In this sermon, the speaker encourages the audience to engage in Travelling Prayer, which involves crying out to God from the bottom of their hearts for the salvation of the lost in this generation and nation. The speaker shares a story of a pastor who experienced a breakthrough in his ministry after committing to pray for an hour instead of watching TV. This led to the pastor being thrust into the middle of the gang situation and being able to minister to them effectively. The speaker emphasizes the importance of setting aside dedicated time for prayer and encourages the audience to prioritize prayer over other activities.

The other thing that casting out demons like that, if you get the person involved in doing it, get them repenting, get them renouncing, it gives them a clue what to do with other stuff in their life. They start to go, hmm, I'm just going to pray to God about such and such a thing, because maybe we can get rid of that the same way. Maybe God can help me get rid of that thing, because that's the next big problem. So we're actually giving people tools. We teach people how to renounce, first of all repent for their sin, and renounce, deeply just renounce from the bottom of their heart the fact that they are involved in that and the stronghold itself, and they get delivered real easy. My friend Mike Smith, who does deliverance all the time, he'll get them to command the demons out most of the time. Out of themselves. He's dealing with people that have got all kinds of problems, all kinds of sicknesses, quite a few sicknesses, is demonic, he says. All mental disease, he says, is demonic. Anything that people need to be medicated for, if they've got mental problems that need to be medicated, he says, it's always, according to him, always demonic. He says arthritis, he believes, cancer, for sure, he's seen a lot of success with cancer, he's casting out demons and getting rid of cancer, that's what he's doing. And sometimes he needs to help, sometimes he needs to help the person, and he'll step in if he needs to. But basically, a lot of deliverance, the best kind of deliverance is where the person is deeply involved in it, and they really are aware of how that thing got rid of, how it was expelled. He talks in the New Testament, I love this word, if you look at the New Testament, in a number of translations, driving out demons. Think of that word, driving, driving out demons. Sometimes they come easy, especially if the person is really repentant and desperate and broken. Sometimes, drive them out in the name of Jesus Christ. It can be like that. They must obey. Don't ever let a demon say, I'm not coming out, you can't tell me to come out, Some of them will try that kind of stuff on. You just say, ah, this one needs driving. I'm going to get in the pile, drive her out, which is in the name of Jesus Christ, and get to work. Commanding that thing, no demon. I've heard Mike do this, they try that on him all the time. He knows better, he's been around a while. But a lot of young Christians will back off and go, oh my goodness, this demon has authority or something. That's not true. Nine times out of ten, you keep going. You say, no, that's not true. You get out of him in the name of Jesus Christ. Suddenness. You've got to remember, demons are trying everything. They're actually extremely frightened of being cast out. They're frightened of losing their host that they've been in. And even you'd be amazed, you see some of these deliverance guys do a sudden clap or something like that. Mike will suddenly virtually lunge at the person and go, get out in Jesus' name. The reason he's doing that, he's basically scaring the living daylights out of the demon. The demon just goes, shunk, straight out of them when he does that kind of stuff. As Smith Willisworth, you know, there was a lady at a bus stop or something and she was talking to a dog and she goes, go home Foo Foo, go home Foo Foo. And you know, Smith Willisworth is standing there, the lady's standing there, Foo Foo's not going anywhere. And the lady goes, go home Foo Foo, go on, off you go home, go on Foo Foo. Foo Foo's doing nothing. And then the lady goes, Foo Foo, get on home. And Smith Willisworth goes, that's how you trick the devil. Okay, the whole point of this weekend is for practical stuff on... Now by the way, just quickly relating to the street stuff again, I really, really hope and pray that whether it's on a Sunday, seems a good day to me, but whether it's on a Sunday or whatever, regularly schedule in going down there. I've never seen a more ripe field of harvest. It's not that we're totally ready for it, but we are better than we used to be. We were better today in that harvest field maybe than we might have been a year ago. Do you think that, John Culler? The rapping, that's the first time I've been involved with decent kind of rapping and stuff that you would hear homeless people stop and listen. They were listening, and what we were doing when we were rapping, we were just covering all the bases of the stuff that we normally would preach. So instead of preaching, we're doing it all with music. It was fantastic to me. It was like, praise God, we finally found a way where we can preach, and yet they don't think it's preaching. They think it's music. We know it's preaching. We're covering the whole gospel, sin righteousness and judgment and everything in ways that you can't even do as a preacher. It's hard to have rattling chains in the background usually when you're talking about hell, but that's what we had. That was pretty good. I like that. So I thought that, especially the second session of it, when we were praying a lot, praying out into the street and stuff over the mics and all kinds of things, I loved that. And the second session, we had more people stopping and listening too. With Jose, is that your first casting out of demons on the street? Second, casting out demons on the street. Good. A number of others were touched and ministered to and preached to, and we had a fantastic conversation with this man, Jose, talking to this black guy. Really had a real anointed conversation with him, and he says he's repenting tonight and stuff like that. There's just lots of good that's going to come out of it, and it'll just expand and widen. The one thing that needs to be organized, and it's a very simple thing, it's probably my fault too, is just that there was no coordination at all with the whole food thing. If you notice that all homeless