In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the need for believers to spend more time with God and in His Word. He shares a personal experience where he had to deliver a message with very little preparation time, but trusted God to provide. The speaker also highlights the contrast between Christians in North America and believers in other countries who have a deep devotion to God. He expresses his concern over the lack of time and commitment that people in North America give to God, as evidenced by their minimal prayer and Bible reading. The sermon concludes with a call to pray for revival.

Beginning in verse 9, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Continue in my love. If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in His love. These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant does not know what his Lord is doing, but I have called you friends. For all things that I have heard of my Father, I have made known unto you. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. And whatever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that you love one another. I want to read a portion of scripture from John 15, beginning at verse 9. The Lord Jesus said, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Continue in my love. If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in His love. These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do whatever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant does not know what his Lord is doing, but I have called you friends. For all things that I have heard of my Father, I have made known unto you. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. Whatever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that you love one another. I want to begin with a question. What's prayer? What is prayer to you? To many people it's getting stuff, or getting information, or strictly for emergencies. I know a Christian couple, they're in business. They were in business before, their business went bankrupt. They're in business again, I think it's going to happen again. And when there's a danger of this happening, they phone all their friends to pray for them, to pray for the business, you know. And in between, I don't know if they do any praying at all, I really don't know. But for some people, it's strictly for emergencies. I'll give you two extreme positions, taken from some reading. One fellow said, a prayer doesn't really get anything from God, because this God stuff is pretty, you know, shadowy. But it's a good thing, it's like spiritual PT, it's good for the soul to pray, you know. Another fellow in a book on prayer said, and this is extreme too, he said prayer is backing a three ton truck up to the warehouse of heaven and then driving away with a full load. So that was prayer to him. What is prayer? Prayer should be first of all, fellowship with God. Fellowship with God. You are my friends, we're not servants, we're friends. We're servants too, but friends first of all, as we know in the scripture here. Let's take off on that. Three times Abraham was called the friend of God. Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, heard a big army had come into his land. He called a prayer meeting. I think it was the biggest prayer meeting in history, because the whole nation was there. All of Judah was there, and Benjamin I imagine too, because the two tribes were very closely related. Men, women, children, thousands. And he's praying. And he reminded God in his prayer that they were the seed of Abraham, your friend. That's how he put it. He didn't say who Abraham long ago was, was your friend. He spoke as if Abraham was still on friendly terms with God, you know. Then in Isaiah 41a, God addressed Jacob or Israel as being the seed of Abraham, my friend. Not Abraham who used to be long ago, my friend. And then James, in James chapter 2, he said about Abraham, he was called friend of God. Jesus said in Matthew 22, I believe it is, he reminded them of the scripture in Exodus chapter 3, where God said, I am. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he said, God is not the God of the dead. But of the living. For all live unto him. So what he was saying was Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are alive and well and fellowshipping with God on the other side. That's what he was really saying there. Abraham, the friend of God. Now Moses' father-in-law had four or five different names. One named Reuel or Raguel meant the friend of God. I don't know where he got the name from, I guess his parents. But why he got the name, I don't really know. He's a very powerful personality and yet very little said about it. You remember he gave good advice to Moses. He said Moses was going to kill himself with all the counseling he was doing. Gave him some better advice. He was called a priest of God. So he knew things about God. And I think he passed on this on to Moses. We don't know what the connection is here because not a great deal is said. But we read about him rejoicing before God and eating with Moses and the elders of Israel before the Lord and all this stuff. He was a great guy. He was a friend of God. And that's important to know. It's said of Moses that God spoke with Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend. And his sister Miriam and his brother Aaron. Aaron was a very weak character. Anybody could lead him in any direction they wanted and sometimes they did. And she led him in this. And they decided to challenge Moses' authority. And it went something like this. Hey