In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of encountering a man who was deeply moved by the message of forgiveness and cleansing. The man was unable to speak and tears were flowing down his face. Eventually, he confessed his sins and sought forgiveness. The speaker also shares another story of a woman who was mentally unstable and attempted to harm children. Despite the chaotic situation, the speaker's wife intervened and protected their child. The sermon emphasizes the power of revival and the presence of God in transforming lives. The speaker references Bible verses and highlights the importance of revival as a work of God.

As you know, my subject tonight is revival. But I'm not going to preach on revival. I'm not going to lecture on revival. Maybe that's what it means to some of you. My intention in coming here tonight is to share with you a first-hand report of what revival is really like. There's a sense in which I can tell you nothing new, because if you've read books, if you've listened to sermons and heard talks and lectures and tapes and so on, then you know a lot about revival. But what I can do is to tell you what it is like, and that is very important. A very interesting thing that's happened in the last two years, as far as I'm concerned, and it's just this, but when the revival broke out in 1953, that was in the Congo, the Belgian Congo, which is now Australia, and the missionaries came home on furlough. They were asked to go all over the country telling the story. And some went to other countries. My brother in particular, because he was in the revival with us, went literally all over the world. You can hardly name a country he didn't go to. A great enthusiasm to know about revival and what happened. And then it just stopped. And I think for about 20 years, none of us have been asked to talk about revival. And then suddenly it's revived again. So much so, in the last two years, I have been unable to meet all the demands and all the invitations to go and talk about revival. Little prayer cells are coming to being. Ministers are preaching about it. Lectures are being delivered. Books are being written. And there seems to be a new interest. Now, I'm not a prophet. I'm not saying revival is around the corner. I'm saying nothing at all of the kind. I'm just saying this is interesting. God is doing something. So I'm pleased to come here tonight and talk to you about it, quite simply, making a report, first of all. And I was wondering this afternoon how I could share it. Because people will come and ask, what is revival like? And I decided this afternoon I would approach it from three angles. First of all, from the scriptures. And then secondly, I want to give you a simple, but I think a very telling, illustration. And then thirdly, a witness report, because I was there. From the scriptures, I'll take Isaiah chapter 64. And some of the students, at least, will be glad to know I'm reading from the authorized version. And I'm reading from the authorized version for the simple reason that the word presence comes into this portion three times. Make a mental note of that, because we'll come back to it. Isaiah 64, verses 1 to 3. I would also like you to note that as we read these three verses, the personal pronoun thou and thy comes into it many times. The point of this, that revival is God at work. Now, we thank God for the prophets, and about this time you have the prophets Enos, and Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, they were all prophesying about this time that this was written here. We thank God for them, but they are representatives of God. But when it's revival, it's different. It's God himself. Revival isn't a crusade. Revival isn't a campaign. Thank God for those. I'm in full sympathy with them all. And I take part in them. But revival is something else. Another phrase you'll find in these verses is God coming down. Now, my brother, when he speaks of the revival, he likes to use the word, an outpouring of a spirit. Well, I use that too, and it is an outpouring of a spirit. But I think I prefer the word visitation. And this comes out in this portion here. All that thou wouldest come down, God coming down. The first visitation of any great significance was in Bethlehem. That was God coming into our world. God visiting this planet. And in revival, it's like that. It's something quite different. Well, let's read this. All that thou wouldest come, all that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence. As when with melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence. When thou didst terrible things, which we look not for, thou camest down. The mountains flow down at thy presence. And you notice the word presence comes there three times, and we'll come back to that later on when I give a report. The personal pronouns are very important because this is God. As I said, revival is completely different from anything else. The workings of it are so completely different that we, the missionaries, were spectators. As if we were standing aside and watching God at work. We were afraid to interfere. Except on occasion when we're all humans, you find some excesses, and a little bit of the flesh coming in, but we would touch that. But apart from that, we just stood aside and watched God at work. It was a tremendous experience. But that's the Scripture. The illustration, a very simple illustration, but I think it will give you the picture. People come and ask, what is it like? I'll tell you. On one occasion I was moved to a mission station called Niangara, which is up in the very north where the climate is dry. Down south it's a humid heat, but up north it's a dry heat, and we had very severe heat there. Very high climate. Outside the little house where we lived, there was a beautiful lawn. Green lawn. Very large. Beautiful lawn. And the dry season would come on. The sun, of course, would be terribly hot. And as the dry season was proceeding, you'd see the grass withering, turning brown, dying. The hot winds would come and blow it away, and nothing remained but the earth. And then as the dry season was going on, the dry earth would cake up and split up and crack. Huge cracks. You could put your hand right down in the cracks all over the place, and you'd be spared of ever seeing a green blade of grass again. That's what it's like before revival. And then, toward the end of the dry season, the dews came in the morning. These lovely, refreshing, lovely, reviving dews, early morning. And cover the whole land. And then, of course, the sun would come out. But next morning, there'd be the dew again, and it proceeded for a few weeks. And almost immediately, you saw a miraculous thing. The little green sheen came on this hard surface. And in a matter of weeks, you had your lawn back again. It was lovely, refreshing. It was life. It was renewal. It was newness. Revival is like that. And when you have a situation that is apparently hopeless, when God comes in revival, it's a quick thing, just like that. Now, that's my second point. I'm going fast, aren't we? That's the Scripture. That's the illustration. What I want to do now is to give you a witness report of what actually happened. And I make, first of all, an appeal. And the appeal is this. Would you like to make those three verses of Isaiah 64 your prayer? Take this to God in prayer. Oh, that thou wouldest render heaven, that thou wouldest come down. That's what we need, isn't it? Now, this does not mean that we must sit back and wait for God to work. That would be idleness. That would be negligence. I'm sure God wouldn't approve of that, because our mandate is to preach. And Paul said, Woe unto me if I preach not the gospel. Go into all the world and preach. And the Word of God is full of it, especially in the New Testament. Our work as ministers of God is to preach the Word. There are some people who sit back and say, Oh, we've done it all. We've preached. We've done house-to-house visitation. We've done open-air work, and there's nobody getting saved. We sit back and wait for God to work. No, no, it's not like that. But when God comes, I say