In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the temporary nature of worldly possessions and the inevitability of death. He highlights the futility of accumulating material wealth, as it cannot be taken with us when we leave this world. The speaker also touches on the importance of music in religious gatherings, noting that it used to play a significant role in worship. However, he suggests that the focus should be on the message of salvation and the transformation of lives. The sermon concludes with a personal anecdote about a powerful meeting where God's presence was felt, leading to a realization of the need for a deeper examination of the heart.

Well, good evening. I hope you can't hear me. If you can't hear me, take me for it. You know, I can give you a little clue, but I can tell you four words from the Bible. I can give you a clue from the same four words. You know what they mean? Nothing at all. We've got nothing in this world, and it is certain we can tell you nothing at all. Sometimes you hear people say, You know what I mean? We used to hang on the ground. We had a bargain that we would never hang on the ground. The Bible says you have to know him. You can't go home. You're going to have to know him. As I've said, any time you get the chance to pray, read Isaiah 40. I used to pray it probably for a few months. You can read it carefully, by the way. I was converted to Christ 62 years ago, and I had one little booklet on the second coming of Christ by Reverend Christ Martin. He was a very strong dispensationalist, and in this particular booklet he made it plain, in other subsequent booklets, that you could never expect revival in America. Revival is a thing of the past. Don't even think about it. Not as intensely as you're going to get your family hanged up, but never think in terms of revival, that will never happen again. And that's when we parted company, and I remember having somebody thank him so much for the good gospel he preached in that little booklet I read. And this is how it went, you know. It really bothered me. I think, well, he's trying to tell me that the Holy Ghost is dead. That's what he's trying to tell me. As long as the Spirit of God is alive, I wondered, why can't there be revival? So I rejected that. You know, when I was first converted, I was 23 years of age, I'm 64 now, and I couldn't find steady work, and so I really didn't read the Bible. You know, in those days there were very few Christian lecturers, and we didn't get found up there anymore. And so I read the Bible, and I went, I don't know, you know, people? I read the Bible five, six, eight, twenty-five hours a day. Sometimes I resented being called from the Lord even, but I got so much out of it. Because it was something for me to do. I had the time to get to getting a training for the ministry I was planning for me. I got lots of training every week there. I got a few thousand books in my library and I look at them sometimes, you know. Anyway, right from the very beginning, I got it right. Revival is still possible. Before the revival in 1971, I saw a picture of revival at a Bible camp. I went there, it was a little private camp. I was there four years in a row. Two years as a counselor, one year as assistant director, and one year as director. A time cap. And on the way down, my son would come up to me and talk to me like, Hey, do you know anything about the Great War that brought a district war in there? Well, if you know about it, know it right. It's probably not running anymore. You used to run around with a couple of acrobats that would bring us around from Shoal Lake to Whittington. There's no running from Shoal Lake in those days. And so I'm riding in this little train, going around to camp, and they'd let us go both, and we'd have a great miles across the lake to the old town there, the town of Cape North, where we lived. And every time we went to the woods, we'd go up some tracks. I was in some shoes back then. But I got tired of that, and I said, Well, that's all good. It was a nice town, and we were talking good, going on tracks and so on. Didn't think anything about it when we got to camp. And a couple of days after camp began, the revival broke. It was so strong, the kids couldn't even eat meals. I saw a kid sitting at the dinner table, a little kid. His name was Bill Campbell. I remember that because later on he became a consul at some of the camps. And he looked up at me and his head was in the dinner table. He looked up at me, and he said, Chicken, what does my kid mean? He said, Chicken, to the person waiting there, your son? I said, Yes, darling. He said, My darling, kind of darling. He would say that someday. And I said, It was a wonderful thing. The kids were standing around, wanting to go back to Christ. It was a wonderful thing. It was the first time I saw anything that might call the revival by the Spirit of God. So when I was ready to bring him back to camp in early October, I don't know if any of you know Cecil Carter. He's one of the choicest children's