The Saskatoon Revival by Bill Mcleod

I would like, first of all, to talk about the meaning of the word revival. It means different things to different people. To some, it's just a time of religious excitement to be frowned on.

To others, it's a series of evangelistic meetings. I recall reading about a Christian worker. He was driving, and he saw a sign in front of a church, and the sign said, Revival every night but Friday.

And he went about 50 miles, and he saw another church, and they had a sign in front saying, Revival every Friday night. So he thought if they could get together, they could have revival seven days a week. But it shows that people don't really understand, at least some do not understand what is meant by the word revival.

Actually, revival has to do with Christians, Christian people who are perhaps truly saved, walking with God to some extent, but more or less dead. In a time of revival, when God pours his spirit on his people, they come alive. They begin witnessing living holy lives, excited about God in a good way, in a good sense.

In 1962, I moved from Winnipeg, Canada, to Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, a distance of 500 miles, and I became pastor of what in Canada would be considered a fairly good church, size church, 175 members. That would not seem like a large church in the United States. I was happy to be there.

It was a good church. We had numbers of people in the congregation who were graduates of Bible schools, a bar cross school, or perhaps Three Hills, and others from other places, mostly young married couples. And they all loved God, they all loved evangelism, they all loved mission, but nobody did it.

And I wondered how to get this church on the road. So to begin with, after I'd been there about a year, I figured I knew the congregation fairly well, so I divided the congregation into five groups. I did this all on my own.

And then I gave each group a name, or a number, and then I let the congregation know what I had done, and I said, now Monday night, and I had a list on the bulletin board, check it out, see which team you're on, then you'll know once in every five weeks you and your team will be going out, door calling, trying to win people to Christ. So I thought that was pretty neat. And Monday came and went, nobody showed up.

I told them, if you don't feel capable of doing this, stay home and pray. So everybody stayed home and prayed. Nobody came.

So I thought, well, now the problem is they really don't know how to do it, so I'll have classes. So I had classes for eight weeks on how to win people to Christ. Then I did the same thing.

I had a good attendance, almost 100%. I mean, people had signed up. They were there every night for eight weeks.

And I said, now Monday night is Evangelism night. I expect to see you all here. We'll go out and talk to people about Jesus Christ.

But if you don't feel quite ready for that, you stay home and pray. And it happened again. Two people showed up, both of them shaking in their shoes.

And then it dawned on me they never had a heart for it. They didn't really want to do that. They didn't have a heart for it.

They weren't excited about God. They weren't really filled with the Spirit of God. So I began praying for revival.

Five years before the revival, which began in 1971, I talked to my deacons. I had ten deacons in the congregation. I asked them to meet with me every Saturday night at 9 o'clock for a half hour just to pray for revival.

They agreed with that. Then the Wednesday night prayer meeting, I used to tell the people the most important meeting of the week is the prayer meeting. So if you have to miss Sunday morning, that's okay.

If you have to miss Sunday evening, that's okay. But don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're dead. And I really pushed the prayer meeting.

And it grew from 25 to 50 to 75 to 100 to 125 to 150. It got up as high as 170. And it became the most exciting meeting of the week.

It wasn't revival, but it was certainly a path to revival. And people began sharing answers to prayer they were having, and people would share personal needs in the prayer meeting. Then we started having children's prayer meetings in connection with the Wednesday night prayer meeting.

So finally we had 30 or 40 children attending, and we divided them into two groups and had an adult with each group in a different room. And they trained the children to run their own prayer meetings, and the kids just loved it. This meant more people could come to the prayer meeting because the kids were in prayer meetings.

And then we ended every Sunday evening service with a half hour of prayer. And I explained to the people, it will not be longer than 30 minutes. We just want to meet and pray for revival in our church.

So 30 or 40, 50 people maybe might stay behind to pray. Then we had a prayer wheel and a bulletin board of the church divided into pie-shaped wedges, 15-minute wedges. And each person was to pray about it and then sign his or her name in a slot that they would take the time, day or night, to pray 15 minutes for revival every day of the year.

Pretty soon we had the whole 24 hours taken up and sometimes more than one name in a time slot. And then I suggested, see, if I had done all this at once, it wouldn't have been too heavy a burden. The people couldn't have carried it.

But as we did one thing, they got more of a spirit of prayer. And then there's a verse in the Bible that speaks about God in Zechariah pouring on his people a spirit of grace and supplication. One translation says, a spirit of grace to supplicate.

That is, there is such a thing as a spirit of prayer. Now Phinney, the evangelist, said that if he ever lost a spirit of prayer, he could not converse effectively with individuals or congregations either. He made much of the spirit of prayer, which he looked on as being a gift from God, to enable God's children to pray.

And that happened to us. People began telling me, you know, last night God waked me, I prayed for 45 minutes. Well, I used to be prayed out in five minutes.

Not anymore. And we began hearing reports like this. And this went on.

And then we had cottage prayer meetings. And we just, we emphasized, we used to tell people, don't worry about the food getting cold. When you're asking a blessing over the meal, if you feel like praying for revival, pray for revival.

And so people began doing that as well. So there was a real spirit of prayer all through the congregation. And we had invited Ralph and Lucitara to come from Mansfield, Ohio.

That's where they lived then. And they arrived. And we started on a Wednesday night.

We were planning to go for a week and a half. We had to go for seven weeks. Meetings every night, then moving from one auditorium to larger buildings to accommodate the crowds.

But I remember that first meeting, the church would seat about 300. And probably the first meeting we had maybe 125 or something there. And five people responded.

And God began working in that first meeting. Two ladies who had been warring got together and straightened things out. And that was a harbinger of what was to come.

By Saturday, we couldn't accommodate the crowds. The church was packed to the doors. There was an Anglican church just three blocks away.

They could seat about 500 or 600. I contacted the pastor. He said, We never have any evening meetings at all.

You can have the church as long as you want. So we moved there. I think it was on Monday.

And we were packed. We had about 100 people. We didn't know what to do with.

So we asked all the young people in the meeting to come and sit on the platform. They had a huge platform. Just sit on the floor so the kids liked that, you know.

And they were sitting all over the platform. And then the next night was worse. There was about 800 there.

So we had to move again. So we contacted the Alliance pastor. This was very interesting because to the Alliance people, the missionary, the annual missionary conference is a real sacred call.

They don't give that up for anything. They already had missionaries in Saskatoon preparing for that time. And they closed it all down and opened their building to us because many of their people were being blessed in the meetings.

So we moved there. But in two nights, we could get about 1,000 in there. In two nights, that was too small.

So we moved to the largest church building in the city, which would seat maybe 1,700. And we were only there. Well, the first night we were there, we were not only packed to the doors.

We had some hundreds of people outside trying to get in. So I asked my people to leave and go to a neighboring church. And I said, I'll have a meeting with you down there.

So my people left, and then people from the street came back in. They had the same problem. An interesting thing happened then.

A caretaker came to me, and he was actually not a Christian guy. He was actually a Christian. He said, You can't have this many people in this building.

The fire marshal will close this place down. Well, he got saved a few days later. Then he said, Hang them on the legs.

Get them in anyhow. So that was neat. And then we had to start having double services, an early service and a late service.

And then when it came to Sunday, that was too small. So we moved to the Centennial Auditorium, seeing 2,200. We had double services there.

We went for seven weeks. Well, that's speaking the statistics of at least one side of the statistics that went on. What really happened? I don't know how to handle that.

There was a tremendous spirit of restitution. Chief Kettles was the chief of police in Saskatoon at the time. He issued a statement to the Star Phoenix, the daily newspaper in Saskatoon.

And he said, I'm not a religious person, but I do know the difference between normal church work and revival. And revival has come to Saskatoon, I know, because people are coming to us on their own and confessing crimes. He said, We've never had this happen before.

This is what happens, I know, he said, when revival comes. We had heard a few little things, but we didn't know to what extent. And then people asking forgiveness publicly, sometimes in tears before large crowds, confessing their failures and their sins and asking for forgiveness and prayer.

We had a ladies' meeting one day. There were 800 ladies showed up. It went on for hours with different people testifying and some of us bringing short messages.

And through that whole period of time, ladies were leaving, sometimes two, sometimes 10 or 12 at a time, and going off to the prayer room to have a meeting with God because he had spoken to their hearts. And then people began talking about answers to prayer, things they'd prayed for for years. They were seeing happen constantly, day after day.

Just everybody you talked to almost had exciting things to talk about when it came to answers to prayer, people being converted. Two young men, both around 18 or 19, they did not like what they saw happening. And so one day they were talking on the phone, and one of the fellow's mothers, she shouldn't have been, but she was listening in on the conversation, and it went like this.

This revival thing is a bunch of hysteria, and remember, we're not getting involved. Okay, we're not getting involved. We have to go Sunday morning because our parents will put the pressure on us, but that's all.