ministries that do food, generally what they'll do is they'll set up the food so that the preaching happens while the food is being given out and all that sort of stuff. That was just a glitch for today, that next time it'll all be prepared, I guess, and all organized, and it'll be given out while the wrapping's going on or something so that we're really getting the hugest audience that we can. Because you notice the big lines that form any time someone arrives down there with food. It's like a line 150 yards long or whatever. That's what they're lining up for, and they're so well-trained, those guys. Someone arrives in their car, and everybody looks at it and goes, food, and suddenly a line forms, bam. Meat, 100 yards long. Suddenly there's a line where there was no line. So that's how. Okay, that's the practical side of today, so we've covered that. But I really encourage just a set time, whatever it is. There's some teaching points that I want to talk about with prayer. This is a teaching night tonight more than an exhortation night, so I hope you're not disappointed to hear me not shake the rafters. We need it, but since you guys are already on top of travailing prayer, that's something I've noticed about you guys, and that blessed me to the skies when I first met a group of you guys. It was just a blessing beyond words to find a group of young people, actually to find almost any people, but find young people that knew what travailing prayer is. In other words, crying out to God from the bottom of your heart, weeping before God for the salvation of the lost and this generation and this nation. We have to spread that. We have to spread that. Praise God, I believe that is going to spread. I believe you can only really pass on prayer by demonstrating it. People hear about agonizing prayer, people hear about this travailing prayer, most of them have never really heard it properly as in a practical way, sitting in a room and experiencing it. It's fairly commonplace here, but in a lot of places it isn't. Where do we get it from? Well, we have to get it out of the revival books because it's almost completely died out in the church. So the only way we can hear about it and learn about it, and this is the way I learned about it, was reading Charles Finney, reading Frank Bartleman from the Azusa Street Revival, and that's how I started agonizing in prayer and stuff. When I was a young Christian, I learned it completely out of books, and I'd never heard anybody pray like that, no one. And, of course, you listen to Ravenhill or you read Why Revival Tarries or whatever, and you start to go, wow, he's talking about this really revival-type praying, which I haven't heard, but which is obviously kind of like this, and you start moving into it by the Spirit of God. That's where we've all got it from, because you guys are immersed in revival, the same kind of stuff that I was when I was 17, 18 years old. But one of the things I want to cover tonight, I want to cover two extra types of praying, which basically you guys know about to a degree, and yet I want to make sure that it's added to your armory by way of every type of prayer that we get in our quiver, so to speak, is just more weapons and more power and more anointing. That's what it's about. Prayer is being in touch with God and God reaching down, and really that's where the power is. That's where the anointing comes from, and that's where out on the streets we're going to see a difference. Let me talk about, I guess, the easiest one to cover first. Speaking in tongues, just to give you a few examples to maybe just give you a slightly different perspective or just an enlarged perspective of what tongues can do. If you've ever read a book, which you may not have, she's not as well known as she used to be, a lady called Jackie Pullinger years ago wrote a book called Chasing the Dragon. Have you ever read that? I've heard of it, yeah. Yeah, okay. Chasing the Dragon, Jackie Pullinger was from England. She went to Hong Kong, arrived literally, I think, in her early 20s, totally, absolutely not a missionary and yet called to it, and so she literally just arrived in Hong Kong and she went to the worst part of Hong Kong, which is called the Walled City. Walled City was not covered by the police, and so every crime, every major gang, the triad gangs of Asia were headquartered in the Walled City. And so part of Hong Kong was just walled off and you can enter into it but, of course, it's like a police-free zone. And so it was literally, it was as bad as you could get in Asia at that time and, of course, still to this day. Now she, as just a white, virtually by herself, went in there and just started trying to minister, started a kind of gathering room, a community room, for people to come in and she tried several things but when she got filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues for the first time, she said God just put it in her to just walk around all the time praying quietly in tongues. So she would walk down the street, she'd get on the bus and just travel on the bus and she'd be quietly praying in tongues so people couldn't hear or kind of notice it. You didn't want to be thought of as a complete lunatic. But there she is and that's what she started doing. She said as soon as she started doing that, it was like the praying in tongues was setting up appointments for her all over the city. She would just happen to get off the bus and bump into some gang guy that was just on the point of going to prison and was desperate and was ready to cry out to God. And if she had missed him that one moment of his life, he would either be in jail or he would be unreachable, hardened heart, which he'd always had before. She found that it just seemed like when she started walking around praying in tongues all the time, all these coincidences started happening all the time. Her days started getting filled up with perfect appointments. You know what I'm saying? She started getting these guys that X gang never saved. Heroin was an enormous problem in that. Heroin addiction was just rampant in there. She said the other thing was she would get the gang guys or the heroin addicts filled with the spirit and they'd be speaking in tongues. She found that if they would speak in tongues all the way through the withdrawal process, they felt no withdrawal at all. They would go right through what they call cold turkey, which is usually the most awful, harrowing experience you can ever have in