again, it's different. It's something entirely of God. The Revival broke out in 1953. That's a long time ago. You might think, Oh, that's so long ago. We've forgotten everything now. That's 38 years ago. No, I haven't forgotten. My wife hasn't forgotten. I don't think any of us have forgotten the amazing things that happened in those days. It left such a tremendous impression on us. The second reason is, I kept a diary. The students know, and I've been advocating this for quite some time, that you should keep diaries and write down what God is doing because you forget so much. I thank God I kept a diary of those days. I kept a diary for some years, about 18 months, really. Then the rebellion came, and I lost everything else. But I do have that little bit of a diary. Thank God for it. Very wonderful. When I go back over that diary and just read a few things, of course it brings other things back to my mind, too. But one thing that struck me, I think, more than anything else, and I've mentioned it already, and I'm going to mention it again, and that is the impression of the presence of God. You couldn't escape it. I'll leave it at that for the moment because I want to come back to it. That's very important. The revival began on a mission station about 500 miles south of us, and it spread like a bushfire. Now, maybe you haven't been in a bushfire. Maybe you've seen that kind of thing on a television. But it is frightening. And it leaps, and it goes from place to place and nothing stops it. The revival began, as I said, about 500 miles south of where I was working, and it traveled to the next mission station where my brother was, about 160 miles. From there, it came to our mission station, about 260 miles, another mission station 80 miles north, another one 70 miles north, and like that, all over the place, we had 10 mission stations and all those miles between them, and it just jumped and spread like that everywhere. It's a very remarkable thing. It touched some of the missions on our borders, and they have equal experiences to what we have. There's something about revival that is so utterly different from anything else that I can agree with what Dr. Alexander White said. He wrote about the 1859 revival, and he said there's a divine mystery about revivals. God's sovereignty is in them. Revivals are still going on. One of our missionaries said quite recently, he made a survey, and revivals are going on at this moment in about 30 different countries. In some cases, they're small. In some cases, they're very, very large. God is continually at work like that. Another impression that was very strong with me still is, and that is, we had a new church after the revival. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. Another thing is the exalting of the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. They loved Christ. They sang about Christ. They preached about Christ. Jesus Christ was everything to them. They had a little chorus in their own language, of course, and the whole thing was quite simple. Repeating it constantly was, Thank God for the blood of Jesus, I have become a new man in Christ. It's the exalting of Jesus. It's that, I think, which made me happy about the revival when it broke out with us. You know, if you're not prepared for revival, if you don't know what it's about, when it happens, you may question, is this of God, or is it of the flesh? Because of the phenomena. But when I heard these people exalting Christ, I thought, oh, we're all ready. And another thing, of course, was the great tenderness amongst the people. Unity. Love. Love to one another. Love for the Bible. Bible study was really something. We had a Bible study every morning at half past six, and often we'd offer it at twelve o'clock, one o'clock. Prayer meeting. You couldn't keep them back from the prayer meeting. They were revived, they were renewed, and God was real, and Jesus was real, and the Spirit was there, and that made all the difference. Church evangelism. I just mention that now to put the thought in your mind, and I come back to it because it's very important. When you have a church, you know, what happens today very often is that a church will engage an evangelist to do the work. And when the church was revived, the whole church went out to evangelize. So we'll come to that in a minute. Now, we had a good work. I won't talk about the other ten mission stations. I'll talk about the station where I was a leader. We were several missionaries there, and we had a very good work, as people would say. We had visitors come out to see the work. People like to come from the home countries, especially from America. They come out and spend a fortnight. They go out and see everything. They go back home and write a book. That's the kind of thing they do. Well, we had reports of people coming out and seeing our work and going back and writing articles about it, and they said what a good work we had. And on the surface, we did have a good work. We had large schools, boys and girls, and they slept on the place. They were looked after well. We had medical work. We had leprosy work. We had Bible school work. We had all that in the mission station. It was a very big work. In the area, we had 130 churches. And at that time, it was the old-fashioned way of running a mission station. The missionary was in charge. It was before we handed over to our national brethren. So I was the big chief there. No, that's not the theological word. I was the pope. I was the bishop. Everything I said carried. It was a good work. And as I said, people go home and give a good report about it. But we were dissatisfied. We felt although we had apparently a good work, there was something wrong. The people were becoming more materialistically minded. They weren't so keen on Bible study and prayer meetings as they used to be, not quite so keen on evangelism and so on, and there were disturbances amongst the fellowship. And we were really concerned about this. We were not satisfied. One of our missionaries wrote home to the headquarters and said, what we have out here is a good shop window. You know what I mean? A Christian can be like that, a good shop window, a good display. But in the back room there may be some things that are not worthy. Our field leader wrote home to the headquarters at that time. He was the successor to C.T. Studd, Jack Harrison. And what he said in his letter, and I've been able to copy the letter, he said, without a doubt, salvation from the guilt of sin and its penalty has come to many. Now, many people will stop there and say, praise God, that's it. The people have got converted and they're no longer under the guilt and penalty of sin. Amen, that's stopped. But he was satisfied. Neither were we. Without a doubt, salvation from the guilt of sin and its penalty has come to many. Without a doubt, the word of life has been embraced. Lazarus is out of the grave, but with his hands and feet wrapped round with a towel. Now you know what that means. Lazarus was out of the grave and he was alive, but he was limited, he was bound. And that's the state in many churches today. Many people have a profession of salvation, of conversion, but very little life. My brother wrote home at that time, and I caught from his letter, we wondered if our work was finished here. We seemed to be tired in our spirits, with a losing battle. Yet outwardly, the work was going on fine, the church being added to daily, and people getting converted. But we are concerned at the coldness, materialism, and the lack of concern for the lost. So that was the situation with us, the leaders in the work. We were disturbed. Now, if you've read much of revivals in various countries, I'm sure you've noticed that the writers always emphasize the matter of prayer. In almost every case, there's been a lot of prayer before the revival. Now we had a lot of prayer. I wouldn't like to say that we had more prayer than other missions around us. This is in the divine mystery of God. We don't understand this. I wouldn't say at all that we were more consecrated and more committed than other people. That would be