In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes that revival is not a result of human effort, but rather the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God. The speaker shares a personal experience of witnessing extreme poverty in the Philippines and the desperate need for revival in that context. He also shares another experience in Argentina where churches were seeing very few conversions and decided to seek revival through prayer. The speaker concludes by expressing gratitude for the blessings in Canada and the opportunity to speak about revival.

Revelation 2, and we'll read one to five. Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write, These things says he that holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. I know your works, and your labor, and your patience, and how you cannot bear them who are evil, and you have tried them who say they are apostles and are not, and has found them liars, and has borne, and has patience, and for my name's sake has labored, and has not fainted. Nevertheless, I am somewhat against you, because you have left your first love. Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works, or else I will come unto you quickly, and will remove your candlestick out of his place, except you repent. Let's just pray, shall we? Father, be with us in our deliberations this afternoon. Draw near to us, dear God, as we seek to draw near to you. Be our teacher, guide us, Lord, in our thinking, and, dear God, help us to understand how you see things. And so far as revival is concerned, we know how close it must be to your heart. And, Father, we want it to be close to our hearts also. Guide us, we ask. Bless us together in Christ's name. Amen. Well, we want to consider the question, when may we expect revival to come? First of all, we have to clear the air, because there's two things to think about. Are we considering a local church revival, a personal revival, or a sweeping revival that will touch a whole nation? So there's three things to think about. An awakening, as it's sometimes called, a revival that might touch the whole of the country, or a church revival that may touch the church we're associated with, or personal individual revival. We're going to talk in a later session about personal individual revival. In this session, I want to talk more about the possibility of a nationwide awakening, and also about a church, a local church revival. And all of this, I'm sure, is close to the heart of God. The agent of revival is the Holy Spirit. The instrument of revival is the Word of God. The object of revival is the Christian believer. And it's important to understand these distinctions. In that song that Edwin Orr wrote, O Holy Ghost, there's a line that says, O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee. Send a revival, start the work in me. That's the last thing he said as a public utterance before he passed away from a heart attack later that same night. O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee. It's not man-made. It's something that God does. We cooperate and work with God in revival, of course. And that's something that I want to discuss to some extent this afternoon. There are two opinions. There's an opinion that revivals are strictly and only the work of God. They really have nothing to do with man. They'll come when God pleases. And all we can do is hope that somehow God might send one in our day. This is a very popular idea. And it's linked to the idea that churches used to have that... And this was true in Finney's day. And Finney demolished the idea. The idea was you must not even talk to your own children about Jesus Christ for fear they are not one of the elect. And generally speaking, that's what Christians believed in the days when Finney came on the scene. And so a father would not talk to his children about Jesus because they might not be one of the elect and you would be interfering with the work of God. And so they were hoping for the Holy Spirit to do something in their family but didn't really believe anything might happen. During the revival in Saskatoon, a team went to Germany. Another team went to Holland of Dutch-speaking people from Canada who had experienced revival. And they got to Holland. They were in different churches there. And they found it very, very... They were in a church, for example, where there were 500 people and only 20 people knew they were born again. The others didn't know whether they were elect or not. And they had an awful time communicating with these people because they were really trapped in this theology. You can't really know this is all God's business. Don't interfere with the work of God. So they're going to church and believing all the doctrines of the Bible, no assurance of salvation at all. And they really had little interest in revival. They were more interested in knowing how they could find out they were saved. Well, anyway, Finney came on the scene and blew this away with his teaching. I think he went to an opposite extreme, which sometimes is necessary to bring the church back to the center. Because Finney just totally rejected the idea of predestination, which I personally don't and can't. I find it's taught in the Bible. But he rejected that totally. He said, I don't understand it, I never talk about it. He has a book on systematic theology, which has some great teaching on sanctification by faith and so on. But when it comes to predestination, he really has nothing to say. However, I can see the problem this day. His pastor, Dr. Gales, and Finney often talk together. And Finney told him one time, he said, you know, I don't believe in the power of your prayers at all. Gales was trying to get Finney to attend the prayer meeting. And Finney had done this and he quit going. And so Gales said, why don't you come to our prayer meetings? He said, because if there was any power in your prayers, all the praying I've listened to in your prayer meetings, you should have driven all the devils out of this place long ago. And nothing has