congregation. One had a grocery store. One had a drugstore. And God spoke to the fellow in the drugstore about selling tobacco. We hadn't mentioned tobacco at all. But God had. And so he got rid of his tobacco and he ran an ad in the local newspaper explaining what he was doing and telling them why he was doing it and inviting them to come and talk to him about it. Well, his store became a witnessing center. He saw all kinds of people coming and asking about this deal. What do you mean you don't sell tobacco anymore? Well, the guy running the grocery store, when he heard about this, he spoke to his heart and he decided to get rid of the tobacco in his store too. Well, then the tobacco salesmen came down because they were afraid there was going to maybe be a run of this kind in the area that would hurt their business. And so they explained to the guy at the grocery store, you know, if people have to buy the tobacco in one place and the groceries in another, they aren't going to come to your store, you know. You're going to lose a lot of customers in the next 12 months. We guarantee that. Well, he said, I couldn't care less. You know why? Because they gave the business to God. It was his business, not mine. And do you know what really happened? His business almost doubled the next 12 months. You think that doesn't happen? Listen, it happened. Some people from the church I fellowship with in the Winnipeg area, they run a restaurant. They finally decided to hang a sign up on the door, no smoking allowed in these premises or whatever. You know what happened? Their business just about doubled in a matter of months. Interesting. God said, those that honor me, I will honor. And those that despise me will be lightly esteemed. In retrospect, looking back, what did God do? I don't know. That is, I know a little bit of what happened. The sum total of what God did is known only to God. I remember getting a phone call from a lady I think in Florida or someplace. And she said, she was very teary and she said, is it true that there is a revival in Saskatoon? She said, when my child goes to school every day, I look out the window and I wonder, will she come home alive? She said, I can't be sure. Is it true that revival came? We explained that God had come. Let me say this. You don't need to worry about your kids. You need to worry about yourself. Make sure your heart is right. Live the Christian life. Commit your kids to God. Trust God. You know, one of my daughters, Naomi, my youngest daughter, she strayed from God 14 years, 15 years ago. We would talk to her and she'd say, look, there's one thing I'll never forget. She said, one, the day I was converted. Two, I'll never forget what I saw God do in the time of revival. I'll never forget that as long as I live. But she said, I really don't want to go this way. I love God and all of that, but you know, it's a lot of reservation. She never went to church for 15 years. How do you handle it? Psalm 37, verse 5 says, commit your way unto the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. One translation says, He will do it. I like that. So that's all we did. We loved her, encouraged her, prayed for her. And then about two years ago, we got a phone call. She spent a half an hour or longer asking us to forgive her for all the grief she'd caused. She found a good gospel church in the area where she was living, in Vancouver, and God had touched her heart and brought her back. You know, if it takes 14 years, keep trusting, believe in God. Don't let the devil have any of your kids. We can believe Him. Dear people, you know there are 7,487 promises in the Bible. Did you know that? 7,487 of them. Okay, so not all of them are for you and for me. But let's say at least 2,000 of them are. You have 2,000 promises from a living God. You can't get along with your wife? You can't get along with your neighbors? You can't believe God for anything? You know, a lot of Christians, all we do, dear people, is we admire the promises. We frame them, have them hanging on the wall. We don't really believe them. We don't stand on them. We admire them. I like to think of it gives them a little comfort to think that there is a promise. But somehow, we don't get our feet on them. And we don't believe God. I don't know if you ever heard this, but here's something very interesting before I conclude. A team of Gideons from Canada, we're in India, and they mention that there had been a revival in Saskatoon, Canada. And they saw a corner of the crowd light up. Men began talking excitedly. And afterwards, a group of men came and said, Did you say there was a revival in Saskatoon, Canada? They said, Yes, why? Oh, they said, We're a prayer group. And about three or four years ago, God laid a burden on our heart to pray for Saskatoon, Canada. We don't even know where we got the name Saskatoon from. We can't remember. They'd been praying for three or four years for a revival in Saskatoon, Canada. The same thing was in another place in India. And the same thing happened. Some people came and said, Did you say there was a revival somewhere in Canada? They said, Yes. They said, We've been praying for a revival in western Canada. They hadn't mentioned Saskatoon, but western Canada, which is where it happened, they've been praying for several years. And who knows what the sum total is as far as preparation is concerned, the way that God works. God has control. God reigns, not God will reign someday. The Lord reigns now. And He's in total control, in total charge, of all the nations of the world. The most high rules in the kingdom of men and gives it to whomsoever He will. That's true also in the church, only sometimes we get in God's way. Duncan Campbell? Yeah, Duncan Campbell was a revivalist. A man God greatly used in the Hebrides awakening. The Hebrides are a small group of islands off the coast of Scotland in the early 1950s. And God led him in a very remarkable way. He was speaking at a conference in central England. And on the platform, just before he was to speak, God told him he was to leave immediately and fly down to the coast and go to the Isle of Skye, which is off the coast of Scotland and also part of the Hebrides. So he told the chairman what he was going to