In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the need for a revolution in the pulpit and the church. He highlights the importance of prayer in both the church and the pulpit. The preacher compares the ongoing spiritual warfare to the hundred years war in Europe, emphasizing that the focus should be on the Christ who died and the resources available to believers today. He also addresses the criticism of the church by the world, emphasizing the need for relevance and effectiveness in the present day.

We thank you, we bless you for this privilege of entering into the court above all other courts, to the God above all other gods. To bow before his majesty, Jesus Christ our Lord, we do so with reverence and godly fear. We will be still and know that thou art God tonight. As the old poet said, may sense be done, let flesh retire. Speak through the earthquake, the wind, or the fire, or the still small voice of calm. Drop thy still dues of quietness till all our strivings cease. Take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace. We come from this world with all its entanglements, with all its ferocity and vulgarity and savagery even in our day. And thank you for this privilege to turn our eyes upon Jesus and look full in his wonderful face. Lord, may we do that tonight. Show us some hidden beauty. You've said you'll bring out of your treasury things new and old. Lord, you know everyone of our hearts. Maybe there are some very wounded hearts tonight. May they find healing in this service. Maybe there are some of us whose sensibilities to deep spiritual things are still very, very small, very, very light. Will you deepen that sensibility tonight? Maybe there are some who can't find their way. We pray that they'll find that way tonight. Make this a crossroad in somebody's life. Nay, Lord, we will pray in everybody's life tonight. We thank you for your word. We bless you for it. We think our men have burned it and banned it and blamed it and buried it. And then it stands at the graveside of all its persecutors. They perish, but your word abides forever. And not only has, it does, and not only does, it will. Because you said that even if they blew the world up in smithereens, heaven and earth may pass away, but my word shall never pass. We thank you. You don't have to make any corrections to it. Men try to do that in their foolishness. But your word to us is, thus saith the Lord. We would ask that we may embrace it tonight and believe it and be quickened. I'll turn my eyes upon Jesus, I'll turn my eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory. Okay, let's look at the book. The book. In the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians chapter 10. And let me give you my usual quip. I'm reading from the Living Bible, King James. 2 Chronicles 10. I'm sorry, 2 Corinthians, thank you. 2 Corinthians 10. Now I, Paul, myself, beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, who in presence and base among you, but being absent, am bold toward you. Jump down to verse 10 for a moment. For his letters, they say, that's his critics, his letters are weighty and powerful, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible. Now if you think Paul was an orator, you've got it all wrong, he wasn't. I've a kind of an idea that maybe he stammered out many of his words. He wouldn't have what Dr. Tauze used to say to me sometimes, it seems today a preacher needs a toothpaste smile, you know, like this. You stand up oozing out personality and you don't wear anything less than a five hundred dollar suit and he'll be sure to show you the gold bracelet, you know. We used to put those on the dogs at home, but anyhow, they have an identification mark and a gold watch and all the trimmings. Now the last, the last thing Paul wanted to do ever was to project Paul. I think if you said Paul was a great preacher, he'd be insulted, he'd be disappointed. The job of no preacher is to show you he's a great preacher, it's to show you that he has a great Christ. That should be the fundamental desire of his life always. But not as he says his bodily presence is weak. Well, could it be anything else? If you were tied to a whipping post and lashed 195 times, do you think you'd be, well, just maybe as strong as you are? Now what does he say? Thrice I was stoned. I'm persuaded he limped. I'm persuaded his eyes weren't quite straight. I'm quite sure his face was marked where he'd been slit with stones and he didn't have any real medication. I think it would be a very, very disappointing, uh, what we call today personality. You know, in the old days, that's a long time back, Dale and I remember them, but, uh, in the old days they used to talk about character. Now we talk about personality. You know, some of those bubbly little women on soap operas and these foolish folk in dynasty or some of these other junky things they show at night. Yeah, I wouldn't let them wash my dog. Incidentally, I don't have a dog, but I wouldn't let them wash the dishes anyhow. He says that his bodily presence is, he even testifies himself, noticed back in the first verse, in, in presence I'm base among you. If he came in the room, you wouldn't say, boy, look at that face, he must be six feet four, boy, he must be a tremendous athlete. He looks the very essence of fitness. No, no, no, no. Isn't it this very man who says that we have this treasure in earthen vessels and good night, we make so much of the earthen vessel. Takes some women longer to get their face straight, I don't wonder, of course, uh, going to church Sunday morning than time they pray. You think God was concerned about fashion instead of passion. We make so much of the body, this is the day when everything's a body. You've got to feel fit, you've got to paint it up, trim it up, feed it up. Well, in case you don't know, the worms are going to eat you anyhow before long, so cheer up. What a lot we make of the body, and if they don't make it of the body, we make it of the mind. Intellectualism, you know, all these philosophies, and of course that marvelous word, psychology. Do you know the definition of psychology? Psychology is something everybody understands in a language nobody understands. There's no woman, no person has more psychology than the mother. If she sees a child got something, a treasure, she doesn't try and grab it, she knows the child would hold on to it, so she picks the ball up and the child puts the thing down and takes the other thing, that's psychology. No charge for this, but, uh, it's true. Oh, how out of focus we are in these days in which we live. As I said today, even amongst God's people, we're not eternity conscious people. We're position conscious, possession conscious, power conscious, personality conscious, eternity conscious. Come on, how much of you thought about eternity today? And yet we're going there, there's no option about it. Okay, he's prepared to say he's bodily present, nothing attractive about him, he's not coming with superior language, he wasn't the orator of the early church. Who was the orator of the early church? Hmm? Not Paul. Who? Apollos. He was the Demosthenes, he was the man that went, oh boy, he could stir your flesh and paint wonderful pictures. Ah, but the man that had the revelation and the authority was surely the Apostle Paul, and he doesn't hesitate with his colossal intellect, with more revelation than any other man that ever lived. Fourteen epistles, if you give him Hebrews, and I think he wrote it, and he says, pray for me, as he finishes Ephesians 6, it kind of staggers me, pray for me that utterance may be given to me. Now if he was eloquent, he wouldn't need utterance. But that word doesn't mean eloquence there, it means pray for me that authority may be, that when I speak the word of God, there's authority, there's weight behind it. Well, isn't that exactly what people said about Jesus? The scribes and others said, well, you listen to those guys and they don't mean it anyhow, but when you hear this man, this man is so different from the scribes and Pharisees. What did they say about him? His words are what? Well, they said of Paul, his words are weighty. They said of Jesus, even his enemies said, never man spake like this man. I get angry with preachers. I'm going to preach to a lot