happened. And so Finney couldn't see that nothing was happening. They were praying, nothing was happening. And of course, Gales, a pastor, and the church generally believe, you know, in this extreme view of predestination, that you couldn't really know and you couldn't do anything about it. Now there's another view, of course, related to that having to do with revival. You can't really do anything about it. You can hope for it and trust that maybe God will do something about it, but we really can't do anything about it personally. Jonathan Goforth read, he was a Canadian missionary in China, and he was very disturbed at the condition of things there. He went to Korea. There was a revival there, and I think in Japan. And he was quite impressed by something he saw of the work of God there. And he came across Finney's book on revival. And he came across this teaching that revival is possible anywhere, anytime, if we meet the conditions. Now I don't think that's totally true, personally. I think there's such a thing as a revival epoch, a revival era. After the 1858 revival, I mentioned this before, there was 40 years of what has been called open skies, and revivals were happening all around the world. And that came to an end after 40 years until the 1905 awakening. Then we had open skies once again for maybe another 10 years. So in a period of open skies, I think it's true that anywhere in the world you can pray and believe God, and revivals will come. Now, we are living in the age of the Holy Spirit. He's been given and never withdrawn. And revivals come through the manifestation, the work, the power of the Holy Spirit. So this says to me, why can't we believe God at any time in this age for a local church revival? These sweeping revivals that have come in the past, after all, there's only been four of them in the history of the church. So, a lot of people feel we're overdue for another one. Now, maybe we are. We don't really know. But let's think about church revival, your church, revival in a local church. I think Finney was right when he said that revival can come to a local church. Anytime, if God's people will meet the conditions. Dr. Torrey said the same thing. He was completely convinced that revival could come to a church anywhere in the world if they would meet the conditions. Have you heard of Solomon Stoddard? He was a grandfather to Jonathan Edwards. He pastored a church in the New England states. In 38 years, he had five powerful revivals in his congregation. No other churches in the New England states were experiencing revival. They were trapped in this other theology that revival only came when God pleased and there was nothing men could do about it. Stoddard was not trapped by that theology. And what happened finally was a group of pastors came to Stoddard. They said, now God is blessing your church in unusual ways and hundreds are being converted from time to time and nothing is happening in our churches. Can you tell us why God is favoring you over us? And he said, God is not favoring me over you. We are meeting the conditions laid down in the Word of God. We fast for revival. We pray for revival. We preach for revival. We preach Christ up and we preach men down was the way he put it. And we keep on believing God until revival comes. He said there's things we can do as individuals and as local churches to promote revival. To use the word promote in a good sense. This was the answer that Stoddard gave to these pastors. I don't know, I don't have any record of what happened in their churches, whether they got a hold of this or not. I mentioned Reverend Calvin Colton before in this book he wrote called A History of American Revivals of Religion and it's a valuable book. I only paid 25 cents for it in a second hand bookstore in Winnipeg and I wouldn't take 25 dollars for it but don't offer me 50, I might. But it's been reprinted. I wish I knew where because I would like to get another copy of it. My copy is just falling apart. I mean published in 1832, you could expect that. But it had a lot of good things to say in the book and one of them was this, that in the early 1800s in the United States a church not expecting revival, not working towards revival, nothing like this going on, would suddenly experience a powerful awakening. Then another church, then another church and he said this kind of revival gradually phased out as men learned how to cooperate with God in bringing revival. And so he said we were never happy with, I mentioned this before, insulated, that is isolated conversions. And they kept on praying and fasting and believing God, a heavy emphasis on believing God until the Spirit came and took the work out of their hands and then made the whole community aware of God and hundreds would be converted. And he talks about this in the book. He wrote the book for British Christians who were inquiring as to the revivals in America. They were not happening in Great Britain and they wanted to know if there was anything they could do to promote revival there and hence the book. He said that this second kind of revival where men cooperated with God was every bit as powerful as the other kind of revival where men were not involved. And the results were just as lasting as the results from the other kind. And so he came to the conclusion, I think he's right, that in the earlier kind of revival God was training the church so they would know how to work with God in bringing revival to their congregations. And when they learned the secret of revival they were able to do this, then revivals became more widespread as churches laid hold of the Word of God and the promises. Remember now, the Holy Spirit's the agent, the Bible, the Word of God, is the instrument and the church, the Christians, are the object of revival. Alright, so Stoddard way back then in the 1700s laid hold of this particular truth. Jonathan Goforth got it from Finney and found it worked in China and there were powerful revivals in China as powerful as anything you can find anywhere in the annals of the