In this sermon, the speaker shares a powerful testimony of a transformative experience in a church. Two brothers who had been at odds with each other were reconciled after a moment of prayer. The congregation witnessed this miracle and joined in the process of reconciliation. The speaker also recounts a touching moment when a young boy passionately pleaded with sinners to repent and Christians to seek God. The sermon emphasizes the power of God to bring about healing and restoration in relationships.

Psalm 85, 6, Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee? And then a couple of verses further down in the same chapter, I will hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace unto his people and to his saints. But let them not turn again to folly. Let them not turn again to folly. I moved from Winnipeg to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada in 1962. My wife and I really didn't want to move to Saskatoon. Saskatchewan was a province that was in economic turmoil, down, people were leaving the province, 30-40,000 a year it seemed. We really didn't want to go there, but God made it very clear. When they voted on us coming, my wife and I set it as high as we could, it's got to be 95% or we won't go. And I was positive there were some people in the church that didn't like me. So I really didn't expect to get called to Saskatoon, but we were. And once we were called, we went. You must keep this in mind that Canada is only about 7% evangelical, as compared to some 30% here in the States. So when we give statistics, you have to keep that in mind as well. Saskatoon was a small city of 120,000, and I had a church with around 100, probably 150 members, about 175 attending. Sunday morning the church would seat probably 300, you could pack 350 in. And we had quite a number of people in the congregation who were Bible school graduates, and everybody seemed to love God and wanted to go ahead. Nobody was soul winning, nobody wanted to get involved in that. I had a course in soul winning, and I had a good attendance, and I thought I'm going to get about 30 or 40 people out of this, and I only got two. And they were both shaking in their shoes, you know. And I tried something else, it didn't work either, and I gave up on it. And about that time I realized what we really need around here is a revival sent from God. We had other problems, we had just some people in the church that had, you know, tongues long enough to shoot up the side window of a car, and used his windshield wipers, you know, this kind of thing. And I was praying, God send these people to the Alliance Church, or send them off to Pentecostal Church, get them out of my hair. And he didn't do that. You know what he did? He took some of the best people I had and moved them off to Calvary or Vancouver, Toronto or someplace, and I was just beside myself, I couldn't figure out what God was doing. A missionary, oh by the way, we had on the average once or twice a year an Evangelistic Crusade, Pack and Pew program, all these things, you know. And we had good people come, good singers, and it was nice, a nice week of meetings, and after they were gone, the church was exactly the same as it had been before. And I got the place where I said, Lord, I'm just not going to go that route again, I'm not going to do it again. We need revival here. Now I shared my heart burden with a missionary who was passing through. He said, why don't you contact Ralph from Lusitera? I said, who are they? He told me, I got their address, I contacted them, they couldn't come for two years, they were all booked up, but said they would consider coming in that particular time, and so we arranged for that. But five years before the revival, I got concerned about revival, and so I started a deacons prayer meeting on a Saturday night. We had ten deacons, we averaged about seven, and we prayed specifically for revival. And God did something interesting the next day, which was Sunday, because in the Sunday morning service, we had a very unique and powerful movement of the Spirit in the congregation, insomuch that people were leaving the upstairs auditorium and running off to rooms to find a place to get away with God and pray. It was just as if God was saying, you're on the right track, stay with it. Stay with it. I used to tell people now, 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. And so the prayer meeting began to grow. Then we included children in the prayer meeting, and finally we had thirty-five or maybe forty kids attending the prayer meeting, so we had a separate meeting for them and a couple of adults who were to train the children to run their own prayer meetings. This meant more adults could come. And so it went from twenty-five to fifty to seventy-five to a hundred to a hundred and fifty, and I think we had prayer meetings where there were probably a hundred and seventy people attending. And it became the most important and exciting meeting of the week as we prayed for one another. It wasn't revival, but it was a step towards revival. And then we ended all of our Sunday evening services with a half hour of prayer for revival for those who wanted to stay. And so we'd have thirty or forty people stay just to pray for revival, and we told them just a half an hour long, and people did that. They stayed. We had a prayer wheel, which we put on the bulletin board in the foyer, and people were to sign their names. We had it cut off into fifteen-minute slots like pie-shaped wedges, and people were to write their name on the wedge they would take for prayer, fifteen-minute prayer for revival. And after a while, we had the whole twenty-four hours taken up, which meant that at any time of the day or night, somebody from our church was on their knees praying for revival. And then I told people, ask God to waken you through the night to pray for revival. And people started doing that. And then people were telling me things like this, last night, pastor, I got up to pray. You know, normally I'm prayed out in five minutes. I must have prayed for almost an hour. It was just a wonderful time. And I was sensing the same thing in my life. I lived about a mile from the church. I used to walk there every morning. I remember walking there once on a winter morning, and a cop car pulled up, and they said, good morning. I said, good morning. They said, where are you going? I said, I'm going to work. May we take you? I said, yes, you can. So I jumped in the car, and I told them where to go. I didn't tell them about the church. And so he pulled up in front of the church. I said, I'm the pastor of this church. There's two cops. They looked at each other. You know, being Scotch, I'm really quite thankful that I managed to get a little something out of the government for free for a change. Anyway, I tried to get to the church by seven o'clock every morning, and then I could have two hours before the phone started ringing when I could pray. I sometimes thought if this church finds out how little I'm doing the normal work of the church and how much I'm praying, they're going to fire me. But I didn't know what else to do. I had such a burden on my heart to see God do something that you couldn't attribute to men. So much of man and all we do in evangelical Christianity today, you can hardly find God. You know, five-star programs, five-star preachers, the most dramatic preacher in America and all this kind of stuff. I was sick and tired of it all. And we kept praying and praying. I used to go into church every Saturday