wrong. That would be wicked. I wouldn't say that. But in God's providence, he came to us, and he stirred up in our hearts a burden of prayer. I know one missionary who, for another few years, never went out preaching on a Sunday. He'd go to the early morning service, which was half past six or seven, and then he'd shut himself up in his house all day, every Sunday. I remember another lady, a missionary, a single lady, very small, frail. She never went to bed before 3 o'clock in the morning, every night, giving herself to pray for revival. So much so that the field leader was concerned because she was so small and frail, and he went to see her and remonstrated with her and told her, You can't do that in the tropics because you're so busy during the day. You must have your sleep. You must have your rest. And then he put himself into a little trap by saying, You know, you can't burn the candle at two ends. And she replied quickly and said, Yes, you can. The only difference is that you burn out quicker, but you burn brighter. And she carried on. Now, there were quite a number of the individual missionaries who were portraying like that. You know, our situation then was like a reporter of the Liverpool Daily Post newspaper went up to North Wales in 1904, during the revival. He made a report, and in this report he said this, If I had been asked a month ago whether a revival was possible in Wales, I should have answered, No, it's not anything. But the situation, as far as he could see, in Wales before the 1904 revival was such that he despaired of ever seeing God at work again. He whom you seek will suddenly come to his aid. Our field leader went around the field. At that time he visited every mission station, all ten of them. He came back with a very heavy burden. And he said that he wasn't pleased with the situation. It looked good, but underneath, it wasn't as it should be. And he suggested that we should give one day a month to prayer. Stop everything. Schools, medical work, everything. Just give ourselves to prayer. So we did that. That was amongst the missionaries mainly. And the immediate result was a new spirit of sensitiveness sprang up amongst us. And we began putting things right among ourselves, nothing serious, but enough to jar the atmosphere. And then that gradually spilled over to the pastors and the evangelists. And they asked that they should join us. And they began doing things too. They got right with us and we got right with them. But that wasn't revival yet. But that was certainly the beginning of it. And then suddenly, the revival broke out in this mission station called Novutu, about 500 miles south of us, as I said. And I'll tell you how it happened. There was a week of Bible study and prayer. All the workers would be called in, the blacks and the whites. They spent a week together. They had a great time Bible study and prayer. And they were going through the Book of the Acts in particular and studying the works of the Holy Spirit. Then one evening, I think it might have been a Saturday evening, I'm not sure, one evening, the African friends were together, having their evening devotions, which they always did and always do, in their quarters before going to their houses. And the whites were up in one of the mission houses. They were having something similar before dispersing and going to their houses. And then one of the natives ran up to the missionaries and said, there's something happening down there amongst us. We don't understand it. Please can you come and help us? Well, two of the missionaries went down to see what was happening. And what he saw, what they saw, I think, frightened them. They weren't used to this. It was something quite new. The African brethren were all together there in this prayer hut. Some were flat on their faces. Some were on their knees. Some were sitting. Some were standing. Some were crying, sobbing, which was something we never knew before. Others were groaning. Others were crying out for mercy. Yet others were on their feet with their arms upraised, praising God, full of joy and singing. It seemed like a bedlam. And the missionaries didn't know what to do because they'd never seen it before. So they waited for quite some considerable time. They tried to quieten it down and tried to disperse the meeting, and they'd go back to their houses. But nobody moved. It went on until about 2 o'clock in the morning. The missionaries went back to their house. That was the break of it. That was the beginning of it. What God's people testified afterwards was that suddenly there came upon them, through the study of the work of the Holy Spirit, a sense of the holiness of God and their own unworthiness. Now, some of you, of course, may have had an experience like this. If you haven't, I tell you, this is something that will make you a different person. If once you've seen something of the utter corruption, corruption is not too strong a word, corruption of your own heart, and the white holiness of God is enough to break you, it's something like that, I think, that happened to Job. I've heard of the hearing of Abraham. By now, I see. And he said, I despise myself, my alcohol and myself. I like the word's translation there, which means I am an abomination to myself. Now, if you're an abomination to yourself, then it says you're awake to what other people see in you and you don't see in yourself. And when you see something of the flashing whiteness of the Spirit of God and of God himself, it's enough to break you. Now, the friends down there at Bermudju began to write letters. They wrote to many mission stations, tell them what was happening. They began writing letters, giving a report of what was happening in the Bermudju station. My brother... I'm bringing him into it because this is important. My brother was out in the district with another missionary, an Australian, visiting the churches in the area, and he received some of these letters. And what he received really frightened him. What frightened him were the phenomena about the dear African people there. Some of them were crying, some sobbing, and some were prostrate on the floor, and all that kind of thing. Now, my brother either had prayed for revival, like everybody else, but he was afraid of this. What he was afraid of was, if that happens in my mission station, he said, will it get out of hand? And if it gets out of hand, what will the veteran official say about it? It's a desert in Congo at that time. And he was afraid of it. And he says in his testimony, he felt he would like to run away. Now, isn't that amazing? You're praying for revival, and when it comes, you don't recognize it as revival, you don't discern it, and you want to run away. But God had something for my brother, and I'll tell you what happened. Before he came back to the mission station, he had a vision. Now, neither my brother nor I are given to visions. Perhaps we're not spiritual enough, I don't know. But he never had a vision before, but what he saw was this. He saw blood being poured onto the surface of a stone. The blood was warm. The surface of the stone was cold, and the blood congealed. It worried him for a little time, and then he saw it. And God seemed to be saying to him, I want to pour my spirit on the people of the church at Opiengi, but they are cold, and I can't work like that. Well, eventually he got back on the mission station, and by this time, God was moving amongst the people. He went to a big meeting there, revival in process, but in progress, but not much enthusiasm. And one of the African ladies got up, and she said, she said, I've had a dream. The Lord spoke to me in a dream, and said, Gileza, when you want to light a fire in your hut, what do you do? And she said, the first thing I do, I clear away yesterday's ashes, because they're dead, they're cold, I clean the floor, and then I bring new wood, and so on, and then build a new fire. And the Lord seemed to say to her, that's just what I want to do here at Opiengi. I want to pour my spirit, the fire of my spirit here, but the surface is too cold and it's dead. She gave her story. I'd rather get up and give