Moses, God hasn't spoken only by you, you know. He's spoken by us as well. But the scripture says, the account says, that they did this because he'd married a black woman. An Ethiopian woman. And they didn't like that, see. So I guess the boy was black. And God suddenly spoke and said, I'll come out, you three. And I can just see Miriam bumping Aaron and winking at him. Hey, Moses is going to find out now what's going on around here, you know. So the three of them stood up. And then God said, Miriam and Aaron step forward. Oh, Moses is staying behind, see. They felt real good. Until God spoke. Here's basically what he said. If I speak to a prophet, I speak through visions or dreams. My servant Moses is not so. With him I speak face to face. Why then were you not afraid? You know, to say what you say. And Miriam was smitten with leprosy. Why wasn't Aaron smitten with leprosy? I wondered about that. I think the problem is, I mentioned a few moments ago, Aaron was a very weak character. When Israel wanted, you know, God's eyes could see, Aaron didn't take a stand, he went along with it, you know. He tried to get God into it somehow, but he went along with it, you know. He was two years older than Moses, and he was a far better public speaker than Moses was, but God didn't choose him to be the leader because he didn't have it. He couldn't be trusted in some ways. And so, I think God gave her the leprosy because she led him into this. It couldn't be for any other reason that God would prefer a male over a female, you know. In any case, God said, like she was smitten with leprosy, and Aaron cried about this to Moses, and Moses cried to God, and God said, if her father had spit in her face, she'd have to spend seven days outside the camp. So stick her outside the camp seven days, which was God's way of saying, Miriam, I just spit in your face. Don't you ever challenge Moses again. So Moses and God, you know, on one occasion, they spent 80 days together, or 40 days on a second occasion for another 40 days, 40 days, never ate, never drank, just communing. Isn't that amazing, you know. Well, some people, you know, if the meeting gets to be 40 minutes long, they want to go home. And sometimes they do, you know. They get enough of God in 30 minutes or even less. And sometimes when it comes to our daily devotional, you know, when I went to Saskatoon in 1962, we had 175 members of church, and we were running close to 300 Sunday mornings. And there were a lot of people, there had been Bible school graduates and stuff, you know. And I wanted to find out where these people were really at. So one Sunday morning, I passed off papers, and people were told, now don't sign your name. So everybody was honest in answering the questions. I had questions like, how much time a day do you spend with the Bible, you know. How much time a day do you spend in prayer? Have you ever witnessed a sinner? Have you ever led a sinner to Christ? Do you tithe your income? And I could hardly wait to get these papers until I got them, and I wish I'd never done it, you know. I couldn't believe it. You know, the average person was about 5 minutes a day they were giving God, you know. One guy put down 30 minutes for devotional time, and then his conscience swore to me, scratched it off, and put a big zero there. He wasn't putting anything on it. And I got those papers, and I have to confess, I bawled, you know. I just cried. Hardly anybody had witnessed anybody. Hardly anybody had ever once told the Lord. And many of them were not tithing. They were a good evangelical church, right? And so I began to pray for revival. What else can you do? We had teams come. We had one guy come, he and his wife. And he was highly tutored as an evangelist. I think he was a good guy and all of that. But the thing they advertised about him was that when he played in nightclubs, he used to stand on his hands and tap dance on a board above his feet here, you know. And that was his claim to fame, you know. And we had guys come, we had one fellow come, he would train a volunteer choir every night. And we'd have 40 people singing in a choir every night. And he could play this instrument, that instrument, you know. I mean, we tried a lot of stuff. Just garbage, you know. And nothing happened. They'd come, and one or two people would get revived maybe, and some people would start tithing, and three people would ask to join the church, and then it was all over, you know. And I gave up on that. I told God, God, I'm not going this way anymore. This is garbage, you know. We're just not going this way anymore. And I shared my burden with a missionary. He said, why don't you contact Ralph and Melissa Terrance? I said, who are they? And they told me about them. I got their address. They wrote them. They couldn't come for two years. But I learned more about them. They had a deep, powerful, revival-type ministry. And then we prayed. And all we did was pray. We got, we got, our prayer meeting went from 25 to 150, 175. And every Sunday evening, we spent a half hour in prayer at the conclusion of the service, just to pray for revival for those who wanted to stay. We did 40, 50 people stay for that time to pray for revival. We had a prayer wheel in the bulletin board in the foyer, and people could sign their name in 15-minute prayer slots. So pretty soon we had the whole 24 hours taken up, which meant that any time of the day and night, someone from our church was on their knees praying for revival. We tried cottage prayer meetings. We tried everything we could. And we didn't do it all at