In this sermon, the speaker shares his experiences and insights on the work of God around the world. He emphasizes the importance of being spirit-controlled believers and the power of the Holy Spirit in spreading the message of Jesus Christ. The speaker highlights the challenge of reaching billions of people who have never heard the name of Jesus and acknowledges the limitations of human strategies. He emphasizes the key role of prayer and the dedication of believers in advancing God's kingdom. The sermon also includes personal anecdotes and examples from the speaker's visit to a large church in Korea.

I'm honored and privileged to have the opportunity to share with those of you who are here tonight and with the Canadian Revival Fellowship team as I minister during these hours that we'll share together. Delighted for the opportunity to return again to Canada and have the privilege for the first time of coming to Saskatoon and this beautiful province of Saskatchewan. Took me three weeks to learn how to pronounce all of that. Still haven't learned how to pronounce the last name of the folks I'm staying with, but Fred and Leon are marvelous folks. I don't know their last name yet. Right, I'll have it down by Saturday night, I promise you that. But I'm delighted to have the privilege tonight to give you some report and some information on what God is doing in some dimensions of His work around the world and the opportunity of sharing with you a little bit about the work that He's called me to. I think it would be most appropriate if you would indulge me for a moment in order that I might build some bridges in relationships. I know that most of you know most of those who are here, with the exception of myself, and so I need to get to know you and you might need to get to know me a little bit better. I was a seminarian in Louisville, Kentucky in 1970, the dawning of the new decade of the Aquarius, a period of time in which there was such desperation of hurt and anguish and heartache throughout the North American continent, in particular in our own nation of the United States of America. In the midst of those days, having been born again into the family of God as a nine-year-old boy in a middle Georgia church, and having been called to preach at the age of twelve and began preaching at the ripe tender age of fifteen and pastoring at seventeen, by the age of twenty-six I was ready to throw in the towel, to be very honest. I'd done everything that my evangelical denomination had shown me. I had worked hard. I'd gussied up the gut, very disciplined-like, and accomplished much in the flesh. I'd married at the ripe age of twenty. My daughter, who is now thirteen, is going to be able to be permitted to date when she's twenty-eight, I think. I'm sure not going to let her marry at twenty, I pray. Married at twenty, during the course of those first five and a half, six years of marriage, instead of a matrimony that developed into the beautiful honeymoon that it should have, it was very difficult and turbulent. And so it was not a surprise when in 1970, in the spring of the year, I was so desperate until I was willing to do almost anything. In fact, I had begun at that point, about a year prior to that, to bargain with the Lord and say, Lord, if it's not any better than this, I want out of this marriage, I want out of this ministry, and I want out of this boat. I'm ready to throw in the towel. Right smack in the middle of that, by God's sovereign action, there was nothing that I did, there was nothing that I deserved on the face of the earth. Right smack in the middle of that, God in sovereignty broke across the campus of the seminary where I happened to be a student in Louisville, Kentucky, in what has become known as the Jesus Movement. Some few weeks prior to the touch in my life, the great Asbury revival had broken out at Wilmore, Kentucky, that sparked some flames of revival in this section of the country and this section of the world. And during the course of an eighteen-hour prayer meeting, God revolutionized my life. It took me a few years to sift out the theology, it took me a while to come down off the clouds, to be honest. I really didn't come down, I just matured a little bit, I don't ever want to come down out of the heavenlies. And in that joy of beginning to discern and understand what it meant to walk in the power and the anointing of the Spirit of the living God, I began with that kind of hunger to say, Lord, I don't know where to turn. My tradition has not given me much information, my theological education has not been a great impetus to help me at the point at which I stand now, and so Father, I desperately desire your direction. Brother Wally mentioned a dear brother by the name of Jack Taylor. Jack had happened to have been in the prayer meeting the afternoon that God revolutionized my life. I did not know him then, he was not an author par excellence who had been read worldwide at that point. In fact, he was in the process of writing his first book, and that afternoon when I got up off my knees with the freshness of the glory of God in my soul in a way that I don't know that words will ever be able to describe, Jack was standing beside me and he took me off onto the eve of a balcony in that beautiful old chapel on the hillside there in Louisville, Kentucky at Southern Seminary, and the service went on. I was but a miniscule, small entity of that tremendous, gigantic prayer meeting of eighteen hours. That service went on and he flipped over in his Bible to Philippians chapter 1, verse 6, and he gave me the first Bible promise I'd ever grasped in my life. The Bible says when God begins a good work in you, he's going to keep on doing it until the day that Jesus comes. And then after those few hours of the intensity of the breath of God had