your life. They would go through that without any withdrawal symptoms, time after time after time after time, just by praying in tongues all the way through it. So, now that's one example. Another example I'll give you is a guy called... Oh my goodness, I've forgotten his name. Anyway, he wrote a book called The Walk of the Spirit, The Walk of Power, I think it is. Lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He's a preacher. He wasn't a preacher at the time this happened to him. In fact, I think he was working at a timber mill. God spoke to him. He believed anyway. He really wasn't that strongly in touch with God. He wanted to go into the ministry. He felt he was called to preach. Nothing was happening. Nobody ever wanted to hear from him. So, he literally gave up his job and he said, God, I'm going to spend like eight hours a day just praying, and praying mostly in tongues. I'm just going to pray all day. I'm going to pray in tongues all day until something happens. Now, nobody knew who he was. He was completely unknown, completely without any known giftings. Anyway, I think he prayed for, it was a number of weeks, just praying in tongues every day. Just getting in front of God and just praying and praying in tongues every day. Didn't pray much in English as far as I know. And about three or four weeks into it, I think it was, could have been seven weeks actually, these ladies knock on his door. And they say, is there a possibility that you could come to our prayer meeting? We're having a prayer meeting, and he remembered that he'd met them somewhere and they were inviting him to come and share some stuff. He said he was sitting in the row, he was sitting in the chair, and he just looked around, and there was a lady, just a few seats over, and it was like her entire body, as far as the joints and the bones and everything, ligaments or whatever of her body, just opened up in the Spirit to his eyes. It was just like, just looking over at someone and just, it's like an x-ray opened up. And he could see the arthritis and the rheumatism and stuff, all her joints were all, all her rough bones and stuff that were all grinding together. This lady could hardly move, and she was all locked up, and she was an old lady that couldn't, and he said he knew in that instant that what he was meant to do was just stand up, walk over to her, and command her to be healed in the name of Jesus Christ. Now he had never had anything of those giftings or whatever, he'd just been spending all that time praying in tongues. He stood up, walked straight over to her, said, be healed in the name of Jesus Christ. She was instantly healed. People around her, there was a bit of commotion, and the preacher stopped preaching, because he wasn't preaching at that moment. The guy up the front stopped preaching. Other people started asking him, hey, can you pray for me? Can you pray for me? Instant healing will do that, man. Because the lady just got up out of the chair, and she's going, I'm healed, I'm healed, I'm healed. And out of that, his entire ministry started up. Massive healing ministry. He became quite a well-known preacher in those circles, and still to this day, prays for hours and hours in tongues all the time, and sees a lot of healings, sees a lot of healings. David Wilkerson, I believe, was doing this. If you remember, he crossed the switchblade just before David Wilkerson's ministry really took off, when he went to the gangs in New York. You notice that he changed one thing about his life. He said, I used to watch television between, I think it was like midnight and one o'clock every morning. I used to just sit and watch television. He was a little pastor of some unknown little church. I think it was in PA somewhere. Anyway, he said, I changed one thing about my life. I decided to pray for an hour instead of watching TV. It was only a matter of a few months after that, I believe it was, that suddenly that whole gang thing opened up. Wham! Suddenly he was thrust into the, he went to visit the gangs. He got arrested in the courtroom for standing up and trying to go and talk to them. They arrested him. It became huge front page news, a preacher arrested in this big courtroom drama. So he's thrust into the middle of the gang situation, a total hick preacher from nowhere, and suddenly all the gangs liked him. Excuse me. All the gangs liked him because he'd been arrested by the cops. He was able to go and minister to all the gangs. That's how his whole ministry got off the ground. That's how Teen Challenge started. Praise God, Teen Challenge. So, praying in tongues is something we should and can and must do. When I'm preaching, when I know I'm going to preach somewhere, I'll often spend virtually an entire day, at least one entire day, and hopefully two or at least one and a half entire days praying in tongues most of the time. Praying in English somewhat, praying in tongues a lot, enormous amount. Why? Because if I don't do that kind of thing, I find when I go to preach, there's no anointing, there's no power. You cannot preach a revival gospel without the power of God. You cannot do it. It's a waste of time. If you want to see people really repent, if you want to see people really powerfully touched by God, you have got to put the time in prayer. Now, does that mean you've got to realize as well that tongues doesn't stop for me when I'm driving down the road. When I'm driving down the road, nine times out of ten, you ask my children, especially if I'm on a long trip, they'll see me literally muttering away in tongues quietly the entire journey. That's very common. Because, why? Because, praise God, I can do two things at once. I can drive down the highway with nobody looking at me, you know, really, and be praying the entire time and still have my mind on the road and actually my mind's kind of going through all the sermon kind of stuff and getting revelation from God about what I'm going to be preaching or whatever, you know. So, there's all kinds of stuff. So tongues is this amazing thing where the Holy Spirit can cry out through us without us really having to think about it. You know, same when I'm, you know, sitting down at the computer a lot of the times. Sitting down at my computer, you know, and I'm praying in tongues the whole time. Not all the time, but quite often, you know. So I just want to encourage you, this is practical step A, and if we all in this room were praying in tongues as much as Jackie Pullinger did, you