his story. And then, you notice in the reading, it says, all that thou wouldest come thou. How else can you express and explain a revival? God came down. Oh, we've seen this. We've really seen this. God came down on the congregation there, and the conviction amongst the people was terrific. Those who were walking with God were filled with joy, but those who had any shadow of anything, you remember, God is light. God is light. In him is no darkness at all. And when there was any darkness, those people went down to conviction. Now that was the beginning of the work there at Opiengi where my brother was. At that time, there was a lady down at the mission station where the revival broke out. Her name was Anna. And she had a difference with a lady in the mission station where my brother was, 160 miles in the forest. I tell you it's a long way. It's a long way by road, but it's a long, long way through the forest. That lady walked 160 miles. I don't know how many days it took her. 160 miles to go to Opiengi because she had something against her sister. But between those two getting right with God and these two visions, I tell you God worked. Then my brother began to write letters to me and was telling me what was happening and his letter was a very normal, very ordinary letter. But now he was using some tremendous adjectives. And it's so much so it didn't sound like him that I wrote and reprimanded him. I said, Ivor, what adjectives are you using? He said in his letter back to me, David, when the Spirit calls on your mission station, you use the same adjectives. And I did. You see, it's something different. This is God at work. Now we had a principle on the mission station where I was that we sent our young people up to the Bible school. They did their two or three years, whatever it was. And when they came back to us having graduated, we always sent them away. We sent them away to another tribe, another language, another culture, different food. We sent them away for a minimum of a year, give them experience, throw them out on the deep end. We always did that. Now, if we had done that with an evangelist called Ioannis Tomou, and he was down at that place when the revival broke out, then he came back to us. And we all thought when he and his wife come back home, they bring the revival, you know. Well, my wife arranged for the wife of this evangelist to speak to the ladies on a weeknight. Nothing happened. Then came the Sunday. So I asked this evangelist to preach. And he preached and took a text, an unusual text from Exodus 19 verses 10 and 11. And the reading is something like this. I'll just give a little of it. The Lord said to Moses, Go unto the people, sanctify them today and tomorrow, let them wash their clothes, and be ready. That's it. Be ready against the third day. For the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of all the people. Well, he preached very powerfully. He gave a little story of the revival and what happened down there. And then we thought, Oh, revival will break out. But nothing happened. I was leading the meeting on the platform with him. When he finished preaching, final hymn and then benediction. And what we always did, we give an invitation to anybody who needed any help, any counseling, prayer, and so on, would either stay where they were or come forward to the front whilst the people moved out of church. So I did that. People got up and they began to go out. Then I saw one young schoolteacher. My wife had a kindergarten of about 120 little children and she had several schoolteachers. This boy, Johnny, was one of them. I saw him walk down the aisle and stand. He could neither go forward nor come back. He stood there as if he was stuck. After a long while, he turned around and he came back. And he was shaking. Now this is the first time I saw that. He was shaking quite uncontrollably. You know, that's where the name Quakers comes from. The Quakers in the early days also experienced revival on several occasions and they went through these shakings. And this boy was shaking and he came and sat right down here in the front. I went down to be with him and another pastor came and we were talking to him. And whilst we were talking with him and the people were moving out, a young girl sitting on the right-hand side of the platform there, she was a cripple. She always waited until everybody had run out because she was a cripple. She was on crutches. So we didn't think anything of it. But whilst you were dealing with this young fellow, this girl, a good Christian girl, screamed. Now, I've never heard anything like that before. See, I was brought up properly in a nice, orderly church where they don't do things like that. In a proper, Calvinistic, Methodist church. But I tell you, this was frightening. This dear girl screaming and what she was saying was, Oh, my sin, my sin. I'm going to hell. But I immediately called one of the pastors' wives to go and help her. And we were dealing with this young girl. Now, this boy's story was quite this. You see how sensitive people can be to sin when God comes. He hadn't done anything extraordinarily bad. But in his case, it was just this. I said that there were several schoolteachers there with my wife. And this boy thought that my wife made more of that monitor, schoolteacher, than of him. And he became jealous. And there was a spiral of jealousy in his heart. And this, when he saw something of the holiness of God frightening. And he was shaking uncontrollably. He said, I sinned against God. Because he had this evil heart against himself. Well, we helped him, of course, with scriptures and so on. And whilst we were still dealing with him, another African ran into the back door there. Came to me and he said, please, he said, can you come immediately over to the house? Your wife is calling for you. Things are happening over there. Well, I left this young lad to the pastor, and I went across. And when I crossed over the lawn to the house there, I went into the large lounge that we had there. It was packed. And I moved in amongst them, and I saw my wife kneeling there and one of our dear African brethren lying on the floor. He was lying face down. And he was beating the floor, hammering the floor with his fist, and crying, oh, my sin, my sin. What shall I do? What shall I do? And he was a lovely Christian fellow. Now, revival is not outside. It's inside the church. Revival is bringing life back again. Revival is where life has been, and it's either dimmed away or almost died away. And it's rekindled, revived, renewed. So this was a dear Christian fellow. And my wife was whispering in his ear, if we confess our sin, he's faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us. And finally he's done. He confessed everything he knew. He said, my heart is clean. I'm free. And I claim through Christ my forgiveness. He jumped to his feet and he began to sing. Everybody took it up. My, what a thing. Now, can you imagine? The people had come out from church. They heard the screaming in the church. They heard this in our house. Everybody went back to church. You talk about a revival in the church. There we had it. Now, that was the first day. There was much more to it, but let me give you a picture of it. Now, I did mention that the whole thing was spirit-controlled. That we didn't interfere with things except, of course, where we felt anything was getting a little bit out of hand. And we found a very lovely spirit amongst the folk. When the spirit of God was working and if anybody did something we thought was extreme, we'd go and rebuke them. And they would come back to us and thank us for rebuking them. Now, that's a spirit of grace. That's a spirit of humility. And we certainly had that amongst them at that time. Now, to prove that the spirit was in control, that Sunday, the spirit fell on the congregation. The next day, the spirit fell on the workmen. We had about 13-14 workmen on the place. Workmen, schoolteachers, male nurses, and so on. The spirit fell on the men. The next day, the spirit fell on the ladies, on the women. The next day, the spirit fell on the schoolboy. The next