Okay, we're not going forward. Remember, yes, they promised each other they wouldn't go forward. Well, Sunday morning came.

I didn't know a thing about this until much later, and one of these fellows, the deacons came and said, The Phil wants to be saved, but we can't do anything with him. I said, Bring him into my office and I'll talk to him. So he knelt at my desk, and he kept shaking his head, just saying, No way, no way, no way.

I knelt beside him and waited, and I said, Phil, what's on your heart? And finally he finished the sentence. He said, No way can I ever doubt the reality of Jesus. So he spoke to my heart.

He broke me. I've been saved. The other kid went forward on the other side of the church and got saved.

He's now a civil engineer living in Denver, Colorado, walking with God. So much for their promises to each other. And then a tremendous spirit of love and understanding and forgiveness, and there were two men in my church.

They had never, well, they hadn't spoken together for two years. They used to sing duets. They hadn't sung duets for, I understand, 10 or 12 years.

I hadn't been there that long and didn't know that. And so they operated by hand signals to third parties. One of them went forward.

They were both graduates of a Bible college, by the way, and they were both in their 40s. One of them went forward and God took to his life, and I said to him, Sam, I think you and your brother need to get together and get things straightened out. And he said, God's been telling me that too.

So then I talked to his brother and the three of us. Well, I took a deacon with me, Ken Merritt, and we went down in the lower atome. We told the church Sunday morning what we were going to do.

You people pray. So we went downstairs, and the one brother sat here, and Sam went over and put his hand out and said, My dear brother, can you forgive me? And he sat like this. And he said, Yeah, it's about time you came.

No forgiveness at all, you see. And so I put a truckload of Bible verses on him. It didn't mean anything, you know.

So then I said to Ken, Ken, let's pray for God to speak to this guy. So we knelt and prayed, and while we were praying, God broke him. I can't explain it here.

He ran to the wall. He was kicking the wall with his feet and beating it with his fists and begging God to have mercy on his soul. He had not been living a Christian life.

He'd been a Christian for years, but he'd been living in some sin, and he just poured out a fountain of stuff that was bottled up inside. And at one point he was running around. Ken and I thought he was going to jump on us.

He didn't. He was just so wrought by the Spirit of God. He kept on and on, and we just prayed and thanked God.

And then there was silence, and I looked, and he had the light of heaven on his face. So I looked at him, caught his eye, and pointed to his brother, who was standing over here that was back to us. And he ran over and almost cracked his ribs.

He grabbed him and lifted him off his feet, and they made everything right. Then we went upstairs, and the congregation got their feet and turned to face us, and these two brothers went marching down the aisle. We just let them go.

I stood at the back, and they marched to the front and turned around, and they told the congregation what had been going on, how they'd made things right. They wanted the congregation to forgive them. And then the wives came running because the wives had been fighting, and then the kids from both families came running.

Finally, there was two families. They knelt in a big circle at the front of the Church with their arms around each other, asking each other's forgiveness, getting right with God. And I'm standing at the back, and my heart is going thump, thump, thump.

I said, Man, what a beautiful way to die, you know, watching this kind of stuff. Anyway, we'd never seen anything like that before. It was just revival.

The Spirit of God was in control, and He was doing some marvelous, marvelous things. We had meetings where you'd sing a song. You'd open the meeting with a song.

Before you got to the second verse, there were 40 people kneeling at the front, seeking the face of God, not even an invitation. This commonly happened. And in meetings on one occasion, Sherwood Wirt, who at that time was editor of Billy Green's Decision magazine, he heard from Leonard Ravenhill that there was a revival in Canada.

He phoned me and asked where. I said, Well, right now we're in Winnipeg. And so he said, I'm coming down for a night.

And so he was in that meeting in Elam Chapel in Winnipeg that night. And we had rented the building. The building's ceiling was about 1,200.

We had no churches cooperating. This is not how you operate. That's what we did in times of revival.

We just rented the building, had a few spot announcements on radio. We had a revival team from Saskatoon in town. And the first night, we had 600 people there.

And before long, it was packed to the doors. And the night Sherwood Wirt was there was very, very unusual. People were coming forward all the while I was speaking and kneeling at the front and praying.

And then the whole front of this church was crowded with people kneeling. We needed more room. So then we filled the choir loft.

And then we filled the platform in the choir loft. And still more people were coming. So I asked the first row to vacate the seats so people could kneel.

And they did that. And then we did the second row. Then we did the third row.

And that's where Sherwood Wirt was sitting. And Sherwood came up to me and he said something like this. I've been involved with Billy Graham in the largest sense of revival or of evangelism, he said.

I've never seen revival. This is revival. Then he told me how his wife needed revival and how not Billy Graham, Billy's clean, he said, but some of the people in the organization need revival.

And then I just didn't say anything. I just looked at him and finally he said, and I think I need revival. And Sherwood Wirt experienced revival during those Canadian revival days.

He wrote a book about it called The Afterglow. He just laid his heart on the table and tells how God broke his heart and then three months later or so broke his wife's heart and she got straightened out with God. And he said on the telephone three months later, our home was like heaven.

It wasn't like that before. Anyway, God was working in people's hearts and evangelists, missionaries, Sunday school teachers, Sunday school superintendents, leaders. I think one of the reasons why so many ordinary people responded was because the leaders were responding.

Three preachers came to see me before one of the meetings and they said, God has shown us how wicked our hearts are. We can't even preach again. If God doesn't do anything in us, all of us are leaving the ministry.

I said, don't leave the ministry, just get honest with God. You ask God to search your heart, we'll pray for you. And all three of those men met with God.

And I just want to tell you something about one of these men. He went back to his church and shortly after he led a fellow to Christ who had just come from Scotland, an electrician. And so this electrician paid for this brother, this preacher who was going to quit the ministry, he paid for him to fly to Scotland and gave him a list of his relatives to go and visit and try and win him to Christ.

And he went over there and led 15 of this guy's relatives to Christ in Scotland. This was one of the side things that happened. By the way, this will be interesting probably to you also.

In the first year after revival in western Canada, the Alliance Phenomenon reported a 100% increase in the number of souls saved in that 12-month period to any previous year. One of the Baptist group reported for the first time in their history they went over the top in meeting their financial budget. They'd never done that before.

The western tract mission which had headquarters in Saskatoon and had some 3,000 tract distributors around the continent, a few in foreign countries, they reported almost a 300% increase in the number of tracts distributed in that 12-month period after revival. So it had an impact on the people in many, many different ways. Then we had a fellow in our church.

He was originally from Russia, came over when he was 14 with his dad. He had to escape from Russia under communism. I think his father was dead at this time.

He was now a grown man and married. God touched his life in the revival. He got involved in sending carloads, that's boxcar loads of clothing and food to people in Russia.

I talked to him quite recently and asked how many cartons. Like these cartons are the size of a boxcar. And he had sent, I think he said 24 cartons to Russia so far.

And it cost about, I think, $10,000 to send one. And people were helping him. He had not been involved in anything of this nature before revival, but he got launched in this at that particular time.

Then Gordon Bailey, I must tell you about Gordon. He was a member of our church for six years. He'd been a cowboy.

He'd worked as a body shop worker and was at that time, at the time of the revival, he was employed, I think, as a cattle inspector for the Saskatchewan government. Anyway, he'd been a Christian for six years, never tried to win a soul to Christ. He was always in church, usually in prayer meeting, but nothing beyond that.

And then one Sunday morning God had been speaking to him and he came to the front of the congregation and he stood by the communion table and he said something like this. He said, you know, I've been a Christian for six years. I've never tried to win a soul to Christ.

He said, I've been sitting in the back pew because I hate some of you people. I've been shooting arrows of hatred at the backs of your heads. I don't want to do that anymore.

I want to be forgiven. Can you forgive me? Well, the heads were nodding up and down and the tears were flowing. Then he said, I want to be right with God.

And so I asked my deacons to take him into my office and pray with him, and they did. And he went home, and here's what he did when he got home. Listen carefully, because the Bible twice says in James 4 and 1 Peter 5 that if you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, he will exalt you, he'll lift you up in due time.

So Gordon got home and he got his wife and his three kids and set out four chairs. Then he asked each child to forgive him for being such a poor Christian and such a poor father. And he asked his wife to forgive him for being such a poor husband.

He told me, he said, you know, Pastor, it was the hardest thing I ever did in all my life, but I felt I had to do it to be honest with God and to be honest with them. How did God respond to that? That very night after he did this, he was working in the barn. He had heard of Black Angus cattle, about 50 cattle beasts, and he was working in the barn, and here's what he told me.

I heard this a number of times because he traveled with me on occasion and gave his testimony in meetings before he began conducting meetings of his own. But he said that night he was working in the barn, and he said, when God the Holy Ghost filled me from top to toe, he didn't speak in tongues, he didn't have any ecstatic experience of that kind, but he knew that the Spirit of God had filled him. He began soul winning, and the next nine months he led 30 people to Christ.