that God ever had. He stayed alive up in D.C. I think he's now probably close to 90 now. But God's so near. And when I got him to come to bring him back to camp, we had 24 Christian workers and they came for a weekend. It was beautiful camping, good fishing, and there'd be bars in the hills. So I paid for one. And he learned the whole weekend some how to stay in the building. And you can do things like that. You know, it's jokers to write books and say God doesn't give you nature miracles anymore. He knows. But then you wake up and you see him in the classroom. He's doing what he always did, you know. So I went out with him. So now I'm going to go fishing and learn bar kicking and I'm going to stay inside and pray. The first message he should have would agree before he spoke that when he was through he would have a time for questions, you know. Before he was halfway through the message God came in and said there won't be no time for questions. So when he was through all he said was let's pray together. And everybody got to their knees and started praying. And it was a powerful, powerful meeting. Afterwards there was someone else who said if you ever preach again God will show us how lucky our hearts is if you ever preach again. It was as if God was trying to break in. Maybe I was in the way. I probably was. What a deacon's man with ten deacons and one servant. What a deacon's man. And all I said was this. It is worth most for only I to pray if we have secret sin in our heart. And the first is break the heart. Break the heart One deacon grabbed another deacon and tried to make the room. The guy in the room started making things up. The guy came in and he put his head in his shoulder and cried. He said pastor please forgive me. I've been very critical of you. And I was just in awe of him and I thought what are you thinking? I don't know what to do with it. What I should have done the next day was get these guys in the parkway to share with the people. I didn't know how to handle it. And on another occasion this one guy came up to me and he said I don't know what to do with you. I said what to do what to do with you. I said He said I don't know what to do I said I don't know what to do with you. He said I don't know what to do with you. I said I don't know what to do with you. He said I don't know what to do with you. I said with you. He said I don't know I don't know I said with you. with you. The church was exactly the same as before. Nothing was new. Never did anything get saved. Church was backslashed and back to back. Some people maybe started tithing. Some people turned to church. But nothing happened to you. And finally I remember talking to God. I said, God, I'll never do it again. I will not have any of these kind of crusades no longer. This is not our way to you. I showed my book to the missionary. He said, why don't you get me a reference to Timothy. I said, we're there. So he said, we're there. So I contacted him. He couldn't come for two years. And so we prepared what it is to save Ukraine. There's been some books written about the Canadian Revival and all kinds of articles and magazines and papers and so on. And I have yet to read anyone talking about the prayer preparation that went on in our church. So I want to show you what I got tonight. I was going to be sharing the story about prayerful revival too. Here's what happened. We had about 23 people attending the prayer meeting that was out there. I began telling the people around, listen if you have to, listen even if you must. But when it was the prayer meeting, and I sure did, and I'll excuse you, when we started to go up to 15, when we started having children's prayer meetings, we had 30 or 40 children coming. So we divided them into two groups. We gave them an order for each group. And then we had these adults who were crying kids to run their own prayer meeting. And the kids loved it to death. And so more people came because the kids could come. And we got up to 75. And we got up to 100 in the prayer meeting. We got up to 125. We got up to 150. We got up to 170. We got up to 175 when there was no church in the world. And then we started a deacon's prayer meeting Saturday night at 9 o'clock just to pray for revival for half an hour or so. We had a deacon's meeting one hour to about 7 every Saturday night. Then we started Sunday evening. We had a Sunday evening service. So we ended every Sunday evening with a half hour of prayer for revival. And we told the people, stay if you can. Most people stayed. And it used to be a half an hour long. And then, you know, if I had tried to put all this in the people at one time, it would have flopped. But as they took a hold of some of these things, they got more from God. And, you know, there's a verse in Zechariah where it says that God would pour on His people the spirit of grace and supplication. One translation is to supplicate. So he called it, he called it the spirit of prayer, a gift from God. He said this, If I ever lose the spirit of prayer, I cannot converse effectively