day, the spirit fell on the schoolgirls. The whole thing was controlled by the spirit of God. This was God. It wasn't organized by us at all. It wasn't led by us. It was a spirit who was completely in control. When the spirit was searching the hearts of people, the things that came out, apart from some very grievous sins, of course, there were murmurings, dishonesty, hypocrisies, there was a lack of love, there was uncleanness, and together with that there was, in several cases, regeneration. If I can put it this way, it may not be quite theologically correct. They had been converted, but not regenerated. In the sense that many of them had come away from witchcraft, they'd come away from drugs, they'd come away from adultery, they'd come away from what we might call the big sins, but they didn't know Christ in their lives. They weren't born again. So there is that, and I think you'll agree with me, that a person can be converted in that sense, reformed in that sense, without being born anew. And we had several, several cases of people that we thought were Christians. There was one woman who was married to an evangelist, and everybody liked her, she was a nice little physician. One day she disappeared, we didn't know where she was. She spent the whole day down in the garden. She came back in the evening, running, and she came to my wife and threw her arms around my wife. Now, our people don't do that. But she hugged my wife and she said, today, she said, I'm saved. Today I'm really born again. And we thought that she was a good Christian before. Now, when the spirit moves amongst people, that kind of thing can happen. Sins, I mentioned them just now. These things we might call the small sins, where you have murmurings and grumblings. You know, when you have revival, there's no such thing as a big sin and a little sin. Sin is sin. God doesn't measure it like that. For instance, there was a little boy, schoolboy, converted during the revival. His name was Andrew. Lovely little chubby boy. And he was so bright, so happy, so lovely. He was really bringing all that. But one day I noticed that his face had fallen, and his joy had gone. So I called him. I said, look, Andrew, what's wrong? And he told me the story. Oh, he said, I just remembered. He said, Jesus has reminded me that before I was converted, I stole a razor blade from a Greek commercial trader down in the town. I said, well, why should that make you sad? Oh, he said, I know, but this priest, Jesus. I said, well, what are you going to do about it? He said, you tell me. You tell me what I should do about it. I said, oh no, I shan't do that. I'll tell you what to do. You go back to your room, and quietly you sit before the Lord and ask the Lord to speak to you and tell you what to do about it. You know, it's much better to do that than for you to take a lead and tell people what to do. You threw the back on God. Well, of course, he came back afterwards. I know what I should do. He said, he showed me a coin. The value of the razor blade was a franc, one franc. And he had one franc in his hand. He said, I'll go down to the town, he said, and I'll pay that man. Well, I knew that Greek trader. He was a very wicked man. He was a noted evil man. I said, look, Andrew, I'll come with you, and I'll help you. No, no, he said, I'll go. I said, all right, you go, and we'll pray for you. Little boy went down, and he came back afterwards and told us his story. He told us that when he went to the Greek trader, he put his franc on the counter, and he told the Greek trader that Jesus was coming to his life. That reminded him of this thing he had done. He came back to pay, and he said, now he said Jesus has put me on another road. The effect on that Greek trader was terrific. He moved away from the counter. He was frightened. Little boy, you're on the right road. You keep on that road. I'm on the bad road. Don't you leave that road. And then he said, wait a minute, and he went in the back of a truck and got a basin. Come on, little boy. Confess, forsake. You're forgiven. You're cleansed. You're washed. You're purged. Of course, there were greater sins, but maybe this one. This one was very costly one. Do you know what time he finished? Do you know? Yes. During the height of the revival, we had one dear man, an evangelist, very well known in England, what was his background? His background was news. He'd been an outstanding, successful, if you can use the word, evangelist. And he was a convert of what was like a country. He converted many churches. He was a big man in the church. One morning, given the height of the revival, you know, we'd begun at half past six. Meetings would go on and on. And that particular day, because the meetings had been going on for a long, long time, about 11 o'clock in the morning, I turned to my wife and I said, look, I'm feeling very tired. I said, I think I'll go out. Go across to the house, and I'll drink a cup of milk or something. Yeah, go ahead. So I left the building, and as I was crossing the lawn to go to the house, I saw quite a number of people following me. So I stopped. I was able to help them. They were back to the chair. But these evangelists were following me. They were like people following at a distance. And I just kept an eye on them. I went to the house and opened up, and he came and stood right by the door, on the threshold. So I drew a chair near the table by the door. I sat there with a glass of milk. I looked to him and I said, oh, big, stroking fellow. Real big, big man. Standing there, wringing his hands. Now, if you see a thing like that, I tell you, it hurts. He was standing, and he couldn't say a word. And the tears were dropping onto his neck. And I sat there, and I told you, I saw it with him. He couldn't say a word. For quite some time, that glass, he shoved it right across him. I sinned against the church. Well, having broken, he was able to get his throat. He had done something against the church, which, of course, he had done. And after a while, I said to him, now you know what you should do. He said, if that's what I can't do, I'm the man that brought many of these people into salvation. I'm the man that held them up to their churches. How can I stand before the people and say I've done this? And more than that, you know, Paul talks about the deceitfulness. He did this. He called the little boy. And he said, my little boy, he said, I'm your father in God. I taught you the way of Jesus. I can teach you the way of God. Now, the way that God says, that when God forgives our sins, he forgets. He puts behind him. He doesn't forget, but he deliberately puts it away. Their sins and their iniquities are, remember, again, normal. Now, listen, little boy. I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to confess before God, and you listen. And when God has forgiven me, he forgets, in that sense. Now, don't you tell anybody. So he thought he got away with it. He thought, you see, by telling this young lad that God puts things out of his remembrance, there's no need to tell anybody. Our offering at that time coined the phrase, it came from John the Baptist, saying about Jesus, his hand is in his hand. But what our brethren said was, the whip of the Holy Ghost. And we have people testifying that they confessed things under the whip of the Spirit, that they would not have confessed under the whip of the chief. Can I tell you about something? I've seen people under the whip of the chief. They used to come to our clinic, and their bodies, their buttocks were lacerated, bleeding, open wounds. I've seen people dying under the whip. I believe people would say that they wouldn't confess under that. But when the Spirit of God came, they confessed. You know, I believe with all my heart what Jesus said is true, that on the judgment day, they will be redeemed. You see your sins in the light of the holiness of God. It's terrible. And this dear man couldn't face it. Well, talking for a little while, of course, at last he gave in. He said, all right, I don't care. So we walked arm in arm, over the lawn, down to the church. And can you imagine a meeting in