church. Now, Bok Singh in India, they called him at one time the Billy Graham of India because he was a very successful evangelist and the churches there used him as an evangelist. And then Bok Singh came to the conclusion that doing it this way was not the best way of reaching the masses in India so amicably he broke with the missionaries and went on his own. He had read about Finney and the power of God and the meetings of Finney and so on and he said, I thought to myself, why can't this happen in India? And he came to the conclusion we've lost the glory of God because we've been trying to do the work of God in human ways. So he got a small group of godly people together and they began searching the scriptures and they came to the conclusion that they could regain the glory of God by starting to do the work of God in God's way. And here's what they did. Prior to this, they were going to a marketplace in India and you know in India you can give out a million tracts in one day. Operation Mobilization has done that sometimes. You know, India, they have 30 million births every year. They have 13 million deaths. So they have a net gain of 17 million people every year. They're close to a billion people now. And these billion people live in an area slightly smaller than western Canada. Can you believe it? Where we have, what, 8 million people or something? Anyway, they had been doing this, running into, you know, these fairs and different places and giving out tracts by the thousands and very little ever happened. So they prayed and fasted and God showed their little team very clearly that they were not to do this anymore. They were to pray and ask Him where they were to go and what they were to do. So they changed this. Instead of going to some needy area that they thought, well there needs a church here, let's start a church there. They didn't do that. They waited till God gave them clear guidance as to where to go. Then they gave out tracts and still nothing happened. So they went back to God in prayer again and fasting. God, what's wrong? We went where you told us to go, nothing happened. And God showed them clearly when you got there, you didn't wait on me for guidance as to what you should be doing. And so they would go to a place and just wait on God. And God would show them what to do. And He said, that's when the glory of God returned. And He said in a book I read that He wrote, He said, we saw revivals as powerful as anything that He ever saw. I'm not sure if He's still preaching, He's probably past 80 now, but I know that some years ago they had over 600 churches and some of them had 2,000 or 3,000 people in fellowship. They had annual conferences of 20,000 or 30,000 people. And Box Sing, it's a brethren style movement, it's not connected with the brethren movement as a whole at all, but it's a brethren kind of movement. And God has greatly used this. The return of God's glory. When we start doing God's work in God's way, the glory of God will return. It's a very simple idea. And I think we need to understand this. I think of one denomination, I'm not criticizing them only to mention who they are, but they have a thing where they fly over the city and take photographs of the city and then say, okay, we've got a church here, now we can't have another church except a mile from this church here, and this is how they operate. So we can put a church in here because it's a mile from this church we already have, and then from this church we can build a church here a mile over, and this is how they do it. And God isn't consulting. I mean, they just do it this way by taking photographs from the air. And a lot of Christian work is done this way. What we think is a good thing to do. Instead of waiting on God for guidance, because you take in the book of Acts, Paul and company tried to go into Asia and what happened? The Spirit wouldn't let them. I say to myself, why were they trying to go into Asia if they never had guidance? But the Spirit closed the door on them. They attempted to go into Bithynia and the Spirit wouldn't let them. Now the Spirit let them go into Asia a few years later in Acts chapter 19, and all of Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, but it wasn't the right time then. So God is trying to teach us through these things, wait on me. Let me guide you. I will show you. And if we learn to do this, that's why Henry Blackaby keeps telling us, you know, find out what God is doing. Find out where God is working. Get in there and work with God. The Father can do nothing of Himself but what He sees, or the Son can do nothing of Himself but what He sees the Father doing. Christ said in the Gospel of John, it's that principle of waiting on God for guidance. Like Paul, two questions, who are you, Lord? When he got the answer, Lord, what will you have me to do? And then somebody says he spent the rest of his life doing it. Finding the will of God and carrying it out. And that brings revival. Bob Singh wrote a little book called The Return of God's Glory. I don't think it's been published in North America. I got a copy over in India. I have it at home. He's not a great writer but he lays it out very clearly. What they did and how they saw God work. When they came to the conclusion they had to do things in God's way. Actually, it's something that should be obvious to us from the very outset. Now, in Saskatoon, five years before the revival, I got concerned about revival. We had evangelistic people come to the church like an evangelist or singers or whatever a number of times. And they'd have pack-a-pew programs and all of this stuff, you know. And we'd get busy and do this and that. Volunteer choirs. I remember one fellow came and we had a volunteer choir of about 40 people every night. And we had good meetings, lively meetings, you know. Very little ever happened. After these men were gone, in some case a couple, after they were gone, the church was exactly the same as before they came. I got to the point where I said, Laura, I'm never going to do it again. I'm never