do and he said, you can't do that. You're committed here for several days. He said, I have to do it. So he went. And a revival, I think there's a book or two on the table talking about the Hebrides awakening. We had Duncan Campbell with us in Saskatoon two years before the revival. And he was a godly, godly person. It was so great to talk with him because there's an old saying, you know, if you ever go through a revival fire, you'll have the smell of smoke and you're closed till the day you die. And that's true. You'll never forget it. No matter what happens, you'll remember what you saw God do. And then you know what God can do. And it was a challenge to us. We didn't see revival in the church when he came. But God used him in the congregation. Some people were wonderfully helped and blessed by his ministry at that time. Duncan Campbell's home in the glory land now was a joy to know him. You know, here's something very interesting. There was a group of men in the Hebrides and they were called the praying men of Barbas. And he told us about these men. Here's what they did. I don't know how many were involved altogether. They would come home from their work, wherever they were. They would have supper and go to bed after supper and sleep till nine o'clock at night. And then get up at nine o'clock and pray until two o'clock in the morning. They didn't meet together to do this. They did this in their own homes. Every day of the year. When Duncan Campbell went to the Isle of Skye, he contacted these men. He wanted to reopen the church that had been closed for many, many years. And nothing happened. Sunday, five people showed up. Monday, five people. The same five. Tuesday, the same five. So he got a message across to the praying men asking them to take the Isle of Skye on their hearts. And they did. And he told me, he said the first night after those men prayed for the Isle of Skye, he said 200 people showed up and 8 or 10 people got saved. You know, people, we've forgotten this. We've forgotten where the power lies. We think it lies in programs and personalities, and it doesn't. It's got nothing to do with that. Because oftentimes our personalities and our programs and plans and all this, they just get in God's way. I remember being in Winnipeg, New Zealand chapel meetings and Sherwood Wirt, who was the right-hand man for Billy Graham. That is, he edited the Decision magazine for 25 years. And he heard about revival in Canada through Ravenhill, Leonard Ravenhill. And Leonard said, you better hop a plane and fly to Winnipeg because he lived in Minneapolis. And he showed up in those meetings one night. It was a very unusual meeting. The place was packed with a whole 1,200 and people were coming forward before I finished preaching. Finally, the whole front of the church was crowded with people kneeling and praying. So then we cleared the platform and filled the platform. Then we had to clear the choir loft and fill the choir loft. Then we started emptying the front pews. So we emptied the first pew and the second pew just to make room for people to pray and the third pew and that's where Duncan or where Sherwood Wirt was. And after he came up and he said, you know, I've been involved with Billy Graham on the largest scale of evangelism imaginable for 25 years but I've never seen revival. And he said, this is revival. And he said, you know, Billy doesn't need revival. He said, the organization does. He said, my wife needs revival. She really needs revival, he told me. And I kept looking at him and finally he said, I think I need it too. And you know, the night he was there, see the problem he had was this, he and his wife didn't get along. They had, I'm not sure, was it five or six, I'm thinking of Harry Thiessen at the moment. Harry Thiessen and his wife gave their testimony that night and it was exactly what he needed to hear because Harry's wife had decided to take the girls and move to Vancouver and leave Harry with the boys. He was a perfectionist, you know, when you hung the toilet paper on the thing, you know, you couldn't hang it with a paper against the wall. You had to hang it out the front and if she didn't do that, he didn't speak to her for two weeks, you know. And if the kids spilled some milk on the table, then he blamed her and for two weeks he wouldn't speak to her. He was an absolute perfectionist, a civil engineer by the way. And that night they gave their testimony how God had changed the whole thing and their life was just dynamic for God. He became a full-time revival worker, Harry Thiessen and his wife did. They were all over Canada and many places in the States following this. He took early retirement, I think at about age 60 and went on the revival circuit. Well anyway, Sherwood Word heard this and invited him to come down to Minneapolis, which they did, and he asked them to conduct an afterglow, which they did. And there may be a book on one of the tables about this. He wrote a book called The Afterglow in which he lays his heart, Sherwood Word does, on the table and tells what happened in Canada, how God touched his life. You ought to read the story. It's a wonderful book. When I said Duncan Campbell, I didn't ask you to tell his story of the Welsh revival, but you did. And we were blessed by it. But what I was thinking in terms of what God showed Duncan Campbell when he was in your church, and there were only about 50 or 60 people who had come to hear this godly man, and what God showed him, how what happened had such a basis in the heart of a man, how God placed it in his heart. Well, Duncan Campbell, he didn't tell me that when he was in Saskatoon, but my brother in Winnipeg had arranged for him to come for a month of meetings in different places in Western Canada, and so in several places, and he told my brother this after he got back to Winnipeg, he said, I was in prayer one night and God showed me clearly he was going to send a revival to Canada, and he said, Keith is going to start in your brother's church in Saskatoon. Now, I'm glad he didn't tell us or we would have been trying to make it happen. But again, he was a man of God walking with God and God had revealed this to him. Just an interesting insight the way God works. Thanks again.