revival? Most of the people now are reviled. Some of them still under conviction. There was a dear man there, standing before the reading desk, and he was trying to speak, and nobody listening, because some were singing, and some were shouting, and some were talking. So I stepped up to him and asked him to give a call. He sat down, and I clapped my hands, and I said, Pastor Ferdinand van Gogh wants to speak. That dear man took over the desk. He couldn't say a word. He thumped the desk, and at last he got peace. It was tremendous. When he told his story, oh, the writings, and the sufferings, and the prayers, it really was something. That did something to the people. Now what I was trying to say was, there's no such thing as a big sin and a little sin. Sin is sin. It was sin that put Jesus on the cross. And we must remember that. You don't play with sin. I repeat, God is light. Now in those days, the Word of God was powerful, mighty. We had saturated our people with the Word of God. Children had gone through our schools by the thousands by this time, and we had taught them thoroughly the Word of God. The Word of God was in the area. Amazing things happened. The revival at that time was on the mission station. The people from the outside hadn't come in yet. And on the mission station, the effect was everywhere on the bunch. There were people who had been through our schools, had learned the Word of God, gone out unconverted, grown up, married, children, and they had their gardens in the forests all over the place, a long way from the mission station. And during the revival, they weren't in the meetings, during the revival, alone, out there, isolated, they would suddenly remember Scripture that they learned when they were children. They were broken at bed, on their knees, alone, on their fields and gardens, crying the God from us. The Word of God was powerful. Some of the Scripture that we use with great power, Psalm 15, Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart. Another one is Psalm 24. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand, like Malachi did? Who shall stand in his holy place? And the answer is he that hath clean hands, and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. You know, when we read those Scriptures, he that hath clean hands, oh, you see, people fight with their hands because of things that they've done. Another Scripture we use of great power, when you bring your gift to the altar. There you remember your brother has something against you, leave your gift there, I don't want it, say, God, you're going to get rid of your brother. Then come. We learned this. You can't be right with God up there if you're wrong with your neighbor down here. Now those are some of the Scriptures that we use. Conviction of sin with people who are resistant to God was terrible. I've mentioned some of it. And as you read revival books, you find the same reports at court, for instance, Wesley, Whitfield, and here in Wales, going right back from the 1600s, 1700s, right up to 1904, there's a spate of revivals. Every 50, 60 years or so, there were revivals in this country. And the names that we're accustomed to here are Howell Harris, Daniel Roland, John Elias, and people of that kind. And more recently, of course, up in the Hebrides, Duncan Campbell. Duncan Campbell came here, told his story, and my brother was here, told his story, and they were all parallel. What we found is that this revival we witnessed in Congo was on a very close parallel with every revival we've read of. Particularly the 1859, 1904, and the more recent ones. And every revival that you read of in books, you read about shakings, frustrations, sobbings, and even coma. Now, wouldn't you credit that? I'll give you one instance. One evangelist, he's a pastor today, one evangelist, a very dear man of God, went into a coma. He was resisting. There's no need for this. If we judge ourselves, we shall not be judged. If we judge ourselves, and we're walking in the light, there's no need of this phenomenon. But this dear man was resisting, and he went into a coma. He was in and out of a coma for three days. So much so that his people and the members of his church were alarmed, and they put him into a native hammock, and they carried him in, coming to our mission station, hoping that we could help. They stopped in a little out church about a mile away from our mission station to have a rest before coming in. And whilst he was there, he came to himself, and he confessed some little thing. It wasn't a very big thing. He was very sensitive fellow. He confessed his sin, and he got right with God. You can imagine him coming in triumphantly to the mission station. So that's what happened. The people that thanked God. Some of the things that we saw in those days were terrifying. There was a lady on the mission station by the name of Maria. Mary? Maria? She paid a big price to step up for God. Her relatives had done her very badly. She came out of the mission station, lived with us for a long time, and we were so happy with her that we put her in charge of all the schoolgirls, all the dormitories. She was their mother. They called her mother. She was a lovely person. One day she snapped. She went absolutely mad. I won't go into all the details and take them on, but this woman came, she was a lunatic, to the point where she went around with a long machete knife trying to kill the children. She went around with a blazing torch trying to set fire to the dormitories and the houses. It's an awful story. One morning we were having our Bible readings and prayer and this woman came into the meeting and she was shouting and oh, it was terrible. She went out of the house, she went across to the house where I lived. When I was on the platform looking through the window, I could see the little veranda and our child, who was only a year old, was in the playpen on the veranda and Maria went straight across to where the child was. What was going to happen? At that moment I saw my wife coming out from the bedroom onto the veranda and I thought, oh, it's OK. She brought a chair and Maria sat on the chair. And the story is this. Maria fell asleep. I stopped the Bible reading and said, now look, all to prayer. Maria's over there. And we got to prayer. And whilst we were praying apparently, what happened was my wife was standing at her side, Maria's side. Maria woke up. She said to my wife, quite sanely, I've been asleep. And she said, do you know, she said, I've been mad. My wife knew that. And then she said, I'll tell you why I've been mad. And she had the New Testament in her hand. She opened the New Testament and in the New Testament was a photograph. It was a photograph of an unsaved Roman Catholic male nurse living in the hospital, the state hospital down in town. It was a married man with several children. She said, I promise this man I'll run away with it. Well, my wife tweeted with her to tear up the photograph and so on. No. We came out from the meeting, we went across. We tried, pastors tried. No. She put the photograph back, closed the book, doesn't matter what happened. I'm going to run away with it. It was a terrible situation. Well, we couldn't take the responsibility of her going around with a flaming thing because we had about 500 children then. So we called the relatives. They took her away and they dealt with her as they dealt with people in those days. They tied her hands and feet to a tree and they gave her medicine. They poured the medicine into her nostrils through her eyes, through her ears. They beat her and so on. Eventually she got free. I don't know how. She ran back on the mission station positively naked. And there she was running from the mission station there naked and the only people who could handle her, by the grace of God, were my wife and myself. And we got her settled in our house. We looked after her. And then one of the other missionaries, an older lady sent a note down to my wife Could you bring Maria up to me? I went to her and this lady said to her, Maria, I've got a word from the Lord for you. She repeated this after me. Forgetting those things