once. We did it over a period of time, you see. And at one point, I finally asked the people, ask God to waken you through the night just to get up and pray for revival. And God began doing that. And people began telling me things like this. You know, I used to be prayed up in five minutes. I prayed last night about 2 o'clock in the morning. I must have prayed for an hour. I could have prayed for two hours. Because God was responding. Listen carefully. In the book of Zechariah, it says, that God poured upon his people the spirit of grace and supplication. That's the spirit of prayer. One translation says, the spirit of grace to supplicate, to pray. Then he made much of the spirit of prayer. He had two men, Abel Clary and Father Nash. When he was going somewhere for meetings, he sent them ahead two weeks ahead, perhaps, or ten days. These guys were prayed for ten hours a day. Then he said, when I got there, the revival had already started. We don't do anything like that today. We don't know how to do it today. We don't think it works today. It doesn't work because it isn't worked. That's the problem. So Moses was a man of God. Eighty days along with God. How could he do it? You know, in North America, we're so far behind Christians in some other countries. We don't even know it. We can't even see them with telescopes, you know. They're so far ahead. I've been in a lot of countries around the world. I've met people, you know. Maybe all they had was a mud floor in their shack, you know. And everybody lived in one big room. They had a hole in the ceiling, let the smoke go out. So you know, it was like when they lit a fire inside. But that was life. But a lot of God. He gave maybe two-tenths of their income to God. And all this sort of thing, witnessing to their neighbors. And all this, you know. We're so far behind. We don't even know it. And we lost contact with God, you know. We're not really friends to God. I read this shortly after I became a Christian. If God could have a need, it could only be a need for fellowship. Why did he make us in his image and likeness? So we could communicate. It must be that. It can't be anything else. And people have often been constantly saying, you know, I pray and God doesn't say anything. David was called a man after God's own heart. And I made a study of David in his prayer life. Very interesting to see how much time. Psalm 88, 1, he said, Day and night I have cried before you. I prevented the dawning of the morning and cried, which means you get up before the sun. Seven times a day do I praise you because of your righteous judgments. And many verses of this kind in the Psalms showing that David spent a great deal of time in prayer. And if you notice his life, when he faced an emergency, he always prayed. He always called on God for guidance. And he always got guidance from God, too. We know that. But David was a man after God's own heart. I'm sure we could call him a friend of God's. Have you ever thought of yourself as a friend of God's? What kind of time do you give him? If we gave an earthly friend, the little time we give God, we wouldn't have any friends, right? We tip our hat to God every now and then. And if we get into trouble, then we can pray really loud and long. And then when it's all over... There's a verse in the Bible that says... I'm going to have to paraphrase it. It goes like this. The things you promised God when you were in trouble, you better come across. So we get in trouble when he promises to God, when it's all over, we forget about it. When I was just a kid, I got in trouble with the police. And I had been collecting shells, and another young kid had been collecting... or his father had been collecting guns. And we got together one day. An old, sharp, buffalo gun, a single-shot thing, and I had a shell that fit it, and we put it in, and it went off. It was an old gun, and it slipped and it went off. And there was a little kid standing in front at the time. He wasn't killed. He wasn't even hurt badly. It just took a little skin off of one of his legs. But it wasn't long until the police were there. And I promised God the moon with a green fence around it, if he just kept me off the hook, you know. And he did, and I promptly forgot all about it, you know. It was years later. I was 22 before I got saved. But I made promises to God. Oh, man, I can remember that so well. It didn't mean anything. Friend of God. David. Jack Hiles in Hammond, Indiana. Some of you know who he is, and some of you don't. He's dead now. He had a small church in, I think it was Garland, Texas. They had about 60 members, and he was never, he just wasn't getting anywhere. So he never got saved. And he didn't know why. His father was an alcoholic, and one day his father died, and this brought things to a climax in his thinking. After the funeral, the funeral, the cemetery is in a secluded place. He went to his daddy's grave. He threw himself across his father's grave, and this is the prayer he prayed. God, I won't eat, and I won't drink, and I'll die if I have to, but I will not move until you give me power to preach the gospel. He lay there three days and three nights. All he ever said was, God touched me. He went back to his little church, and the first time he preached, 18 people were saved. And in about four years, that church went from 60 to 2,000 members. Then he moved to Hammond, Indiana. The church had 800 members, and he lost several hundred because of his method of soul winning. When he first got there, Gordon Bailey and I were there for a visit one time. They had 