going to do it again. I shared this with a missionary and he said, why don't you get Ralph and Lucita? And I said, who are they? So he told me. So I wrote them. They said, we can't come for two years. Fine, so. But five years before the revival, I got concerned about this and I decided, God, we've got to have a revival here. And you're the only one that consented. So I started a Saturday night deacon's prayer meeting to pray for revival at nine o'clock Saturday night. We had 10 deacons. I think we averaged around six or seven of them attended that particular meeting. That was the start. Then I began telling people things like this. Miss Sunday morning if you have to. Miss Sunday evening if you must. But don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're dead. This is the most important meeting of the week. And our prayer meeting started to grow. It went up to 25, to 50, to 75. We eventually got to a place, I remember counting 167 people in the prayer meeting one prayer night, which is about the number of members we had in the church. But anyway, we really emphasized the Wednesday night prayer meeting. Then we had a prayer wheel, sitting on the bulletin board, and people took 15-minute slots. There were pie-shaped wedges all around the thing, you know, and people would write their name and the time they would take, the 15 minutes they would take to pray. And after a while we had the whole 24 hours taken out. This meant that any time of the day or night somebody from our church was on their knees praying for revival. We ended all our Sunday evening services with a half hour of prayer for revival. We used to tell the people it won't be longer than 30 minutes. Stay if you can. Maybe 30 people would stay, and we'd have a time of prayer for revival. We had some cottage prayer meetings going, that didn't take very well. Very few people attended the cottage prayer meetings, so we kind of gave up on that. We just kept emphasizing these other things. We really did no advertising for the meetings. I remember at one point I thought to myself, if Ralph and Lou phone to find if I've done all these things they've been writing me about, then I have to tell them we haven't done all these things, because they may not even come. But we prayed. I remember just saying, God, I'm so tired. I'm so tired of seeing what men can do. We want to see what you can do. We saw. Our church would seat about 350 with a few chairs at the back. We started on a Wednesday night with about 150 people. I think three or four people came forward. By Saturday we were packed out. We couldn't hack it. Sunday was hopeless. We talked to a neighbor, an Anglican church pastor, and he said, well, you can use our building. We don't have any Sunday evening meetings. You can have it for weeknights as long as you want. He was quite open to the idea. His church would seat five or six hundred. I think we lasted there two nights and the building was packed right out. We couldn't handle it. So then the Alliance Church, and they had their annual missionary conference coming up. They already had missionaries in Saskatoon ready for the conference, but Walter Wolfe, the pastor, was very sensitive to what he saw God doing because some of his people were attending the meetings, being blessed, and coming back and sharing what God had been doing in their hearts, and so they washed up their missionary conference and made their church available to us, and you could pack about a thousand there by a little ingenuity. That didn't last long. It was too small. So we moved in the biggest church building in the city, seating about 1,400. Now, never forget the first night. We had that place packed. I mean packed. The caretaker lost his cool. He was cursing. He told me, he said, you've got to get rid of some of these people. The fire marshal will close this place down, man. We can't have all these people in this building. There was another 200 or 300 outside, you know, yet. So I asked all my people to go down to the, I think, down to the Alliance Church we went, and we had a private meeting with them there, but when our people went out, a bunch of people came in off the street again. But you know what happened? A week later, the caretaker got saved. And he said, hang them on the lights, put them everywhere, you know. Yeah, that was different. Then that church was too small, so we had to start having double services every night. We planned to go for a week and a half, but we had to go for seven weeks. And it was a revival. It was a real revival. Dr. J. Edwin Orr, the expert on revivals, heard about the revival in Canada, and in a public meeting said, it's not a genuine revival. It never was and it was based on a very strong separatistic note. It wasn't with God. So I wrote him a long letter. I said, you know, we quit counting after 2,000 teams went out for Saskatoon. I have no idea how many teams have gone out. Teams, I told him, teams went to the British Isles, teams went to South America, to India, to the Philippines, to Europe, and so on. He didn't know a thing about this. He completely altered his opinion after he found out what had happened. As a matter of fact, this particular book here, The Flaming Tongue, from which I read a few moments ago, he sent me a copy and there's his John Henry there and he was just admitting that he had made a mistake in evaluating the revival the way he did. He had been fed some information that was not true. In any case, we started having double services and then on Sunday that was too small so we moved to Centennial Auditorium and finally there on Sunday evening we got to have double services and we went for seven weeks and hundreds of people were touched by God and many churches were blessed and these teams going out was just incredible. We were hearing from all over the continent pretty well, people want send a team, send a team, send a team. We didn't have that many teams, you know, we just sent who we could and often it was just a group of lay people went and God used them so in that sense it was a lay movement