which are behind and pressing forward, you know. And Maria repeated that time and time and time again and suddenly she stopped and she burst into tears. She opened her Bible, New Testament. She tore the photograph into pieces and she was gone. Then she became a soul winner. A great soul winner for God. Do you see what I'm getting at? You can't play with sin. Sin can drive a person to despair. Sin can drive a person to madness. Sin can drive a person to hell. That's what sin does. I repeat, the scripture that we had in those days was God is light and in him is no darkness at all. Now, I say again about this phenomena of shakings and frustrations and coma and all that kind of thing. Don't think too much of this and don't be afraid of it. It will pass. People say, well, that's revival when people get shakings and when people have all this. That's not revival. That's the effect of revival. That's only a little thing. Don't be afraid of it. It'll pass. I've been having letters from a journalist, not really a journalist, an author, writing books. He's on a research on the subject of phenomena in revival for this Catholic. And he's wanting me to give him instances of phenomena, and I refused. I said, I don't make anything at all of phenomena. What I'm after is the fruit of the revival. That's the important thing. The phenomena will pass, but the fruit, well, you find all that in revival, as a result of the revival. I have nothing at all to do with that. So don't be too alarmed when you get all this phenomena, all this excitement and emotionalism. Don't worry about that. Because if it's a true revival, it will pass. But the fruit of the spirit will remain. Now, let me quote something to you. In one of the Welsh revivals in 1985, there was a great revivalist by the name of David Morgan. And he gives this report of a revival. He said about some stalwart fellows, and, you know, it's tough just. Stalwart fellows from the mountains would moan as if crushed beneath stupendous burdens or pierced with swords. Some would weep as if their hearts were breaking. Others would fall into ecstatic swoons. Waves of power overwhelmed them. Most extraordinary physical effects accompanied their impact. Many leaped and danced in the exuberance of their rupture. The proprieties of a religious service were cast to the winds. There were loud outcries from souls in agony. Now, people would readily say, that's revival. No, no, no. Don't worry about that. A few months later, that revival has come back to that place. And this is what he said. A deep, genuine work of grace is going on. There is no excitement, but a deep, silent, awfully solemn impression prevails everywhere. Now, that's the truth. Now, I don't mind a little bit of excitement. I don't mind a little bit of emotion. I'm not perturbed. If people jump to their feet and want to sing and dance and raise their arms, hallelujah, that's fine. But, what about the fruit? That's the point. If you have both, well, that's grand, amen? But don't be perturbed with emotionalism. If it's true revival, it will pass. Now, let me get back, and I must hurry because the time is going on, to what I started with. The greatest impression that I still have about the revival was the sense of the presence of God. This is something you can't explain. You see, we live by faith and not by sight. But the spirit of God being present, you could say that you can feel it even though you can't touch it. I think there's a book in the library that used to be, it isn't now, by a man, dear man of God, called R.B. Jones. The name of the book is Rent Evans. He was a great friend of the founder of this college. He was in Port. He had a Bible college there. And he wrote an account of the 1904 revival because he was in it. And this is what he says. Phenomena, all this excitement, phenomena are mere incidents. The outstanding feature of those days was the universal, inescapable sense of the presence of God. That's what he said. Jonathan Edwards in 1775 said this. The town seemed to be full of the presence of God. Saying the same thing. Now there's a little booklet around here somewhere which is the story of the Congo Revival. It's called This Is That. And one of the missions says this in the book. We seem to be wrapped around with a very presence of God. You know, everybody says the same thing of every revival. The sense of the presence of God. Now when people came in onto our mission station from the outside, from the 130 churches they came in to see what was happening. It spread to them, of course, eventually. They talked and whispered, God is here. It was an awful sense. We had two atmospheres on the mission station. One was an atmosphere of heaven upon earth. People were full of love and joy and peace and singing. And on the other hand there was this awful atmosphere of darkness, people resisting God, an atmosphere of hell. And you have those two atmospheres together. This sense of the spirit of God, I said, people coming in from the outside and talking and whispers, was not only on the mission station, but down in the town. And the town was a very wicked place. A noted wicked place. You have a sense of the spirit of God in the shops, in the hospital, which is a Roman Catholic, and a state hospital, in the police barracks, in the soldier's quarters. It doesn't matter where you went, everybody was talking about God. This is the visitation. This is where God comes down, as we read in the Scripture. Remember that Scripture, Acts 3, 19, Peter says, repent ye therefore, be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. There it is. And revival is like that. A sense of refreshing from the presence of God. And it's not man-made or anything. Now, I'm not particularly emotional, plus I could do it a little bit more. I don't throw my arms up like some people have relief in doing. Bless them, it's right they should do it, if they want to do it. I'm not that kind of person. But I have been in meetings where I've not been able to sit on my chair. Not on myself, but the congregation. They were overpowering sense of God being there. You slip off your chair, you turn around, and you put your elbows on your chair, and there you are alone, in a crowd of people that are alone with God. Let me give you an illustration of it. You know, I read something that Duncan Cantor once said about the hush of the awful presence of God. I have a note in my diary that one morning, in the height of the revival, there was a knock at my door at twenty minutes past five in the morning. I wasn't there. I rolled out of bed, put on a dressing gown, dark, always cold in the tropics in the mornings. I went to the door, opened the door, and there was a dear man there. He was one of the workmen, a lay preacher, went out every Sunday, good, gracious fellow. He was standing there, and he only had a bit of a cloth around his waist, been holding himself because it was cold. And we were often knocked up at night to attend to sick people or take them to the hospital and so on, and I said, well, what is it then, Daniel? Daniel, I'm a guest here, you know. Daniel, what is it? Is your wife here? No. Is it your children? And he said, it was something else. I said, come inside. Shut the door, a little lantern, put it on the table. I said, now look, there are two chairs here, easy chairs, cushions, but you sit there and I'll sit here and talk. He looked at the chair and then he looked at the floor. I'm not fit to... Now there was a lovely Christian fellow. I'm not fit to sit on that chair. He said, I want to pray. I said, yes, of course. Now this is the first time I saw this too. Saw it many times afterwards. He went on his knees. I wonder if you've ever been like that. He couldn't get down low enough. Down he went, prostrate, flat on the floor. His arms outstretched and the palms of his hands down there, there he was. He couldn't go any lower. He sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and prayed for him. And then he had release. And he said something like what George said. Not an exact word, the same thought. I've heard of me. I've been taught of me. I know all about me. And now