night, kneel at the end of every pew and pray that God would bless the people sitting in that pew the next day. It took a little while. You know, God responded. When God saw we meant business, He began giving us what the Bible, well, Finney used to call it, the spirit of prayer. And Finney said, if I ever lose the spirit of prayer, I have no more effect in public preaching or private conversation. The spirit of prayer. Based on that verse in the book of Zechariah, I will pour upon the house of David the spirit of grace and supplication. One translation says the spirit of grace to supplicate. It's a spirit of prayer that God alone can give. And He gave us that. When He saw we meant business, and we're staying on the course after the revival came. You know, we had Duncan Campbell, who was the man God so greatly used in the Hebrides' awakening in the early 1950s. We had him in our church two years before the revival. Nothing happened. Some people liked him. Some people didn't like him because of his Scotch accent. He was a little difficult to understand, but a godly man. My brother Keith who lived in Winnipeg at the time had arranged for Duncan Campbell to come to Canada and arranged for meetings in our church. When Duncan Campbell got back to Winnipeg, he told my brother, thankfully he never told me. He told my brother, God is going to bring revival to Canada. It's going to start in your brother's church in Saskatoon. My brother said, well, how do you know? He said, God showed me the other night when I was in prayer. The reason I'm glad he didn't tell me was because I'd have been trying to make it happen. Probably got in God's way. And he told us about the praying men of Barvis in Scotland after the Hebrides' awakening. These men would come home from their jobs, whatever they were doing, and go to bed right after supper and sleep until nine o'clock at night. Then rise at nine and pray until two o'clock in the morning, then go to bed until seven and get up for breakfast and then go to their jobs. They did this all year round. They were known as the praying men. And Campbell told us about going to a church, trying to revive a dead church. And nothing happened. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, about five people there. He got a message across to the praying men, asked them to pray for this particular place. It was on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland. And the first night after these men had prayed, two hundred people showed up in the church. I think eight or ten people were converted and a revival was on. So I asked Mr. Campbell if we could contact these men, have them pray for revival in our church in Saskatoon, so no doubt they had part to do with that as well. Then in India we found there were at least two groups of people in India. One group had been praying for several years for revival in western Canada, where Saskatoon is. The other group had been praying for revival in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and they didn't even know where they got the name from. They'd been praying for two or three years. So the roots of the revival were certainly, well, from God, but men praying around the world even. And there were probably people praying that we don't know a thing about, probably find out about when we get to heaven. We started the meetings on a Wednesday night with a hundred and fifty people there. Three or four people responded, including my wife. There was another lady in the church that my wife Nadine belonged with too well. They made things right at the altar that night. And the revival, you know by Saturday night you couldn't move in the church, it was packed to the door. And so we contacted a neighboring Anglican church and we could get six or seven hundred in there. And they said you can have it as long as you want, but we never use it in the evenings and so it wasn't far from our church. And so we packed in six, seven, eight hundred in there. Finally we had to use the plant for one night. We had all the young people come and sit on the platform and the church was still packed to the doors. So we had to get out of there and move to the Alliance Church. It was seated around a thousand and it was packed for only a couple of nights. It was too small. So then we got the largest church building in the city, which was seated about fourteen, fifteen hundred. And the first night we had eighteen hundred people packed in there. And God was doing marvelous things. You know sometimes we sang a hymn to open the meeting. We got halfway through the hymn and there were forty people kneeling at the altar. And all kinds of lives were being transformed. Four preachers showed up from northern Manitoba and they met with me before the meeting and they said, if God doesn't meet our need, we're all leaving the ministry. We can't hack it anymore. And I remember seeing that one pastor laying on his face for hours. Oh yes, he met with God. Not long afterwards, a man came in his church who had just moved to Thompson, Manitoba from Scotland. Paid for him to go to Scotland and he gave him a long list of his relatives and said, try and win him to Christ would you? And so he went over to Scotland. I think he led fourteen of these guys' relatives to Christ. God gave us revival weather that time of year. It was in October. We could have had a blizzard and three feet of snow and closed everything down. We had beautiful revival weather. Sunny days, quiet days, and people could drive and they did drive and come from all around the country. People were flying in from the states, eastern Canada, western Canada and so on. And the thing just grew and grew. Ralph and Lucitaire, they washed out. They had Crusades planned for two years ahead. They washed all of that out. And I remember the phrase they used was this, we're just going to go where the river is flowing the highest. And that's what they did. Just moving from place to place as God was pouring out His Spirit. And it was amazing once God broke through, then it seemed as if revival was happening everywhere. You could send almost anybody that could talk to a church and there would be a revival. And we have one case where they asked us to send someone down ten churches in Colorado somewhere and they wanted to go for a week of revival meetings. Could we send somebody down? We had no preachers available. We were all tied up somewhere preaching or doing something. And so we sent down two revived farmers. Yeah, farmers. And they preached and gave their testimony and everything. What happened? They had a revival. And I forget how many people were saved and Christians were revived. I was just telling some of the brethren the other day about a truck driver from Winnipeg. His English was very poor and he drove inter-province, inter-state. He was down in the state somewhere driving a transport and went to a little church on a Sunday morning when he walked in the door and Usher asked him who he was. He told him who he was. He was from Canada. And the guy said, do you know anything about the revival in Canada? Oh yeah, he said, I got revived last week. And so he told the pastor that this fellow did. And so the pastor made the announcement from the pulpit with a gentleman from Canada who was going to tell us about the Canadian revival. This guy in his trucker clothes and everything, you know, went up in the pulpit, never done this in his life and poured out his soul. And all of a sudden the pastor was kneeling at the altar and other people and a whole flock of people came to the front