Then he started getting invitations to speak on weekends in churches, and one year speaking on weekends, he had spoken 105 times in different churches in western Canada. Then he started getting invitations from the United States. He only had, I think, grade 8 education and no time in Bible college.

He didn't read a book on how to do it. He just had a meeting with God and got his sin cleaned up and began walking with God. He had meetings in Vancouver.

He told me the power of God was so strong he was almost afraid to say anything or do anything because God was working so powerfully, just breaking people. And then he was in meetings one time, he told me he gave an invitation and two men came forward. He dismissed the congregation, went into a back room to pray with these men, came out 30 minutes later, the whole congregation was still sitting there.

Nobody had left. They were all under conviction of sin. And so he counseled the whole congregation as one person, and people were kneeling, crying, and seeking the face of God.

And the hand of God was just on this man. As a cattle inspector, he loved it because he was with men all the time, and so he had many opportunities for sharing the gospel. On one occasion he was asked to speak at an international gathering of cowboys, I think in Calgary, and they had a Sunday service for cowboys, had Gordon as a speaker, they had a couple of tents set up where counseling could be done for people that responded.

So many cowboys wanted to be saved, they couldn't even handle it. But nothing like this had happened before. But remember the promise, if you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, whatever he asks you to do, not what someone else asks you to do, what he asks you to do, you do that, you humble yourself, and God will exalt you.

He'll pick you up, he'll lift you up, he'll give you a ministry of whatever kind. I mean, Gordon wasn't in full-time ministry, but he's doing more than most people in full-time ministry, just on Sundays. And then people were called into full-time service.

Before the revival I had a young man as an assistant in Saskatoon, and after he'd been there a short while it seemed he was not sitting in too well. We found it hard to figure out, and finally the deacons and I had a meeting. We decided that we should probably ask him to resign, which we did, and he did.

And he left, didn't create any fuss or anything, he just left. And then several years went by, and one night after the revival, he phoned me long distance and said, God told me last night I'd never been born again. And he said, Can I come to Saskatoon? And so we told him to come.

I got some men together, and we knelt with him in the office. I'll never forget that. He knelt there, Dennis Johnson.

And we all prayed for him, and then he prayed, and he was praying, and suddenly he just wept and he cried, God is real! God is real! He kept hollering, God is real! God is real! And he's still walking with God. And so things like this were happening. In some cases where liberal preachers found Christ in some of these meetings.

And there were people coming and saying, My priest is in the meeting tonight, he's wearing other clothes, he doesn't have his frock on, but he's here. And so things like this were happening. I remember a lady, she was a Roman Catholic, and high up in the Catholic church that is, she was in education, and she was saved at that particular time.

Found Christ as her personal Savior. So God was no respecter of persons from many different religious backgrounds, people were finding Christ. Interesting though, seven weeks, and not once in seven weeks was a gospel message preached.

I mean, the gospel was not preached once in seven weeks, but it was referred to. I mean, most of the messages that we had, Ralph and Lou, they would say something about the gospel and the message, but the messages were to Christians. When Christians are right with God, He has no problem reaching the lost, and they knew that.

And so people were being saved in every meeting because Christians were getting revived, and people... I'll give you an example. There was a lady, they called her Mrs. Bible because she knew her Bible so well, and she was attending her meetings. This was after the revival in Saskatoon because we were going all over the country, myself and other pastors and other people holding revival meetings.

And I was in Brandon, Manitoba. There were ten churches that went together for meetings. We still went for three weeks, had a wonderful time there.

And this woman was attending the meetings, and one night during the sharing time, we always had a sharing time in the meeting when people had been revived would come to the pulpit and tell what God had done in their life. So we made the rules very clear. We said, look, don't preach and don't be long.

If you can't find the landing field, we'll help you come down. We warned them. And so this lady got up to give a testimony, but she got preaching, and so we stopped her and asked her to sign off.

We did it as gently as possible, and she was very sweet about it and went to her seat, but inside she was seething with anger. And she went home and told her husband what happened. He wasn't a Christian.

None of her kids were Christians, and that's one thing she couldn't understand. Everybody else knew how she knew her Bible well, but her own family didn't believe it. And so she was really upset about that.

But she told her husband, I will never go back to those meetings again. I will never give my testimony in public again. Well, this happened on Monday or Tuesday.

She was back on Thursday, because in the meantime God had been working in her heart and showing her the monstrous pride she had. So when she came Thursday night, she came to the pulpit, and she confessed her pride, and she just wept, and she said, I've been filled with stinking pride, and I need to be forgiven. Can you people forgive me? She said, you know, I may know my Bible well, but I don't know my own heart well or God well either, and she asked for forgiveness.

And do you know what happened? All her family, her three kids and her husband, found Christ as their Savior within seven days. You see, they were not rejecting the Christ of the Bible. They were rejecting the Christ they saw in her.

They saw the pride, and they didn't want that kind of a Christ. And I say that because many times the problem is not for the unsaved people we're praying for. The problem is in our own hearts that we're not walking.

We're not a light. We're not shining for Christ the way we should be. We're full of pride or whatever, or self-seeking, and consequently God can't use us.

And that's a major problem. It was certainly in her life. There are many things like that happening around the country.

One pastor, I remember, he came one night to give his testimony, and he got to the Pope, and he briskly broke down and began to weep, and he said, you know, many of you people have been giving testimonies and telling how you had something against me, the pastor, and he said it was fine at the start, but then I began to wonder how come all these people had something against me? Maybe there's something wrong in me. So he said one night I asked God to show me if there's anything wrong in me, and he said he showed me and was just filled with pride. And then he took about ten minutes because he wept so much he could hardly speak as he confessed his pride to the congregation and asked their forgiveness.

And that precipitated a powerful movement in the whole congregation at that particular time. So God was at work one night. A boy, maybe eight or nine years of age, came running up on the platform right to the pulpit, and so Ralph Sotero moved over and let him have the mic, and this kid began to preach, and he was very overcome.

He was weeping, but he was begging the sinners to give their hearts to Jesus and begging the Christians to deal with their sin and get right with God, and then he couldn't say anymore. He just stood there crying. So his dad came up and took him by the arm and led him back to his seat.

And nobody thought this was unusual, but nobody thought it was wrong because obviously God had spoken through this kid. And in times of revival you can't tell God how to handle it. You have to just back off.

Let me tell you something that happened to me in one of the meetings where God was so powerful it worked. I didn't hear a voice. I didn't see anything.

Don't misunderstand me. But I had powerful impressions on my heart, and God was saying something like this. There's a coffin here on the platform.

I want you to climb into it and lay there. Now, you can keep the lid open, but if you get out of the coffin, everything stops. Don't get in my way.

You just lay there and watch. Watch what I'm doing. And so in that kind of a sense, I realized I'm not to get in God's way.

Just let him do what he's doing. And so God was working this heart and working that. Somebody come and give a testimony of what God had done for them, and then God might want us to give an invitation right then.

Has anybody here been spoken? You come and say six, eight people would come to kneel at the altar after having heard this testimony and maybe before preaching. Sometimes there was no time for preaching at all. But only in seven weeks, there was only maybe two or three nights where there was no preaching, where God was working so powerfully.

That was in Saskatoon. And mostly there was preaching in perhaps 40 minutes of preaching Bible truths directed to Christians. Now, I said something a little while ago about God having no problem saving sinners when Christians are right with God.

Let me give you an example. I was down in Buenos Aires in Argentina, and there were six Baptist groups that met together. They used to get together one... There are six different Baptist groups.

They'd meet together once a year for a fellowship weekend. They were meeting in Rosario, which is a city of a million and a half, I think, in Argentina, and for a weekend, now it's a speak. And here's how God set this thing up.

The year before I came, when they had their annual get-together, when they compared notes, they discovered that the average church in those six Baptist groups had only won two people to Christ in a whole 12-month period. And so they had a time of confession. They confessed to God, this is terrible, we need revival.

So here's what they did. Now, listen carefully, because God did something very unusual here. They set up a committee who was to arrange dates for the following year when they were going to meet together, where they would meet, when they would meet, and the dates.

And then they told the committee, you're not to choose a speaker. You're just to pray, and we'll all pray that God will send someone to us that knows something about revival. I didn't know anything about them.

They didn't know a thing about me. So I get down there, and I spoke at a Southern Baptist seminary in Buenos Aires, and a professor came running up after us and said, what are you doing this weekend? And he mentioned this weekend. I got my book on it.

He said, it's the only weekend I don't have anything. Why? I was there for two months, you know. And it was that weekend when they were having their annual get-together.

And so God, he just put that whole thing together that was wonderful. And so, of course, I was speaking through an interpreter. I couldn't give the invitation because the church received a thousand or more.

It was packed to the doors, people standing at the back and the chairs in the aisles and all this, and so we couldn't give invitations. So in the last meeting, I simply said, if God has spoken to your heart and you need to be saved, stay behind. One of us leave.