of them in next month. They're in for a bad time, let me tell you. I do not understand how you can have a dead service with the living Christ. Do you know the answer? If you do, tell me. Why do so many of the young people say, oh, I don't know, the church is bawling, stand up, sit down, the choir will sing. Now we're going to put a new wing on the church. You know, some of those judges have so many wings, you wonder it doesn't fly away. Again, it's all external, materialistic. It's not getting down to the heart of the matter. Okay, let's read a bit further, verse 2. But I beseech you that I may not be bold when I am present with you with that confidence, wherewith I think to be bold against some which think they're of us, as if we, think of us as if we were walking according to the flesh. Now remember, this is only part of a scenario. It's like taking one piece out the middle of a crossroad of a, what do you call those puzzles? Jigsaw puzzle. In the next chapter, he's going to warn us against people that come as sheep, and actually they're wolves, they're false apostles. And so he's justifying, to some degree, the fact that God has ordained him. This is his final appeal to this church, and it's his second epistle, as you know, obviously, and he's almost at the end of it. He says in verse 3, though we walk in flesh, we do not walk after the flesh. Does that remind you that we're in the world, yet not of the world? We're in the flesh. People say, I went to a meeting the other night, trying to get us all to die, die to self. You can't die to self, you are a self, you are an entity. You can die to sinful self, you can die to what I call hyphenated sin, self-seeking, self-interest, self-glory, self-projection, you can die, but you're a self, you're a personality, there'd only be you. I mean, the Lord's gracious, there's only one of you in the whole world, isn't that a relief? I mean, if we were all like you, where would we be? But anyhow, the fact is that you, you, you. Now, Paul says, we walk in the flesh, in this flesh, that's what he's meaning, he's not meaning the inner flesh, the fleshly things. We do not walk after the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalted itself. Now, I think the best way to read this chapter, actually, is to read this part and then go right over to Ephesians, to the latter part of Ephesians, the sixth chapter, where it talks about putting on the whole armor of God. And not as it's putting on, the armor's there. It wouldn't do you any good if you have a suit of armor. I, I used to go to a place, in fact, I stayed in a castle for a month, and as you went in, there were two, not men, but there were two suits of shining armor with men holding spears there, very attractive. But that armor wouldn't be any good if you were out fighting in the field and somebody shot an arrow at you. You've got to put it on, not that God puts it on, you put it on, he makes the provision. There are things we want God to do when God says, do it yourself, stir up yourself, stir up the gift of God that's in you. Don't blame God for your sloth. As I've said so often, this Bible, whether Wesley Harriet or Finney or Booth or somebody else, nobody ever had a bigger Bible than you have. The only thing is that they used it better. They redeemed the time better. Now notice he says the weapons of our warfare, and that's the thing that I latched onto for tonight, warfare. A Christian life is no picnic. We're in the world, but we're not of the world. It's a warfare. There are three main adversaries in this warfare, the world, the flesh, the devil. Now you could make a circle kind of, you know, like this, say this is the world. And then you could put pockets in like this, you know, and you could put all kinds of things in it. Here are the cults, and here is the devil, and here are evil spirits. And you can fill a hundred things up that are all in this present, as the Word of God calls it, evil world. There's an old hymn that says, is this vile world a friend to grace? The only desire this world has, the only desire Satan has, is to reduce you to zero. Make you think you're inferior, make you think you don't count very much in the kingdom of God. Make you say, well my daddy wasn't much, and my grandfather certainly wasn't, and his father wasn't. And you go back and all that senseless thing. Instead of entering into the fact that we are, we are in Jesus Christ, we are heirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. Now if I said to you, I say again, this Sunday, ninety percent of the preaching in America or England will be about a man who lived two thousand years ago called Jesus Christ. And we'll think we're doing him a favor by defending his miraculous birth and resurrection. And it will be all about, ninety percent is about the man who died two thousand years ago. Out of the next ten percent, nine percent will be about a man who's coming soon, the king, coming in all his glory, in all his majesty. Only one percent, this is my judgment, it's not a poll that Gallup made of somebody, it's my opinion or my conviction. Ninety percent is about the Christ who died years ago. Nine percent is about him coming in glory. One percent is really drawing on his resources for this hour in which we live. The world out there isn't criticizing the church of two thousand years ago, it's criticizing the church today. It doesn't care how Wesley preached, it doesn't care how Finney preached. It says so what, so what, what is the church doing today? And they'll come up and say it's not very relevant, you know, I mean in a day like this. Well, this has been a wonderful day. In case you don't know, was it last night, two men got out of a tin can up in the sky and they walked for four hours today in the air. Isn't that wonderful? But it so happens that tonight on the news, it said that that Kilauea volcano in Hawaii was coming down the road at an awesome pace. It is twenty feet high of molten lava, the river is more than two miles long, it's only two miles to go to the sea and it's all downhill, and we don't know how to stop it. Well, why don't all the ice cream dealers in America send ice cream over and put it in the path of it? Don't you think that would stop it? I mean, twenty feet of molten lava, six hundred, six hundred feet wide, and you stack ice cream a mile high and a mile thick, surely it would sizzle the thing out. No, it wouldn't, of course it wouldn't. Well, I want to tell you, I believe that's a correct analogy of what the church is trying to do again against the tide of sin that's in the world today. We're putting an ice cream barrier up there. We think we're going to stop it by broadcasting a few messages, giving out some tracts, which are all good, but we've had them for years and we've not stopped this awesome barrage of sin. And I don't care what church you go to, no church is going to have revival on a once a week prayer meeting, neither in Garden Valley or Green Acres or Black Acres or anywhere else. It's rather like having a, I guess you'll like my drawings, here, wait a minute, I've got a wall here, here's a torrent, here's water rushing out from here. A little boy saw it according to the legend, you know, in Holland, and he went and stuck his finger in that hole and there he stayed all night and he died and he held up the dike. Now everybody knows that story except people in Holland, they don't know a thing about it, so it's all, it's all, it's all imagination. Now wouldn't it be something if he stuck his finger in all night and then he went and said, I'll come back next Friday and stick my finger in it, and the Friday after and stick my finger in it, and the Friday after and stick my finger, it wouldn't do much. Right, well you think of the great barrier that there is out there, like going to Boulder Dam and seeing all the water held up. You know the church is trying to do the same thing. We're trying to stick our finger in the hole just for about an hour on Friday nights and let the world go to hell fire the rest of the week, and it hasn't worked, and it doesn't work, and it won't work. Paul says that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holes. Now come on, do you think there were ever any more hide holes, or holes to hide in for the devil than do you think you