95,000 members in the church, and they were baptizing 200 converts a week, on the average. But he said this, Whenever I sense the power is gone, I fast and I pray, and I get other people to fast and to pray, until God touches us again. He takes that verse in the Psalms, the verse he uses for this kind of activity, I shall be anointed with fresh oil. And he said, We need to be anointed with fresh oil again and again. And it's not always easy, especially in some situations. But somehow we have to do it. To be alone with God. Let him speak. I know we're afraid to do that sometimes because of what he might say. That shouldn't be a problem. When Daniel knew the writing was signed, and anybody who prayed to any God or man, except to the king, would be thrown into a den of lions. When he knew the writing was signed, he did what he always did, he prayed three times a day. Three times a day. Spurgeon said, I rarely pray for half an hour, an hour at a time. But he said, When I awaken in the morning, before my feet hit the floor, I'm talking to my Lord. He said, Then I find myself talking to Jesus all day long. And you know, just when he was dying, he said to Susannah's wife, Susannah, I've had such a wonderful time with Jesus. And then he was gone. And that's what it's all about. A servant doesn't know what his Lord is doing, but a friend. Jesus said, All things I've heard of my Father I've known. I read an African publication, and here is a story. A young fellow got saved. And he'd been at one of the Christian schools, and he got saved. Shortly after, he went to the missionaries and said, God has called me to be a pastor. Give me a church. Well, they had a little meeting, and oh, this kid doesn't know anything, you know. How can we give him a church? Well, we'll put him off. We'll tell him to come back in six months, and he'll forget about it. So they did. But in six months, he came back. Where is the church? They'd forgotten about it in the meantime. So they put him off for another three months, and he came back again. And here's what these rascally missionaries finally did. They had a church, and the way they put it was, they could have written its own history of the wars of the Lord, because they'd been fighting for years, you know. They had nothing left but about a dozen people. Now we'll give him this church, and we won't tell him about its past history, and there's no way he can save it, and it'll go down, and then we'll have to tell him, well, son, you weren't really called to be a pastor. So it happened. At the time I read the article, he was still a pastor of the church, and I had 5,000 members. What had happened? Every now and then, here's what he would say to the church. God is calling me away. I don't know when I'll be back. I may be gone for two weeks or three weeks. I found a cave in the hills, and I'll take a sack of food, and there's a creek not far away, and so I'll drink from the creek, and I'll eat my food, and I'll pray, and I'll fast. You know, if a preacher did that in North America, they'd fire him, right? Who does he think he's going away for? Two weeks? Fishing? Golfing? You know, we'd kick him out. They didn't kick him out. Every time he came back from that cave, there was a new revival, and sometimes hundreds of people were saved. We don't, in North America, we didn't know anything about this. You know, if anybody used to rise at four every morning and read the Bible and pray until eight every day, so did Moody. So did Torrey. So did many praying high in India spend ten hours a day in prayer on the average. When the bell rang for dinner, he would say, Jesus, do I go or do I stay? And often the Lord asked him to stay. So when I was in India, they wanted to take me over to where praying high did minister, and we couldn't go because of the program we had. I couldn't go. I wish I had somehow managed to go. Because all he'd been doing a long while, he still talked about praying high in the wild. He asked God to give him a soul a day. Then he asked God to give him two souls a day. Then he asked God to give him three souls a day. I think he got up to five souls a day. He would never go to bed at night until that fifth soul was one to Christ. Well, we don't know anything about that in North America. We've got a slap-happy kind of Christianity, you know. We want God to be in it somehow, but not too much. John the Baptist, he that has the bride, but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears the bridegroom's voice, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled. What he was saying was, John the Baptist, I'm a friend to Jesus. He saw that. We don't know much about him. He trained for thirty years for six months ministry, and then lost his head. It doesn't sound like a success story, but it certainly was a success story. We have no idea what time he spent with God. I imagine he spent hours every day alone with God. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. That's not how it is in North America. It's, Lord, you better listen for I'm speaking, you know. It's the other way around. You shouldn't be calling on God, talking with God. You know, when you read the Bible, God is speaking to you. Do you ever think of it that way? Or do you just read it? So you've got to figure it out. I'm going to read a chapter a day. So you read a chapter a day. If somebody asks you later on the day which chapter you read, you can't remember it, you know. It didn't make a dent because you were really not into it. And to be alone with God and forget, do what you have to do in order to do that. But we are beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. So we want to be transformed into the image of Christ. How do we do that? We do that by looking at Christ in the pages of Scripture. Don't ever read from the Bible, don't first pray, Dear God, speak to me. And God will do that. He has ways of communicating to us. I've so often heard from people who say, Well, I pray and God doesn't say it. It's as if God can't communicate. There's one thing God can do, from Joel. It says, He never takes his eyes off the righteous. Now that can be scary or comforting, depending on where you're at spiritually. He never takes his eyes off the righteous. That's what I'm trying to say. He establishes them forever. And they are exalted. And then comes an if. If they be bound in fetters and held in cords of affliction, for them. Then, He shows them their work. And their transgressions, that they have exceeded. And He opens their ears to discipline. And He commands that they return from iniquity. He's a faithful God. And sometimes we're bound. Remember Simon the Sorcerer? And he professed to be saved. Probably he was. He was baptized. Then he offered money to the apostles, if he could have the power to lay hands on people, so they could receive the Holy Ghost. And Peter gave him a hard time, remember? He said, I perceive that you're in a gall of bitterness and in a bond of iniquity. He had that if problem. What was the problem? He was very bitter because until Philip showed up, he was the big shot in the community. Now that was all gone. Nobody was listening to him anymore. Nobody was watching his occult magic stuff, you know. And he was bitter about that. And then he hadn't broken clearly with the occult. I don't think he had. Many people in Samaria were into the occult because we read about Philip and all the people being delivered from demons. And this guy was responsible for that. And I don't think he'd broken with it completely. And so if, that's us, if they'd be bound in fetters, we used to say a lot in Revival days, Jesus sets me absolutely free. We were singing that in a church in Ontario and a lady got up and just rushed out of the room. And we thought she wasn't feeling well, but she told us later on in her testimony, as we sang the song, she saw how bound up she was. That she had to get into a room somewhere alone with God and get her life straightened up, you know. Jesus sets me absolutely free. He died on Calvary. Sometimes we Christians, if the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free what? Indeed. Why is it when two Christians are talking about the Lord, if a sinner happens to sail by, we lower our voices so he doesn't hear what we're talking about. A little old lady, an Anglican lady of Christ in rural Manitoba years ago, she had been raised as a girl in Wales. She was there at the time of the Welsh Revival. And she told me what had happened. She said, sometimes you'd be walking down the street and there would be six men kneeling on the sidewalk praying with their arms around each other. She said, I'd run by. I didn't know what they were doing. She was an Anglican. But I knew they had something I didn't have. Can you tell me what it is? And I led her to Christ. Those men kneeling on the sidewalk didn't know that little girl running past so fast would be saved. In Canada, because they were kneeling there praying, you know, they weren't ashamed to kneel on the sidewalk. A bunch of us flew from the Revival in Saskatoon to Toronto by invitation. And when we flew from Saskatoon to Winnipeg, we were all sitting in a little group together on the plane. And then we, as we talked about Winnipeg, we had to wait a couple of hours. This isn't right. We should be scattered all over the plane so we can witness to people. So that's what we did. We had a prayer meeting and they were talking there. All of us praying, people walking by, wondering what in the world is going on, all these fanatics, you know. Anyway, we got on the plane and here's what we prayed. Dear God, get us next to someone we can share with. When we compared notes afterwards, it was incredible. I found myself sitting next to a guy that ran a sawmill. Well, I preached in logging camps for years, you know. And one of the gals was in the team. She was a nurse and found herself sitting next to a nurse, you know. And this is what happened. God put us all in the right place, you know. We had a great time. We got to Toronto and we had a prayer meeting after we got there. We had a great time. But dear people, let's revise. To learn how to give God quality time, all of us need to do that. I would never preach myself, but I'll just say this. Many years ago, after the revival of Saskatoon, I asked God to awaken me every night. I'd often awakened nights before, but it was a little spotty and sporadic perhaps. But since that time, there's never a night that God doesn't awaken. And you know what? The telephone never rings at two o'clock in the morning. Just to be alone. You don't have to talk, you can just listen. You know, tell the Lord you love Him. Thank the Lord for who He is, for what He's done. Pick up the Bible maybe and read a little of quotes and verses or sing a song. We'll just be a friend to God. He made us so we could be that. How disappointing He must be often with us as His children. They turn around, like ants in an anthill, running around doing stuff, you know, but not giving God quality time. Well, we know about it. It says, God is faithful by whom you were called. You were called unto the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ. You