In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of being arrested in Romania and feeling discouraged and uncertain about the future. He reflects on the human nature of wanting to do things our own way and being captive to sin. The speaker emphasizes the importance of prayer in preparing the hearts of people to receive the message of Christ and empowering the proclaimer of the message. He highlights the need for intimacy with God through prayer, which brings a sense of security and boldness to proclaim the gospel.

...in which I spoke to finish my story, because a lot of people have asked her about our son. And our son, we ended up returning to the United States because of his illness and the doctors, our God, through the doctors, has totally healed our son. And he graduated from high school last year and received the award for Scholar-Athlete. He's a freshman at Baylor University and loves the Lord and is very active in his walk with Jesus Christ, for which we praise God. Last night, or yesterday afternoon, I spoke on the subject of looking up, seeking God, and desperation in prayer. This morning, I spoke on looking inward, that as we look up, we're going to see God, and we're going to see Him in His absolute purity. And when we see Him in His absolute purity, we're going to see ourselves in the light of Him. Isaiah had this experience. Isaiah saw the Lord, and then he saw himself in the light of the Lord, and he cried out, Woe is me. And as we begin to seek the face of God, we will see the holiness of God, and holiness will always produce humility of heart. Now, holiness drives us to the position of humility, and humility places us in the position where the arms of grace can engulf us. And you remember that Isaiah, when he saw the Lord, and he was broken before God, God's grace touched his heart, and his tongue, and his lips, and his sin was forgiven. And then once he experienced the grace of God, the first thing that he did was he received an outward vision. He had an upward vision. He had an inward vision. And then he had an outward vision. If you have your Bibles, I want you to turn to Luke chapter 24. And in Luke chapter 24, we're going to see that Jesus gave the commission to his disciples to go into all the world. And today I want to say that our vision must be a global vision. Our vision must be a vision for the world. And when I talk about revival, I'm not talking about an inward mystical experience that is alienated from the needs and the hurts of the world. When I talk about revival, and seeing the glory of God, and having our lives changed, the end result of all that is that we're going to have a vision of a world that's in need of Jesus Christ. Jesus said in Luke chapter 24, beginning with verse 46, and he said to them, and thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and rise again from the dead on the third day. And that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of my Father upon you. But you are to stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high. Now, I find it very interesting in this passage that Jesus told his disciples, go into all the world. This prophecy that has been fulfilled that the Messiah would die, be buried, and arise from the grave on the third day. You have been witnesses of the fulfillment of prophecy. Now, go and take this message to all the nations, to all the world, to all the people groups, to every man, rich and poor, white and black, no matter who they are, no matter what their status is, you bring this message unto them. But then he said, before you go, tarry in Jerusalem until you have been endued with power from on high. And we find as Jesus gave the great commission that he wed the ministry of intercession and the ministry of evangelism. And there was a wedding of these two ministries. And I think as we look throughout the book of Acts, we find the wedding of the ministry of evangelism and the ministry of intercession. In Acts chapter 1, the church is birthed in a prayer meeting. In Acts chapter 2, Peter, the denier of Jesus, becomes Peter, the powerful proclaimer of Jesus. Acts chapter 1, they pray. Acts chapter 2, they proclaim. The result, 3,000 people are converted to Jesus Christ. In Acts chapter 3, as we saw earlier today, Peter and John are on their way to a prayer meeting. And as they're going to a prayer meeting, they see a lame man, and he's begging for alms. And they say, silver and gold have I none, but what I do have I give to you in the name of Jesus. Rise up and walk. And he who was lame didn't just rise up and walk, he leaped, he shouted, and he praised the Lord. And revival spread through Jerusalem. And we find that they were hauled in before the magistrates and they were told not to preach in the name of Jesus. And they responded by saying, we cannot help but speak of those things which we have seen and heard. And then, what did they do? You would have thought they would have known better. They go back to another prayer meeting in Acts chapter 4. And here's the pattern. They pray, they proclaim. They pray, they proclaim. They pray, and they proclaim. In Acts chapter 4 and verse 31, the Bible says, and when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and they spoke the Word of God with boldness. And all through the book of Acts, there is this pattern. Pray