If you're a Christian and God has spoken to your heart and you want to experience the infilling of the Spirit of God, you stay behind. About 700 people stayed behind. The interpreter got so excited, he was jumping up off the floor.

It was kind of difficult to handle from the platform, 700 people. We did the best we could. I'll give you one example of what happened in that meeting.

A pastor got touched by God, went back to Buenos Aires. He had a Baptist church of about 500 people. He began praying day and night.

I think he fasted and prayed for several days and actually for a week or two in all for revival. And revival broke. And everybody in the congregation was touched and revived by God.

And it was a good thing because one of the men in his testimony confessed he had been planning to shoot the preacher. I don't know what the details were or why, but that's the feeling he had. So if they hadn't had a revival, they'd have had a dead preacher.

And so then after the church got touched, listen carefully, 200 sinners were saved in two weeks with no special meanings at all. Sinners were knocking on the door of this pastor day and night. It was so hectic, he phoned the previous pastor to come down and help him gather in the harvest.

And 200 sinners got saved with no special meanings at all. But when the Christians were right, God had no trouble saving sinners. And most of these sinners knew people that had been revived and they saw the change in these Christians that they'd known for years and they saw this excitement, this godly excitement, and so they came under conviction.

And we had numbers of cases like that where when the church got right, God had no trouble saving sinners. In one church where this happened, the pastor said, you know, in a year we might see 20 people saved or less than that. Since revival came, we have seen from one in 20 people saved every week of the year.

But the church was right, so revival is needed so churches can be right with God. I came across a book. The title of the book was A History of American Revivals of Religion.

The author was Reverend Calvin Colton. It was published in 1832. There were great revivals in the United States in the early part of the 1800s.

And he was getting inquiries from England, so he wrote this book. As a matter of fact, he went to England for some meetings and realized he could never cover all the churches, so he wrote a book and then sent copies to England. And some things he said were this.

Revival never came to a church that was not expecting revival and believing God for revival. It never failed to come to churches that believed God it would come. So he said, fasting, praying, preaching, believing God for revival, and revival would come.

He said we were never happy or satisfied. We were happy but not satisfied with twos and threes finding Christ. We kept praying for God the Holy Ghost to come.

And when he came, he took the work out of our hands and he made the whole community aware of God. And then people were saved by the hundreds. I understand this old book is being reprinted.

I don't know under the same title or not, but I know it has been reprinted somewhere in the United States. But it's a very challenging, interesting book, the way that God was working. He worked in the beginning of those revival meetings in an independent way.

Churches that were not expecting revival suddenly experienced revival. This was happening for a period of time until Christians found out what revival meant and how to work towards revival. And then that type of revival phased out.

And the revivals that followed were every bit as powerful as the other revivals have been. But Christians had learned how to do it. Stoddard, if some of you will know who he was, related to Jonathan Edwards, he experienced in 35 years, he experienced five revivals in his church.

But other churches were not experiencing revival. So a bunch of pastors had a meeting with Stoddard to ask him the secret of revival. And he said, God is not favoring us because we're any better than you.

But we expect revival. We pray for it. We fast for it.

We believe God for it. You don't do any of those things. You're waiting for something to happen.

We're waiting for something to happen too, but we're believing God for it. We're preaching towards it. And that was the difference.

And I think there is a very important lesson for us to learn here. We didn't know when revival came in Saskatoon what God was doing. We didn't really know much about revival.

I'd read books about it. I had an idea. But I quickly learned, stay out of the way.

Watch what God is doing. Ralph and Lucifer were so sensitive to God they were a marvelous example to all of us, not only being good preachers, but good organizers, very sensitive to what God was doing. And they're so sensitive.

I remember one Sunday morning, God waking me early in the morning and he gave me two revival messages. And later that day, Ralph told me, he said, now you're preaching at both services tonight. I said, really? What do you mean? Because evangelists never ask the pastor to preach in meetings they're conducting.

But God had given me those two messages. So that night, I preached twice. And then sometimes they asked Walter Bolt, who pastored the large Alliance Church in Saskatoon, asked him to preach, and he did.

And of course, what Ralph and Lucifer were doing, they were trying to train us in this kind of thing so we could carry on because they knew they weren't going to be there forever, maybe seven weeks as it turned out. So a lot of broken marriages were restored. There were people that had been divorced that were remarried.

This happened in numbers of cases and meetings in Saskatoon and other places as well. And I remember one case so well. This gal, she'd been through, I think she said four doctors and three psychiatrists or maybe four psychiatrists and three doctors.

I don't remember, but there were seven altogether. And they'd given up on her. She had emotional problems.

They couldn't help her. And finally, the one doctor said, we're going to try hypnotism. And if that doesn't help, there's nothing else on the shelves.

We don't know what to do. Well, before she took that last, she met God in revival. And she went to see the doctor.

And so he talked about a few things. Then he said, well, now we'll hypnotism. No, she said, I don't need that.

We said, what do you mean you don't need it? She said, I've been revived. What do you mean you've been revived? Explain this to me. That's what she told him.

And after listening to her for a while, he simply said, well, something has happened. I don't understand it. This is wonderful.

And one night, an unconverted psychiatrist was in one of those meetings. And he heard the testimonies of different people. And this woman gave her testimony that night.

And afterwards, this psychiatrist said, I wish her story could be written and published in a book in every language in the world. He said, I've never heard anything like that. And so God was just touching people who maybe didn't come forward in the meetings.

They were just sitting there, maybe not even in the meetings, but they talked with Christians themselves. And if something, they'd be revived just in their homes or driving a car. We had cases where people left the meeting, got in the car, drove a half a block, and found they couldn't coordinate to drive the car safely.

So they came back in the meeting and asked for prayer and met with God. And then they were able to drive their car home. We had things like that.

I had one custodian in a certain building when he told me, I can't coordinate to sweep a floor. You guys are going to have to pray for me. And so we prayed for him.

He couldn't even coordinate to sweep a floor. And people were confessing to stealing, to lying, to being unfaithful. I got a phone call during those days of revival in Saskatoon and one of my men was on the phone.

He worked in the university and he was weeping and he said, I must see you. So he came running into my office. Fifteen minutes later, he ran in, fell on his knees at my desk, and he was just weeping and the water was running from his eyes across the desk.

And I knelt beside him. I thought maybe something terrible has happened to him, his wife, his kids or something. And finally he told me what happened.

He'd been sitting at his office desk and here's what he said. The spirit of God tore my heart wide open and he showed me every sin I'd ever committed from the time I was a kid until this present day. He said, Pastor, it was just like looking into hell itself.

He said, I can't explain it. He said, it's terrible. He said, you know, I was not faithful to my wife on one occasion.

I've got to make this right with my wife. I falsified a workman's compensation form in Regina. I've got to go back.

I've got thousands of dollars. I've got some guys to lie for me that I was hurting a job. I wasn't hurting a job.

I was hurting a parson. I've got thousands of dollars anyway. I've got to go and make that right.

And then here's what he said. I don't care if I lose my wife and family. I don't care if I lose my job.

And I don't care if I go to jail. But I can't stand the pressure of God on my soul. Now that's revival.

That's revival. He wasn't even in a meeting when this happened. And so when the Spirit of God is working, it's a totally different story.

And this is revival. God's children being touched by God and made to see their sin. We often, when we sing that song, O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee.

Send a revival. Start the work in me. But we don't really mean it, you know.

And we're not being honest with God. He talks to us about our sins. We don't do anything about it.

And we just still keep praying for revival. And so the history of revival shows they don't all follow the same pattern, but they do follow the same pattern in some respects. There's always deep and powerful conviction of sin on the part of Christians.

And when Christians start getting right with God, then God has no problem saving sinners. The problem with sinners, they've seen Christians. They don't like what they see.

They're not impressed by the way we live. We live so close to the way the world lives there's hardly any difference. We're selfish with our money.

We buy all kinds of things we don't really need. And I remember in meetings one time it was a Flames of Freedom rally a weekend. And I found a room over an organ loft.

And this room had nothing but pails and mops. So I didn't worry about that. I got a chair in there.

And then in between the sessions, I spoke a number of times. But in between the sessions, I did nothing but pray. I fasted and prayed the whole weekend.

I never took a meal even. And just sought the face of God. And in that last meeting, God did something unusual.

I finished the meeting. And then I turned to Ralph Satero and asked Ralph to close the meeting. And Ralph closed the meeting.

And afterwards he said, Were you not aware of what God was doing down there? Well, I said, I didn't sense anything. Why? And he said, We should have got all those people on their faces. He said, God just broke this place up, you know.

And then we began hearing what happened after the meeting. One doctor had a huge house. He sold this house and gave the money to missions and built a house big enough for himself and his wife.

He had several vehicles, sold some vehicles, put the money into missions. Then he sold a bunch of stuff he had that he didn't really need. Made everything right with God.