ever had more, what shall I call them, agencies? A lady wrote me a blistering letter. I'd written something for last days and she sent me a letter, she didn't like it. Well to tell the truth, I didn't like it, but I wrote it. I write a lot of things I don't write, but I wrote it. And I mentioned the fact that we change the names of things. We don't call it iniquity, we call it infirmity. We don't call wickedness, wickedness, we call it weakness. We don't say people are living in adultery, they're having an affair, that's innocent enough, isn't it? You don't say there's a whore, you call her a call girl, there's nothing offensive about that. And I said the fact we don't use the word bastard, and she said, would you go to somebody illegitimate and say you're a bastard? No, I have more sense than that. But it happens to be a bible word. And one thing that gets to me more than that is this, we talk about the cults. Mercy, you couldn't find a word more inoffensive than that. What if you call them doctrines of devils like the apostle does? Oh we have some people next door to us, some lovely people, Jehovah's Witnesses. They're not Jehovah's Witnesses, they're Hell's Witnesses, why don't you wake up? They haven't got a degree of truth. Cults, cults, strongholds. I picked this up today. Is it possible that Great Britain has more Muslims than she has Christians in church on Sunday morning? Statistics tell us it is so. Is it true that the Islamic countries are training 6,000 Muslim missionaries, 6,000, who in turn will train workers to carry the message of Islam to the ends of the earth? The Muslim money that we've poured back to those oil chiefs, those, what do you call them, moguls or sheikhs. That money has built 22 universities of the Islam faith and the Ayatollah Khomeini promises to export militant Islam to liberate people who are in darkness. Dear God, that's more than most of your preachers will say this weekend. Some of those preachers reach every Sunday was Mother's Sunday and they never have to say anything offensive. Jesus was abrasive, Paul was abrasive. He talks about us entering into a place where we pulled down strongholds. Come on, come on. When did you ever feel any engagement with the powers of darkness? Did you ever feel you entered into a situation and you knew when you got up you pulled a stronghold down? Dear, Dale and I pray together every Tuesday and Thursday and I value that time. It's what fancy name these days, quality time. And we've prayed for so many different things and God has answered prayer and we've prayed for them here. And just before lunch today a man called me, he said good afternoon. Well it was morning so I said, well, he said, well it's morning with you, afternoon with me. Oh, where are you in the world? I hope with the astronauts. No, I am in South Africa, Wellington, South Africa. I've got halfway through a book called Why Revival Tarries and I can't finish it. I've got to tell you that God is just breaking my heart over it. It's got a message that's needed for the day. Have you been to South Africa? No, I haven't been around the world, I haven't been to South Africa. Oh, he said, listen, this book is getting hold of people and I don't take any credit for it. God gave it to me. My dear friend Alfredo here from, I was going to say, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, God used it in his life partly too. But the thing that gives me joy is that there are saints all over the earth right now who are totally dissatisfied with materialism. They're tired of the status quo in the church. They're tired of their kids going to church and falling asleep and they don't know the text of the preacher or anything when they come out. That's an abomination. People go to a film, they know who the characters in the film are, you ask them, what film did you see last week? Oh, I saw so-and-so. Boy, the leading lady, she is gorgeous. Maybe she's a big sack of flesh, that's all, but anyhow, there she's gorgeous. The other fellow's marvelous because he's a brute, he shot somebody's death, three or four of them, which is par for the course these days. They can remember everything about a film, they can't remember the first thing about the sermon they heard last Sunday. Come on, what did your preacher preach on last Sunday morning? Give me the text, give me the… What was he driving at? We need a revolution in the church. No, we need a revolution in the pulpit, first of all. The church needs to pray, the pulpit needs to pray. But when I got… we're in a warfare, you know, this warfare is… in Europe, you may be remembering history, there was once a hundred years war. That's a pretty long war. This war, in our version of it, in our section of it, began two thousand years ago. And the difference between this war and other wars is that we can't make a peace treaty without adversary. Now, have you ever thought how war… World War I ended with an armistice? Do you know what an armistice is? It's a suspension of activity, that's all it is. And it resurfaced in twenty years, it came up in 1939. Twenty years in which the church had the greatest opportunity since Pentecost, and she muffed it. Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, all the snobbish intellectuals were saying, we don't need the gospel, we don't need the bible, we don't need the church. They said that in 1912, two years before World War I. They were rather startled when World War… Fabian Socialism had all the super intellectuals, Aldous Huxley, all the monkey boys, you know, believe they came from monkeys and they act like it, of course. And all those intellectuals were there. Two years before World War I, England was almost still sleepy Elizabethan English, England. And these super men said, we don't need the church, what has it done in two thousand years? We don't need the gospel, we don't need this, the bible. Well, they got wakened up. Just like all these people are going to have great fun and banquets tonight. And this horrible river of fire has come down now, and would you believe it, it even, oh, it has no manners. It went into the royal gardens this afternoon and burned half of them up. And millionaires' homes, going like that. Well, of course, what is Hawaii being? It's been a fun place. It's almost a Las Vegas. New Orleans is what? Four feet underwater. Well, New Orleans is under the sea level, I don't know whether you know that at all. They pump every day to keep it from… But now it's got eight feet of water in some places. Well, Bourbon Street won't be dancing tonight to the tune when the saints go marching in. God does get his revenge now and again and shut these places down. And if the world had enough sense and the preacher had enough, we'll tell them this is a foretaste of coming judgment. That river may be roaring with all its power right now through New Orleans, through Baton Rouge. It's only a cup of water compared to the judgment that's coming. That river of fire, 20 feet high, 600 feet broad, I forget how many thousands of degrees, people are backing off as they're reported on it, and they don't realize that God, our God, is a consuming fire. And the reason the world goes to hell fire tonight is because the church has lost Holy Ghost fire. If your church has chicken suppers, find a better church. If your church has an amusement park, I passed a church today, Family Life Center. In God's name, why? There's a fellow going around the country, Dobson, telling Christians how to run the homes. And then the church builds a center so you won't stay at home. Isn't that logical? But you go there and your children can play games in one room and you can sit here with the Joneses or the Smiths or the Browns or somebody else and talk. Our Browns don't go, but other Browns do. But is this what it's all about? Isn't the house divided enough without the church helping to divide it? Isn't enough worldliness and sensuality without feeding it and getting little minds away from eternity? I think it was Isaac Watts, I'm not quite sure, I think it was Isaac Watts that started studying Greek when he was six and Hebrew when he was eight, and he spoke about five languages by the time he was 11, and that wasn't unusual in that day. It isn't unusual today. In some of the best schools in England, our boys went