and proclaim. Pray and proclaim. As a matter of fact, you sit here today because of a prayer meeting in Acts chapter 13. And in Acts chapter 13, there were five prophets and five teachers and God gave them a vision of a world that was unreached and said, set apart for me two of you whom I have called to this task. And you know the great apostle Paul went into all the world. He brought the gospel to Europe. And from Europe, the gospel came to North America. And we sit here today because of a prayer meeting in Acts chapter 13. And so we find the wedding of the ministry of evangelism and the ministry of intercession. It has been my observation that in America, we have a tendency towards extremes. And there are those who are deeply spiritual and yet refuse to see the needs of the world. And there are those who are consumed with the needs of the world and we are filled in our churches with burnout. And I find that Jesus in the book of Acts and Jesus established in Luke chapter 24 this dynamic wedding of both ministries of going deeper with God and reaching out in broader ways than ever before. And if we are to be what God wants us to be, I believe we must go deep in prayer and we must reach out into the places where the gospel has never gone before. And we must be on the cutting edge. As a matter of fact, in all of the great revivals and all of the great awakenings, I think that I can prove from a historical viewpoint that there has always been this wedding between the ministry of intercession and the ministry of evangelism. We speak of Charles Finney, the great evangelist. But I want to tell you there was a man who united his heart with Charles Finney. And when Charles Finney would go to preach, this man by the name of Daniel Nash would go to pray. He never heard Finney preach. He would go and find a place and he would lock himself up in that place and he would seek the face of God. And many times when Finney preached, entire communities came under the awesome presence of God and entire communities would be converted to Jesus Christ. In the first great awakening, we talk about Wesley. We talk about Whitefield. We talk about Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd. But did you know how Wesley was converted? It was through a group of people called Moravians. And did you know that before Wesley was ever converted, that Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who had a place called Herdenhut, which means the Lord's Watch, had a place for the Moravian brethren to come and to seek the face of God. And the longest prayer meeting in the history of the church was formed. For 100 years, they prayed without stop around the clock and out of that prayer meeting came men who were touched by God like John Wesley. And I don't believe that you can separate the first great awakening from the prayer movement that was birthed at that time. And so Jesus says there must be a wedding between the ministry of evangelism and the ministry of intercession. Now why did He say that? I believe there are three reasons why He said that. The first reason is the impossibility of the human heart to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ. Man is born in slavery to sin. Man is born with a sin nature. Now some people today have a problem with that. But I want to tell you something. When we had our first child, our son, I came to the conclusion that the Bible was true real quick. When my son was just a little bitty baby, I remember my wife and I, we were so excited, just new parents, and I can remember tucking him in and he had been fed and he was clean and everything and his stomach was full and we would say goodnight to him and pray over him and he would just smile and goo-goo at us and everything and we would tiptoe out of the room and turn off the light and as soon as we turned off the light, do you know what happened? We would hear wah! And we would go running back in there to see what was wrong with him. Perfect peace. And we'd look at him and so we'd pat him and we'd tiptoe out again and we'd turn off the light and he'd say wah! And we'd run back in and we'd look at him and we'd say what's wrong? We couldn't figure it out. So he'd be real quiet and so then we'd cover him up and we'd tiptoe out again only to hear the same little cry and we went in and finally we found out what was wrong. Do you know what was wrong with him? He couldn't talk. But he was saying, I don't want to go to sleep. I don't care what you say. I want to do what I want to do. And you aren't going to tell me when to go to sleep. I'll go to sleep when I want to. That's what he was saying. And I want to tell you what, every one of us were born with that nature. We were born a slave. We were born captive to sin. And I want you to know that as proclaimers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are not just salesmen who can convince people intellectually and emotionally and we've done enough of that and we have roles that are twice the size. We have twice as many people in our roles than we have in our churches because we've convinced people intellectually. We've convinced people emotionally. But I want to tell you something, it is impossible to bring the human heart under the conversion experience without the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And prayer releases