Began living as a Christian should live. And then people were called into full-time service. And God just broke up all kinds of people's hearts, you know.

And this is what revival is like. And it's not ordinary church work. It's a special time when God works and God speaks.

I will hear, for 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, it says. Will thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee? Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me. The Lord will perfect that which concerns me.

And so we need to be praying that prayer, Search me, O God. There's much else we could say. Churches being revived.

One interesting thing happened. We got kind of an SOS from a group of churches in Colorado. They said there's six or eight churches that want to go together.

Can you send a team down? We didn't have any preachers available. They were all on the road. At least most of them were on the road somewhere.

So we sent two revived farmers down. And so they went down just revived farmers. And they had a week of meetings, and people were saved, and people were revived.

And then there was a truck driver in Winnipeg. He was on our meetings. He was new from Germany.

His English was not the best, but he was driving truck interstate into province. He was down in the states somewhere on a Sunday morning, and he drove into a little church and walked in truck to close and all. At the door somebody asked him who he was.

He said, I'm just from Canada. I'm a truck driver. And they said, well, we heard there's a revival in Canada.

Yeah, he said, I just got revived last week. So this guy tells the pastor. And the pastor gets excited.

He goes to the pulpit and he says, hey, God has sent us a man from Canada who was just revived last week. He's going to come and tell us all about it. So this truck driver, he goes up to the pulpit, and there's broken English.

He told them the whole story. And then here's, you know, God made him so wise, this guy, you know. He somehow gave invitations, so he did the same thing.

And he gave an invitation for people to come forward to meet with God. And the place was flooded with people. When he came back to Winnipeg, he gave his testimony in one of our meetings.

The guy was so excited. It was hard to understand at times, you know. His English was poor, but he let us know.

Man, there were so many people at that altar. He said, I was praying with them people until 2 in the afternoon. Truck driver.

So God was using anybody whose heart was aflame, you know, and open to him. And it says about the Lord Jesus, if you should write everything that he did, the world couldn't contain the books. And in a sense, that will be true of the revival, too, because thousands of lives were touched and churches were changed and people were called into full-time Christian work and homes were healed and all this kind of thing, not only in Saskatoon, because long before the seven weeks were over, we got invitations to go elsewhere, Winnipeg, Brandon.

Then I went down to eastern Canada. I had meetings in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and 50 churches went together. We spilled over, had to go for five weeks, and the same kind of things were happening there.

And I remember one Sunday morning in those meetings, I had to preach in a neighboring church about 10 miles away. So the pastor in the church where we were meeting with the 50 churches, he said, Now, Bill, you've got to be back here by 11 o'clock. Don't be late.

Well, I watched that carefully. They were having an early service in the other church, but I almost wiped out in a curve. When I got there, it was about 25 to 12, and I got in, I ran up, and I could look from here to the platform, and the platform was loaded with people giving their testimony.

I never even got to the pulpit until 5 to 12. And one lady, when she came down the aisle, I got on the platform, and the pastor came over, and he said, It's wonderful what God is doing. He said, You see that girl coming down the aisle? I said, What about her? He said, That girl, she couldn't say hello to two kids without blushing.

I don't know what she's going to say when she gets in the pulpit. Well, she got up there, and she started to go. She was just flying.

And one kid came one night, and he was so excited, he was crying. He says, You know, every time we've had meetings in this place, the young people go for it. Now I see older people doing it.

It's so great. And number one, there's people down the aisle so old, they can only walk three pews and then hang on to a pew and get their breath and walk another three pews, you know. And one lady, she came up there.

She must have been 85 or something, and we had to stop her. I mean, she got to preaching there. She was just on fire.

This is so unusual, but there was no working out. Ralph and Lou were extremely careful in this way. They taught us, and we were just as careful as they were not to, you know.

Try and work anything up. If there's not a big response, don't be worried about that. Just do what God is doing.

Work along with God. And don't make a fool of yourself or try and make a fool of the people. That'll never work.

God the Holy Ghost will do what he has to do. And I had a friend. He served with me as a song leader for a year or so before his health gave out, and he couldn't be on the road.

But he was a, they called him Happy Howard. He was six foot three or so, the life of every party, young people falling in my droves. And he heard I was coming to Winnipeg with a revival team from Saskatoon, so he checked it out.

I can still see him sitting there, and he told me afterwards what happened. He was sitting there, and my team gave their testimony, five guys. They all gave their testimony that I was preaching.

And I quoted this verse, Let each esteem other better than themselves. And that's when God took over in his life. He said, At that moment, I never heard a word you were saying.

There was nothing. It was just like I was in a tomb somewhere with no one but God and me. And God was standing in front of me, and he said to me, Do you live this way? Do you esteem others? Yes, I do, he said.

Certainly I do. And the Lord said, What about George Bell? George Bell was a fellow pastor that he didn't like. He just couldn't stand him.

So he said to God, I don't know how you can bless George Bell the way you do. He's just a big windbag. And the Lord said, I want you to come down the aisle.

I have something to teach you. So I'm in the middle of my sermon. I see Howard coming down the aisle.

His face was as white as snow. I said after, Boy, you look sick. He said, Brother, I've never been so sick in my life.

But here's what he said. Now, you'll have to put your own construction on this. I can't explain it.

He said, I was walking down the aisle, and Jesus met me in the aisle and put his hand on my head and reduced me to absolute zero. He said, When I got to the altar, he said, I couldn't find myself. There's nothing there but God, you know.

And then the Lord came and said, What about George Bell? And Howard said, Through my tears, he said, George, oh, Lord, he's a thousand times better than me. And God said, Now you have it right. Then he traveled with me as a song leader, and he was so full of God.

He was a marvelous song leader, witness, willing people to the Lord, praying, and it was wonderful. But that's how God dealt me his life. All right.

Paul wrote to Timothy, and he said, I remind you that you stir up the gift of God which is in you. One translation says that you revive the gift of God. Another translation says that you rekindle a fire.

And that's what revival is. It's a rekindling of the fire. It's the Spanish Bible that says revive the gift of God.

God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind, a healthy, disciplined mind. That's the kind of spirit that is within us as Christians. That's the kind of spirit we need as we share the gospel with other people.

That's what revival is, to walk. There's three thoughts here. We're to walk in the light and walk in the spirit and walk in love, the New Testament says.

Walking in the light, that's the light of the Word of God. Walking in the spirit, that's a relationship with the Spirit of God. Walking in love is my relationship with other people.

And revival can be summed up with those three thoughts, my relationship to others, my relationship to the Spirit of God, my walking in the light of the Word of God. That's revival. Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people may rejoice in thee? You can't work it up, but you can be a candidate for it.

And remember, it's for the glory of God. You, the Bible says, walk. Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own? You're bought for the price.

Therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. In New Brunswick, Canada, we had a meeting with 24 Christian workers, and I had my song leader share. I had spoken about 15 minutes when the pastor was sitting over to my left.

He began to weep, and his weeping got louder and louder and louder, so I asked my song leader to take him into another room, which he did. They were gone a half an hour, and the whole time we could hear them weeping wherever they were. They came back in, and so I stopped preaching, and I said, My brother, have you something to share? And he said, I was sitting there.

I heard Howard's testimony, and Brother Billy was speaking, and here's what he said. Jesus came and stood in front of me, and he demanded that I resign and surrender everything to him. I said, Brethren, I didn't see him with my eyes, but he was there.

I knew he was there. I've never had this kind of a meeting with God before, and God had just broken him. I don't know how to explain that.

I suppose I could go on for a long while. One other thing might be of help to you. There's a verse in the Bible that says, Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying.

That is, be thinking of other people all the time you're talking. Don't say anything that's going to hurt anybody. No corrupt communication.

Well, I had a man in one of my churches, and he was a deacon, but I didn't know that as a high school teacher, he sometimes told dirty stories in the classroom. I didn't know that. If I'd known that, he wouldn't have been a deacon.

Well, I spoke at Three Hills Bible School in Canada one time, and somebody taped my messages and mailed them to this very person, who is now a university professor. He told me later on, I was holding meetings in the area where he lived, and he came to see me one Saturday, and he told me what happened. He said, I was working in the garden, and just like a voice said, Go and see what your wife is doing, so I ran in the house.

Guess what she was doing? Why, she was listening to one of those five tapes. Guess which tape she was listening to? She was listening to the tape where I told the story about the high school teacher who told a dirty story in the classroom. Guess where the tape was when he walked through the door? I just started to tell the story about the high school teacher who told a dirty story in the classroom.

So he said to me, Brother Bill, I don't know if you're talking about me. And since he didn't ask me, I didn't have to tell him. He said, When you told that story, God flung not an arrow, but a spear into my soul.

And he said, In 25 years, a high school teacher, a university professor, I've never been a blessing enough to anybody. Never led a soul to Christ. God has never used me.