of the church and began to cry. And this, when he got, when this truck driver got home, he shared in one of our meetings, we're holding meetings in Winnipeg at the time. And he said, you know, I was counseling those people at two o'clock in the afternoon. And how'd he find out how to counsel? Did he read a book on it? He just knew what to say because God had said it to his heart and he was sharing with these people. And so things like this were happening all over the country and teams began going out. Some people thought it wasn't a genuine revival because it never moved out of Saskatoon. And a well-known revival leader had said this in a public meeting to three or four hundred pastors in Minneapolis. And so they thought, they just forgot about it, thought it wasn't real. And they didn't know. We just quit counting teams going out. After 2,000 teams had gone out, we quit counting. Teams went to every province in Canada, every state in the United States. They went to foreign countries, South America, India, the Philippines, and Europe and so on. When I think back, it's just bewildering. People were, we just couldn't keep track of it anymore. There was such deep and powerful conviction of sin. Much restitution, much restitution. The chief of police, his name was Kettles, Mr. Kettles in Saskatoon, issued a statement to the newspapers. And they gave us some publicity about the only thing they did as far as the revival was concerned. But he was saying that, I'm not a church person, not a Christian, but he said, I know the difference between ordinary church work and revival. And revival has come to Saskatoon because we have all kinds of people coming in and confessing the crimes they've committed. And one man who was the head of the telephones for the province of Manitoba, I was holding meetings at a place called Brandon Manitoba with ten churches, and God was working in a powerful way. And this fellow came and told me, he said, I've never been in your meetings, but he said, we've had all kinds of people coming in, paying up bad debts they'd overlooked for five or ten years. So he said, they told me they'd been in your revival meetings. Of course, he was all for revival. Wanted to help bring the money in. But it was interesting because people were really serious about it. Now I'll never forget one day when my telephone rang in my office, and a man from my church, he gave his name, and then he started to bawl, and he cried and cried, and he couldn't make himself coherent. I didn't know what was on his mind, except he was really upset about something. He worked at the university, and finally I said, why don't you come on down to the office? He was there in fifteen minutes, and he just ran in the door, and knelt at the desk, put his head in the desk, and just bawled. And I got down beside him and put my arm around him. I thought maybe one of his kids had died or something terrible had happened. And finally, when he was composed enough to speak, he just said, Pastor, I was sitting at my desk at the university in my office, and I was thanking God that Irma had gone forward because she really needed it, and Pete needed to meet with God, and Harry, it was good to see them at the altar, and then God ripped my heart wide open. He said, Pastor, I can never explain it. He tore my heart wide open, and he showed me every sin I'd ever committed from the time I was a child until that day. He said, Pastor, it was like looking into hell. He said, it was awful. I have so much to make right. To be morally indiscreet, he had to go make things right with his wife, and then he falsified a workman's compensation form and got some thousands of dollars from the government when he was hurt off the job. He got some friends to witness that he was hurt on the job. This is how he got the money. He had to go make this right. And when he got before this committee in Regina, and he said they tried to let him off the hook. They said, well, we really appreciate your coming, your honesty and all, and don't let it happen again. He said, listen, guys, don't let me off the hook. Give me everything you can give me because I want to get this taken care of properly. I remember him saying, I don't care if I lose my job. I don't care if I lose my family. I don't care if I have to go to jail. I don't care about anything. I've got to be right with God. I can't stand this pressure of God's Spirit on my soul. Dear people, that's revival. We had two brothers in our church, both graduates of Bible college, men in their 40s. One of them had been disciplined on a serious charge by another church in Saskatoon some years before. In our church, I wasn't pastor then. I don't think it would have happened, but the church had taken him in as a member because he had two brothers in the congregation and no questions were asked. He's a very critical person. He used to talk to me and say, Pastor, you know, this church isn't going anywhere. My kids are all going to hell and they've got no program for the kids. And he'd yak on and I'd say, well, wait a minute, brother. What about other people? Their kids are doing okay. Could the problem be somewhere else? And he'd just walk away. During the revival, his older brother, just a few years between them, came forward and met with God. And so the next night I said to this older brother, isn't it time you and your brother made things right? He said, God's been telling me the same thing. So I got a hold of his brother and he grudgingly, kind of sneeringly agreed. Then we went down in the lower auctorium. I told the congregation what we were going to do. I said, now you people pray. So we go down in the basement and I had a deacon with me. We sat this fellow down. His brother stood there and the brother who had met with God went to his brother and put out his hand and said, my brother, can you find in your heart to forgive me? And he sat like this. He said, it's about time you came. Wouldn't move his hand even. And so his brother looked at me and said, I knew he wouldn't forgive me. And he started for the door and I just prayed and said, God, don't let him go through the door. And he didn't. He stopped at the door with his back to us. And I poured a truckload of Bible verses on this guy, you know, and it did nothing. He just sat there and smirked. So I said to my deacon, Ken, let's just pray for him. And so we started to pray for him and suddenly he gave a shout. I looked at him, he got to his feet and he ran to the wall. He began kicking the wall with his feet and beating with his fists and begging God to have mercy on his soul. People, it was like a storm. It went on for 10 minutes. He just was screaming to God, Oh God, have mercy on my soul. And he poured out this fountain of junk that had been in there for all these years and went on and on. So we just kept quietly praying. And finally it was quiet. I looked, he was sitting there, he had the light of heaven on his face. I looked at him and pointed to his brother. He ran to his brother and just cracked his ribs, you know? And so we went upstairs and we went upstairs. The congregation all got their feet and turned to see what had happened. And these two brothers came marching down the aisle, arm and arm to the front. And they turned and started to share and their wives came. The wives had been fighting and all the kids came. And pretty soon they all knelt in a big circle at the front of the church. They were making things right. And I'm at the back of the church at this time and my heart is just going thump, thump, thump. I