with individuals or with assemblies of Christians. I can't do it. The spirit of prayer. What do you know about it? He had two men, Abel Clay and Father Nash. And these men, when he was going through a crusade, they would crusade him by maybe two weeks or something and begin their prayer ministry. They would pray 18, 20 hours a day. People were afraid to walk past the house where they stayed. They were afraid that their prayer might fall on them. And so he said, when I got to the revival, it was only when it started, there was men who prayed. And Dr. Cameron told us, when I was in Saskatoon two years before the revival, about the men called the praying men of Godhood. And they were out cruising the Isle of Wombs off the coast of Scotland. He was out with his men having a hallowed prayer. They would come home after their day's work, have supper, and go to bed until nine o'clock at night. Then at nine they would rise and they would pray until two o'clock in the morning. Then they would go back to bed until seven o'clock when they got to breakfast. They were known as the praying men of Godhood. Dr. Cameron told me he went to the one of the islands off the coast of Scotland where a prayer church had been built for years. And he started on Sunday, five people showed up. Monday night, five people. Tuesday night, five people. Wednesday night, five people. Nothing was happening. So he contacted the praying men and asked them to take this burden on their heart. And the first night, after those men prayed, there were 200 people in the church and 12 people found Christ as their Savior. They had forgotten. They didn't know how to do that anymore. They don't trust Him. They trust in every kind of a program of the Son. They get people to come. People aren't in God's way. There never was God's way. And so then, we got a prayer here going and we had it marked off in the township ledger as 15 minutes. And we asked the people to pick the 15 minute slot there. Pretty soon we had the whole 24 hours taken out. Now this meant that anytime at day or night, people from our congregation were praying for revival. And I suggested to the people, why don't you ask God to wake you in the middle of the night just to pray for revival? The people kept on doing that. And then one day it came, she said, Pastor, you know, I can pray for 45 minutes here. So God, His hands would have an office. Because the people were faithful in doing these things, God gave us a spirit of prayer. And the prayer meeting became, long before the revival, it became the most exciting meeting of the night. Things were happening around. People were asking for prayer. You know, sitting in church, praying for people. This was before the revival. Otherwise, there's no use to tell the people, you're asking and blessing over the food. Why don't you take five minutes longer and, you know, just pray? Don't worry about the salad getting cold. You know? And I did that. It was a wonderful time. I lived a mile from the church. I used to get up and walk to the church in the morning. I tried to get up by 7 o'clock in the morning. Is that revival? No, it wasn't. You know what happened? The first night that we had to get up, it was raining, and the rain started to pour down on the mud, and it poured in my closet. God, I don't have any idea what's going on. So when God gets working, just get out of the way. That's all. So, the revival began. Well, for me, they were a great couple, and God, it was great that He was there. They certainly sharpened my focus on creation, and I learned so much from them. I certainly learned a lot of things about revival and living with the Lord. God was so good. You know, they had, you know, their paradise accordance very well, and everything was different between blacks. Do you know what happened? We always sang congregational songs. We had meetings where we sang one song, and when we got to the first one, we were on vacation sometimes. And sometimes we were preaching to have a revival run in the church. Do you know what? It was a prayer meeting 10 hours long, and we would pray during the time, in the car. Some would think about a mission they needed to pray for, or some big thing was going to die, but somebody would buy it from us, so we would just pray. So we had a wonderful time. And I'll never forget that meeting at East St. Paul Church. How God was a healer. And he learned about this revival thing, and he said, why don't you go in the car? So he checked it out, didn't he? I saw him sitting there, and he said afterwards, you know, I don't have much to be ashamed of, but I could see that God had done something more in your life, and I was glad for that. But he said, you could have been worse than you've been, and that's when the action started. And I said to God, George Burns never went back. There was a great story about how it went. When he said that to me, he said, the Lord said to me, why don't you go in the car? And he said, when I got to the office, I looked around, and I couldn't find Howard Gardner. I wasn't even there. There