Nobody ever came to me. They knew I was an evangelical professor. Nobody ever came to me to talk about God or ask me questions.

And so he said, My wife and I, ever since that incident where you preached on that tape thing, my wife and I have been praying the prayer search for me, O God, and we've dealt with every sin God has shown us. But he said, That's not the problem. He said, What do you do with this big rotten self? You see, people don't understand, but self is the factor that manufactures the sin.

We keep dealing with a finished product. God wants to bomb the factory. And he does that through the cross.

Well, I explained this to this man, and he began to pray. University professor on his face before God, crying to God. And dear people, his prayer, it went like this.

Dear God, only he was shouting. God, he said, Kill me. Kill me dead.

Kill me dead, this rotten self. Nail me on that cross. Kill me dead, I said.

And he kept telling God, I want to be dead. I want to be dead to myself. Absolutely dead.

Kill me, God, now. And this went on for about five minutes. Then I heard him say, Oh, with peace, with peace.

And he was flooded with the Spirit of God. The very next Sunday, he preached in the Baptist church. He often preached as a lay person.

On a revival book, when he was halfway through his message, a lady got up and she said, Can you stop preaching? God has spoken in my heart. I must come to the altar and pray. And so he had good sense to give an invitation.

And people came and knelt at the front of the church in a revival book. And he told me this. He said, Bill, more happened in that one meeting than has happened in 25 years.

He said, I know now why nobody ever came to me. I had nothing to tell them. I wasn't walking with God.

The Spirit couldn't use me. He kept the record, and he told me probably 18 months later that he personally prayed with 400 people in that period of time. He was out as a university professor holding revival meetings.

Can you believe it? And God's blessing him. He's retired now, living in western Canada. Anyway, these are some of the things that God did, and I don't want to worry the congregation.

What happened to our church afterwards? Well, the church, they started two churches in years following. They built a building seating 800. I think they could pack 1,000 in.

They got a pastor in there named Wes Long, who met God in revival in Alberta in those revival days. And God used Wes in a wonderful way, and the church was built up. They've been doing very, very well.

And we thank God. We thank God for that. But to God be the glory.

We give him all the glory and the praise for what he did. There's 1,000 things he did we haven't mentioned. We haven't time for that.

But maybe if you're watching this tape, when you get home, or perhaps you can do it where you are in the church, ask God to search your heart, show your sin. But don't ask God to do that if you're not willing to do something about it. There may be some restitution you have to make.

I had to make some restitution with a brother of mine and with some other people. It's hard to do that, to say, I was wrong, I sinned against you, please forgive me. But you have to do that.

Follow through whatever God may ask you to do. You may have to go to your boss and confess to him that you stole some of the petty money in the drawer in the office. People have had to do that we know about.

Well, go and do that. You might lose your job. So what? If you honor God, God said, I'll honor you.

Those that honor me, I will honor. Those that despise me will be lightly esteemed, it says in 1 Samuel. And so let him search you.

Take time. Not three minutes won't do it. We sometimes sing, have a little talk with Jesus.

That isn't how it works. You've got to get alone with God. And you might have to spend a night in prayer even, alone with God.

J.B. Earle, that man, at one point in his evangelistic career, he was getting absolutely nowhere. He preached for ten weeks and not a soul got saved. So one night he said, God, what's wrong with these people? And God said, there's nothing wrong with the people.

There's something wrong with you. And he said, I said to God, just a minute. God, I often weep when I preach.

And God said, yes, it's water off an iceberg. And so he tells how he, 2 o'clock in the morning, he got in the safe before God and stayed there. And after some hours, apparently, of prayer and supplication, he said, I was filled with the love of Christ.

And before he died, 150,000 people found Christ as their Savior. So it's not just something that's happening today. It's something that's happened in the past.

Phinney testified of that. Moody testified of that. Torrey testified of that.

The fact that there was a time in their life when they met with God and were filled with the Spirit of God in a deep and powerful way. All right. That's all.

God bless you all. Thank you. Let me ask you a question, too.

Just the things that you were doing as a church before the revival came and you realized that, you know, this isn't going on. You brought in other fellows to speak initially in Saskatoon. Regular meetings.

Oh, yeah, we did that, too. I didn't say anything about that. This particular time, I did say something about the people not responding well.

Yeah, like you had gone for a number of years and you kind of promised God, I won't ever do that again. Yeah. It's pretty hard to dub that in now, though, isn't it? Can you? Yeah, I can put it in.

You can dub it in? Yeah. Okay, sure. Okay, then.

Is it still on? Yeah. Oh, okay. Before the revival, I had different evangelistic teams come into my church, a husband and wife team.

She was a beautiful singer. And before his conversion, his special thing was in nightclubs, he used to stand on his hands and tap his feet on a board above his feet. He didn't do that in the meetings, but he was a good preacher.

And we had one fellow come, and he was a great song leader, trombonist. He used to train a choir every night, 40 people. He'd train a volunteer choir every night, and he'd preach good messages.

And so we had different people come once or twice a year. But when these people left, the church hadn't been changed or altered in the slightest. You might have a couple of people, backsliders restored.

You might have one or two people saved. Maybe some people started tithing. Maybe a couple of people joined the church.

But it was certainly not revival or anything like that. It got to the point where I just said, God, I'm not going that route anymore. I've had it.

I'm not going to try this anymore. We have to have revival. And that's really what happened there.

And then we found what God could do when we got out of his way. And Ralph and Lucita were certainly prepared by God and used of God in wonderful ways. They were very transparent, too, in their testimony to the people.

They never created any impression that they felt they were big shots, and not at all. Sometimes Ralph might say something, and Lou might even correct them in a meeting in front of the crowd. And there's no bad feeling about that.

They just did it. They were honest and humble and pliable. And it was such a refreshing thing.

And what happened was, actually, I told a missionary I had in my church, I told him how I felt, and he said, try and get Ralph and Lucita, and I said, who are they? I'd never heard of them. And he told me something about them, where they lived, and I got their address, and this is how the whole thing, how God put it all together. I should perhaps point out, Saskatoon at that time was a city of 120,000.

I think it's somewhere up to 200,000 now. And I had, as I mentioned before, a church of 175 members. We were running, before the Revival, we were running about 300.

The church, you could pack 350 in. We were pretty well full Sunday mornings. But it wasn't Revival.

But there's an old saying, if you ever go through a Revival fire, you'll have the smell of smoke on your clothes until the day you die. You'll never forget it. You'll never be satisfied with anything less.

Okay. My wife and I had flown down to South America. We had a contact who had been a Kansas cowboy.

He was a missionary with the Gospel Mission of South America. And Lyle Eggleston was his name, and he was my contact. And so we arrived in Buenos Aires.

It's a city of 10 or 12 million, and nobody met the plane. And so we didn't understand. He explained later that if you're right down there, you want to use a small envelope and a small stamp.

If you use a big, colorful stamp, the guy in the post office likes it, he'll take the letter home. So my last two letters never got to him. Somebody had taken them home.

So he knew I was coming, but he didn't know when. And so there we are sitting in this air terminal wondering what to do, you know. And the boy said, Hey, that guy looks like an American.

So I went over and said, Good day. Are you an American? No, he wasn't. He was Spanish.

You know, we didn't know any Spanish except C. And then I thought, Hey, that guy looks like him. Remember me? That's him. No, he was a Spanish guy.

So we gave up on that, and we prayed. And to make a long story short, a fellow, a total stranger, he walked up and he bowed, and he had me slip the paper, and on it it said Lyle Egglestone, 35 Amblegada, that's the street where he lived, and his phone number. And he bowed and walked away.

So I phoned Lyle, and he came tearing down all apologies, and I told him what happened. He said, Bill, listen. He said, I've only been here a couple of months.

Nobody knows me. I said, I know that. I phoned the Latin American mission and the sailors' mission.

Nobody had even heard of you, and I thought we were in a wild goose chase. But he said, Who is this guy? And I said, I described him. We turned all around the air terminal.

We couldn't find him. Of course, there's thousands of people. It's a big air terminal there.

We never did find him, so we finally had to conclude it was an angel sent from God, you know. And then my wife and I were riding in a bus one night, and we'd forgotten to ask where to get off, and we didn't have a clue where to get off. So the bus is packed.

All the buses are packed. If you get on when the bus starts, you get a seat. Otherwise, you're standing.

So we're standing on the strap for the longest line, you know, whispering back and forth. What are we going to do? Now, just trust the Lord. So we went on for half an hour, and then somebody leaned over in the dark and said, Please get off at the next stop.

So we did. And it was obligato, the street he lived on, the very street, you know. So how did that happen? How did he know where we were to get off, you know? So again, it must have been an angel, you know.

So we had things like that happening in traveling in third-world countries or other countries. When you don't know the language, God always comes through. Get many evidences of God's engineering and control and concern.