said, boy, what a wonderful way to die. Anyway, we moved just about that time to the Alliance Church. And these two brothers, they used to sing duets together. I never knew that. They'd never sung while I'd been there. And I'd been there ten years. And so they were going to sing a song. But it was in the Alliance Church. And this was a church that had disciplined him years before. And so he couldn't sing until he'd made things right. And so he made things right with the congregation. And when he did, an Alliance fellow jumped to a seat. There was everybody that was mixed up like a dog's breakfast, you know, Pentecostals, Baptists, Mennonites, everything, you know. And so a guy, a nice guy, jumped to a seat and said, I move that we restore our brotherhood to fellowship in this congregation. Someone said, I second the motion. And all the Alliance people raised their hands. So he's a member of the Alliance Church and the Baptist Church at the same time. And who cared? You know. And so it just went and it went. And I got a call, a phone call from my brother in Winnipeg, if I wouldn't come. He'd been talking with a pastor there, pastor of a German language congregation. And he said, we both feel strongly after much prayer together that God wants you to come to Winnipeg. Soterios had moved to Regina and great things were happening in Regina. And so I asked my brother if he could get ahold. There's a certain church called Elam Chapel in Winnipeg, inter-denomination, will seat about 1,200, well located, and see if he can get that church for some meetings. And so he phoned back. He was able to get it. We'd have it as long as we wanted in the evenings because they didn't have any kind of evening meetings either. And so we started. Now let's forget, you know, with two days notice no church was cooperating because this German language church couldn't be involved. There were new people, new immigrants from Germany. And so we really didn't have any backing at all. Here we had a building seating 1,200 and there was a half a dozen of us, my brother and a couple of others we met for prayer before the first service. And one of the men said, you know, he said, I'm really feeling scary. He said, we're going to go upstairs and find about eight people sitting there. Went upstairs and found 600 people sitting there because God was in the thing. And before long it was packed to the doors. And Leonard Raidenhill phoned Woody Wirt, Sherwood Wirt, who was Billy Graham's right hand man. He edited Decision Magazine for 25 years. And Raidenhill told Wirt, he said, there's a revival in Canada. It's next door to heaven. You better get up there. So he flew up. He phoned me. I don't know where he got my phone number. And he flew to Winnipeg and he was in that one meeting. And he was sitting in the third pew down over here. And while I was preaching, people were coming forward pretty soon. The whole front of the church, before I gave an invitation, was packed with people kneeling and praying. We filled the platform. Then we filled the choir loft. Then we started emptying the pews. First people in the first pew moved to the back of the church to make room for people to pray. And then we did the second pew. Then we did the third pew. And that's where Woody Wirt was. And finally he came up to me and he said, you know, I've been involved in evangelism on the largest scale for 25 years, but I've never seen revival. He said, this is revival That night there were some very powerful testimonies. And a couple had given their testimony. Harry Neville and Thiessen, he was a civil engineer and he took early retirement. So if you go on the road as a revival team, and they did that, were great news of God in many places. And he heard their testimony that night and it was the story of his own life. He and his wife did not have a good relationship. And he'd been more or less blaming her. And that night he met with God and met more fully with God shortly afterwards, because he invited the Thiessen's down to Minneapolis. And he asked him to conduct one of these afterglows. An afterglow is an after meeting that you have after the major meeting is over. Most people have gone and have a smaller meeting somewhere where you can get chairs in a circle, maybe have two, 300 people or less or more, and have a, just a time of sharing and praying and counseling and so on. And so he asked the Thiessen's to conduct one of these meetings and they did so. And nobody responded. They had a chair in the middle. Nobody went to the chair. So Woody Wood told me later on, he said, you know, I thought, well, I better go to the chair so I can set an example. So he went and knelt to the chair. And then when he knelt to the chair, Harry said, now confess your sins. He said, what? He said, I said to myself, confess my sins in front of this crowd. There's no way, you know, no way I can do that, you know. And so Harry had his hand on his shoulder and he tried to get up and Harry wouldn't let him up. And so finally he did. And then he broke. And he really met with God. He broke over Galatians 2.20 when Harry, when he was going to get up after he'd done his confessing and Harry said, no brother, you're not ready yet. You have to meet God at the cross. He said, I said to myself, what theology is this? I've never heard this before. But he stayed and met with God. Three months later, his wife met with God. He phoned me long distance. I was in meetings in Beulah Alliance in Edmondon, Canada. And he phoned me, tell me what happened in their home. He said, our house is like heaven now. And they were conducting afterglows, Billy Green crusades, after crusades, Sherwood Woodford get in behind the bleachers or somewhere and have an afterglow, get as many people together as they could for an afterglow and try and get people revived. And so this is going on. Many things of this kind happen. My mind is just flooded with, right now with, with things I might share. I don't know where to go, how long I've got yet, but all right. Restitution, a spirit of love. There were two ladies in Saskatoon. They had the same first name and they had the same problem that their husbands had left them with children. And they used to get together twice a week and drink coffee and curse the women that stole her husband's. And then they both met God in the meeting. You know what happened? This one lady, she wrote a letter to the gal who stole her husband. Her first name was Alice. And she just said, Alice, I've hated you with a passion and God has shown me how wrong that is. I'm a Christian believer and I want you to forgive me for hating you the way I do, the way I did. And I want you to know that I love you with the love of God. And I'm just hoping and praying that someday you'll come to know Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Gals, could you write a letter like that? Without the grace of God? But she wrote it and meant it, read it to the congregation, mailed it the next day. We don't know if anything ever happened. I don't think anything did happen there. The other gal, one day her husband dropped in. He took one look at his wife and he said, what happened to you? She didn't have to tell him a thing he could see. It was not the gal he'd left. And she told him what had happened. He started attending the meeting and seven days later he found Christ as his personal savior and that home was saved. Then I was down in the New Brunswick in meetings and I couldn't believe it. In this church there were two ladies that had the same first name as those two in