as well. We were all involved and thank God for it. I remember three pastors came, they were up from Thompson, Manitoba area, one of them said to me, I can never preach again. If God doesn't meet my need in these meetings I can never preach again. And I remember seeing him laying on the floor at the front of the church by the hour waiting on God and God touched his life. Not long after that he led an electrician to Christ who was from Scotland, a new immigrant from Canada and this guy got so fired up, this Scots guy, Scots remember, he offered to pay the fare for this preacher to fly to Scotland and he gave him a whole long list of relatives that he could witness to and try and went to Christ and he hopped on a plane and flew over to Scotland and brought 16 of these people to Christ, you know. This was after God touched them in revival in Canada here. Sherwood Work who was Billy Graham's right hand man for 25 years, Leonard Ravenhill phoned him and said, Woody, there's a revival in Canada, hop a plane and get up there, revival's next door to heaven. So I don't know where he got my name from, maybe from Leonard Ravenhill. He phoned me long distance, he said, where's the revival now? I said, well, here in Minneapolis, we're in Winnipeg and God's doing great things here. So Sherwood Work showed up in Winnipeg. And you know, we had rented Elam Chapel seat 1200, we started with 600 and finally we were packed out, we had double service, then we had to move to a larger building and the same thing began happening, theirs was happening, had happened in Saskatoon. And the night he came, the church was packed to the doors and he was sitting about the third pew from the front with a notebook taking down notes. And people were giving testimonies and all this kind of stuff. And before I got to preaching, people started coming forward and kneeling at the front and pretty soon the whole front of the church was covered with people kneeling, praying, and then we filled the platform and then we filled the choir walls. And then I started emptying the front pews and the second pew and we had emptied the third pew so people could have a place to kneel. And that's when we got to Sherwood Work. So he came up to me after, he said, he introduced himself, and then he said, I've been involved in evangelism on a large scale for 25 years but I've never seen revival. He said, this is revival. He said, you know, he said, Billy doesn't need it, but the Graham organization does. He said, they desperately need revival. And my wife, he said, well, he explained to me quietly, he doesn't say this in his book, but he told me quietly he would have divorced her 25 years before but he didn't want to hurt Billy Graham, so they just lived in the same house. He said, my wife really needs revival. I said, oh, that's nice. I just stared at him, and finally he said, and I think I need it too. And through Harry and Evelyn Thiessen's testimony, which he heard that night, God got through to Sherwood Words. And he experienced revival. He wrote a book called The Afterglow, in which he tells what happened in his life to the revival in Canada. And you know, there's a lot of hidden springs to this. There were people in India, two places in India, one place for four years before the revival in Canada, they had been praying, a group had been praying for revival in western Canada. Some Gideons from Canada were over in England, and some of these people came and told them what had been going on. Another group in India had been praying for a couple of years for revival specifically in Saskatoon. They didn't even know where they got the name Saskatoon from. So there's hidden springs to a lot of this, things God is doing that we can't really see the whole picture. But God was certainly involved. Then we saw what God could do with very little human effort just to be available, that's all. I say again, the Holy Ghost is the agent and the Word of God is the instrument and we are the object of revival. Wilt Thou not revive us again that Thy people may rejoice in Thee? For all the blessings we have here, again, I've traveled a lot. Every time I get home I say to my wife, honey, I feel like kissing the ground. Let me give you an example. In the Philippines, in Surigao, in Mindanao, the big island in the south of the Philippines, I mean there's no such thing as garbage pickup, you know. So the people decided to make a garbage pickup. They decided to make a pickup. They make a They decided to make a They decided to make a garbage pickup. They decided to garbage pickup. decided to make a garbage They the garbage pickup department in Philippines decided to make a garbage you have no power, you have no strength. Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?" The reason for revival would be right there. And then to bring glory to God. The answers to prayer, the hundreds and hundreds of answers to prayer we saw. Everything seemed to speed up and just accelerate. And I remember down in the Maritimes, I had some meetings in a church and one of the local pastors who was cooperating, there was I think maybe ten churches cooperating, and one of the local pastors came to talk to me before this meeting. And I just sensed in my heart he had a need. I don't claim to have any gift along those lines, but I just felt he had a need. And he kept telling me about the wonderful things that was happening in his church, missionaries they're sending out, money they're raising for missions, evangelism, all this stuff, you know. And people had told me about this guy that he had the fastest growing church in the Maritimes. Well a meeting started and I had a fellow with me and he gave his testimony. And I was preaching low key about ten minutes, when suddenly this pastor began to weep. And finally he was just absolutely roaring as he wept. And I signaled to my helper and he went over and took him out to another room in the church. We could hear him for twenty minutes just screaming at the top of his lungs. Finally after half an hour they came in, and I asked this