You know, it's a wonderful thing to take chances for God. You don't see anything much happen until you take some chances, you know. And He said, Prove me now herewith.

God likes to be proved. Okay. I have one last thing to ask you.

Could you make one statement, you know, to the young people of today that don't want to see revival? You know, they're going in the direction of, you know, church programs and different things. What do we need to do? What do you feel that this generation needs to do if they want to see revival? One thing would be if a Christian person wants revival, it would be a good thing to try and find some friend that would want revival, if they could pray together, if two people could start praying together, you know. And maybe you might get another in three, and then maybe four or five, you know.

And get started. Like if two of you agree upon Earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them if my Father was in heaven. And the word agree there, it's a musical term, somphoneo, from which you get the English word symphony.

So if two people agree together, it'll be done. But I would say find someone else and start encouraging one another and praying for revival, and then try and get others in on this. In Steinbeck, Manitoba, there was a revival in the Bible College there.

I was in there later on for meetings. What happened was, some girls got together and began praying for revival. And then more girls, and then more girls, and then more girls.

It just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the staff heard about these prayer meetings late at night and thought they'd better check it out. So they checked it out and they could see there was nothing wrong with it.

It was good, you know. And so they let it go, just the girls, and praying sometimes for twelve at night. And then one day in the chapel service, God came and had a glorious revival, you know.

It swept the whole school. And they said for years after that revival, they never ever had any problems between staff or this kind of thing in the school. It was all just cleaned up, you know.

So we need, we must have, Spurgeon said, Our system will not work without the Holy Ghost. And he was absolutely right. He knew the power of God.

You know, when he started off at Water Beach, it's a small town of 1200 people, and he had a church of 40 people, and every second man was a drunkard. He was 18 years of age, no training. And in two years, the church went from 40 to 400.

There wasn't a drunkard left in the area. And he said, We had a Holy Ghost revival. When he moved to London, New Park Street Church, it was a building seating 1200.

They only had anywhere from 60 to 120 or so on a Sunday morning, and five in the prayer meeting. He was there one year, and there were 500 in the prayer meeting, and the church was packed to the doors. But he said, When I got to New Park Street Chapel, there was a small group of people who'd been praying for years for revival.

So people get together and pray and hang in there. Eventually you'll see it. You have to stay with it.

Pay the price and let God lead. I used to think, you know, back in Saskatoon, if my church finds out how little time I spend doing normal church business and how much time I spend in my face in prayer, they're going to fire me. But I didn't really care, you know.

I used to try and get to church at 7 o'clock in the morning. It was about a mile from where I lived. I'd walk there, and then for two hours until 9 o'clock, there'd be no phone calls or anything, and so I'd pray the whole time.

And then the burden for prayer got heavier, and I spent hours often daily in prayer. But you see, in every church there's... We sometimes speak about the church being a sleeping giant, and I don't like the term. It may be true, but I don't like it, because people who seem satisfied just be a sleeping giant, you know.

Why not wake up? Three times in the Old Testament, people are calling on God to awaken, you know. Awake, O Lord, why sleepest thou? And we know God isn't asleep, but it looks like He is. Nothing is happening, so He's concerned.

But in the New Testament, it's God calling three times for Christians to awake. Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.

Wherefore, be you not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is, and be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit. Be not drunk with wine when it is excess, but be filled with the Spirit. So He's talking about revival.

Awake, thou that sleepest, arise from the dead. Awake to righteousness, and sin not, for some have not the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.

So, you know, in Matthew 25, while the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. That's the wise and the foolish versions. That's a picture of the church.

It's asleep. Then some people get concerned about revival and pay the price, and God revives. But it's not, it doesn't come easy.

Like Paul spoke about travailing in birth again until Christ be formed. He is really praying for revival among those Christians in Galatia that they might experience revival again. They slipped away from that, and He wanted to bring them back.

So... I did a special study, you know, on Spurgeon, and I did a lot of notes on that, and I got eight or so books on his life, and then three or four shelves of his works. And I had no idea until I finished that study on his biographies that he understood the revival concept completely, absolutely completely. And he had, in my opinion, the greatest church that the church ever saw in the last 2,000 years.

He had 44 organizations in the church, all of them geared to soul winning and helping people. He had an orphanage with 400 kids. He had almshouses for older people that had no money, they didn't have any government support.

He had a preacher's lending library. Preachers had little money, so his wife began a lending library, and they loaned books to preachers and Christian workers. He had a Christian college.

Before he died, that church, that college graduated very close to 1,000 soul winners, like they went out to start churches, you know, all over the British Isles. And he had, every Sunday evening, he had 800 people that went out soul winning. He had a bunch of people, they called them co-porters.

It's a French word, and it really referred in France to people who went door-to-door selling wares and stuff, you know. And he had co-porters. He had about 50 of them, and one year between them they made about a million house calls.

And he had one saying, he said, if you want to get started soul winning, pick the dirtiest street in the city where you live, and then find the dirtiest house on that dirty street, and then beat on the door and get inside and preach Christ. He said that's how to start. And it's a wonderful story, though, the way that God used his church.

Man, it was, one of the newspapers, literatures, after he'd been there and he saw what was happening, he said, this Essex country bumpkin, that's what he called them, see, has done more to revive South London than all the established churches put together, which was probably true. And he had revival the whole time, but he constantly urged his people to pray for God the Holy Ghost to work. He was constantly begging them to pray, pray for God the Holy Ghost to come, that he'll do the work.

So although he was a great orator and a great preacher and had a tremendous mind, that was not the secret. He knew what the secret was, you know. He had open-air meetings.

His brother used to set up these meetings for him, and I have a book here that talks about his brother, what he felt about those open-air meetings. And he said, he can never forget them. He said, the power of the Spirit was so great in those meetings, he'd be preaching, and sometimes the people he saw would come with the nearness of God, they'd start just to praise God, you know.

In the middle of the sermon, he'd just stop preaching for five minutes maybe, you know. And sometimes they'd just clap and cheer and whistle. The Spirit of God was working so powerfully.

And he said, he couldn't explain it, but he said it was just awesome to watch God work in those open-air meetings. 10, 15, 20,000 people, you know, and no PA systems and no big singer or anything, just preaching the Word of God, you know. Somehow we've lost that, the glory of God, you know.

We're trying to do it with big programs and big speakers and big choirs and big singers, big frantic antics, you know. It doesn't work. Curiosity, did I read somewhere that men that were revived in the Hebrides revival were praying for your church at the time? Well, there's a group of men in the Hebrides revival, and Duncan Campbell, who was the man God used in that awakening, he was in our church in 1969, two years before the revival.

So we spent a lot of time together. He told me about things that happened. And there was a group of men in a place called Barvis in the Hebrides.

That's an island. There was Lewis and Harris and Skye. There were three islands, and the revival swept in those islands there.

And these men were called the praying men of Barvis. And he told me about them. He said they come home from their jobs, and they have supper, and they go to bed till 9 o'clock at night.

They get up at 9, and they pray till 2 o'clock in the morning. And they go to bed and get up at 7 to go to work. They do that every night of the year.

They were called the praying men. And he told me he'd gone to the Isle of Skye to open a church that had been closed for many years. So he started on Sunday.

Five people showed up. Nothing happened. Monday, nothing happened.

Tuesday, nothing happened. Wednesday, nothing happened. So he phoned the praying men and asked them to take this burden down their heart.

And then next night, there were 200 people, and seven or eight got saved, you know, and a revival broke there. So I asked Duncan if he would contact the praying men and have them pray for us. So I presume he did, you know.

And then there was a Gideon team in... Where was this now? In the Philippines? No, in India, in India. And they mentioned in their speaking, they mentioned to this group that there had been a revival in Saskatoon, Canada, and he saw a corner light up, and a bunch of men began to talk very excitedly. And they came running up after him and said, Tell us about the revival in Saskatoon.

So he did, and they said, Why are you so concerned? They said, Listen, three years ago, God led us as a praying group to pray for revival in Saskatoon. We didn't even know where Saskatoon was. Just the name was clear to us, but we didn't know where Saskatoon was.

And then in another place in India, I don't know if it was the same group, but somebody from Canada talked about revival in western Canada. The same thing happened. A bunch of men came up and said, God gave us a burden three years ago to pray for revival in western Canada.

So there may have been a lot of that kind of thing going on. But the main thing to me is to believe, to cry to God and not doubt that he's going to do it. And I've been praying that way for years.

See, what I did years ago, and some of you know this, but in that time, that session one night with God, I said, Look, Lord, I'm going to take Canada, and I'm going to stick it across your throne. I'm going to leave it there until you revive this place. And I did that many years ago, and I keep reminding God, Don't forget Canada is on your knees.

So I just thought I should do it. Now I have to believe God that he will do that, and I think he will. You see, some of you have heard of Pastor Cho and this church in South Korea.

He's got the biggest church in the world. I think they have 250,000 members or something, or maybe even more. And, of course, he's got this broken up into smaller groups of hundreds.