Saskatoon and both their husbands had left them. And I didn't dare tell that story out of Saskatoon or they'd think I was concocting it or something, you know. But many things of this kind. One gal, well she'd gone through four doctors and three psychiatrists and the last person to see her, I think she was a doctor then, he said, we're going to try hypnotism and lady if this doesn't help there's nothing we can do. You just have to live with it. She used a walking post, you know, a cabbage. And she met God in one of the meetings. She gave her testimony and a night or two later there was an unconverted psychiatrist in the meeting and after he heard this testimony he said to some of us, he said, I wish that lady's story could be written in a book and scattered around the world. He said, I've never heard anything like it. And she finally went to see the doctor about hypnotism and they talked a little bit about generalities and then he said, well let's start with the hypnotist. No, she said, I don't want that. He said, what do you mean you don't want it? She said, I'm okay. What do you mean you're okay? Well, I'm healed. What do you mean you're healed? How did you get healed? Well, through a revival she said. He said, what's that? So she spent an hour or so explaining what revival was and he said at the end, well lady, I don't understand all of this but I'm sure for it. It's wonderful to see you the way you are. And people, she didn't turn back. She stayed that way. She was healed by God just in a second. I remember seeing a Ph.D. friend of mine in one of the meetings and in afterglow and I said, Hugh, what do you think of what you're hearing and seeing? He said, Bill, I never thought I'd live long enough to see this kind of thing where people are getting absolutely transparently honest before God and their brothers and sisters and making things right. He said it is incredible and it was incredible but it was a work, dear people. It was born in heaven and carried on by the Spirit of God. There was very little of man in it. Ralph and Lucitae were so careful in that area. They deflected any attempt to put them on a pedestal. They were self-effacing. They were always staying out of it, staying in the background. Do you know what they did? This is crazy but, well I shouldn't use the word crazy but I mean by some standards what we consider crazy. Sometimes they'd say, hey brother Bill, you're preaching tonight. One time I woke early in the morning and God gave me two brand new messages just out of the blue. And later that day Ralph told me you're preaching twice at the two services tonight. We're going to have double services you see. Then I understood why God had given me these two messages. Why am I preaching? Are you guys not able to preach? Well that's not it but God told us you were to preach tonight. And sometimes they might ask one of the other pastors to bring the message, you know. That's unheard of. Ever heard of an evangelist inviting the pastor to bring the message? And it didn't seem to make any difference. I mean people responded just the same. Because God was in control. God was doing it. Men were not doing it. I was telling somebody the other day how one time I was in meetings and God was working in such a powerful way. You know I didn't hear any voice or see a vision or anything but it was a very strong communication going on. One went like this, now the Lord is saying to me, now Bill there's a coffin on the platform. I want you to crawl in that coffin and just lay in the coffin. You can keep the lid open to watch what I'm doing but if you get out of the coffin I'll stop. I knew exactly what God was saying. Stay out of it. Don't interfere. We didn't try to control things. We watched things. There were some things we had to stop. And perhaps the Mormon or somebody else in the testimony time began giving their testimony. We stopped that. But apart from that I mean we just let the thing flow. Let God do what he wants to do and say what he wants to say. One of the afterglows. These afterglows I should explain after the regular meeting was over. For those who wanted to stay we'd have an afterglow. We'd get another auditorium and have a circle of chairs. Maybe 50 or 100, 150 chairs with two openings so people could move in and out. A couple of chairs in the center where people could kneel and pray. We'd sing and share testimonies and pray a little bit and then we'd invite anybody that had a personal need, wanted to be prayed for in council to come and kneel at the chair. And I'll tell you there were some meetings that were, oh, some of those meetings were so powerful. So powerful. Where people were meeting with God. There was a backslidden Alliance Evangelist. His name was Bowker. And he was in one of those afterglows. I never even knew about him. Had never heard of him. And he was in this meeting. He and his wife were not living together any longer and she was sitting five or so away from him and all of a sudden this afterglow she got up and walked and stood in front of her husband and she said something like this. She said, you know dear, you backslidden so terribly you went right to the bottom. I know that. And she said, God has been showing me that I'm partly responsible, largely responsible because I was not sympathetic to you in your ministry and I didn't really support you and I didn't love you the way I should have. And she just said, could you find it in your heart please to forgive me? And just like there's only two of them in the room. And he got to his feet and he ran for the chair and she with him. And the two of them fell down at the chair in the center, the two chairs in the center of the room. And he just started to pray. And it was almost scripture from beginning to end. And he was revived after fourteen years at the bottom of the heap. Thank God. Things like this, you know, you couldn't. And I remember one night a girl about sixteen, a beautiful child with blonde hair and everything, she got to the mic and she just said in the afterglow, you know, I used to be, I couldn't stand old people. I just didn't like them. I guess she thought she wasn't going to get old herself someday. But anyway, she said, I just didn't want to be like them. I didn't want to talk to them. And I just walked away when they came around. And she said, God's really broken my heart over this. And she said, you know, you old people here tonight, there's lots of them there. And she said, I just love you with all my heart. And an old lady, she must have been eighty-five or more. And we'd run out of chairs. She was standing at the wall. And she spoke and said, oh, dearie, she said, those are such sweet words. You know, she said, that's the first time in my life that anybody ever said that they loved me. And so the young were getting blessed. The old were getting blessed. The young people decided they'd like to try revival meetings on their own and it was a total failure. It didn't work. And so they came back and said, we want to get back with the adults where the action is. Maybe the action was with the adults because they had more sin. That's likely true, you know. But anyway, we needed them. They needed us. It's thrilling to hear young people testify. There were two young men in our church and they'd been talking on the telephone. And one of the mothers had been listening in, which mothers shouldn't be doing, but they were listening in. One of them was. And they were promising each other, now this revival thing is straight emotionalism. So we're not getting