to school and when they were 11, they have compulsorily to take a second language. Do you know our children? We're number 12. Our children in America, with all the food we have, they're about number 12 on the health list of the world. We have so much junk food and we got an agent for coke up there, so I mustn't say too much. We only have cokes and all the rest of it. Richest nation in the world eating the worst food. Richest nation in the world, children very uneducated. Most god-blessed nation in the world with radios, TVs, and we're number one in crime, and we're number one in divorce, and heaven knows what else. You see, when you read this, it talks about pulling down strongholds, and I began to ask myself, well how many strongholds are they? What are they all about? Well you can face a lot. We're facing a stronghold in society today. The lifestyle of America or England is anti-Christian, let's face it. Don't get so blind with the stars and stripes that you can't see the cross, or with the Union Jack that you can't see the cross. Our first loyalty is not to a country, our first loyalty is to the cross. Not too many amens, but it's true. I was reading Spurgeon yesterday, he says, you can't think of a Christian taking up a sword or a gun. I never tried to persuade my boys what to do, but I did say, look, when you come to a situation, visualize Jesus with a machine gun in his hand, sweeping down a whole crowd of people who are going to, immediately they're shot down, they're going to hell. Doesn't matter whether they're communists, whether they're black or white, or what in the world we are. Once we get an eternity consciousness, once we see any man, whoever he is, not in his social standing, or intellectual standing, or any other standing, we see him as a person lost, he's going to a lost eternity without God. Why, if that were true, every prayer meeting in the nation, every house of God, in my judgment, in this crisis hour, we should have a prayer room that's open 24 hours a day in every church in the land. Maybe our choice is as simple as this. Concentrate in prayer, or pray in concentration camps. Come on, make your choice. What do you do? You take the fence from the top of the cliff, as they've done in schools, taking the ten commandments, but we put a streamlined ambulance at the bottom. Isn't it better to have the barrier at the top than the swanky ambulance at the bottom? We're denying children their birthright. We're up against, well, adversaries like society, the style of living which is so accepted today, and it's a corrupt style of living. I was reading, I get the New York Times book review, I read it, I get it free, but there's some tremendous things. There was one in today in which a man said, how do you escape from the senseless cruelty of this generation in which we live? We're the most cruel generation that's ever lived. Been around here two years ago, and you pull an arrow out of your back. Oh, dirty Indians. You should throw them all away, those Indians. We don't do that now. We're civilized. All we do, we just take a bomb and drop it on the city and barbecue a whole city. That's education. But when you've dropped it, remember, you've put a hundred thousand or a million people into hell. What do we do? Well, God has said, I didn't say, God has said that when the enemy comes in like a flood, he'll lift up a standard against him. But listen, you wouldn't send Boy Scouts out to fight a herd of Indians, a crowd of Indians, if they were coming. You'll get some chosen men to do it. And I think if you're honest, you'll admit that the weakest portion of your life is your prayer life, and the weakest portion of your church is a prayer meeting. Preachers don't like me to say it, so I rub it in. The crowd on Sunday morning shows you how popular the church is. The crowd on Sunday night shows you how popular the preacher is. The crowd at the prayer meeting shows you how popular God is. People come and crowd to hear, a lady wrote to me today, we'd over, maybe nearly 4,000 people Sunday morning, couldn't get them in the sanctuary, had to put them all over. So what, it's Easter. What's the good of buying new clothes if you can't show them off? It's like humility, what's the good of having it if you can't tell a folk about it? Oh, I was talking with a brother today, that old sense of God's holiness. Now, how often do you think you're a soldier? I know you're saved, you're going to heaven, your name is in the book of life. When you got there, Gabriel would stand at salute, and Peter and all the apostles would be waiting just for you, all the way from Garden Valley. What was it an old saint used to say, God don't let me come to heaven without any notches in my blade. You know, that's when you used to fight with swords, and every time you fought, somebody defended and said, chipped a bit out of the blade. Another saint says, don't let me come to heaven without scars. We've got what I think is almost a nursery rhyme Christianity. Jesus shed the last drop of his blood, I'll be careful I don't shed the first drop of mine. He died for me, well I want to live for him, I sure don't want to die for him. Now look, this engagement is going to get easier, so you may as well face up to it. I talked with a couple not long ago, they said, look we're very happily married, we've both got good situations, and we would, if we felt it was of God, we'd be very glad to have a child. We can afford children, we've got money to educate them, so forth so on, but we're not having children. Not to bring them into a world which is increasingly deteriorating morally, and in every other way, and Satan is getting a stronger grip on every system on earth. I disagree with their philosophy if you like, but there's some sense in it too. If you're bringing children into the world, you'd better do like Job, he says, I'll pray this morning, before my children go out in the world, lest they should fall into sin. And even when they're old enough to pray, you should do. My daddy did it, prayed with us, my dad prayed with me till I was working in a factory, every morning before I went to work. You want the church to do it. Why do you let your kids run around like little animals all week, and expect Sunday school to straighten them out in 40 minutes? You should be the king in your home, and you should be the priest in your home. And I would love if your children should say, the greatest thing about my daddy was not that he bought me the best dresses, or the best suits, or a motorcycle, or something. But I can remember like a famous Scot said, mother used to say, daddy's praying. And he says, we always tiptoed quietly past that room, we could hear daddy with his intercessions. You know that's about the greatest thing on earth. I'd rather be born in a home with a godly daddy, and I thank God I had a godly praying daddy. And I'd rather have that, than my dad be ten times more famous than Babe Ruth, or Babe Ruth, or any inventor, anybody on earth. Because you see, everything else has debt in it. Why invest your life in death? Now this is a real warfare. Our adversary has no manners, he's going to try every conceivable thing to trap you. He's got all those traps laid out in the world, and on top of that of course, you've got some hidden foes, if God hasn't dealt with them. You've got some enemies inside that can strangle, or shall I say, hinder your spiritual life as much as anything external. For instance, you could have a monster that lots of guys can't deal with, they can go and sweat, and lift up so many weights, bars, and all the rest, they can't get out of bed in the morning to pray. Well I don't think he's a strong man, I think he's a weakling. My bed is never more comfortable than the last five minutes, just before I get out of it every morning. I say, Martha, this bed is lovely this morning. It wasn't like this when we got in last night, but oh, I feel like a bird in a nest, you know, the soft feathers all round, and I could just stay here. I mean, I'm not young, I'm over 17 now, and I think I've had my innings and worked out, oh, but this bed is so lovely, and then I say, yeah, but come on, get out of it. Oh, I don't know whether this is quite right to say, but I'll tell you what a fellow said one day to me when I was about 