the Holy Spirit in our communities, on the lives of people, to prepare them, to make them ripe for the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that's why Jesus said there must be this wedding. When I first began to go to Romania and I met Titus, Titus said to me, I was going to Oradea, the northwestern section of Romania is under a great movement of revival. The churches are huge. The churches are growing in that part of the country and there's a great revival. And Titus came to me and he said, Sammy, there's an area of our country where no one from the west has ever gone. The churches are very small. The churches are very poor. He said no one ever goes there. He said would you go there? We went there. The first year we went there, we went from church to church and place to place and we did nothing but teach the people how to pray. And then the next year we came back for evangelistic meetings. We set the church to praying and then we came back for evangelistic meetings. And I'll never forget, we would go throughout that place and we would see the glory of God. And we would see God move and God work. One day Titus picked me up at the airport in Bucharest and when he picked us up, we got in the van and he said, Sammy, he said there is a pastor from a town called Bakou and he wants you to come for a meeting there. His church is very small but he'd like for you to come. And I said, Titus, I can't do that. I said, I made a commitment to preach a crusade here in Bucharest. And he said, well, don't worry about that. This pastor has already called the pastor in Bucharest and released you from that meeting if you'll come. And I said, I'd love to go. So we prayed about it. Remember Titus and we went to Bakou. And I'll never forget what happened there. You see, the average Romanian Baptist pastor pastors between five and seven churches in five to seven different cities. And so we went there. We got to that city Bakou. The pastor wasn't there. He was in another town called Roman. Now in Roman, we went there, a little old bitty church and it was just packed with people. People were standing outside and Titus and I stood at the pulpit and we preached the gospel and I guess about 25 people gave their hearts to Jesus Christ that Sunday morning. And oh, how wonderful it was. And afterwards, a lady came to me and this is what she said to me. She was just running off in Romanian. I said, wait, wait, wait, wait. I grabbed Titus and said, Titus, tell me what she's saying. And this lady told her story. She had not been inside of a church in 25 years. And she said the night before we arrived that she was asleep and she had a dream. And in that dream, she saw two foreigners, two people that she had never seen before in the pulpit of the Baptist church. And she woke her son up and said, we've got to go to the Baptist church. And they came and when she saw us in the pulpit, we were the two people she had seen in her dream. And she got saved and her son got saved. Now, by the way, folks, this is not a charismatic church I'm talking about. The next day, we went on back to Bako. I preached on Sunday night. On Monday night, one of the deacons prayed and he said, oh God, is there someone, is there someone that we can witness to because you see, it's very dangerous in that part of the country. Christians are a small minority. We're a small minority. And he said, Lord, is there someone that I can witness to? And he prayed for God to give him someone. And he went and the Lord laid a man on his heart. He went and knocked on the door of that man's house and asked the man if he would come to church with him. And you know what the man told him? He says, I've been waiting for you. This man had never in his life been inside of an evangelical church. He said, I've been waiting for you. He said, today I came home from work. And he said, I just had this sense that I needed to go somewhere. So I got cleaned up, shaved, and I didn't know where to go. So I sat down and I was just waiting, wondering where I was supposed to go. And you knocked on my door and you asked me to come. And I want to tell you something. He gave his heart to Jesus. God had gone ahead of us and prepared the hearts of the people because there was a praying pastor and there was a praying people. The pastor said to me, he said, Sammy, he said, there's one more town you've got to go to. Comenesti. And I said, okay, let's go. He said, but Sammy, I mean, this place is really small and there are only a few Christians and our church is just a handful of Christians. Would you go preach evangelistically to them? I said, let's go for it. And so we went to Comenesti. And I'll never forget when we arrived at the church, the church was just a little old bitty living room of a home. And there were about 50 people squeezed inside there, but there were about 200 people on the outside. And the pastor was thrilled and he said, Sammy, he said, would you preach outside? And I said, let's do it. And Titus pulled me over to the side and he said, you don't understand, Sam. It's against the law to preach outside. He could go to jail. I could go to jail. You might be arrested. You might be kicked out of the country. Oh, I don't know if we ought to do this. Let's pray about it. I said, you're right. Let's pray about it. We got out and we prayed