moved away, a long-haired hippie by the name of Arthur Blessed, who has carried the cross in countries all over the world to the tune of 23,000 miles now, happened to have been there that day. Arthur and his entourage had left, and Jack, my dear friend, had left, and many of my seminarians thought I'd gone off the deep end. I didn't have much to hold on to except Philippians 1, 6. I graduated the following June and went to my first pastorate out of seminary, and when I settled into that pastorate, I must confess to you, theology was beginning to gel. I've discovered that you learn most of what you learn after you learn it instead of while you're learning it. Most of you pastors know that. And I kept saying, Lord, I don't know what you've done, but something so much better than it's ever been, I'm going to go on. I don't care what the world says. I just want you to somehow, someway, bring to my attention that which I need to know. I do not know, outside of sovereign God's work, how into my hands felled a little pamphlet somewhere, I think, as best I can remember, in 1972. It may have been late 72 or early 73. It may have been just a prior time. We were on a group called the Canadian Revival Fellowship in a place far off in a country that I'd only visited when I'd gone across as a little boy to Niagara Falls. And I read of a word of that little newsletter, and I thought to myself, wow, God, you do it up there as well as down here. I'm so glad. You're real. Wherever you are, you change people's lives. Because what they said, my heart jumped out and grabbed. And I knew it was reality. I knew that what I read of those that I never thought I'd ever see as long as I lived was the same experience that I had experienced. And so it was that introduction over a decade ago that I had to the Canadian Revival Fellowship. I owe a lot to these precious brothers that I've listened to, Brother Bill McLeod and Brother Bill Lang this afternoon. They know not that. They never have understood that. But they've ministered to me over the years. And so I stand here tonight humbling myself before you and saying thank you. This portion of the family that I've never met before. Bless you for loving and praying for other parts of that family of God that he's pulling together. A remnant, nonetheless. A remnant is always what he begins revival with. Now I'm to report to you tonight on what we can learn from the Church in Korea. It was my delight and privilege just a few months ago during the International Prayer Assembly in Seoul to be a part of the planning and preparation stages of that. And for the first time in my life of visiting that section of the world. Having become a student of revival almost through the back door in 1970 and in these subsequent years working in our own structure and tradition and across the nation of the United States and in some parts of the world, I'd read with a tremendous amount of interest what God has been doing and is doing in the great country of South Korea. And as a part of the National Prayer Committee and the planning stages of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization is we began to put the dreams down and pray God's sovereign hand to bring together people in Seoul in the spring or in the summer of 1984, my heart's dream began to come into reality. When I arrived in Seoul after having flown for many hours, what seemed like weeks to be very honest from Chicago through Tokyo and then on into Seoul, my first intention was to see if the Church really prayed like I'd read they prayed. I'd encountered a group of Koreans for the first time in a prayer meeting in Maryland some several years ago. I was teaching one of our seminars that we do on prayer and spiritual awakening that Chuck Newman of the Canadian Revival Fellowship family had been doing for you for a long time up in this section of the country. And I'd go there to teach this for a group of spiritual leaders in a retreat center in Maryland and I can remember the night that we had the opening session and God blessed and it was a marvelous time and those Anglos of us that were there were so excited until we stayed and prayed thirty or forty-five minutes. There was a group of Koreans there that night and I will not soon forget that when I came out of the small group, the concert of prayer that I had joined myself to, I heard this group off down the hall somewhere and I kept trying to tune my ears in and I thought, I don't understand that and so I sneaked down the hall to listen and I still could not understand and I pulled the door open and laying on the floor down on their face were a group of Korean pastors, some ten or twelve of them, and they were obviously more at business with God than I'd been at business with God. And I went away that night thinking, boy God, I don't know how to pray like that. I don't understand that. I want to learn, I'm willing Father, but I did like most of us are most accustomed to doing. After the glory had come for a few moments, I went to fellowship with men instead of to stay and love the Father. We went over into one of the beautiful chalets and there spent a good portion of the remainder of the evening fellowshipping, feeding our faces with refreshments, and somewhere close to the midnight hour we finally all went to bed. Forgetting about that bunch of Korean pastors, they had absolutely slipped my mind. About three o'clock in the morning they came in. Woke up the whole chalet. I couldn't understand a word they were saying. They could all speak English, but they chose not to at three o'clock in the morning. They didn't want us to know what was going on, I don't suppose, and they were just rejoicing in the Lord. I could tell they were happy. So when I headed toward Korea, I thought, Lord, if those are Americanized Koreans, I want to see