brother if he had anything to share with us, and he told us what happened. And you can interpret this any way you want. He said, I was sitting there, Brother McLeod was speaking, he said, I don't know what happened, he said, but Jesus came and stood right in front of me, and he demanded that I give him my all. He said, I've never done that. And he said, he broke me. Nobody else saw Jesus. This is what God did and how God handled that problem. A man, a pastor from about three hundred miles away, drove over with one of his men from the church. His wife wanted to come and couldn't come. And soon he came over and experienced revival. He could hardly wait to get home and tell his wife what happened. So he roars in the house and says, Hi, where are you? God revived me. She said, God revived me when you were gone. Let me tell you what happened. And what happened, she couldn't sleep at night, and she got out of bed at two o'clock, and she got on her knees and started to pray. And she said, Jesus Christ came, and she said, he just, he said to me, give me everything. She said, I gave him everything. And she was just so full of God, he could hardly, he couldn't believe it, you know. And she hadn't even been in a meeting. Some of those things, I believe them. These people have nothing to, they're not telling the story of some kind, especially when you see the after-effects of what happened at that time. I was praying with a pastor one time, and he had been misappropriating funds in his church and making eyes at the ladies, and he wouldn't admit anything. So I said, well brother, let's pray. There was a big pillar right here, and his chair was here, and I was kneeling here. And I began to pray for him, that God would speak to him. And suddenly he screamed. I looked, he had both arms around the pillar, he was holding on for dear life. And he kept crying, oh God, don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me. And he kept screaming and crying, God, don't kill me, don't kill me. Afterwards, he told me that the hand of God came around his body and began to squeeze him, and he thought he was going to die. And it wasn't hard to get honest when that happened. Well, we don't ask God to do things of that kind, but we can't deny, like in Acts chapter 4, when they prayed for boldness to preach the Word of God, they asked the Lord to work miracles and so on. There's no evidence in Acts chapter 4 that actually happened, that they saw miracles, but they prayed particularly for boldness, and boldness they got. And so revival, I think, is possible. We have to meet the conditions. We have to pray, we have to fast. As we noted in one of the other sessions, we have to get thoroughly dissatisfied with our present status, get to the point where we can't stand it, we can't we can't live this way anymore. I just got something in the mail that I'm still shocked about. Somebody has done a study on evangelical pastors in Canada, and I don't know where they got the figures from, but they're saying that over sixty percent of them give up the ministry before they've been in it ten years. And the ones that give up the ministry, the majority of them quit the church totally, and they're talking about evangelical pastors. As a matter of fact, there's a group of us having a meeting in February to discuss this whole thing, and try to come to some opinion or something on it. It's shocking, but I think what is happening is people are sick and tired of humdrum, ho-hum Christianity. I mean, where's God in this? When Elisha walked back to the Jordan River and smoked the waters with Elijah's cloak, he cried, where is the Lord God of Elijah? And the waters parted, and he saw the power of God as Elijah had. Sometimes we can be quite satisfied with something less than that. We don't really worry. You remember that phrase in the Gospel of Luke? They, supposing he was in the company, they thought Jesus was in the crowd somewhere. They supposed he was there. I think we do the same. We suppose that Christ is in our Sunday services. We don't see any evidence of it, but we suppose he's there. Well, maybe he's not there at all. Samson didn't know when God left him, right? That's what it says. He didn't know that the Spirit had left him, and that's shocking. What did we learn from Stoddard? What did we learn from Jonathan Goforth? In the revivals he saw in China after he learned how to work with God, as powerful as anything. Do you know something? In China today, in areas where Goforth worked, and Hudson Taylor, and men like that, a long while ago, that's where the largest Christian communities are found in China today. So their work was certainly not in vain. Those powerful revivals, it seems if communism quelched all that. Not really, because the work of God is eternal. Whatever God does, it says in Ecclesiastes, it shall be forever. Nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it, and God does it that men should fear before him. Now the church at Ephesus were doing a lot of good things. I think nine good things were mentioned there that they were doing, laboring and working, and defending the truth, and trying false apostles, and all of these things were good. But all of this was wiped out because they'd left their first love, and God called them to follow him. Remember, therefore, from whence you are fallen, and repent, and do the first works. If you're interested in revival, then we are. You know, I was going to South America years ago. First time, a matter of fact, it was the first time I was off the North American continent. My wife and I went down to Argentina. A missionary with a gospel mission to South America had invited us to go. He never got my last two letters. He didn't know I was coming. He knew I was coming, but didn't know when. He doesn't mean to play. Here we are in Buenos Aires, a city of 12 million people. It's a cluster of 28 cities jammed together in this busy terminal. We don't know a word of Spanish except C, which means yes, and we're sitting there waiting, you know. Nobody shows up. He told us