20. He was talking about this thing, he said, up from the bed he arose with a mighty triumph over clothes. Well, it sounds a bit facetious almost, but boy, it's true. Oh, I stay up late at night. Well, there's no moral, there's no moral challenge in staying up. I can stay up all night and stay till 3, 4, 5 o'clock. I prefer to go to bed as early as I can and get up early in the morning. I usually get about an hour with the Lord between 3 and 4. I do my meditation or meditation sometimes, and I keep a notebook at the side of my bed, and I put down what the Lord gives to me, and I sing a few hymns to him, and have a great time, and find it strengthens me for the day. Most of you pray all the problems at the end of the day you'd never have had if you prayed at the beginning of the day. You went to bed half asleep. If you didn't have angels guarding your driving, half of you would have been dead by now. You thought you drove, well you weren't, you were half unconscious driving. There's an angel who was pushing your elbows and your arms half the time, I'm sure. But oh, how many traps there are. I don't need traps outside, I can have traps inside. Again, I can have, I can have sloth, I can have pride, I can have covetousness. Now you can't fight a war against the enemy if you're fighting a war on the inside all the time. You've got a divided interest, you've got a divided personality. And the only unification is that through the blood of Jesus to cleanse us, and the Holy Spirit to control us. Our warfare is not carnal, but it's mighty in God through, it's mighty through God. Well how in the world can you be mighty through God if you don't know him? Listen, I don't care what church you go to. Most people that go to your church don't know the owner of the church. In other words, they go to the house of God, but they don't know God. They don't have a living vital relationship with God. They live on meetings, maybe they live on the pastor, maybe they live on the pastor's aide or somebody. But how many of us really know God? Now if we're going to be mighty through God. We had a dear little fellow came and sat at the back there two or three times. What was his name, John something, I don't know, from India. Quiet little fellows out there came to our house twice. Now he's been living in India where there's not much food. And people say when you go to America, ever had a banana split? No. Next best thing to heaven. Have you had a coke? No. Oh when you go to America, I tell you when you go in some of those houses you'll stare at all the food. And he came over here and as soon as he got here the Lord said I want you to fast for 40 days. Oh mercy that's rough isn't it? I mean it's easy fasting in India, mercy there's nothing to fast about. But when you come to America, a land flowing with mink and money, I mean milk and honey, it's a big temptation you know. And he just said quietly well I'm just coming off a 40 day fast. You know as I listened to that fellow talking about the way God moves in that country, I was so glad. The way that my dear friend here, man nobody knew and he went and rented a bull ring in his city. Valencia wasn't it? You're going to rent a bull ring for what? The gospel. Don't want the gospel. How many nights do you want it for? 21? Fifteen hundred dollars a night wasn't that it? Fifteen hundred dollars a night to a guy that doesn't have a penny. And a man that nobody knows and he rents the bull ring. And got 25,000 people a night and 50,000 at weekend. And then you say well I'd do that if I had the Billy Graham organization behind me. Well he didn't have that you know. You'll hardly believe this. All this poor fellow has is God. Isn't that tough when you've only God? We talk as though it is. Some of your preachers will say we want to get some money to do this and do that. Money? Yuck. I think we're going into the toughest years we've ever lived in. Two of the biggest gospel societies in America today are on the verge of bankruptcy. I could tell you the names but I won't. Not that they're short of money. They've had millions maybe altogether, billions over the years and they've wasted it and used it for all kinds of things and now money's running out. And I'll say this whether you like it or not. I'll say it. I'd say it if I was in England. I'd say it anywhere. I believe that America is going to suffer for the sin of the church rather than the church suffer the sin of America. We're the unbelievers. We're the people that don't pull down the strongholds. The commission is not to the heathen. The commission is not to the intellectuals. He's not saying this on Mars Hill as if you Stoics and Epicureans and poets and philosophers would only get together and pool all your wisdom and do this, that and the other. We could rout all the heathen. He doesn't say that. He's saying it to a people in Corinth. Do you know what Corinth was? It was a combination of Las Vegas, Bourbon Street, Babylon, every hellhole that's ever been. When Paul went to Corinth, you didn't say about a man, he's licentious, he's a woman chaser, he's a thief, he's a drunkard, he's a sex pervert, he's a gambler. You didn't say that. You just said he's a Corinthian. And when you said that, you were saying he's the lousiest thing on two legs that walks this earth. And the old German commentator, not F. B. Meyer, but Meyer, M-E-Y-E-R says, blessed and sublime miracle of God that a church could be founded in Corinth. I've not been facetious, it's as stupid as saying you can build a 120 story skyscraper on a bed of jello. All the sewers of the known world gathered there in Corinth. You notice what Paul did? He went to key cities like Corinth and Ephesus and he set up shop, as you'd say. And he says, wait a minute, wait a minute now, don't get censorious, don't say that man over there is a moral leper. And this girl over here has had one or two babies out of wedlock and that man has a jail record. He says, listen, remember this, such was some of ye that ye are washed, ye are sanctified. It's not of your virtue that you're here tonight. You might be in some lousy prison, you might be a prostitute, you might be in some other filthy area, but one day Jesus invaded your life. And from the moment he invaded, it became his whether you let him have it or not. Maybe you want him as a savior so you won't go to hell fire. But you'd want him as Lord to rule and direct and make your choices for you. You know what I like about Paul? I like a lot of things. But one of the outstanding things I like about Paul is he's the best example of his own philosophy, or if you like, his own Christian teaching. He out-praises us, he out-fasts us, he out-suffers us. Show me an example from then till now of a man who was more totally living because he says an awful thing, and it is awful. We use the word awful when we mean terrible. I mean awful, full of awe. And the awful thing he says is this, Christ liveth in me. Supposing you go in the morning, you get up and you call the children and say, look I forgot to tell you something, Mary, Jane and John and Jack. I want to tell you, Christ lives in me. Would they say, well daddy I never dreamed that that was true. Mommy I didn't. I know you're singing the choir at church and you teach a Sunday school class, but I've never, I thought Jesus just lived up in the bright blue sky, but I never thought he lived in you. Does he live in you? Well Paul says, the life which I now live in the flesh. You see, if you have a little faith it will take you to heaven. But if you have a little more faith on top of that little faith, it will bring heaven down to you. Now I was reading one of the old divines today, lived in 16-something, and he was interpreting Hebrews 4, there remaineth a rest for the people of God. And what he said, he said, well wouldn't it be good to get out of this world with all its cares and all its taxes and all its tribulations and be able to rest forever. Oh mercy, come on. We're not going to rest forever. It says his servant shall serve him. I don't know what we're going to do, but boy it's going to be great. Maybe he'll have to listen to me sing for a million years. No, that won't happen because there's no more pain. But do we live now in heavenly places? That's what Paul says, we're already seated with