know, we would see more than we're seeing. We'd see more power. We'd see more coincidences. You know, what they are is God incidences, really. We'd see more God incidences happening because I believe we're kind of setting up God's schedule for us by just praying into it so much, you know. So that's practical step A. Pray in tongues more than you ever have. And don't ever give up on it. Alright, let's get into revival prayer. Now actually, come to think of it, when Paul mentions, when he says, you know, the spirit groans within us, the spirit prays with groanings that cannot be uttered, I believe that is speaking about tongues. I also believe it's speaking about travailing prayer in English. I believe it applies to both. But the interesting thing is the tongues type of thing, we don't really have to be as involved. I believe that the Holy Spirit, when He prays, I guarantee you, He's praying powerful prayers to God on our behalf. And I bet, way down deep, you know, the Holy Spirit is making the groanings for us. Now is there an English kind of version of that? Yes. It's equally important that we allow God's groanings and God's travail to come up through us. That is an incredibly important type of praying to do in English as well. So I want to say, there's two applications to that scripture. I believe in doing both. Alright, let's move on to this other kind of prayer. If you ever read Charles Finney's autobiography, periodically, it's not that often, but if you take note of it, if you're looking for it, and you're kind of aware of Charles Finney's prayer life, which he describes, there was times, he says, when he would come into a place before God when he would be asking in faith for things that if you heard him, and he almost wondered whether it was total presumption. In other words, he was virtually demanding from God. He's virtually demanding from God that God fulfills His promises and gives Him, sends revival down, sends the Holy Spirit down. God, pour out Your Holy Spirit. It turned from a travailing and weeping into almost a demanding and a very faith-filled requiring from God that God fulfill His promises. Requiring from God that since He said this in Scripture, then God, do it. And it was far more that it was not pleading anymore. Travailing prayer to me is a pleading and a weeping kind of prayer. It's actually crying to God. That's what travailing prayer is to me. I make a distinction between that and what I call, and this is what you find in all revival literature, John Carley would have seen it many times, what I call wrestling prayer. I make a distinction. And I tend, when I talk about agonizing prayer, I'm also often tending to be talking about this one as well. Although to me it can be both travailing or wrestling. Now, where do we get this whole wrestling thing from and is it practical? And I want to say to you, wrestling prayer, where we're wrestling not with demons, but we're wrestling with God for a blessing. Remember, we need to look at this Scripture. Everybody turn with me to Genesis 32. If I can describe this to you, I just want to say this to you, this will revolutionize your prayer life. If you can get a handle on this, and I'm not joking, I'm not even half serious about that. If you can get a handle on this, this will revolutionize your prayer life. The reason I'm saying this to you guys is you're ready for it. I've preached on this topic for short segments of time and watched it just completely go over people's heads. Does it change anything about the way they pray? Absolutely nothing. In fact, they're not even in travail. They hardly know what that is. They're not in any kind of agonizing prayer. Most of the time when I talk about this stuff, I'm usually wasting my time. I'm wasting my breath. But you guys are ready for this. You're already travailing in prayer and you are moving into agonizing prayer and out of it, wrestling prayer and out of it without knowing what it is at times too. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. Genesis 32. This is Jacob wrestling with God. Some say wrestling with an angel. But basically wrestling with God really. Genesis 32 verse 24. You'll notice that Ravenhill, when he talks about this kind of praying, he will reference this Scripture. And most of the guys that talk about this kind of praying reference this Scripture. Jacob was left alone. There wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go for the day is breaking. And he said, I will not let you go except thou bless me. That's Jacob speaking. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel. For as a prince have you power with God and with men and have prevailed. And Jacob asked him and said, Tell me, I pray thee, your name. And he said, Why are you asking my name? And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel. For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved. Now this is an interesting Scripture. This is an interesting Scripture. We are talking here about the founding of the nation of God that would carry the name and the glory of God down century after century. And who is it named after? It's named after this guy who one night prevailed with God in wrestling with Him, so to speak, in wrestling with Him, not letting go of Him until the blessing was gained. And God calls the guy a prince. Thou art a prince with God. Because you see, this kind of prayer is a prayer that utterly reverences God. In other words, you're not taking away from God's majesty and reverencing Him in any way, but it's kind of like this prayer stands in a different place. This prayer does not stand in the place of the weeping widow who's crying out for her son or whatever. This prayer is not standing in the place. This prayer is standing in the place of being a prince with God. Of being a prince with God where you are praying in faith and you're basically... The old guys, if you read them again, you'll see this. They talk about getting a hold on God and not letting go of God until God has poured out His Spirit upon you. Now, where does the concept of prevailing prayer come from? It comes straight out of the Scripture. You hear the old revivalists talking about prevailing prayer. What do they mean? They are talking about this. As a prince, thou hast prevailed with God. Now, this is a different place. You remember one of the things that I love that Elijah says that people pass glibly by is this. Elijah literally arrives on the scene and is literally in the presence of the King and he