involved, right? Okay. Now remember, we'll go to the meetings to keep our parents happy, but on Sundays, but that's it. Okay, okay. So it all figured out. So what happened? One Sunday morning, this, the one of the two kids, they, I was in my, I forget exactly what was happening. The meeting was over. It was Sunday morning. And we were constant with people in my office and they brought this boy in. And they said he wants to get saved. Oh, great. Praise the Lord. So he knelt. And I tried to get him to pray. And he kept saying, no way, no way, no way. And I couldn't get his attention really. I said, well, didn't you want to be saved? He kept saying, no way. But it was an unfinished sentence. And finally he finished the sentence. And here was the sentence. No way can I ever doubt the reality of Jesus Christ again. He revealed himself to my heart. I know him. And the other day the other boy came forward on the other side of the church the same morning and he got saved. He's a civil engineer today down in Colorado. I remember meeting him several years ago, still walking with God. Thank God for that. And so it went on and on. After the revival, the first 12 months after the revival, the Alliance denomination in Western Canada, they reported a 100% increase in the number of souls saved in their churches in that 12-month period. The Baptist denomination I was with, for the first time in their history, they went right over the top when it came to their financial budget. The Western Tract Mission has 3,000 tract distributors, their headquarters in Saskatoon, and they reported an almost 300% increase in the number of tracts sold and distributed in that 12-month period. And so it had an effect in many ways on churches, on individuals, on families. I was holding meetings in this place called Brandon, Manitoba, and a lady had told me about her husband. She said he's a very kind person, but not a Christian. And she said, I brought him tonight, that's him standing over there. So she introduced me to him. So I talked to him about the Lord and I'll preach, she said. This is good stuff, he said, you know, I appreciate your interest. But you know, no, I'll listen. So the meeting goes on. Halfway through the meeting, he grabbed his wife, he said, honey, I'm going to hell. He said, I can see the flames. He got a hold of his wife, he shakes his wife, what can I do? What can I do? Then he started throwing me hand signals to stop preaching so he could get to the altar. And I couldn't see it, the crowd was too big for that, and so he got up and just ran to the altar and got saved. They gave his testimony the next night. I quoted that verse, you know, in Hebrews about doing despite to the Spirit of Grace, and I explained it meant insulting the Spirit of Grace. He said, God took that truth and burned it into my soul, and he showed me I'd been insulting the Holy Spirit. And he got saved that night. And then there was a wonderful aftermath. They went home. They sat on the floor and they talked. They usually didn't talk very much. And they said something like this, I don't know whether he said it or she said it, it went like this. Why don't we get honest with one another? We've never done that, have we? No, they haven't. You know, married 11 years, had four kids. Well, he said, honey, let me start. He said, you know, I never loved you. I married you because I felt sorry for you. Ladies, how would you feel if somebody said that to you? And she looked at him with her white eyes and she said, well, honey, that's why I married you. And she said, they sat on the floor and they just laughed. She said, this is crazy. What are they going to do? We can't split. We've got four kids. And we're both Christians now. You know what they did? They prayed and asked God to give them a love for each other. Did he? Immediately. They sat in the meetings holding hands, looking at each other. Half the time, I don't think they were even aware there was anybody else around. But that was so beautiful to see. And one other man got saved in some meetings we had. He was wanted in three Canadian provinces. He raped a girl in Ontario. He was living in Common Law with some gal. He'd left his wife with some guy in Ontario somewhere. They had two children by their marriage. And he got saved. He gave himself up to the chief of police in Brandon, Manitoba the next morning. They checked his story out. He talked to the father of the girl he'd raped. And he gave his testimony. He told the dad what had happened. He was asking his forgiveness. And finally the dad said, oh, he said, if I had met you, I'd have smashed you in the face. But he said, after listening to what you're telling about Jesus Christ, he said, we forgive you. We don't want to lay any charges. And you know, nobody would lay any charges against a guy. And he flew back to Ontario and he got his wife and his two sons. They came back to Brandon and she got saved the next night. I remember talking to her before the meeting. She said, well, I don't know what's happened to my husband. Can it happen to me? And it happened to her. And she found Christ. And so it spread across the country. I had meetings all across Canada in the Maritimes, Woodstock, New Brunswick. There's a Woodstock, South Africa, Woodstock, New York, Woodstock, Ontario, and then Woodstock, New Brunswick. It's a small place, maybe 5,000 people, but there were 50 little churches in the area. And they had gone together for the meetings. And it spilled over and we had to go for five weeks. I was scheduled to start in Denver, Colorado, with 40 churches or so. And it spilled over and we had to keep going. So I phoned my contact in Denver, told him what happened. I said, Bill, we've got thousands of mailings out. You can't leave us. You can't hijack us this way. And I said, well, brother, we just don't feel God is through here yet. He said, well, if you really feel that way, we'll accept it then. You know what God did? He sent a big snowstorm to Denver, Colorado. So they were quite satisfied. They couldn't have meetings anyway. And so we stayed that fifth week in Woodstock. And God touched life after life in some deep and marvelous ways. You know, one time on a Sunday morning, I preached in a neighboring church. And the pastor told me of the church in Woodstock, now be sure you're back by 1130, because I don't have anything in the program after 1130. I almost never made it. I'd put in your wife down in the curb. It was in the wintertime. It was icy and stuff. And I wasn't in a hurry to get back. And I got there. The place was packed. And there was a door over here. And I got to this door and I could see the platform. And on the platform must have been 12 people waiting to give their testimony. And there was a lady giving her testimony to people. She must have been 90. You should have heard her. I'm telling you, it was thrilling. They didn't need me. I never got the publical 5 to 12. That's revival. No, would the God He would do it again. Would God not revive us again? But dear people, there's a price we have to pay. It just doesn't happen. There are no personalities that will make it happen. There are no plans that will make it happen. It's seeking the face of God in prayer, fasting in prayer, calling on God, obeying God, letting God lead. I'm sure God wants to do it again. I'm sure in my own heart that God will do it again. I don't know what will have to happen first. Maybe we'll have to rattle our cage a little louder than He has been. I know the flood in Winnipeg certainly made a lot of people think about