about it and God gave us peace. That was what we were supposed to do. And when we stood up and preached, I want to tell you what, folks, I'd rather have been there than at this evangelism conference or Billy Graham crusade or anywhere else. The glory of God came on that place in a way like I've seen a few times in my ministry. We began to preach and as we began to preach, Titus and I standing there together ministering the Word of God, people began to run out of their apartments and they had all these huge apartment complexes around. They began to run out of their apartments. They began to run. They filled that complete courtyard area. They climbed up into trees. They climbed on top of the fence. They climbed on top of garages. They stood outside to hear the Word of God preached. And there were more people saved in two nights than had been saved in the past ten years. That church tripled in size. Tripled in size. But you see, it was because the pastor and the people knew the secret and the secret was in this, that prayer prepares the hearts of the people to receive the message of Christ. But prayer does more than prepare the people's hearts to receive the message of Christ. Prayer empowers the proclaimer of the message of Christ. That's why Jesus told His disciples, tarry in Jerusalem until you have been endued with power from on high. You see, prayer, as I defined it yesterday, is intimacy with God. And when we are so intimate with God that His love just bathes us and fills us, there is a new sense of security. And the boldness which we have to proclaim the message of Christ, the power comes from that sense of security of having been with God. Before the revolution, the last time that I went to the nation of Romania was a year and a half ago. And I was pulled off a train. And I was put under arrest. And I was held by soldiers there with guns and rifles. And I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if they were going to put me in prison. I didn't know if they were going to just deport me. I didn't know what was going to take place. It was about midnight. And I'll never forget, I was there and I was depressed. I was discouraged. I didn't know whether I would see my wife, my children again. I thought that I would probably never see Titus and Gabi again. They were my dearest friends. And oh, my heart was aching. And oh, how my heart broke. And I was sitting there on the cold ground surrounded by six soldiers. And I was just kind of having a big pity party. And oh, I was so turned inward and selfward because things didn't go the way that I had wanted them to go. And the Holy Spirit began to nudge on my heart and say, Son, you've got your focus in the wrong place. You've got your focus on your problem and your situation. You need to get your focus on God. And I turned my focus from myself to God and I began to sing some of the great old hymns. I began to sing, Great is Thy faithfulness. Great is Thy faithfulness. Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me. Morning by morning new mercies I see. I began to sing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. I began to sing, How great Thou art. And I began to sing some of the great hymns of the faith. And as I began to focus on the person and the character of God, something happened. I forgot my problems. And I began to worship Him. And I began to just tell Him how much I loved Him and how much I thanked Him for the wonderful privilege of knowing Him. And when I got my focus on Him, I got my focus off myself, I got my focus on God, and I began to talk with Him and see Him and worship Him, then all of a sudden my focus changed and I realized that those guards, they were not holding me captive. I was holding them captive. And they didn't understand what I was doing because I was singing in English. Here they were with guns, kind of looking strange at me. I was worshiping the Lord and talking to God and loving God and they were looking at me like I was half crazy. And I realized, I'm not their prisoner. They're my prisoner. So I began to sing in Romanian, the little I knew. I began to sing unto the Lord in their language. And then I said, Well, why not just preach? And so I started preaching to them and they couldn't leave. And a new courage and a new boldness welled up inside of me. And you see, prayer brought me to the place where I was secure in the Spirit of God. Therefore, I could boldly proclaim the name of Jesus. As I did that, I had a wonderful time the whole evening and they couldn't leave. So finally the next day, they kicked me out of the country. And they put me on a train going to the West. And the train was filled with people. And I was looking for a car to get in there. And there was only one car with any room. And it was filled with punk rockers. And their hair was going every way and every which color. And these kids were in this car and I went in and sat down with them. I hadn't eaten in two days. I hadn't slept in two days. And I looked worse than them. And they said, Man, what happened to you? I said, I got arrested. They said, Far out. That's great. And they said, How did that happen? And I told them, And you know what? They were my prisoners all the way back to Austria. I told them about Jesus. And they couldn't leave. And you see, that's what prayer does. That's what