couldn't be less fazed at all. I believe it was the King that he was in front of at the time. And he says, The Lord God before whom I stand. You see, there's something in those words that is incredibly important. The Lord God before whom I stand. See, everybody else, when they're before God, is flat on their face. They are not in the position that Elijah is in. Elijah has prevailed with God. He's a prince of God. He is coming to the King and he's saying, I'm sorry, but this is all implied in his words and in his actions continuously afterwards. The 50 men that are sent to arrest him, Elijah sitting on the hill, the King sends 50 guys up to arrest Elijah. I'm sorry, sir. Behind all of the actions that Elijah takes, I'm sorry, sir, I'm a prince of God. What does Elijah say? He says, If I be a man of God, fire will come down from heaven and consume you and your 50 men. Why is that? He's carrying about him the dignity of God. He's carrying about him the reverence that you hold God in. And some of that has come upon Elijah. And you do not arrest the man of God. Now you talk about here all these big guys, you know, oh, the man of God, that's the man of God that well. I want to see evidence of the reverence, the dignity of God, the glory of God resting upon someone such that when they start making their grandiose statements that it has some basis in reality. I want to see guys that have spent time in the presence of God. The Lord God before whom I stand. There will be neither June nor rain these three and a half years except at my word. Now, this kind of praying carries that into the praying with God. This is where we're standing in this kind of praying. So it's not a begging that's going on. Alright? It's not a begging. It's a faith-filled, it's still a crying out and it's still from the gut. You know, it's the fervent effectual prayer of a righteous man. So it's still fervent, it's still effective. But I want to say it's positionally different. You're in a different position and you pray differently. You pray as though God is your close relation and you're able to literally ask Him anything and He will grant it. It's difficult to describe but wrestling is a good thing. When I talk about agonizing prayer, most of the time I'm talking about wrestling with God. Ever since I was 17 and I started reading, you know, Frank Bartleman would talk about this, he would say that we'd be in agonizing prayer before the revival came at Azusa Street. We were agonizing, excuse me, agonizing with God in prayer. Wrestling with God in prayer. This is the kind of praying, he was immersed in revival writings and he had read all the same stuff we have. You see it in Finney all the time. You see it in many of the statements and so I'm 17 years old and I'm reading this stuff and I'm saying to myself, hmm, you know, I wonder if I can try that. At the time I was working as a shopkeeper. I had charge of a little shop, not owned by me, but owned by some guy who put me in charge of a little electronics shop. I had the right to close the shop for an hour every day at midday. I could close the shop completely and I would basically spend that time praying or most of it praying. So I had that ability, praise God, that was a God given opportunity. So I'd close the shop door, lock it all up, get down behind the desk and I'd start in this agonizing prayer, wrestling prayer, because I was reading about it so much, it was almost like the reading of it infused me with it. I started to, I'd read Raven, one of the favourite things I would do was I'd read a chapter of Leonard Ravenhill's book, you know, Why Revival Tarries and I'd go pray straight after. Because it was kind of like, I feel that there's certain books in the world, Charles Finney's, the modernised, the cut down version of Charles Finney's autobiography would often do this, the same thing. So would Frank Bartleman's book Azusa's Street. Totally soaked in prayer, those books. And Why Revival Tarries would do it to me as well. They carry an anointing on the pages of the book somehow that would just infuse my prayer life. So I'd get down behind the desk and I'd be, you know, I learnt how to agonise like it was really thunderously loud except I was doing it almost as a whisper. So I learnt to agonise, kind of whispering and I would basically find myself almost instantaneously in the presence of God, in the throne room of God. I could feel it. Bam! Literally, in the space of a second. You're there. Because this kind of prayer is breakthrough prayer. This kind of prayer is throne room prayer. This is the kind of prayer, I don't believe God calls you a prince in prevailing with God in that sense until you can, until you show it. Look at Jacob, he wasn't called a prince of prevailing etc. Beforehand, it was after. In other words, you've got to do it and you've got to see it happening and then it's kind of like you come into an authority in your prayer life. That kind of stays with you all the time. Okay. Not that it's unique. The other thing I want to say about this is we've lost it in the church but in revival times it's absolutely fairly common. Finney would regularly go into places and he'd say, okay, who are the prevailing prayer warriors in this town? This was not an unknown thing or a kind of uncommon thing. In times of revival, times of awakening, it was well known and talked about a lot. We're the ones that have lost it. We're the ones that have generations of people where it becomes rare for a while. We hope to God that we get it back. Can you do this kind of praying? Can you teach it and then see people start doing it? Well, the answer of course is yes. What's the only prerequisite really is this, is that you're in that state that we talked about a couple of nights ago which you guys talk about all the time which is that Romans 8 condition of your heart before God. Is your conscience clean? Are your hands clean? Is your heart pure? Why does that matter? Because the throne room of God is barred to you if you are not in that place. You will not get in. You can knock as much as you like. Okay? So, if you're walking in a state of heart purity before God, you have, I believe, the right to go forth into this kind of praying. And especially if you've experienced travailing prayer and so on, this is the obvious step. This is the obvious thing. Lost my train of thought what I was just going to say about that. But totally practically, oh yes, I remember what I was going to say. In a revival in Cambodia, there's