the real thing. I want to see if they get in on what you are up to and down from what the world is doing. I want to confess to you tonight that I saw some of the things there that I think, if we could have touch North America, it would change the course and become a watershed in the history of the Church in North America. I am more and more convinced the more I travel this nation and this world that what we need is not new technology, not more emphasis or enthusiasm, not even more prayer conferences like we are gathered here together in. What we need is an old-fashioned, God-sent, Spirit-anointed, Holy Ghost, glory, hallelujah, foot-stomping, sin-killing, gully-washing, God-honoring revival. Y'all can say amen, can't you? I know you are more reserved than us Americans, but just try it. You'll like it. And by the way, you need to know this, if you don't encourage me every now and then I go back to the top and start again. So you best encourage me. I arrived in Korea with an anticipation of seeing the hand of the Lord. I'm going to jump forward to Pentecost Sunday before I back up and come through a portion of the week. Then I want to talk to you about the things I think we can learn. On Pentecost Sunday of this past year I had the privilege of standing, preaching in the Young Knock Presbyterian Church. It's the largest Presbyterian Church in the world. They number in membership somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 at present. During the last 20-some-odd years that fledgling church that started out of a bunch of, really a bunch of nomads that came down looking for a place to habitat, that church has started 296 churches and still has between 80,000 and 90,000 members themselves. On Sunday morning on Pentecost of this past year I stood at their first morning worship service at 7 a.m. and I looked out across the congregation that would make this sanctuary look small. I understand when it's completed you'll be able to see it in the upper balcony along with the main floor, some 3,000 people. But at 7 o'clock in the morning that morning I looked out to a congregation of 4,000 people and was told that there were another 3,000 worshiping with us by closed-circuit television. And that was the first of six worship services like that they were going to have during the course of that day. Or in other words, multiply it out yourself. Somewhere between 40 and 50,000 people in that one church. I'd already discovered earlier in the week that that was not the real power, not the masses of the people coming together, because the little remnant that comes day in and day out at 4.30 every morning, week in and week out, not five days a week, not six days a week, but every day of the week is the group that gathers in the outlying chapels and they stay from two to five hours every single morning praying God down to heaven, from heaven to earth. And I knew the reason for plus 40,000 being present was not the charisma of the personality of the pulpiteer, but was the power of the glory of God that is destined to arrive in a church that is willing to be an effectual, fervent, praying people. That day when I finished preaching there I went with one of their 66 associates, had a bite of breakfast, picked up my associate, and we headed by taxi across town toward the largest church in the world, Dr. Paul Youngichoe's church. As we got within about two blocks of the church, it's the only place I've ever been in the entire world, in any continents of the world, where Sunday morning there's a traffic jam and you can't get there from here. You have to go somewhere else to start just about it. It was unbelievable. People everywhere. And at 11 o'clock in the morning I sat in the balcony of that chapel, of that main sanctuary that will house 12,000 people, and it's too small, mind you. They're expanding it to seat 25,000. But I sat in the balcony of that beautiful central church on Yoida Isle, and up in that balcony I looked out across the masses of those 12,000 and they told us that they always packed it to 14,000. And then my mind was expanded a little beyond that as I became cognizant of the fact that those 14,000 were not even 50% of the worshipers in that 11 o'clock service because they had surrounding chapels that were worshiping by closed circuit television that numbered another 16,000. And that meant that in that one service alone at 11 a.m. there were 30,000 people, and you multiply that out by seven times, and that's how many times they worshiped. They had between 210 and 250,000 people, almost a quarter of a million people in that one church alone. You think it's the charisma of Cho, you just go and watch. He's nothing extraordinary, or he's obviously a man of God, obviously an anointed instrument that the Father has chosen to use in grace and glory. But I've heard just as good all over the world. I'll tell you where the key is. The key is in people who arise at 4.30 in the morning and pray until the sun comes up and on into the wee hours of the day. The key is those 12,000 or so people that amass themselves together every single Friday night. My friend Jack Taylor, again, that Wally mentioned a while ago, called me on the Friday night prior to that center that I was worshiping there. About 2 a.m. in the morning the phone rang. I'd been up going literally day and night. I was totally exhausted physically and spiritually elated beyond a degree. And the phone rang, and at 2 a.m. I picked it up, and Jack in his Texas drawl said, Shepard, get up and get over here. If you don't see what I'm seeing, you'll kick yourself all over the United States. I said, Jack, where are you? He says, I'm in a prayer meeting. I said, Jack, I've been in prayer more this week than I have in the last 12 months combined. He said, there are 12,000 people where I am. I said, just