were called to have fellowship with God. 1 John 1 verse 3, That which we have seen in her we declare unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us. And truly, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. Somebody said, and I think this statement is true, that the average Christian does not have fellowship with God. He has fellowship with other Christians above God. And I think it's often that way. Fellowship with God. During those days of revival, it often saw people. I remember a fellow, he was a pastor, and he was having a hard time, and he got very bitter, and the church finally had asked him to go, and he was old, he was so bitter. He phoned me, and he told me I could have his library, and he was just almost cursing. He was so angry. Then he heard about the revival in Saskatoon, and he made up his mind. He was going to go there and blow this revival thing right out the window. You know what happened? He walked in the door, and Jesus met him. He ran down to find a room somewhere, and he found this place before God, and he prayed his way back to God. I don't know what happened. He just said, Jesus met him. We had all kinds of experiences of that kind. Jesus meeting people and talking. I remember a fellow one time, he came running back into the church. He started for a moment after the meeting. He came back from the church, and he said, people, I can't coordinate to drive the car. Well, I tried to drive the car. I can't. Jesus is there. The place is filled with the glory of God. I need help to get home. So, I mean, God was so alive, you know, then. Somehow we lost that. We need to have it back again. Penny is to say, whenever the revival abated in power, I fasted and prayed, the host of fast and prayed, and the revival would come back to power. We'd forgotten that. I didn't know it. And so when the revival abates, it's a way of life. Repentance is a way of life. Call to the fellowship of Christ in him. Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening. And they told me, they said, now, if you're holding a crusade, you need some help. Let us know. I'll take my holidays, and we'll come down. I remember one time, I often had them on the platform, had them give their testimony. And they all would sit there smiling. And he said, I guess you notice I'm always smiling sitting on the platform. Yeah, I said, what's going on? He said, well, I know what's going to happen down there that people don't know. He knew what God was going to do. And Howard Gardner, who worked with me, Howard was such a soul in contact with God. He was, he looked so much like the Lord, and we fellowshiped together when some, just some great times. But he knew when God began to work in the congregation, he knew in what corner of the congregation God began to work. I never ever had a clue. God never gave me that kind of insight. He had this kind. I remember once, we were staying in a house in Texas. They gave us a house to stay in, and nobody else was around. And he had a room, and I had a room, and we had a kitchen there and stuff. And one afternoon, I knew he was praying. I could hear him praying. And then the Lord just told me, go in. So I was struggling with, I don't know what was. He was, he had a hold of God, and he was afraid he was going to die. He had to pray true. He was just, he had gotten so close to God, and I think the Lord was about to take him home. He's, he's home with the Lord now, by the way. But he had such an insight. So you are my friend, mercy. Eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show himself strong. Which is to say, God is looking for people through whom he can pull himself. No. I'm not sure who it was said this. It might have been Spurgeon. A preacher said this. If I have an hour to prepare a message. In Toronto one time at a conference, one of the men came to me one morning and said, well, Bill, let's go. I said, let's go where? He said, you're speaking at the Ontario Bible College in about 35 minutes. I said, why didn't somebody tell me? He said, I wrote you about this months ago. When I got home, I checked my correspondence. I mean, handwritten, eight pages, and I hadn't read it all because it was hard reading, you know. I hadn't read it all. So now I'm in a car, and in 30 minutes I'm going to speak to a bunch of kids at the Bible College, you know. So what do you do? Do you panic? No. Didn't God know all about this? Sure God knew how stupid I was. You know, he knew all about that. No problem. So I just started praising the Lord. Give me a text. That's all I needed was a text. John 7, 38 and 9. I had the whole thing by the time I got there. Amen. When I got there, the dean said, now Bill, don't take any more than about 28 minutes. You know, we have a busy schedule here. Just, so I prayed for 26 minutes. I walked there carefully. I prayed for two minutes afterwards, and I got the call. And all those kids and staff were falling on their knees, crying. It was just a beautiful place. I couldn't believe what was happening there. People crying before God. Everybody on their face before God. And the dean came running up and he said, oh Bill, we don't need 28 minutes. He said, we need a whole week of this. And I couldn't say the truth. But God wants to do this kind of thing. And again, I'm mentioning this from God, not from some book. Today, one of our big problems is we spend hours listening to tapes and hours reading books and very little time with the word of God. And very little time in the press with God. A friend of God. Would you be that?