prayer does. So many times what happens is, you see, we wallow around and there are people waiting, as our brother shared with us, to hear the Word of God, ready to receive the message of God. But we're so caught up in our church problems, so caught up in our situations, so caught up in our circumstances, that we haven't seen God. And we're not secure enough in God that we have that new courage and that new boldness and that new power to witness the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So you see, it prepares the people. But it also empowers the proclaimer. And then thirdly, it produces an atmosphere that is conducive for evangelism. It produces an atmosphere in our churches that God can dwell in and God can move in. And there is something about the atmospheric presence of God and glory of God that comes from revival when it's been prayed in and God is able to move and God is able to work. And I want to tell you what, there is nothing too hard for our God. What we need in our churches, we need the atmospheric presence of God which only comes from people who have sought the face of God. I'm not talking about emotional hype. I'm not talking about working people up. I'm talking about where we have been with God, that the presence of God is so upon our lives and our people have been with God, that the presence of God is so upon them that His glory rests upon the church when the church comes together and it produces a climate of evangelism. It breaks the powers of the evil forces in the world in order that the glory of God might be displayed among us. In East Germany, I was in Nigeria in the hospital, sick. When the wall came down in East Berlin, my wife called me. I know how it broke my heart. I was suffering. I had pain in my stomach. I had been dehydrated. And oh, I want to tell you when I began to rejoice, you can't imagine the joy of the East German people. I remember going there and whenever I would come back from East Berlin to West Berlin, there was a place called the Temple of Tears where they could not leave. But I remember in East Berlin, I remember the first time I went there. The first time I went there, the churches were empty. There were no young people in the churches at all. They were totally empty. The young people had left the churches in mass because at the age of 14, they had to make a decision to be a part of the Communist Youth Organization or part of the church. If they chose the church, that meant they could not continue their education and so life was almost impossible for them. There were two men in a little village called Groß Hartmannsdorf and these two men began to pray. And for one year, they met together and instead of having a Bible study for young people, they met together to do nothing but pray for the youth of that nation. And after a year, they spent 14 days in prayer and fasting for the youth of that nation. They started a Bible study. The first Bible study had 60 young people. It grew to 100 and then to 200 and then to 500 and then to 1,000. It grew to 1,500 and finally they started meeting in five different cities because young people were coming from all over East Germany. And they were meeting there together. I preached in one of those cities in Dresden to 2,000 young people who had come to know Jesus Christ and were meeting together every week on a regular basis. I preached in Leipzig to 2,000 young people. I heard that there were 2,000 young people in the city named after Karl Marx. Karl Marxstadt. And I met some young people from there and I said, is it true? And they said, no, it's not true. We don't have 2,000 young people who meet together regularly in the name of Jesus Christ. We have 5,000 young people who come together in the name of Jesus. I preached in that meeting in Karl Marxstadt. Huge Lutheran Cathedral filled two times on Sunday afternoon regularly with young people. And I preached there and all through my message I was interrupted with applause from those young people as I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ. I met those two men, one of the two men, who had begun that prayer meeting. And I said, tell me what it was like. What was it like? What was it like whenever it began? And this is what he told me. He said, Sammy, the youth of our nation had been entrapped and enslaved with atheism. And we heard of the revival in Korea. We heard of the revival in other parts of the world. And so we begin to pray in this manner. Oh God, let the wind of Your Spirit blow across the hearts of the young people of our nation. And we prayed that way for one year. And after one year, then we began our meetings and there was a sense of the presence and the glory of God. You see, I'm afraid that in America we want easy solutions to our problems. We want quick, instantaneous solutions. But I want to tell you what, if the heart of this nation is going to be turned back to God, it's going to have to be the wind of the Spirit blowing across the hearts of the people. And there is going to have to be the atmosphere of the presence of the glory of God upon our churches. When that happens, we'll see this nation turn back to God. You see, it prepared the hearts of those who heard. It empowered the proclaimer. And it produced an atmosphere where the glory of God could dwell. And I want to close by just sharing