a book called There's a book called Anointed for Burial. Two American guys went to Cambodia. No, a couple went to Cambodia. Very young they were in the 1970s. They started seeing revival in Cambodia just as the war was at its worst and Cambodia was only a matter of I think it was two years. Could have been three. But it was probably two years from the time just before Cambodia fell and the place got obliterated. It became a killing field. Cambodia became a killing field. The communists took it over. Just two years prior to that these guys went in there. The government was always trying to get them to leave. The American government always trying to get them out. They saw a massive revival. The stadium at one time was filled with people. The government paid for everything and they saw massive healings in that stadium meeting and they were seeing the power of God on a daily basis. One day the guy was led by God to teach on this scripture that we just read and to teach people how to wrestle in prayer. To teach the people how to wrestle in prayer. He said, OK. He literally did it. He just read from that scripture, spoke to the people about it and said, listen, this is the kind of prayer that God is calling us to. He said instantly as soon as the people started to wrestle with God in prayer, wrestling with God in prayer. By the way, it's not something I ever do in public. It's something I only ever do in private. I don't know if that's just me or whether it's just because it's a private thing between me and God. It's not a way I ever feel comfortable bringing out into the public. Never have and I probably never will as far as I know. Groups of the people in Cambodia started praying this way and outpourings of the Holy Spirit began almost immediately. And when I say outpourings, I'm talking Pentecost type outpourings upon those groups. The Holy Spirit would come down in tremendous power like a rushing mighty wind would come into the room. The glory of God would fall on the group that was praying or whatever. And suddenly everybody was just on the floor and crying and the glory of God was in the place. This was happening all over their groups as soon as He taught them that and as soon as they started doing it. And it always struck me that yes, this can be taught. This is not some ethereal thing that only Revival guys get. This can be taught. And people can simply begin to pray that way and see the power of God multiply. You know what I'm saying? Okay, moving on. Alright, we're about to go into a completely different topic which is my last topic for the evening. Can I just say, just before we leave that very briefly, go and do it. Go and do it. I believe virtually everybody in this room as far as I know is walking in a place where this is a step. This is the kind of thing you should expect to move into. There's nothing stopping you. Next time you're by yourself praying, maybe if you're in a group of people that you're really comfortable with praying, prayer partners that you pray with regularly, try this kind of prayer. Move into it. Read about it in some of the books. Then move into it. Do whatever it takes, but don't sit on it and just say, well that was interesting. I want to say again, you guys are ready for this. This is an obvious thing. Obvious to me. And I believe it will result in greater revival power in your midst. I really believe that. Do it tonight. Whenever. Do it every day. I started doing it every day. That's what happened to me. I started doing it every day. You just pray faith-filled prayers. Pray to God that you'd be more filled with the Holy Spirit. That you'd be a vessel fit for God's use. That you'd go out with signs and wonders following. That the glory of God would be on your preaching. Go for it. Pray it all. You can pray in humility. You can pray in humility as a prince of God. You can pray in humility as a prince of God. Amen. Next topic. I spoke a couple of nights ago. We were talking about what do you do if you have repented of a whole lot of stuff and still in your life there remains just something in there. I'm not necessarily talking about a demon. I'm really talking about every time you're doing stuff thoughts of pride are bubbling up inside you. You repent of pride. You go and say, God, I'm so sorry for that pride. I turn away from it. And it doesn't go away. It's kind of like next time you go out and preach and it's good or something. All these thoughts of pride flood up and you get puffed up again. And you go away and repent again for it. Why is this pride? How is God going to use me when just preaching to 30 people or something I get prideful? How is God going to put me in front of 500 people? The answer to that question is, He's not. He ain't going to do it. He knows full well what will happen if He does do it. You'll fall over. You'll get puffed up and you'll get into deception. That's how preachers get into deception because they get in pride and they start getting to the point where they won't listen to anybody. They won't listen to genuine scriptural teaching. They think that, oh well, you know, the attitude behind everything is usually not conscious. The attitude behind everything is, you know, I'm God's man for the hour. Didn't you know that? But they won't say that. They'll say, oh no, I just don't witness with that brother. There's a pride that's crept in. God can't afford to stick that guy in front of 500 people because He knows what will happen. So He just won't do it. And people wonder why they keep hitting the ceiling in their ministry. It's not always this case. God can have you in the wilderness for all kinds of reasons. God will put you in the wilderness. He put Joseph in jail for years and years and years and years, you know, preparing him. So it's not just because of that. It's not just because of pride or whatever. But I just want to give that as an example. How do we attack that pride? I believe it's possible to have strongholds still in your life and yet you're a fully repented, walking in Romans 8, Christian. In other words, you're experiencing what John Carlo calls, and he's quoting various writers and things, you're experiencing what you call, what is it again? Entire sanctification. You know, I'm still trying to picture kind of going down in the kind of places we're at today and just kind of walking around. You know, we believe in entire sanctification. What about you? You know, we've got to put the gospel in easily understood terms. You know, I'm sure