a minute, I'll be right there. I woke up my associate, called one of my other associates, called Barbara, Jack's wife. We loaded in the taxi, and at 2.30 a.m. the wee hours of the morning on Saturday morning, two blocks from the church, we were willing to get out and walk because the taxi couldn't get close enough. I walked into that upper balcony where I sat just two days later at that 11 o'clock worship service, and I saw people at 2.30 in the morning in that humongous sanctuary of 12,000 who were weeping and praying and testifying and praising the Lord. I couldn't understand a lot of what they were saying except that they were translating it for us. The translator had stayed on in the wee hours of the morning because there were those of us who were English speaking that wanted to hear. In the quietness of those moments, as I sat in that balcony on Sunday morning, I knew that the power was not in a man, but the power was in the people of God who were paying the price. The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous people availeth much. That afternoon when I finished that service and had gone through some of the orientation in their World Mission Conference Center, I went back to the hotel, changed clothes and had one of the young ladies from one of the Baptist churches, the second largest Baptist church in Seoul, to pick me up. They had invited me to speak for them for their final afternoon service of the day. So when she picked me up, she was bilingual in seven languages, fluent in English, of course, and as we drove along, very graciously at a warm, warm Oriental hospitality, she said on two occasions to me, and finally a third occasion, Oh, Brother Shepard, we're so sorry you have to come to our very small church. She knew I had been in the two largest churches in the world in that morning, and so finally my South Georgia curiosity got up and I said, How small is your church? And she said, Oh, Brother Shepard, we only have 6,000 members. And that afternoon I arrived at a church that was in the heart of the ghetto section of Seoul, Korea. At least you think they've discovered the principles of church growth, of the beautiful 25-acre plot of ground with parking all around it, with high-rise towers there in the process of constructing. They had discovered none of that. They had one parking spot that was within four blocks of the church, and that was the spot that they parked the car in that had driven me there. And yet that afternoon, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in their fifth worship service of the day, in a sanctuary that would seat 800, there were a thousand people present. And the pastor, in his English as he introduced me, apologetically said, I'm so sorry, this is our smallest crowd of the day. And I knew the reason that they were there was not because I had come, but because they had long before been with the Father God. For the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous people availeth much. And somehow in the tyranny of all of the difficulty they've experienced from those destitute years of the Korean conflict in the late forties and the early fifties, somehow in the heartache and the tragedy that most of us in North America have no comprehension of, where the country has split asunder, where there is a DMZ zone, somehow in the midst of all of that, those precious people have learned to pay the price and grab hold of the helm of the garment of God and pray for the power to fall. They are willing to give their life. The effectual fervent prayer of righteous people availeth much. We're willing to meet and talk about it, but not do it. We're willing to come and stay for several hours, but if someone suggests to us that we stay all night, we're afraid that we'll just simply not be able to make it the next day. And yet there's some of you sitting under the sound of my voice tonight who can hearken back to the decade of the seventies and that springtime in 1970 when the breath of God came to this very place and when the glory came. I sat last night as Fred shared with me and he told me about how for six weeks in this city every church seemed to be filled. How folks would come and arrive in the evening services like we are and the churches would be packed to capacity and they'd stay until the wee hours of the morning, three or four o'clock, and then get up and go to work and rush back. And for six weeks that went on. And I listened to him as he said, we ought to have been dead tired, but we weren't. And I knew what he was saying, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Somehow they knew how to get hold of the hymn of God himself. I took some of our missionaries that were traveling with us. One of our precious little saints of a missionary who was returning not only to Korea, but from there as we went on to China a few days later, returning to the China area that she had served as a missionary. And I took Miss Olive Lawton who is now in her 85th year. She was in the great Shandong revival in China in the late 20s and the early 30s when in that province, in the Shandong province, God broke out and out across some of the heartland of China, God did a mighty and majestic work preparing the church for what happened in 1948 and 49 as the Red Guard moved in. Communism took over. Churches were closed. Pastors were executed. Leaders were incarcerated. I took her as we went up to one of the prayer mountains that they have in Korea. They don't have prayer rooms or prayer chapels. They just buy a slab of rock, a whole mountain. And they'll convert it into a prayer center. And I went there and as I arrived at the one that happens to be the biggest chose, of course, I was amazed to see that they had constructed an auditorium, an auditorium that would almost dwarf this one. It's built in the