this with you today. God is up to something wonderful. But there is going to have to be in our churches, if we are serious about reaching Oklahoma and reaching this nation, we are going to have to have a global perspective. We're going to have to see outside of the four walls of our churches. And we're going to have to place ourselves in a position where people are hurting, where people are needy, where people are just at the end of themselves. And we're going to have to go into that position in a spirit of prayer. And there must be this wedding of the ministry of evangelism and intercession. And when that happens, I believe we're going to see the greatest revival that this nation has ever had. And it can happen. I'm tired of reading about it in history. I want to see it today in my own country. But we're going to have to do it God's way. The way Jesus said in Luke 24. Every man, every woman, every boy, every girl, but before you go, pray, pray, pray. Matthew chapter 9. The Bible says Jesus seeing the multitudes felt compassion for them. There were only a few thousand. Nothing like her in the city of Oklahoma City. Nothing like Tulsa. Nothing like the great urban centers of our world today. Jesus seeing the multitudes felt compassion for them. Oh, we need a new view of our people. When Titus and I were traveling, we were in the city of Bucharest. We were ministering. And afterwards, Titus had done so much. He and Gabi had been so precious to me. And I told Titus, I said, Titus, I want to just do something special. And we wanted to bring him out to eat at a nice restaurant. We went to, remember, the Hotel Intercontinental in Bucharest. And on the top, there's a restaurant. We went there. And we were sitting there. And in this restaurant, you could see out over the city. And I remember looking over the multitudes, the thousands and thousands of apartment complexes. And I remember that Scripture came to me where Jesus said, Oh, Jerusalem. Oh, Jerusalem. And I began to quote that. And I said, Oh, Bucharest. Oh, Bucharest. I looked over at Titus. Tears were running down his face. There were two friends from the United States with me. And it was almost as though God came and sat down at that table with us. For about ten minutes, nobody could speak. We sat there in silence. Weeping. As God met with us. We left there and we went to a little place called Galats right on the Soviet border. They never had anyone from the West. I was going to go and preach on revival. But when I got there, I couldn't preach on revival because you see, there were so many lost people there. They were hungry, ready for people. Someone had gone in, a lady from Campus Crusade for Christ, as a matter of fact, had gone in and got the people praying about two months before we ever arrived there. And we didn't even know it. And God had prepared the hearts of the people. The people had been praying. And when we got there, you know what the responsibility of the deacons were at that church? At the Baptist Church in Galats, the deacons stood at the door to make sure no Christians got in. Only lost people could come in. I saw little old ladies in the main auditorium. Little old ladies, 60, 70 years old, climbing upstairs to go into the balcony because lost people would be able to sit down in the main level. And they filled it and Christians stood outside. As a matter of fact, one night it was so packed, one night it was so packed that the pastor couldn't get in. Remember that time? He couldn't get into the service the whole evening because he got there late and there were too many people. And oh, God moved and God worked. I'll never forget, we would go down to the Danube River and we would pray every night. It was in the middle of the winter. There was ice on the ground. And we were down there praying. We'd spend about two hours each evening talking with God, seeking the face of God, calling out to God for the city and the people of Romania. And Titus, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but brother, if God used you in my life, Titus was on his face before God, crying unto the Lord. And I'll never forget the prayer Titus prayed. He said, Oh God, if it takes the blood of the martyrs to bring my people to Jesus, I want to be the first to offer my blood. I've never heard such compassion in all my life and I knew that compassion didn't come from Titus. That came straight from the heart of Jesus. And oh, I want to tell you we'll reach our world when we begin to see through the eyes of Jesus and we begin to feel with the heart of Jesus and we go to God and we weep before God for souls and we weep for the lost and we weep for our cities and we weep for our churches with the heart of Christ. But I tell you today, our hearts do not break. Paul said he would be accursed if his own kinsmen would come to Christ. Where's that kind of compassion in the American church today? Oh, let God go deep in our lives, folks. And let's get a fresh view of Jesus. And let's unite. Let's quit all this spirituality versus evangelism and getting in our little corners and fighting each other. And let's go before God and let there be a wedding of the ministry of intercession and the ministry of evangelism that will shake this city, that will shake this state, that will shake this nation for the glory of God. Amen.