God. Yes, and it made some people pretty bitter. Some people are very bitter right now. Their houses are gone and they're not getting any money from the government that was promised and this kind of thing. But God has His hand in all of this. Not a thing can happen, but God knows all about it. Other things relative to revival. I was telling some people again the other day how that, you know, before the revival, if I had evangelistic meetings in a church in a town 50 miles away, I never expected to see any of my people there and I was never disappointed. They never did come. But here I am holding meetings in Edmond and 385 miles out of Saskatoon, there's a bunch of my people sitting there, a whole row of them, throwing me kisses. I go to Winnipeg, 500 miles from Saskatoon, there's a whole pile of my people there that come all the way from Saskatoon, 10 hours driving on the highway, just so they can help, you know. A businessman who had been revived in Saskatoon, he paid for five of us to fly to Toronto to share in a seminar in Toronto. And let's see, there were two Baptist preachers, myself and another Baptist preacher and three Alliance people. One of them was a son to Pastor Bolt, who was the pastor of the big Alliance church in Saskatoon at the time, wearing cowboy boots and all. We got to Toronto, got into this seminary, it was the longest meeting I was ever in. People went on for 14 hours. What a time. Our team, they gave their testimonies. After it was all over, a lady got up and said she wanted one of the gals to give her testimony again. She couldn't believe what she'd heard. Can I hear it again? So she gave it again. And we had a chair out in the front. The man got to his feet and he stood like this and he said, my name is, and he gave his name. He said, you people all know me, I'm the son of most of your churches. He said, I'm listening to these people up at the front there. I don't know if it's real or not. Could anything happen to me? He said, my name is not Don Moore. He said, my name is Don Sewer. He said, that's the kind of a mind I have. I need to be changed. Can God change me? So we invited him to come. He knelt at the chair. We gathered around him, our team, and we prayed with him right there in front of the whole group. Remember, this is a seminary. He got to his feet and he was radiant. Then it was just a steady stream, kept coming and coming and coming and coming and coming. Finally, one of the professors came. I can see him yet. He was half running down the aisle and he got to this chair and he fell across the chair. In a stentorian voice, he cried, oh God, he said, all my life I sought and talked the academic and now I want the spiritual. Fill me, God, fill me. God touched his life in a marvelous way. We heard of some after things out of that. A day or two later, he was walking across the campus and he happened to pass a male student and they just said, good morning, that was all. And the male student, he gave his testimony in one of the meetings and he said, I saw Jesus Christ in his face. This man was a chaplain for the seminary. He said, I saw Jesus Christ in his face. And this kid ran off to his room and got on his face before God and stayed there until God had touched his life. He got in many ways, many ways of working. We were in a church in Toronto right after the seminary and this Pastor Bolt's son, the one with the cowboy boots and everything, he was preaching and telling how he had a new love for everybody, for all people. There was a lady sitting there, she had a great big hat on, you know, sitting about six pews down. And she spoke up and said, oh, it was so good to hear young people that like older people. And he came running down off the platform and grabbed her and gave her a great big kiss, you know. And when he was running back to the platform, she said, her hat was off to one side and she said, oh, I love that boy. This stuff was not exactly rehearsed, you understand. And a boy about 10 ran to the pulpit in one of the meetings, just crying. And so Ralph moved over and the kid took over and he begged. There was probably 700, 800 people there and this kid just poured out his soul. And he begged the sinners to get saved. And he begged the Christians to get right with God. And he couldn't say anymore. He just stood there weeping and his daddy came up and took him back to his seat again. And it was just part of what God was doing, part of what God was saying. You know, it's interesting, 1972, that's when Jack Taylor saw a revival. That's when this ministry began. That's when the thing started in Saskatoon. And in 1972, before the revival in Saskatoon, there was a Bible college in Steinbeck, Manitoba. And at the Bible college, a bunch of girls began having prayer meetings at night. So they checked this out because it was going on for hours at nighttime. And so there was nothing fanatical about it, so they let it go. And suddenly a revival broke in the Bible college. And it touched the whole school. And the dean of the college told me later on, he said, for a whole year, he said, we never had one single problem in the Bible college at all. God just sweetened the whole thing up. And that was in 1972, just before it happened in Saskatoon. So God was on the march, many areas of the continent, at work. Revive us again. Oh God, that your people may rejoice in you. You know, if we got an extra thousand dollars somehow, we'd be rejoicing, right? Would we? Why? But to meet with God and to come into a personal relationship, a new personal relationship with God, that's worth a lot more than a thousand dollars. And we thank God for all he did, what has happened since. People often ask the question, what about today? What's happening in Canada? Well, I'd say we need another revival. That was, you know, 25 years ago. We certainly need a revival again. It accomplished all that God had in mind at that particular time. You know, teams went all around the world. I must share something that happened in Argentina, out of the Canadian revival. I went down there. I had a contact with the Gospel Mission of South America. And he'd arranged for us to come and set up some meetings. But I was writing him letters in big envelopes, big stamps. And in the post office in some of these foreign countries, if they liked the stamp, they'd take the letter home. So I never got my last two letters, didn't know when we were coming. My wife and I arrived in Buenos Aires, a city of 11 million people. Nobody's there to meet us. And the only Spanish word we knew was sea. And we waited and waited. And we prayed and nothing happened. Nobody showed up. And I thought I had his phone in my pocket. I didn't have it. I think God took it away. And he had something else in mind. And so we waited and waited. Nothing happened. Didn't know what to do. And then I found a bank of phones. He didn't have a listed phone. He had just moved to Buenos Aires from Santiago, Chile. And nobody knew him. I phoned the sailors' mission, the Latin American mission, other missions. Nobody even heard of the guy. And I began to think we'd been taken on a ride of some kind by this guy we'd been riding. And then a stranger walks up, about 50 years of age. And he bowed so politely, began talking in beautiful Spanish. And I let him understand I didn't know any Spanish. But I said, my amigo, friend, my friend, Lyle Eggleston. Ah, he grabbed the phone book. I said, no, no, it's not there. So he just walked away and came back a few minutes later, handed me a slip of paper. And on the paper it said, Lyle