exact proportion of the Old Testament description of Noah's Ark. What a beautiful prayer chapel to have. A chapel that's built in the form of the Ark that rode the people to deliverance. That is the power of delivering prayer. Those people had discovered that and when we got there early in the wee hours of the morning, having come up by bus, there was a group of those who were down on the main floor. The main floor is somewhat like an arena. And these Korean men and women, mamas and daddies and grandparents that had gathered there, they'd been there, the group that we arrived to see, they had been there for two days already. Our young Korean deacon who was out there for a week just simply to give information to those guests who came, told us that those that were getting up in the early morning hours, those men and women were there. They had been there for two days. They would spend another day. And I noted as they were getting up, they were not lavishly attired. They were not all dressed up as we would have to be dressed up. They didn't have to have heat control, climate control facilities. They had bedrolls and each one of them had a little veil of water because they were fasting and all they were taking off was liquid. And I watched that morning as the first thing many of those dear saints did is they rolled over out of their slumber, having prayed to the wee hours of the morning and now slept for only a few and began to awaken as the guest Americans make their way through on the tour. As they rolled over and down on their knees they went. And the thing that struck me the most, and I think I'll never forget this as long as I live, the thing that struck me the most is the children that were present. Little boys and girls, suckling children at the breast of their moms. They had gathered there and I thought we'd shuttle them off to somebody's nursery. We'd hire a babysitter to take care of them. But these folks brought their children and their grandchildren and I thought what a rich heritage to pass on to your children and children's children. The heritage of them seeing you spend days before God Almighty. And I realized that there was very little of that kind of movement of God in the North American continent from which I'd come. We walked across those marvelous rolling hills and in the sides of the mountains there they've just dug out what they call grottoes. Well they don't really call them grottoes, they call them prayer holes. We've dressed it up and call them grottoes. Dr. Cho has his own prayer hole. As we'd go along through the paths that were kind of on a sloping side of a mountain, I could hear in those prayer holes that had been dug out of the side of the mountain and kind of a little shack built over and a little screen door, a swinging door where it would pull together and a ventilation system where ventilation could go through. I could hear on the inside the agonizing prayer of prayers that were praying different from what I hear anywhere else in much of the world. They meant business. They sounded like, they sounded like that one that prayed many years ago who got hold of what he didn't know. He met him in the middle of the night and he thought it was an angel and he cried, you bless me, you bless me, I'll not let you go. Turn me loose or I'll touch you and you'll walk with a limp. Touch me and bless me, I'll not let you go. Oh they may walk with a limp but they walk with the glory of Holy God on them. I'll tell you what we've stood in our arrogant egotism with all of our statistical results, with our white Anglo-Saxon westernized religiosity, and we don't know the glory of God as we need it. The more I travel this world of ours, the more I'm thoroughly convinced that the most desperate need that we have is a touch from Holy God. It might leave us where we are crippled people. We might not walk like the world thinks we ought to walk, but I had rather walk with the glory of God upon me than for all of the world to acclaim me. The desperation of the church in Korea is obvious wherever you go. Well what can we learn from that church? Could I suggest several things to you tonight and then we're going to pray. I mean I, if all we've come to do is talk about it and we're not going to do it, I might as well get on a plane and go to Atlanta. I'm hungry for folks who are willing to pay the price. Desperately pray, pray, and pray. Let me make several suggestions. I think the thing that I began to understand was that to the best of my eyes ability, what I saw in the church in Korea was some simulance of what it must have been like the church on the day of its birth at Pentecost. I think what we can learn first from the church in Korea is that they are a spirit-controlled believers. 1 8 that that the scripture says that that you shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you. You will be my witnesses Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth. The promise for the power for a worldwide campaign, a commission to go to all of the corners of the globe, red and yellow, black and white, everyone precious in his sight. But man, how do you do that? Have you tried to strategize how to win 4.5 billion people to God? 3.2 billion people have never heard the name of Jesus Christ ever in their lifetime as best we can ascertain today. How do you strategize how to get to 3.2 billion people in a population center of the world worth 4.5 billion? I don't know how to do it. We've done the best we can with the biggest evangelical Protestant denomination in the entire United States of America with Southern Baptists. 