was no one there but God. And then he said to me, what about George Burns? And I said, you know, please just hate God. And he became my song leader. Song leader. Man of power. Prayed by it all. After the revival. Preached for it. And the author was a priest, a pastor. Well, I picked up a copy of this, published in 1832, just for it. But I read it, you know, and it got some insights in the revival. And then he's pointing out that when the revival began in the early 1800s, it was a sovereign thing straight from God. And this, and what they learned is there could be a part of revival. And so he said, we found we have to fast and pray. And we have to bow. And he made a great deal of this matter. You know, every thousand people pray for revival and almost none ever pray this way, hey God, I know you're going to do it. Nobody prays that way. Isn't that how it is? Yes, it's how it is. He said this, this kind of revival never came to a church and it never failed to come to a church. You know, Stoddard, he was related to Jonathan Edwards and he saw in his church, he saw five revivals in 45 years. Over seven years ago had he had a revival, hundreds would be saved. No other church was experiencing this and so they called a meeting with Stoddard. Pastors did. What secret do we have? We don't understand this. Why is God bypassing us? He said, let me explain. He said, we preach for revival, we pray for revival, we fast for revival, and we believe God for revival and you guys don't do any of that. God doesn't tell you to say this. We want to just particularly emphasize that without faith it's impossible to pray. Let's stop believing. We can't tell God when. Nor can we tell God how. Nor can we say to God, there's only one. Only one. Revival. Then the revival broke. We started on Wednesday night about 150 people at church and so we contacted a neighboring Anglican church that we could sit about 600. We got over there Sunday night and we had about 700 in there so we were there two nights. We had 800 the next night. We had to get all the Anglicans to come sit on the platform on the floor, you know. And God was doing wonderful things. The kid about ate right up there. This kid stood there. He had us in his lap and so he could communicate with us. He knows how to do it. And when we ate like this, I have a platform, I have a coffee on the platform. Good, you know. We weren't sure what it was. We had the zero for 25 minutes. Anyway, we finally had the whole front of the church. The church was in 1200 and it seats about 800. So then we filled the platform. Then we filled the choir wall. Then we asked the front row to exit so we'd have room for people to pray. And then the second row, and then the third row. And that's where Shirley Moore fought. He came up to talk to me. He said, I've been involved in evangelism on a larger scale for 25 years. He invited me down to Minneapolis to conduct some after-days and dancing for a while there. And one of the reasons I heard was because God's been saving these people and God said it. So I can understand why Christians are so impressed. What are we doing with these people? They're saying, we're standing on the promises of Christ my King for revival. We're satisfied with it. There were three other guys in the room, four other guys, no, three, four of us, and we all trusted the Lord in the room. So finally we went back, and we went back, and he was there. But that's the bad one, where they moved me out into another room who happened to be a Jewish doctor in a Christian medical college. He was also head of the admissions committee for doctors going into medicine, people going into medicine. And he was head of the of the Olympic symphony orchestra and all this kind of stuff. We happened to be good friends. And he looked at me and said something, and he started to laugh. Nobody's ever been with me. And then one day, he really didn't have a lot of hangovers to see, at all. But his wife was there every day. Nobody else ever showed up. And every time we got, one day, 15 days in a row, and all this pain, pain, pain and one of his writings was constantly appearing in his sermons I think he had the greatest church since the days of the apostles, and ever heard of a church like this? Every single evening we had 800 people at soul winning. We had a bunch of people called cold porters. This person used to say, if you want to start soul winning, pick out the worst area you can find in the city world, town or the hood, then pick out the worst house and the worst people you can find, then go to that worst house and talk about Jesus. That's how they would start it, they said. Really, for the power of the Spirit of God, in his writings, it's there all the time. They must have. Holy Ghost Revival, he said. And they shall have it. And they had it. In the face of God. They said they were praying for the coming of Jesus. We've forgotten all that. We haven't learned a lot of it. When God comes, when God comes with people, when they're praying to lose Him, that's all. I can't compress it.