you guys do. Yeah, how do you put it in simple terms? You just describe the inner state of a person who is, who does have that experience. And to me, that's the normal Christian life. I don't know about you. I believe that's the normal Christian life. It's Romans 8 that we're talking about. So, we believe in a clean heart experience as a normal state of Christianity. We don't accept anything less than that because otherwise, we have to be sub New Testament. We have to go below the New Testament level of Christianity. So we believe in a clean heart state that you can walk in it. Does this mean that my body is no longer a fallen body? Well, sadly, sadly, our body still is fallen. So does our clean heart state affect the way we act and our behavior? Of course it does. But my view is this, and we've talked about this, Giancarlo and myself, and of course it's a common topic of discussion down the centuries, literally, is to what degree is the entirety of me now sanctified? Just because I've... Now, I have to tell you, I came into Romans 8 Christianity in an instant. Absolutely in an instant. I didn't understand it for a while afterwards. But there was no question I was walking in it. I came into it when I was 17 years old. Bam! I believe it was the gift of God. It came about when I got filled with the Holy Spirit. I was talking about it the other night. I got filled with the Holy Spirit, and man, I was in Romans 8. I was walking in it. I was a child of God. My spirit was crying out to God, Abba, Father. I was just in that state and able to walk in it, communing with God. It just seemed normal to do that and to avoid sin so that I could maintain it. So I was just walking in a state, kind of avoiding sin, maintaining that heart state before God. I think it's a very simple concept. It's getting a white robe and keeping it white. Getting a clean robe from God and keeping it clean. Just walking in it. Just walk in the robe, man. You're given a robe, walk in the robe. Is this complicated? No, it's not. That's Romans 8 Christianity to me. So I'm walking in that, but probably ten years later, it became very apparent to me. We had almost like a mini revival time in our house at one period of time. We were just doing a lot of seeking God. It was almost like God gave me revelation of really the fact that, yes, I've been walking in that state, but all the while inside of me were strongholds. I believe they're in the soul area of man. I'll tell you why I believe that. They say that the soul is the seat of our emotions. What I believe is this. When we get regenerated, when we start walking in Romans 8, we're a spirit-filled, transformed being. We're a new creation. And we're walking in that. My belief is this. Our spirit has been completely renewed. Our mind, if we will allow it to, is capable of walking in the spirit. Walking in the spirit. Our mind has been renewed to a degree where we can actually choose to walk in the spirit of God every moment of every day. As many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God. What are we being led into? We're being led not to sin. We're being led in our choices. We're being led in just how do I avoid lust? I avert my eyes. I'm being led by the spirit. I'm transparent before Him every moment of every day. I'm just walking in that. And I maintain it. Just maintain it. Just walk in it. Okay, so that's the state we're in. But I believe that part of us still, and I believe it's the soul area. That's my opinion, and I kind of think it's fairly scriptural. I also believe, can people have spirits? You know, my friend Mike Smith, who cast demons out of people, would say to you, Christians cannot have any spirit inside or attached to their spirit when they become a child of God. That is possession, and no Christian can have it. The Holy Spirit has taken possession of that part of you, and it is utterly, and it's what makes you a new creation. You're born of the Spirit, born from above, taken hold of by God, and you belong to Him. But, he says, spirits can still dwell in your body, which we all know is still foreign. Spirits, he says, can attach themselves to your brain. You know, this is where the mental illnesses come in. And he says, he sees spirit-filled Christians with this all the time. So in theory, we're thinking, how can a spirit-filled Christian have demons attached to their brain, literally pretty bad demons. He says, I see it all the time. Depression, bipolar disease, all kinds of stuff, depression being the most common by far, terrible depression. And of course, the doctors, all they know how to do is sedate people, stick them on Prozac or whatever. That's all they know how to do. Mike just comes straight in there and says, man, if you'll get desperate right now, if you'll get broken before God, if you'll start crying out and casting getting that thing out of you, I'm going to be here and we're going to get rid of that thing and it's going to be gone today. And he'll do that with Christians and non-Christians alike. And I believe it's totally from the Holy Spirit, his ministry. And because, do we want spirit-filled Christians wandering around, nobody knows how to cure them and they're just depressed for the rest of their life. Do we want that? The answer is no. So can spirits attach themselves perhaps to the soul area of man if it has fallen strongholds in it? I believe so. Now I don't know to what degree or even whether any demonic spirits were in me, but in 1993, God just showed me that if you have strongholds of the enemy still inside you and you've tried repenting of certain things and they just don't seem to go away, and I'm talking about things like, such as pride or rebellion. What's rebellion? Usually it's the kind of stuff that's bubbling up from rebellion is all thoughts against leaders and stuff. You're no minute around a new leader and the next thing, thoughts of anti-leadership are kind of bubbling up continuously in your head. You can never get on with leaders. Quite a few people pick this up in their teenage years with their relationship with their parents. They had an atrocious relationship with their dad or whatever, and it's affected their relationship with every leader ever since. You know what I'm saying? And it's commonplace. It's commonplace in Christians. And you see people all the time who have a problem in this area, they don't recognize it, and they just go around making the exact same mistake every place they go. Okay? They're always murmuring against