I see me. Oh, it was something. He brought me to see a dear brother flat on the floor that he spoke of. He was so full of the thought and the sense of the presence and the nearness of God because he couldn't stand before God. That was the kind of thing that we saw there. Then the revival spread. Spread throughout all our 130 churches. Spread, as I said, from mission station to mission station. How did it spread? Well, it spread mainly through revived people going and telling the story or by sending letters. I sent a letter to one of our evangelists just giving him a report of what was happening. And he was miles away from us on a very lonely place. And when he read the letter, they all went on their face. The whole congregation down on their face. Revival spreading like that with revived people. I'll go quickly. Some of the fruits of the revival I've just touched on. One was restorations. This was absolutely amazing. Our people were often called on to do jobs for the state. Like repairing bridges and do jobs on the road and so on. And they were given axes and hoes and spades and machete knives and so on to do the jobs. And crowds of them never thought of returning to the state for the state is rich. And they had these tools in their houses. They didn't deliberately steal them, but they didn't give them back. And then came the revival. Or the restoration or something. The people were taking things back to the Belgium officials at the administrative office in such quantities that one of the officials wrote me a letter. Mr. Davis, please can you help me? I haven't got time to attend to all this pile of people coming back. Can you tell your people to bring everything back to your mission station, fill your lorry and bring the load down. That's the kind of thing. I could keep you here all night telling the stories of restorations. But one funny little one. We have a house boy, dear man. He's in Iran yesterday. And his wife. A lovely person. During the revival she was tremendously blessed. She went under deep conviction, but anyway she got blessed. And one day she arrived at the front door. A basket full of eggs. And she was wanting the white lady, my wife. So she came and she said, I've come to give you these eggs. She told a story. What she used to do was when our chickens were laying eggs, she would steal the eggs, come round to our front door, sell the eggs to my wife. And then the revival came. But she had to restore the eggs. Lots and lots of stories like that. Some of the results of the revival I've already touched on and some of the phenomena. I could tell you a lot about that. I was happy with the phenomena if I could find something comparative in the Bible. Otherwise I'd refuse it. Because I had no room for anything of the flesh or anything that was evil. We had some things that were extreme, which of course is quite normal. I refused anything like that. But if I found it in the Word of God I was safe. For instance, lots of our people, lots of our people gave testimony to seeing a light. They saw a light in the room. They saw a light above the preacher. Some of these stories are really wonderful. I wasn't disturbed about that. People in prison. A light in the prison. Saw a Parsis, a light. Plenty of them. As I said, anything I found in the Word of God I was happy about. There was one interesting one. That was from my brother. He told me in his letter a story of a man living off the mission station, a pagan, who was evidently under conviction of sin but wouldn't give in. And one Sunday he went out of his house with a long machete knife, got to this wine palm to draw some wine from the palm, climbed up a tree, took his knife to make the incision and he was under conviction of sin and suddenly his arm froze. We've read about things like this in other revivals. And there he was with his arm upraised and the knife in his arm and he couldn't move it. He managed to take it down. He ran along the path to the village with his arm up and big knife into the church, revival meeting on. Can you imagine him running down the aisle with a big knife in his arm falling down in the front and confessing his sin, immediately losing it. My brother said, I'm concerned about this one. And I remembered something. It's in 1 Kings chapter 13. I think this is chapter 13. A story of King Jereboam. Yes, it's chapter 13. King Jereboam raised his arm against the altar and he couldn't bring his arm back. And he said, pray for me. And they prayed for him and his arm was released. Now, anything like that is found in the word of God. Another great fruit of the revival was the spiritual enlightenment. Elderly people who were sitting under your ministry, if you talked about very, very elementary things, they would listen. If you went into the deep things of God, they'd fall asleep. But during the revival and afterwards, you could give them all the depth that you've got. And they would take it and they could relay it to other people. Spiritual understanding. One of our preachers, a remarkable fellow, he had such spiritual understanding after the revival that when he was preaching, we had two visitors from the States, they came out to see the leprosy lab, were sitting there. He was preaching in one language. It was being interpreted into a second language. That gave me time to write out his sermon in English and pass it down to these friends. They were corn scouts who'd been preaching so long. And they collected them all. When they went back to America, they did, as I said, they wrote a book. And I've got the diary at home. And in it, they said what that man preached was of higher quality than what they had listened to from the Keswick platform up in the Lake District. This was a simple man who couldn't write, but he could read nothing more and he had this spiritual enlightenment. Well, I don't know. I haven't told you very much, but the time is good. There's one final thing that I said I would touch on, and that is church evangelism. When the church was revived, the whole church, everybody wanted to go out to evangelize. As I said, it wasn't the case of calling an evangelist and giving him a job to do. What happened was this. We found that in the area, on a given Sunday, every church was closed. The door was locked. Nobody would go into the church building. But the whole church thought he would move out and have the meetings somewhere else. Not like an open-air meeting, but an orderly service like they would have in a church building. And if they were invited to the chief's village, they'd go there. To another village wherever, a marketplace wherever, and during the week the men would go around and put up a temporary structure, bamboo poles and palm leaves on the top, and they'd have their meetings there. And what we found was that people who wouldn't come to a church building would go to that temporary building. And they were attracted by revived Christians. Now the revival in the beginning was limited to the church. Weeks went by without anybody getting converted. But now it's been all the way to the area. Now I don't want to give figures, I couldn't anyway if I tried. But I guess thousands of people got converted through a revived church. Now that gives you some idea of a revival, what it's like, some of the fruits of it. I was hoping to have given time to questions, but we can't do that now, it's ten past nine. But do you think we should close in prayer? Let's have a word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we hardly know what to say, except that we confess that we need a visitation from Heaven. We thank Thee for preachers, pastors, evangelists. Thank Thee for every effort that's put forth to win people to Christ, to preach the Word of God. But our Father, we need Thee to come. For that Thou wouldst our Heavenly Father, we pray that it may be the experience of many of us here. That one day, in Thy goodness and Thy providence, they may witness the wonderful workings of God. A God who hates iniquity and loves righteousness. Teach us these things. It will be done in these days. And if it pleases Thee, come again a moving, mighty power amongst the people.