afterwards, he said, you were using big church letters probably, and I had been. He said, don't use those with big stamps, because if they like the stamp on the letter, they'll take the whole letter home, you know, in the post office, and that's what happened. He didn't get two letters. So what do you do in a case like that? My wife and I were sitting there, hey, that guy looks like an American, because the missionary we're corresponding with was a Kansas cowboy, and we go and talk to this guy, I know he is Spanish, so we gave up on that. Then we prayed for guidance, and I found a phone bank of phones in one place, and I got a phone book from a girl there, and I went through it, and he wasn't listed. I didn't know until afterwards. He had been in Chile for 25 years, had just moved to Buenos Aires, he had an unlisted phone, nobody even knew him. I phoned the Latin American mission, I phoned the sailors mission, another mission, nobody heard this guy. So I said to my wife, you know honey, it looks like we've been taken for a ride here somehow. And all of a sudden, a total stranger, about 50 years of age, walked up to me, and he bowed, and spoke in lovely Spanish, and I made him understand I don't know any Spanish, and so I said to him, my amigo, amigo is friend, my amigo, and I gave his name Lyle Eggleston. Lyle told me after, he said, you know, Eggleston, these Spanish people, they can't pronounce it, they can't spell it, they just don't get it, it's not a Spanish name. So this guy grabbed the phone book, and I said, no, no, no, it's not that, you know. So he put the phone book down, and he bowed, and he walked away. Ten minutes later, he suddenly appears again, and he hands me a slip of paper. I look at it, he says, Lyle Eggleston, I'll look out at 35, that's where he lived, and his phone number, and the whole thing. And he bowed, and walked away with a smile on his face, you know. I phoned Lyle, he came tearing down all apologies, I told him what happened. Hey, wait, though, he said, don't hand me that, that's, you're handing me shots, he said. There's nobody in this place who even knows me. I showed him the paper. We finally came to the conclusion that we were in trouble, and God just sent an angel. I don't know, we don't have any other explanation for it, you know. Where did this guy get this name, and his address, and his phone number from? It wasn't in the phone book, where did this guy get it from, this total stranger? Why did he come to me, you know? Anyway, that's how it all started. And I had a hundred and five meetings in nine weeks, I guess it was. I had one free weekend, and we were kind of looking forward to getting around to see a little bit of the country and stuff, my wife and I. And I preached in the Southern Baptist Seminary in Buenos Aires, and one of the professors came up and said, what are you doing on this weekend? Well, I said, nothing, that's the weekend we are free. Why? Oh, wonderful, he said. We have a gathering of six Baptist groups in Argentina. We meet once a year for fellowship, Friday over Sunday, and last year when we met, we compared our statistics, and the average church had only won two people to Christ in 12 months. So we decided it was time for revival and repentance. And so we set up a committee to plan for this year. We told the committee, do not invite a speaker, pray for God to send us someone who will talk about revival, and you're it. I thought to myself, how can God put these things together, you know? It was the only weekend we were free. So they drove us down to Rosario, a city of a million and a half, and the Baptist church seating 1,200. It was packed to the doors, and they're standing along the walls. I couldn't give invitations. There's nowhere for people to move. And I had a wonderful interpreter. He got so excited, sometimes I had to calm him and slow him down. And the last meeting, I just said, people, maybe you need to be saved. Maybe you're a Christian. You want to commit your life totally to God and experience personal revival. That's how you feel. Stay together. Stay behind. One of the people even, 700 people stayed. And the interpreter got so excited, I could hardly get him to stop. And so I had to counsel these people through an interpreter, which is the easiest thing in the world. There was a pastor sitting there, and he prayed, and he had another pastor he hated, who was in the meeting. And he knew he should make things right with his pastor, so he said, I prayed. I said, Lord, if you'll bring that pastor right in front of me, I'll confess to him. He opened his eyes, and the guy was standing right there. Well, how in the world did God manage that? He didn't figure this could ever happen, because there's, you know, 1,500 people milling around, you know. I think in Argentina, but somebody said they had a glorious future behind them. And so they sent two elders down to the camp when we were there to check out our doctrine. They weren't too sure about this doctrine stuff, you know. And we were preaching Galatians 2.20 all the time. And these two elders got a hold of Galatians 2.20. We heard later on, they were in all the assemblies in Argentina preaching Galatians 2.20, Galatians 2.20. And you know, there's been revival in Argentina since then. I take no credit for that. But God started it then. And, you know, well, one of the pastors in that meeting at Rosario, he was so excited about revival, he went back to his church. They began praying for revival and preaching for revival. And I may repeat myself sometimes here. If I do, maybe you need to hear it twice. I don't know. But in any case, he was such a godly guy. You know, he needed a car. He couldn't afford a car. So he talked to his deacons. And deacons said, well, we'll start a car fund. No, he said, we won't start a car fund. We're going to ask God to show us what to do. Well, they said, pastor, I mean, there's no other way. I mean, what do you expect? Somebody's going to give you a car? Well, he said, you never know. No, he said, don't start a fund. So he prayed, and