him. I've got a very famous doctor friend in this country, he's a great preacher, great writer of books, and he always signs up, Len, keep looking up. And I say, I can't, I can't. All I can do is look down. Why? Because I'm seated with him in heavenly places. How can you look up when you're sitting up there? I'd be cross-eyed. Come on, are we drawing now on his resurrection life? Man said to me not long ago, I got no use for Christianity. I said, shake, shake. Don't you preach? Yes, but I've got no use for Christianity. You haven't? No, not a bit of use for it. Well, don't you preach Christianity? No, I preach Christ. Christianity is a philosophy. It's true you can't have Christianity without Christ. You can have Buddhism without Buddha, Confucianism without Confucius, but you cannot have Christianity without Christ. But in the accepted sense of the term, what I see today, this dried up intellectualism. These boys always hanging the Greek out to dry or a Hebrew text out to dry, you know, till they get a bit more learning next time they come up with a silly old stupid thing. The church of Jesus Christ, and I mean this in the right sense, I won't use the word, should be the most exciting place, it should be the most inspiring place. It ought to be when you come through that door that those deacons, who should be beacons as well as deacons, have prayed that place till the Holy Ghost is down and immediately you cross and you know there's something here which is not of men, it's of God. I said to somebody today, again I remember the time when 50, 60 years ago, you went to a holiness meeting or a Pentecostal meeting, the altar would be filled with more people an hour before the service than it was after the preacher preached. Why? They were preaching the power down. They didn't go in the last minute and say, oh, I've got to go to the powder room, my hair isn't straight, you know, some of this junk. They just went and they'd leave tears at the altar, interceding, praying, prevailing, scare you to death. They used to say, God come down tonight. They used to say, oh don't, I don't, I wouldn't like to see God tonight, you know. Someone would say, Lord send the fire, send it tonight. No, Lord, I've got, I'll burn up, don't send the fire tonight. I thought it was literal, but you know by the time some of those guys got through preaching, you might just as well have had somebody throw a hot cinder on you. They really left an impact. Would this man give his life? Would he be suffering the way he suffered for anything less than this? The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. The life which I now live. He's not talking about Jesus who died years before, he's not talking about rapturous coming, he just talked about that elsewhere. But he says, right now I have a communication line with heaven, I have a hot line to heaven, I have an open line to heaven. And it's easy to sing it, isn't it? But we sing sometimes, he walks with me, he talks with me, he tells me I'm his own. Now come on, let's be a bit, make this a bit tighter. Do you think there's any stronghold God wants pulling down in your community and he wants you to do it? Along with two or three other guys? Hmm? That's why I put your church where he put it. So you could be a threat to the devil. If you've been here before, usually I pray somewhere in the night, Lord, make this meeting, what we say usually, make this meeting painful to the devil. What's the good of praying if it isn't that? The weapons of our warfare. What weapons? Well, the word of God. What weapons? The character of God. He's faithful, he's true, he's holy, he's never denied himself. You have a spirit. Supposing right now God says to all of us, look, you're all coming into eternity by midnight tonight. Bring your report cards with you. Hmm? Would you like that? Everybody bring your report card for the last month. Gabriel's going to read it to billions and billions of people, right back to, well, I don't know whether Adam will be there, but Zechariah and Ezekiel and all the saints of all the ages. And he's going to read your report card before all that crowd. Well, believe it or not, he's going to do that. Not by 12 o'clock tonight, but by the time you get to the end of the trip. And he's going to ask us why there were so many unused resources. A friend of mine got saved in England. He was a, I hardly know how to describe him, he was all muscle. He used to wear moleskin trousers because he worked in a forge, and when they were striking the hot metal, it would, it would leap off, you know, and get into the trousers and burn the legs. So they wore skin trousers. And he'd take his shirt off, his undershirt, and tighten his belt up and stand outside of his father's tavern. And he'd holler down the street there, the, the main street of his village. Come on, anybody, outside, anybody. Always Sunday morning he'd call them. You know, when that man got saved, he became just as reckless for God. And when he was coming to America, he said, there's one thing I want to see. I want to see Niagara Falls. When he came back, I said, did you go see Niagara Falls? He said, yes, Wayne, I did. Uh, I went to, not too long after daylight, the sun was coming up. And he said, I was, I saw that great torrent of water going down into that abyss. Now on the American side, it's wasted, it doesn't do anything. On the Canadian side, years ago, they made the river go down a chute, and it makes electricity. And as somebody said, it makes electricity as cheap today as it did 50 years, 80 years ago, when they put the thing in. That's one place we missed the boat. He said, I stood there and looked, and somebody said, you know, this is the greatest force on earth, naturally. And knowing the man, I know how he'd do it. He said, I just fell on my knees as near as I could, look into that abyss and said, oh God, this water is useless, it's doing nothing. And there are so many resources in you, and the church hasn't tapped onto those resources yet. We're doing nothing. We've got a paper tiger. We've got a theology we tell to every class, as we've done for the last 50 years, and not one in a hundred of those guys strike fire. You know what Spurgeon said about this book? This book is a, is a checkbook, and the names of God are at the bottom of every check, and it's for you to cash in on them. Pretty suggestive thing, isn't it? You think the devil's getting away with too much tonight? You know, almost every church in the country is locked up tonight, and every tavern's open in every hell hole. Tell me this, do you ever, did you ever find anybody who tithes to the devil? You know, says, well, I can only give 10% of what I earn to smokes and drinks and dancing and gambling. Man will give half his income for beer and drinks and smokes and nightclubs. Nobody tithes to the devil. They give, they give more than 50%, often, and often they borrow money so they can go to Las Vegas and try and win more, and all they do is lose it. Pulling down strongholds. I hear a lot of these boys talking about faith out of Dallas. I don't listen to them anymore. I guess when you get older, you have a bit more time. I used to live full speed, you know. I'd preach in a big church, Sunday night, be packed out. People used to line up at the door to get a seat before the service. And I'd go home and I'd go to bed and maybe take two or three hours sleep. And then I wouldn't go to bed again till maybe Thursday morning. I spent time in my office studying. I had a big old clad rug. I'd roll up in the rug and lay down at the side of my bookcase there. And I think, looking back, often I did more working for God than working with God. But anyhow, I don't regret those days in many ways. We did see some revival. We did see some waste howling. Wildernesses become fruitful ground. But, you know, as you get older and you contemplate, you think to yourself, well, I could have invested my time maybe a little better and I'm sure I could. Particularly in meditation, particularly in prayer. I've been in three churches or met three lots of people who in the last month have said to me, we're sending packages of food and we're sending books and we're sending clothes to Haiti. I say, well, that's very good. The only thing, we were doing that 50 years ago too. And we haven't solved the problem. If all these men of such monumental faith in Dallas, why in God's name don't they send a dozen men down to Haiti, which is one of the most bedeviled countries in the world. They still practice voodooism. 