14 million of us trying to figure out how to do it and we're losing ground 14 times faster than the population is growing. We're backing up and we're supposed to be the biggest at it. Do you know why and how they did it in the book of Acts? The glory, the anointing of God came. The Bible says in Acts chapter 2 verse 2, when they were assembled together, the place where they were was filled with the power of God's Spirit. I think if we're going to see God work in this North American continent, we're going to have to come to the point of relinquishing leadership to God again. We're going to have to back off and in humility lift our voice with a wailing honesty and integrity that demands honesty and say, oh God, I can't. You can. You never said I could. You always said you would. Please, Father, do it again. I believe the first lesson we need to learn is that the church that moves the world to the throne room of God is a church that is wholly controlled by the Spirit of God. Somebody says, what does that mean, Shepherd? What do you mean by a church controlled by the Spirit of God? Well, let's just use the Bible. You remember the passage there in John chapter 3? I think it's about midway where the Spirit is described as being like the wind. The wind bloweth whether it chooseth and you don't understand where it comes from. You don't know where it's going, but you know it's there. Do you know what we want to do? We want to box God up. We want to put Him into our little geographical, theological, positionalized, doctrinal, denominational structures and say, God, would you move among us? Would you move among the congregational? Would you move? Let me tell you something. When the glory of God moves as He's moving in Korea, as He's moving in China, as He's moving in South and Central America, as He's moving all over portions of East Africa now for 20 plus years, the glory of God, when it comes, moves indiscriminatingly among people who are desperate enough to say, oh God, we'll move with you. I believe we need to learn that the Holy Spirit demands that He be in control. Total control. Now, Lisa, that frightened you. Let me define what I mean by control. Acts chapter 2, down there in those verses about Lebman 12, just before Peter stood after he got his theological degree and started preaching, about Lebman 12 there in verse, uh, Lebman 12 chapter 2, the Bible says that those men who saw the people under the unction of the Spirit stood back and said, huh, this is weird. Those folks are drunk. Drunk, that's what's the matter. All men will dream dreams. There's going to be an outpouring of the Spirit. I'll tell you what the church must come to the point of. It must come to the point of being inebriated with the glory of God until the things of the world grow strangely dim in the light of the glory and the grace of God the Father, where we care not what the world thinks any longer, but where we are team players who keep our eye on the coach and see if he says, well done. I think the church in Korea is beginning to be an expression of that. Or should I say continuing to be? I think there's a second thing that we need to learn from the church in Korea. The church in Korea is not only a church that is so infused with the Spirit until it does things that are phenomenal in the world, but the church in Korea is so infused with the Spirit that it is unable to do proclamation that changes the course of human life. The course of human history, the segment of the world they are a part of is being changed by Christianity. In South Korea where the church has in these last 20 plus years grown at a phenomenal rate, it was about 6% of the population a little over 20 years ago. It is now approaching 38% of the population of South Korea. Now that's not bad New Testament Christianity. Little by little they're beginning to turn their world upside down. I asked Paul Younggi Cho, I said, Dr. Cho, what's the most difficult problem you have in a church that now supersedes, well they're somewhere over 400,000 in membership. I said, what's the most difficult problem? I figured he would talk about administration. How do you administer 400 pastors? How do you give guidance and control to 22,000 cell groups literally spread from one coast to the other, from one boundary to the other? How do you give administration to that? And so I kind of preempted him and I was kind of ready to pursue what you did with administration. And I asked him, what's your biggest problem? He didn't talk about administration. I thought one other thing. I thought, well what about fellowship? I've pastored for 18 years, varying sizes of churches, anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand in membership. And it's hard to keep them folks going in the same direction sometimes. You pastors ever run into that? Fellowship was a difficulty. And then I carried it a little bit bigger and I thought, good gracious Father, what would it be like to be the big kid on the block and it just kind of happens. You believed it could happen, but you weren't really the one that orchestrated it. Obviously the Father has done it. What about jealousy that's going to develop? And so I kind of anticipated he might talk about the jealousy that could develop within the family. So I said, Dr. Cho, what's the greatest difficulty you have in your church? And I'll never forget. He said, our greatest difficulty is to convince our members to come to only one service a Sunday and I beg them to come only every other Sunday. I said, why? He said, we want to have room for the baby Christians to come to the house of the Lord to learn to worship. I said, how many baby Christians you have every week around here? He said, well, let me give you a monthly figure. I said, how many? He said, we're averaging between 10 and 12,000 a month that are coming to Christ for the first time. I think we need to learn from the church in Korea the enablement of Holy Spirit proclamation. We have so many methods of how to lead people to Christ until we have discovered, I mean, that we