I mean, he's got pastors for these smaller groups. And some years ago, and I read this in three different publications, he said, I was praying with my pastors one day, and God showed us that revival is going to start in Canada and sweep the world. And they said that revival is going to be very powerful in 80 central areas in Canada and then spread from there around the world.

When was this? When did it happen? Well, I read about it probably eight, nine years ago, but I read it in different publications, so I don't know. See, Cho, he's certainly a great man of prayer. He probably prays five, six hours a day from what I read about him.

He's been influenced by Bob Shuler and some of the inferences. I mean, Bob Shuler I don't have much confidence in, but I don't think this destroys Cho. He certainly has been greatly used of God.

But that's what he said, so I don't know. I don't want to put my faith in that. Maybe that's really happened.

I don't know. This is an odd sort of thing. Long before I was a Christian, I used to listen to music by Bob Dylan.

And he had an album, and one of the lines on the cover of the album was this. He said, One night while healing ceilings in Harlem, I dreamed I saw Canada ablaze, and nobody know nothing about it except who held the match. And I was very struck by that.

This was back in 1962. No, 65, sorry. Sixty-five? Yeah.

Well, see, Duncan Campbell, he was with us for a week, but he was in different churches as well as ours, single meetings. And he didn't say a thing to me, but my brother in Winnipeg, he was an evangelist, and he had invited him to come to Canada, and that's how it all began. So when he got back to Winnipeg, he told my brother, he said, Revival is coming to Canada.

It's starting in your brother's church in Saskatoon. I was in prayer one night, and God showed me that very clearly. I'm glad he didn't tell me, or I might have been trying to make it happen, you know.

My brother didn't tell me until after revival came. But I was in meetings up in the interlake country here, and people up there told me Duncan Campbell had been in some of their churches. He told them the same thing, that revival was going to start in my church in Saskatoon.

So certainly God... The Bible says God will do nothing but He reveals His secret to His servants, the prophets. So when God's going to do something, He reveals that to some of His servants, you know. So we're all a secret now, eh? I'm afraid.

Yes, exactly. I'm afraid. The Bible says in the book of Joel, a rise in the night watchers.

Cry out to God, you know. Cry out to God. He may leave a blessing.

And so He knows when the time is right and the people are ready. And there's no restraint to the Lord, as said by many or by a few, the Bible says. It doesn't have to be a big beginning.

You know, there's a haystack revival. They called that in the States years ago when a bunch of men were praying together for revival, and a storm came, so they got inside a haystack, you know, to be dry, you know. And they had a time of prayer there and broke through, and I think all of those men, if I remember the story rightly, became missionaries, went out as missionaries, you know.

The Hebrides revival in 1932 and on, more people went into full-time Christian work from that revival than from any revival in the history of the church, in proportion to the number of people involved, you know. So... So the normal situation in the world was for everyone to be asleep... Yeah. ...in the church as well.

Yeah, that's true. It's true. And revival is simply waking up.

That's a waking up. Absolutely. You see, the Heron Hut thing, you know, the Moravians, Transnistria North, every time they met, especially when they had a business meeting, they had a fight.

Everybody was pulling things their own way. Nothing was working well. But a few godly people were praying for revival, and it began at a communion service one Sunday morning.

And they started a prayer meeting. It never quit, day or night, for a hundred years, you know. It's an amazing thing, you know.

And that church sent out more missionaries than all the churches in that century put together, that one church did. There was Moravians who sold themselves as slaves in slave markets so they could be transported to West India, somewhere else. They'd never have a three-year, you know, home for a year stuff, the missionaries have today.

They know they'd never see their families again. They might be cruelly beaten and all that, but have a chance to share the gospel with people. I've never heard anything like that.

I mean, that's the utmost in sacrifice and surrender to God, you know. They're the ones who brought the Westleys to be born again. Yeah, they were preaching long before they were converted, yeah.

So was Whitefield. Yeah, those guys, see, Spurgeon looked on Whitefield as being his mentor, and they were certainly alike in many ways. They both had tremendous success in open-air meetings, you know.

But Whitefield had this voice, you know. They said he could make a whole congregation tremble in their seats just by pronouncing the one word, Mesopotamia. And there was a guy who was a shipbuilder in Scotland, and he heard Spurgeon preach, or Whitefield preach, rather.

And he said afterwards, you know, when I'm listening to normal preachers, I can build a whole ship from stem to stern while I'm listening to this preacher, you know. But he said, under Whitefield, I can't even find the hammer, you know. So, you know, these guys were alive, you know.

Yeah? At one time I heard you saying a message that a university professor had read through the autobiographies of George Whitefield. Yes. This made him, this spurred him on to pray.

I was wondering if that was the same fellow you were talking about. No, that was a different person, yeah. Yeah, he was a member of the church in Saskatoon, and he came to me one day.

He taught psychology in the university, and he said, you know, I'm a Christian, but I'm absolutely flat dead. Can you recommend some books that might help me? And so I said, there are four books I can recommend. They're a series.

There's two on Spurgeon's life and two on Whitefield's life. So he got the two on Whitefield's life, and he read them, and he was totally transformed, you know. You'd never see him in a church service.

He was always in the prayer room praying the whole time through. And if he came to you and said, brother, let's pray, you're thinking of two hours, you know. He'd say, now you watch and I'll pray, and then I'll watch and you pray.

Watch and pray, watch and pray, watch and pray. And he had a hold on God. It was incredible.

And there was a guy in Saskatoon, he had a Christian counseling center, so he'd ask him to come and talk to his class about Christian counseling because he was teaching counseling, you know, and psychology and so on. So the first time he went there, he told me, he said, now make it clear from the Bible how you do it, and then if you want to give an invitation, feel free to do that in the university in Saskatoon. So he brought this message, and then he gave an invitation for salvation, and some students came forward, and he met with them at the front of this class and led them to Christ in front of this university class.

I mean, that's unusual. But that's what happened to this professor. He was really touched by God.

And he had an insight into what God was doing or what God wanted to do, you know. Harold, I forget his last name now. There was one fellow in our church, he was a wealthy man, I guess the wealthiest man in our congregation.

He never responded. Sat there through all those meetings, you know, never responded. And when some of the guys talked to him, he said, look, I've got so much garbage in my life, if I ever start cleaning up the garbage, I'll be working day and night till Jesus comes.

I'm not going to get started. So the years rolled by, but Gordon Bailey made a friend of him because the guy could sing well. And so Gordon invited him to come with him for meetings on the weekend, you know.

And he went, and finally God touched him. And then Gordon used me. He's quite a good singer, this wealthy guy.

And Gordon said, you should have heard his testimony. He'd stand and he'd weep. He said, I sat through the most powerful meetings for seven weeks, and I never stood.

I hardened my heart like a rock because I was ashamed of my past and didn't want to get messed around there. And he begged the people not to make the mistake he made, to deal with the sin and get it straightened up. He's dead now.

So, but those were great days, I'll tell you. Wow. The answers to prayer were just thousands of them.

People were talking constantly about answers to prayer, you know. My husband got saved. My brother got saved.

My sister found Christ. My preacher got converted. Yeah.

You know, I pray for this too. I pray for my family. I'm having a hard time with my daughter.

And so I haven't been pursuing her and just waiting for her. She'd call and say, oh, I haven't talked to you in a long time. I miss you.

We should get together next week. Next week never comes, you know. I just wait and wait, you know.

And so I did something, you know, a surprise thing for the spoken. And I'm never going to call back. But then I'm on the computer, and all of a sudden I'm in the chat room.

It says Catherine's online. So she called me just a couple days ago. I said, let's go out for, well, I said, in the chat room, I says, I got your message.

Catherine, you know, I'm going to be busy on Monday and Tuesday, which she wanted to do in the evening, because I had made this prior commitment. And then I says, what about the following week? And she says, well, not really, but I was thinking of a matinee. And then it's just my heart is heavy to say, just, you know, I'm just praying.

I'm just thinking that maybe that time is there before to go and meet and then say, come along, Catherine. God is able to do what? Exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. If he's able to do that, then why isn't he doing more, you know? This is one thing that I plead with God.

I remind him of that statement. And then God is so great. The Bible says, how little a whisperer has heard of him, the thunder of his power who can understand.

I say, God, we're tired of listening to the whispers behind the curtain. We want the power, you know. I mean, God is so great, and people think of him as being almost nothing, you know.

And God needs to be working, because when he's working in these powerful ways, man, people, you don't have to persuade people. So we should get together and pray. We should be praying much more than we do, yes.

We certainly should. And preferably together, I imagine. Pardon? Preferably together.

Yes, yes. I think it's wonderful when people get together with a common burden, you know. There's other things we have to pray about as well besides revival, but we need to be certainly praying for revival and praying as often as we can, you know.

Remember it says, 1 Timothy 2.8, I will, therefore, that many...