God told him what to do. So he wrote a letter to a local Ford company and explained he was a pastor and needed a car. Could they give him a car? He had no money. They gave him a brand new New Yorker. And so what he did, he didn't tell the deacons what had happened, but he called a meeting with deacons. And he drove this car up right in front of the church so they couldn't get into the church without having to get around the cars. Wow, they were really excited about this. And then a revival broke in his church. And apparently it touched the 500 people, it touched everybody in the congregation. After the church was revived, now I think this is, there were 200 sinners converted in two weeks with no special meetings at all. He said people ringing his doorbell and beating on his door day and night wanting to be saved. And so he phoned the previous pastor and he came down. Between them, they were gathering in the harvest. I was in the church for some meetings shortly after they baptized 85 of these converts and had them in the church and had the others in baptismal classes and so on. But you know this pastor had such a simple faith and he had this thing right, do what God says. No, we don't want to fund. If God says, sure we'll do it, but God hasn't said that. So God tells him what to do, he does it and it works. I don't know why it is we think that God can't really communicate clearly. I think he can. The trouble is we don't hear clearly, you know, and we get in the way. So God says remember therefore from whence you have fallen and repent and get back to the first love. Most of us can remember how it was when we first converted. I ran upstairs about four at a time to tell my older brother Don and my mother what had happened. I was so full of God I was tearing around the house, hollering. Well we sort of figure, you know, over a period of time everybody loses that and we expect to lose it and we're not disappointed, we lose it all right. And sometimes we can go on for 25, 35 years with no thought about personal revival. And people, we need to repent and seek the face of God. As far as a nationwide revival is concerned, I'm praying for that too. And I know that's in the hands of God. God may be gracious to us. I pray that prayer from Habakkuk, in wrath remember mercy. Remember mercy oh God. We deserve wrath certainly, considering the moral conditions in our country, but God in wrath remember mercy. Have mercy on Canada. One of the things that I've never been able to figure out is why God gave to 30 million people the second largest landmass in the world. Russia's the largest, Canada's the second largest. Why did God give this to us? Do you know in the Athabasca tar sands there's more oil in those tar sands than in all the oil deposits in the world put together, including Soviet Russia, all the Arab countries, and the United States of America. If the figure for the world is 7, the figure for Athabasca is 11. And 75 percent is recoverable. Why did God give that to us? There's islands in the Arctic that belong to Canada that are solid iron. They don't have to cobble anything out of it. They can feed that stuff directly into the furnaces. Why did God give that to us? Why does the United Nations say that Canada is the number one country that everybody wants to move to? We who live here apparently don't feel that way. I say to myself, I can only come up with one answer. God has blessed us this way because he expects something great from us in return. What could be greater than a Canadian-wide revival from the American border to the Arctic islands, from Newfoundland right out to Vancouver Island, that every home might be visited by God. You know in some of these revivals I've read about, every home was visited by the Holy Ghost, and there was at least one person saved in every house in some entire areas. God can do it again. We have to pray for it and humble ourselves before God. You know King Manasseh was a very wicked king. His name almost became a synonym for wickedness in the Bible. And it talks about his sin as witchcraft and immorality and all this garbage. And so God gave him a bad deal. And Manasseh humbled himself. Ahab humbled himself when God told him what was going to happen. And God said to the prophet, do you see how Ahab humbles himself? I don't think anything pleases God so much as a humble heart would come before God. Just admit, dear God. You know God said we're less than nothing in vanity. It's a mathematical impossibility. Man at his best state is altogether vanity. Vanity means emptiness, wind, and confusion. Men of low degree are vanity. Men of high degree are light. If you're laid in the balances, they're altogether lighter than vanity. So I tell God, Lord, that's right. I'm less than nothing. I'm a bag of garbage. There won't be a ripple on the water when I die. You can get along very well without me. I've never done anything. I've never been anything. But dear God, have mercy on this poor worm down here. We need to pray that way and humble ourselves in the sight of God. And remember from whence we're fallen. And ask God to restore that first love. Romans 5.5 says, The love of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us. Phineas was filled with the Holy Spirit. What did he say about it? I felt, he said, as if I were being fanned with gigantic wings of love. Moody was filled with the Holy Spirit. What did he say about it? Moody said, I was so filled with the love of God, I felt I could take the world into my heart. J.B. Earle was filled with the Holy Spirit. What did he say? And up until then, his ministry had been totally fruitless. Following this night when he met God, there was about, I think he said, 150,000 converts before he died. What did he say about his meeting with God? He said, at three o'clock in the morning, I was filled with the fullness of the love of Christ. And so we need that to humble ourselves and to seek the face of God until we're filled with the love of God. Oh God, wilt thou not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you.