have lost the power of the methods. We've got so many people that are instructed and trained, whether it be in the four spiritual laws, how to have a full and meaningful life, evangelism explosion, a marked New Testament, or whatever the tradition you come from to share with someone about how to come to Christ. We've got so many people in our churches who are trained to do that. We've got enough unanointed instruments. We need some anointed instruments. There's not any wrong way to lead someone to Jesus Christ as far as I'm concerned. I've seen some folks who do it so weird. I've got a young lady that works for me. I hope you meet her someday. You ought to have her up here. She stands six foot three inches tall. Little girl. She's bigger than I am. Broad. When she was 12, she ran away from home. Ended up in the red light district in South Houston down by the water area. By the age of 13, was in the oldest profession in the world. By the age of 14, to cover up the guilt of the immoral life and the promiscuity she was living with, she was already using drugs. By the age of 15, mainlining heroin. By the age of 16, the habit cost her $300 a day, and she could not even support it as a street prostitute. So she took to armed robbery at the age of 17, was caught in prison at the age of 18, docked for 20 years to spend the rest of those 20 years in jail. Finally, after much a sacrifice on her parents' part, they got a new trial and they cut it down to seven years. Iris Urey got out after seven years. Spent three and a half of those seven years in solitary confinement. She was marked incorrigible. They told her mama and daddy don't come back to see her anymore. She's not worth anything. But they rehabilitated her. They got her off drugs. They got all the disease germs out of her bloodstream. And they helped her to think proper. She's got a paper that's better than most of us got. She got a paper that says she ain't crazy. I haven't even got one of those. I can look at some of you. Some of you haven't got one of those either. Iris has got what a certificate of sanity is what it's called. Old Iris came out thoroughly rehabilitated. Do you know how man rehabilitates man? Man starts on the outside and works in. Do you know how God rehabilitates a man? God starts on the inside and works out. So when old Iris came out, she was just like she was. She just happened to be smarter and healthier and just meaner. Wasn't long before she was back on the streets doing the same thing. Was a madam that ran a prostitute house in South Houston. Finally opened another one and was in the process of opening a third one. When a young man who was a mainline heroin addict had been converted a few months before confronted Iris head on. One night asked her these words, Iris, what if it's true? What if God's real and Jesus died for you and is going to heaven and is coming back? What if it's true? And Iris in her Southern Baptist background with a WMU mama who had always worked in church got a real active conscience and the Holy Spirit got hold of her. And she got under conviction. And old Iris dallied with that old boy. She did everything she could to bring him from where he was down to where she was. And finally one night he said to her, Iris, I can't see anymore. I promised holy God when I was saved I'd never touch another tramp. All of a sudden God showed her what she was. And that broken hearted giant of a girl said, I don't want to be that way anymore. I'm in business. I want to be saved. He said, Iris, you've played games with me so long I don't believe you mean it. If you mean it, you get in the car. Let's go over in front of one of your strip joints. You get out on the sidewalk in front of the strip joints. You run and out loud pray to receive Jesus. Now folks, you either got to be loony or mean it. And I tell you what I've watched her and listened to her over these last seven or eight years as she's traveled with me around the world, is she's stood so many times and she puts the clincher on. She says, I knelt down a tramp and I stood up a lady. You know how Iris leads people to the Lord? Now when you're 6'3 and weigh well in excess of 250 pounds, you have some advantages. She'll get an old boy and she wants to lead the Lord. She'll say, shut up and sit down. You ought to be saved. Get saved. And they do. I mean, I've seen it happen. I've been with her. We were coming through the airport in London, England on the way back from an international revival conference in Switzerland. And Iris, this young man that was walking along with her, saw an old boy up on a scaffold. They were doing work in the London airport. And as they were walking along, Iris' heart went out to that young man. She stopped, started to talk to him. The piercing glory of God came. That boy climbed down off the scaffold and got down on his knees in the terminal in the airport in London, England. And she looked over his shoulder and saw they were getting ready to close the door to the plane that we were getting on down the way. She said, Glenn, run down there and stop them. I said, Iris, I can't make them stop that plane. She said, have a heart attack in the door. Don't let them close it. This boy needs to be saved. I went and stood in the door, threatening to die. I want you to know something, folks. She's got God all over her. The church in Korea knows how to proclaim Jesus in the unction of the Spirit. We need to recapture that. One more observation and then I'll close. I think we need to recapture, rediscover, if you please, that marvelous passage in Proverbs 29, verse 18, without a vision, the people perish. You know what those crazy Koreans think they're going to do? They just think they're going to take South Korea for Jesus Christ. I mean, they just, you know, you talk to most of them. It doesn't matter