97% of the people there are Catholics. 93% of the 97% practice voodooism as well as Catholicism. Do you think, it's easy to quote scripture, but the scripture talks about doing greater works than these should he do. Do you think there'll ever be a bunch of men who say, look, I've got a sweet girlfriend and I've got this, that and the other, but two or three of us have decided to postpone marriage and go out of business for a while. We're going to Haiti and we're going to get a small house and we're going to believe God to send revival to that island that's never had revival. Now there's a challenge to your faith. You'll have to do something more than confess it and possess it. You need more than a good vocabulary and an exciting method of preaching. This is getting down to grips with the powers of darkness. And I said to somebody recently, and I would do it if I were young, if God would reverse me or tell me I can live 15 more years. I said, I'd like to sell my house and buy a house down the other side of Athens. I was in it two years ago. It's the house where E.M. Bounds used to live. I always wanted to rub my nose on the floor where he used to pray in case there's some inspiration left. His old granddaughter was sitting there. She was about 70 years of age. I would love to buy that house still and take about 12 men twice a year and say, when you come here, you don't go out with your girlfriend, you don't go into Athens for the football match, you don't go into any shows. You're concentrating here on God, on the power of the Holy Ghost, and we're going to study one thing. You can study what you like when you get out. We're going to study prayer, intercession, travail. I don't know a school of prayer in America. Maybe there's one I don't know about. That was the greatest theological revolution. Good night. We're stacked six feet deep with theology. The nation's six feet deep with cassettes and tapes. Some of them are good. You can get mine after the meeting. I mean, have you ever seen guys shadow boxing? You know, they used to put a screen there, and the fellow there, and he's doing this, and the fellow at this side's fighting his own shadow. That's all the church is doing in most cases. Come on, what impact are we making in this valley on Tyler? How much is the church in Tyler? They're concerned about people of the other side of the world. That's fine. So am I. Go to this country where my little black friend here is from, Nigeria. You've had some great meetings there. Great manifestations of power. Now, look at his black hair. Look at that lady's hair next to him. Isn't that something? I don't know what color is your hair, silver or blue or what? Silver. Oh. You know, that hair is about as different as that black hair could be. But you know, they've both got white hearts. Isn't that nice? George is my little black sheep. I love him very much. I love his zeal for God. I love to hear him pray. I can't always tell all the words he says. He talks a bit too fast. He's not like me. But anyhow. But look, take this home if you take nothing else. This generation of Christians is, I s, responsible for this generation of heathen. You're not responsible for the Indians and heathen in the days of, well, I was going to say Wesley. Yes, he did live. He lived in Georgia. He was a missionary in Georgia before he was saved. Wesley was frozen to the ground one morning. He said, I struggled. I got one arm free. Then I pulled the other arm free. And then I carefully pulled my hair out of the mud. And then I lifted one leg and then the other. And then I stood up and brushed the frost off and sang the doxology. Your preacher did that. He'd write a book about it and expect six months in Florida to get over it. He isn't saved and he comes over here to enlighten people. He rose at four o'clock in the morning to pray and he's not yet enlightened. Dear God, where are we? You heathen. Would you like to transfer what physical strength you have into spiritual and say, Lord, I'm a candidate tonight to pull down strongholds. I don't know what it means. I may get bloody. I may get beaten up by the enemy. He's no gentleman. And if it's no bars hold for me on him, it's no bars hold on him for me. And one of our strongholds is that we know the wiles of the devil. You don't get a theological class. All you have to do is study this book. It'll tell you about all the wiles of the devil. It will tell you about all the imaginations, the highfalutin things in your mind, your dreams that you have about being strong and doing exploits. But it never gets further than dreams. A lady was in our house the other day. She said something I've said many times. It's nice to hear somebody else say. She said, I feel that we're missing something today in the ministry of the Holy Spirit. I said, thanks. She said, for what? I said, for giving me a confirmation. I've said that for so long. There's no comparison between the New Testament church and the church of God today. We've got some teaching called dispensationalism. It's an alibi. On top of that, we have a horrid thing called the Schofield Bible. If anybody gives you that, give it back to them. Telling me you only read good theology. You know, most people think there were twelve apostles and the thirteenth was Schofield. And when they read the Schofield Bible, have you got one there? Oh, I thought you, you got one at home? Oh no, oh good. I thought you looked a bit guilty. You see, when they read the Schofield Bible, they don't know where the scripture stops and Schofield starts. He's hopeless with some things, Romans 7 and whatnot. Everybody's hoping that you believe. When people tell me, you know, the man from South Africa said to me today, he said, you know, we believe in the imminent return. Well, I didn't want to use his bill. It would cost him a lot of money. Call him from there. I say, I don't believe you. Are you judging me? No, you judge yourself. How do I judge myself? If you believe that Jesus Christ was coming imminently tonight at twelve o'clock, you'd have lived very differently today. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you have been more alert to witness? Wouldn't you have taken that unnecessary trip and put it into prayer? That unnecessary spending and put it into missions? Nobody wants out what we've got. The guy says, I can live without what the church has. I said, so can I. Shake hands. I can't live without the Lord. I can't live without his word. I can't live without illumination. I can't live without confrontations with the devil day by day. I can't live and not go up the Amazon every day in my prayers. I go up somewhere else. I'm not a creature of this earth. I have to wear a suit. I have to do like other men. I have to eat and drink, go to sleep and all the rest of it. But that's about the end of it. We're not of this world, even as he was not of the world. And all he manifested was his power over nature, his power over demons, his power over everything that was militant against him. And Paul says, we're to pull down those strongholds. Again, I say, if we called, instead of saying a smooth word like coats, we call them the doctrines of devils, it might upset us a bit more in our thinking. It might upset other people a bit more in their thinking. There's nobody else going to forestall the devil except the church of Jesus Christ. What is prayer? In a nutshell, I would say prayer is an act of obedience. Prayerlessness is disobedience which borders on rebellion. Prayer is not an option. Montgomery has a marvelous hymn, and I better quit on this because we need to do some prayer. Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, he says. Well, most of us must have been very near death because our prayer is gasping. Prayer. I'm trying to think how he starts the hymn by saying, prayer is the soul's sincere desire uttered or unexpressed. The motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breath. Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try, and prayer is the sublime estrangement, it exhausts your vocabulary. You know when you're praying? When you aren't praying. That is when you can't utter anything, when you can't pray in your language or what some people call a prayer language, where you get further than that and you get to a place where it's groanings and groanings and groanings and groanings which cannot be uttered. As I've been dipping in and looking at some of the old Puritans in the past week, I've been amazed at these men that many people think are starchy old theologians, you know, strong thoroughbred Presbyterians and tough old guys that used to preach two or three hours at a stretch. And then I read their private diaries and how in the secret place they towered, they towered in the pulpit. They spoke with anointing, they spoke with authority, they spoke until people trembled, if not physically, on the inside they trembled. To realize the obligations of discipleship. If I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ, I've no rights to my time, I've no rights to anything, they're His. In other words, I've become a love slave. Pulling down the strongholds. Okay, let me suggest some things to pray now. I want you to pray. We're commanded to pray and you don't, we're, the last thing is prayer is not a competition. God doesn't hear you because you frame your words better. Prayer is something that's a head and fire, that God can understand. And if you put words that are beyond that, you're in trouble. It may have groaning that cannot be uttered, it may be a groaning you have to utter. Here are some things we, I want us to pray about. Many of us know Dean Snell. How many of you know Dean Snell? He's a lovely fellow, lives away here. He built many of the houses, built our house. And Dean came home from hospital, been in hospital ten days, came home this afternoon. For ten days hasn't kept any food down, and now his wife says he's been eating a little today, she's very happy. Joe Foss, that some of you know, Calvary Commission, they're down in Belize. Fourteen of them went down this week. Dr. Walker down from the Greenacres, he works there. Bob Roberts is going there. Evangelist Bob Roberts going there tomorrow, I think. So there's a whole team of them going. This man in South Africa that requests prayer, God, he says, hearts are being torn up there. That's a wonderful expression. Hearts are being torn up as they see the supreme need of revival. You can't buy it, you can't argue about it, you can't counsel for it. It's a divine invasion into the affairs of men. It's God, as it were, stopping the clock and saying, look everybody's going to take notice that I'm operating in my power. Okay, there are a number of young men in this community that especially need our prayer, that are involved in some Christian work, and I'll leave it there. Dave Wilkerson had some tremendous crusade, he'll be going out shortly again, we need to pray for him. His son Gary has left. Gary has a nice house here, he never lives in it. He's gone and got a place right in the heart of Detroit, there's a place to go to, of his own choice. Taking his wife, his other brother, or his sister and her husband are going. And the youngest boy is about sixteen, he's going to another place to work for the summer. So now he's tasting something that we've tasted. You get rid of your family for fifteen or sixteen years and you get to miss it. So we need to pray for Detroit. We need to pray for the agape stations, they have some around the country, field stations as we call them. John isn't here, but we do need to pray for India, a colossal country, 700 million people, 400 languages. Can you imagine that? Every one of those languages needs an Apostle Paul or a Finney or somebody. Then there's Tyler, some of the fellows go down to Tyler after this meeting, go street preaching, and we need to remember them. There may be others, but it will be good tonight in the time that's left, and of course starting late, I get talking takes up so much time. But it would be good tonight if you'd be really honest, and maybe forget everybody I mentioned tonight, and tell God your need is supreme, that you have no strength to travel in prayer. That you know, you have no strength to pull down strongholds. You like to ask the church, put this on the prayer list, you don't know much about it. Again, simply what the church has had in the last 25 years has not moved the world to God. So there's something else. We all need a baptism of compassion. We all need a baptism of love. We all need God to come and disrupt all the nice, relaxed inner feeling that we have, and say, Lord God, I'm prepared now to battle. I'm prepared to go where you tell me. I'm prepared to bear wounds. I'm prepared to travel in birth. Well, you'll never be in a more friendly atmosphere than here, I can assure you of that. You say, I don't know how to pray. Do you know anybody that does? The men that I know who pray the greatest, men I've prayed with that sweat and traveled, and men that would pray an hour at a time. When I knelt with them, I knew I wouldn't get up for two or three hours. The man at the side of me was totally blind, he'd pray 45 minutes. The man at the other side, he was a very anointed man, and he'd pray for 45 or 50 minutes. Now you don't have to do that, you can do that if you like. And some will go out because they have to. But on the other hand, there's such a thing, you see, as Paul says, as praying without ceasing, as having an inward conscious, continual consciousness, that you're in a relationship with God, and your life can be a pageant of praise, and a prayer. So if you're latched on to something here, pray for these enslaved nations. Well, how many of you have thought of all your brothers and sisters in Russia in concentration camps tonight? Or in the Gulag archipelago? Or in Bangladesh? Read an article today, one of the most penetrating articles about San Salvador, and what's going on there. The cruelty is totally unmentionable, and we're supposed to be backing it because we're afraid Cuba might get into Russia. But the atrocities going on there, I wouldn't tell you, they'd make you sick. Isn't it easy to live an easy street in America or England? Ride your nice little car, get angry because the stoplight doesn't blink at the right moment. Such trivia. See, what I want you to do, I don't know how far I'll get doing it, but what I want to, what I want you to do, I want you to get grown up pretty quickly, spiritually. Because you don't have to wait till you're 50 to mature spiritually. David Brainerd was pretty mature at 28, wasn't he? And the great Scottish saint, Macshane. You get his diary, they set it up at the Gappy. It's a big thing, it's worth reading. We have to get out of the doldrums. Maybe you'll have to sell your TV, maybe you'll have to sell your golf club, maybe you'll have to do something else. Get rid of your own impediments, don't blame God Almighty for things you've done. You'll have to get the pool table out of the back of your house. You'll have to start being a proper daddy and say, well now to your wife, well darling I'm sorry that I haven't been the king in this house, and I haven't been the priest in this house, but from here on we're going to do that. I won't bully you more, I love you more. There's not going to be a day in this house that we don't get the children together and pray with them and read with them and instruct them. It's a vicious world. It doesn't care that they're your kids or anybody else's, it wants to tear them to pieces. And you've got people in high authority in education and in every other sphere. Buy your children some books on dungeons and dragons and help to make them crazy. Some of these other things that are going on, all subtle to strongholds that Satan's gradually building up. And then it takes an awful lot, it takes almost an earthquake to pull them down. We're going to pray. It is now almost half past nine. We're going to pray till ten, in case some of you have to leave. After ten I've got to talk to a bunch of men, so I should leave as quickly as you can after that and give the fellows 15 minutes to go wash or do, get a drink or something, I don't know. And then I want to see them at quarter past ten. We're going to pray till ten. Will you pray? If you only pray and say, God I can't pray, that's fine.