leadership. Always in the background. Always murmuring. Murmuring, murmuring, murmuring. They don't even recognize it about themselves. I believe they have a stronghold of rebellion in their life. Now they can repent of rebellion. It may get rid of it. It may not. In my case, I had a stronghold of rebellion, and I think around that time that I recognized it was the time I started knowing how to really go to town and get things out. Slam, smash, nuke, crunch. I would not like to be a stronghold inside Andrew Strime anymore. You know what I'm saying? Because God just showed me what to do in that case. And it's not really complicated. Again, it's just basic stuff. So 1993, the first thing that God showed me to do was just ask Him to shine His light brightly into every corner of my being so I could clearly look at things that I'd had a problem with for years that I hadn't really faced up to. I'd always been a harsh person. I was raised in a very religious household. By that I mean strict Pentecostal. Very, very strict Pentecostal. And I picked up a lot of religious hang-ups out of that. How do you know you've got a stronghold of religion in your life? You love arguments. You love spiritual arguments. You'll argue to death about the smallest word in the New Testament. You'll go and get... Strong's Concordance isn't good enough for you, man. You've got to get the translator's manuals and argue from that. You've got to go find your dad's Hebrew blah-blah-blahs to argue from that. In other words, you are contentious. You're contentious on spiritual matters. Like the Pharisees were. They were contentious all the time with Jesus. They would always come up to Him and they'd want to argue trivial points. Jesus just healed this. It's like the most incredible miracle anybody's ever seen. And the scribe and Pharisee in the room, they want to discuss the technical issue of what day of the week it happened on. Everybody else is going, Wow, did you see? The guy got healed. Praise God. Glory to God in the highest. The Pharisee's going, No, no, there's a technical problem here. The technical problem is that his learned findings in Scripture don't agree with this. That's just happened. This cannot be God. Because his learned findings in Scripture don't agree with that. God is God, man. He does unusual things sometimes. I'm not talking about weird and ugly, but He does do the unusual. He does it all the time. He does unusual stuff all the time. And the Pharisee type mindset cannot handle that. It wants to nail it all down. It wants to turn Scripture, which often Scripture is not meant to be. Believe this. Scripture is not meant to be always used as a technical manual in a textbook. It's not meant to be used in that way. There's very many occasions it's supposed to be used for inspiration, correcting severe problems that we don't happen to have. We misuse Scripture a lot because the intent that it was written with, we ignore the intent and just take the bits that we want to argue about and make a doctrine out of them. That's another thing that religious people do. Religious people make doctrines. They want to nail everything down to a doctrine. What's a doctrine? It's a theory that I can put in ABCDEFG categorizing. And God's saying, listen man, I want to get people's hearts clean. I want them to keep them clean. Can you please get out of my way? Don't reduce what my Holy Spirit is trying to do in people to such this technical little thing that you can argue about with your buddies because I want to do it to everybody and your technical jargon is totally getting in my way. Wesley, sadly, in the latter days, I've talked about this before, got involved in pamphlet wars in his day with guys that were arguing back and forth over the meaning at the end of the day, the meaning of bam, bam, bam, it was gone, gone, gone, gone. So what do you do? You say, God, shine your light into me. Show me any stronghold. I want to go through and think about what could have passed down to me of my parents' attitudes. When I look at my parents, a lot of parents have this fear in certain areas. Do I have the same fear in me? Am I like my parents? I sometimes think about just ways that they are that I don't want to be like and I've kind of ended up being that way. Can I renounce that? Yes, I can. Is it of darkness? Is it anti the Kingdom of God? Or does it help God's Kingdom? It's anti the Kingdom of God. It's a non-Kingdom thing. It tends to be bad. Nuke it. Sometimes you can nuke things and just say, God, grow it back if you like it. It's the shoot beforehand and ask questions later situation. Or it's nuke it and God, grow it back in a different way that's pure because I believe it's tainted. I'll go after things if I believe there's a, as Evan Roberts would say, a shadow of a cloud about them. If there's a shadow of a cloud about them, I'll go after them. Now when I say go after them, what do I do next? We've asked God to shine his light on them. What I want at the end of the day is a name to call the thing. If I can name it, it's had it. It's dead. It's gone. If I can name it, it's gone. In other words, rebellion is an easy thing to name. I just look at my life and say, do I realistically have a problem with leaders and stuff? Do I tend to just rub them up the wrong way? Is that me? Answer, yes, right. We're going to chase rebellion. How can I tell that, and then I'll go into what I call renouncing. I just say, I renounce rebellion in the name of Jesus Christ. I talk about renouncing it with the whole of your being, not just renouncing it with your words. A lot of people do this renouncing thing. I renounce in Jesus' name rebellion. Amen. Or some exaggerated version of that. I want to go, no, from the depths of my being, I renounce rebellion in the name of Jesus Christ, and I'm going to go to town renouncing it until it's gone. How do I know it's gone? The little thoughts from that stronghold no longer bubble up into my brain. They are simply missing. The stronghold is being destroyed. I used to have a terrible problem with depression, which of course stemmed from my childhood. I spent three or four years suicidal as a teenager, wanting to end my life every day, coming home from school, wanting to die every single day, desperate to die. That's how depressed I was. That's three or four years, age 13, 13 or 14, through to 17. That's what I was like. I was one of the most depressed people that I knew. I knew kids at our school who slashed their wrists at school.