whether you go to a Baptist church or congregational, whether you go to a Presbyterian, whether you go to a Pentecostal or Charismatic. How are things going? Great! We're going to win South Korea to Jesus! He's told us that we're the winner! The devil's beat! Ha! We're going to do it! That may offend our traditional reserve, but I'll tell you what, folks, I'd rather be in a fenced tee and change the world than you like me and not change the world. Somehow, someway, we must become people who get a grasp of the glory of God and understand that in Christ there is an answer for the chaos and the hunger and the desperation of a dying and lost world, and move with the conviction that in Christ all things are possible. Are you hungry for revival? Or did you just come to another Canadian Revival Fellowship meeting? I mean, did you just come to hear reports from some men that you know and love? Bless the Lord. I heard Brother Bill Lang say this afternoon, sitting back there listening, wouldn't it be nice if the program went down the tube and the glory came? Wouldn't it be something if there was no need for a Lang or a McLeod or a Satyr or a Shepherd? Wouldn't it be beyond comprehension if it was like it was? The breath of God came. And in desperation we said, Oh, Father, Father, we are tired of remembering what it was like. We are hungry for what it can be. We are tired, Father, of hearkening back a decade and a half ago. Oh, God, as you did in years gone by, would you pour your glory into this place again? I believe the Father is so predisposed that if we got so hungry that he would have to honor his word. And his word says, Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. They should be filled. Folks who are filled with the Holy Ghost of God walking in the anointing of God are people who expect the miracles of God. Walking in the power of God, proclaim the word of God. Walking in the Spirit and the power of God, proclaiming the word of God. Gather the harvest of God. There are people like those 2,000 years ago who walked not in flesh power, but in holy power into the midst of the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire attempted to crush them. But it's gone today. And the church lives on. And it's going to live on and on and on. I'm hungry, folks. I'm so thirsty. I'm so thirsty to live now. And then I get a running fit just to get with God and get so alone and put myself away from the world and just say, Lord, I'm tired of listening to anybody else. I want to hear from you. Let's pray. With your heads bowed and your hearts open, let me give you some instructions for a minute. Do not hear me being manipulative. I do not intend that. I hope you'll read my heart in purity. I want you to do something a little different than I saw you do this afternoon. We'll come back and wrap up with that, with people praying loud for everyone can hear. I want you to form little groups of prayer cells. No more than five people, if you'll do that. It's going to mandate that you'll probably have to get up. You may have to move around where you can get comfortable a little bit. If you want to come to the altar, just kneel down. If you want to sit down on the floor, that's all right. Get comfortable because we're going to pray a while. Now I want you, as you get together in those little groups, I want you to, if you'll just try it, I think God will honor it, I want you to take the sham off and the facade. Oh God, we're hurting folks. We're not changing the course of Canada or the United States or North America. We get together and talk to each other and we seldom touch the fiber of a decadent generation. I think it would be nice to pull off the sham tonight and say, Father, thank you for these days, but oh God, come to us in such power that when we leave these days, wherever we go and wherever the shadow of your life in us goes, we touch the world. And I think it would just be good to grasp hands in that circle and maybe one or two or all of you, just pray. Don't preach, don't pray long prayers, give each one ample time to pray. Let it be a concert of prayer. United, extraordinary, concertized prayer is what Jonathan Edwards talked about almost 300 years ago when the first great awakening was in the making. People everywhere gathered and they just concerted their hearts together. Now pray loud enough that those in your group will be blessed by your praying and don't pray so loud that you disturb someone three or four rows away from you and just begin to pray. Would you try that? Just try it. Get up and move if you want to. Find you another three people or four at the most and you'll form a little group, a concert. It can be as small as two if you want it to be that small. Now as some continue to praise the Lord, there'll be others that are finishing in their group and you'll be wanting to move to the point of saying, Lord, search me and try me and see if there'd be any wicked way in me. Reveal that and clean me up. As God's spirit penetrates your heart and shows you areas where you need to be clean, you begin to confess to him and say, Father, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Be honest with him. If it's coldness, if it's empathy, if it's a lack of caring, if it's prayerlessness, a preacher not reading his Bible or studying the word, harsh words to your mate, to your children, you just let him show you and then you begin to say, Father, I'm sorry. Forgive me. Now as the Lord would burden your heart, pray for forgiveness for the national sins of Canada and America. Open your heart and ask God to forgive us for what we've become. Let him reveal what you need to pray for and you ask God, oh Lord, God, forgive us for that. On behalf of my nation, I come before you. You become an intercessor standing in the stead, walking under the burden.