Eggleston Obligado 35, his phone number, and the whole bit. When I told Lyle Eggleston about it, he said, nobody in this world knows me, Bill. How could this happen? So we finally got it figured out. The Lord sent an angel. We were in trouble. There's no other way we could explain this thing. He said, Spanish people, they can't pronounce my name. They can't spell it. They never get it. It was all perfectly spelled and everything else. Why would he come to me? In an air terminal, there's hundreds, thousands of people moving back and forth. Why did this guy come to me? Anyway, while we were down there for about nine weeks, I think I preached 105 times or something. And I went down to Rosario, which is a city of a million people, some distance away from Buenos Aires. There were six Baptist groups that went together once a year for a refreshing weekend. And the year before they did this, when they compared statistics, the churches had averaged two converts a year for the whole year. And they rightly figured this is awful. We need to repent. We need to have revival. That's what we need. So they set up a committee to plan for the program the following year, not knowing a thing about me going to South America. And they told the committee, you're not to ask anyone to speak. We're all going to pray that God will send us somebody from somewhere in the world to talk about revival. So I'm down there. I speak in a Southern Baptist seminar in Buenos Aires. And a professor comes running up after me and said, Bill, what are you doing this weekend? I got up my little book and it was the only weekend I had free. Oh, he said, listen, we have a gathering of six Baptist groups and they want someone to talk about revival. Would you do it for that weekend? See how God can set things up? Beautiful, you know. Church was seated a thousand. There was probably 1400 people that were standing all around the walls. Aisles were packed. I couldn't give an invitation of any kind. So we just preached Friday over Sunday. And I had a tremendous interpreter. Of course, the Latin Americans, they have a kind of a low boiling point, you know, they're easily moved. Anyway, he did a great job. And in the last meeting, I had to do something. So I said, maybe God's spoken to your heart and you want to be saved. Or maybe you need to be revived. You feel in need of Jesus Christ having control of your life. Just stay behind, would you? About 700 people stayed. And then I had to counsel these 700 people through the interpreter, which was a little difficult to do, but we did it. And out of that came all kinds of blessings. As a matter of fact, there's a revival in Argentina that's been going on for several years. I think I've heard at least that some of the roots go back to what happened back then in 1974, I guess it was. So God is doing it around the world. You have the book, Operation World. If you don't have it, get it. If you don't get it, I hope you feel guilty. Use it. It gives you information on every country in the world. It tells you all about how many evangelicals there are in the country and what their needs are, the political situation, the economic situation, and all these things. And I use it as a sort of prayer manual. I pray for at least two countries every day. Just go through the book, go through it again, go through it again. And people, it gives you a passion for the world. You know, God's world is not North America. It's a world. A Christian in Africa or Malaysia or Nepal or Bhutan or any country is as precious to God as any person could be here in Canada States. And revival can come to any country in the world. You know, I remember reading not long ago about a young man. It was over in India. He got saved. And he started four churches in three years. Then he came to missionaries. You know what he said? He said, I think maybe I should go to Bible school now. Isn't that kind of reversing things a little bit? But it was real revival. The Spirit of God was resting on him. Can I share one other thing? There's a buffer state between India and China. It's called NIFA, N-E-F-A. And in Tezpur and Assam, there's a Christian hospital. And there's a lot of missionaries in Assam. And they wanted to get into NIFA and there was no way they could. The government forbade it. Nobody could go in there. So they prayed. And one day, a kid named Bhattai, B-A-T-T-A-I, he came out. He was sick. And they got him to hospital and they led him to Christ and they sent him back. Six months later, he came back and he said, how do you start churches? And they said, why are you asking? Oh, he said, hundreds have been saved. You know, Bhattai went back. They gave him a little diploma. He wanted to go to Bible school, so he was in Bible school for three weeks. He couldn't read or write, so they gave him a little diploma. And the diploma said, Bhattai has done his best. And he went home. Half his life with this diploma, you know. He started soul winning. And it became a tribal movement. And finally thousands were saved. You know, when they baptized converts, it was up in the Himalayas, you know. And the streams are cold. They used to get a couple of deacons standing down here. He'd be baptizing the river up here. And sooner or later he'd flake out. And these deacons would get him, take him up on shore, stick him beside a bonfire in Thamud, stick him back in the river again. Because he was baptizing 60, 80 or 100 converts at a time. Bhattai, no education. Nipah. Who's ever heard of Nipah? But a deep and genuine work of God. But he found a man, want to close with that verse. It says, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, through this crowd, throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in behalf of those whose heart is perfect towards him. Do you qualify? Why? Wouldn't you want to be a person to whom God can demonstrate his power and change lives, bringing glory to Jesus Christ? Won't thou not revive us again, that that people may rejoice in thee? I will hear what God the Lord will speak. For he will speak peace to his people and to his saints. But let them not turn again to folly. O Father, thank you that we can prostrate ourselves before your throne and confess that you are King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the blessed and only power holder, who only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom the honor and power everlasting. O God, you're so great and so good, but how little a portion has heard of him, how little a whisper has heard of God. Father, in times of revival, we don't hear a whisper, we hear a shout. And God, we need these times of revival. And on our faces now, Lord God, we're asking you to remember us. Lord God, to send a revival again to the churches in the states in Canada and then around the world. God, let it not be something that we keep to ourselves selfishly, but that we spread abroad as far as we possibly can. And then, Father, in our own circle of influence, and as these teams go on their own shortly, O God, may there be, we pray, revival in churches, revival in hearts and families. God, don't let the devil have it his own way. Father, you're greater than Satan is, we know that. We've had a time of hurt, we need a time of healing. O God, heal us, we pray. Send your spirit among us in new power. Convict thousands, Father. Convict us first of all of our sins and our coldness, and then revive our hearts, O God. And just do it again, do it again for your own glory and honor. We pray, Father, with thanksgiving in Christ's name. Amen.