Hands in the Mississippi River

I really believe, friends, that revival is possible, improbable, if we can only get honest enough with God. If we can get to the place of transparency with God, in desperation before God, in confession of sin to God, then God can go to work. Let me give you an example.

My homiletical mentor, Dr. Stephen F. Olford, shared his story about the campus revival that occurred under his preaching at Wheaton College in January of 1948, and one of the students in attendance was Jim Elliott, the missionary martyr to the Yawka Indians. Well, Stephen Olford's story of the Wheaton revival is a remarkable one, where a God consciousness permeated the entire college campus to the point that the college president ordered all campus classes canceled so that the students could attend to the things of God. It was a cold winter in Chicago in 1948 when a 29-year-old Stephen Olford was invited to preach at chapel services during the day at Wheaton College during January 11th through the 18th, but the breakthrough occurred at the large and prestigious Wheaton Bible Church at night.

Here are his words. Please pay attention to his story, friends. That Sunday night, my theme was the blood of Christ.

I poured out my heart. What I felt was the essential gospel message and sensed unusual resistance. I can only describe it as hitting a tractor tire with a sledgehammer.

The harder I swung the hammer, the harder the words bounced back at me. I was disappointed and somewhat discouraged. I gave an invitation and I was never more shocked in my life.

The devil just howled at me. There was indifference and absolute deadness. I pressed the invitation and no one responded.

As I walked home with Dr. Joseph McCauley, I said to him, what's going on here? You invited me to preach and I have a fight on my hands. Brother, let's spend the night together in prayer till God shows us what to do. And as we laid hold of God, it became very apparent that the Holy Spirit was leading me to change my whole strategy.

So I stopped praying and looked into Joe McCauley's face and said, would I betray you if I ministered to believers rather than trying to reach the unconverted? I don't believe there was an unsafe center in the audience this evening. And I feel that what God wants to do here is a deep work in the lives of Christians. Dr. McCauley, who was a deeply spiritual and sensitive man said, you do entirely as you feel God is leading you.

And he got up and he left me to continue to pray by myself through the night. Monday morning, I spoke in chapel session at Wheaton College. Then came the evening service at the Bible church.

The church was two thirds full. The message of the Lord laid on my heart was, prepare ye the way of the Lord and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. As I preached on what preparing the way of the Lord entailed in terms of spiritual issues in our lives, God broke in and I had to stop preaching.

Every head was bowed. Many were weeping. And I just sat down and waited as the minutes passed, several prayed and broke down.

The first man to walk the aisle was Peter Joshua, the brother of Joshua, who was so mildly used in the 1904 Welsh revival. He said, Mr. Alford, I want to say something. God has revealed to me the sin in my life.

I have been preaching for years, but I am a hypocrite. I have been told by God to confess my sin. Well, that broke up the meeting.

Dr. McCauley stepped up to the pulpit and said words like this. I rise to my feet to confess my sin to you, my people. I invited Stephen Alford to be our evangelist for an outreach to the lost, but I have to state that we haven't prayed or prepared as we should have done.

I doubt if we have even canvassed the area to invite the lost to attend these meetings. I also have to admit in my own ministry, I haven't had a passion for souls. I've been merely occupied in dotting my theological I's and crossing my theological T's to please the professors and the students who attend my church.

My messages have not carried the burden and passion of an evangelist, and I feel I have failed my dear brother in asking him to do what is virtually impossible. He had hardly finished that sentence when his wife came down the aisle and stood alongside him and simply said, I confess my sin also. I've encouraged him in his pursuit of popularity in this college community rather than in seeking to reach the untold numbers who are out of Christ in this town.

With that, a preacher in the audience rose to his feet and made a similar confession, and that led to a time of unbelievable confessions throughout the entire congregation while we were there for hours. God had brought us all to the place of repentance, brokenness, and readiness for cleansing and renewal. We went to bed very late that night.

The revival carried over to Wheaton College Chapel Hour the next morning. I did not even finish the message when God moved in and brought us all to our knees in repentance and confession. The acting president, Dr. Roger Voskell, came to the podium and announced that all classes were canceled until further notice and that professors and students were to form groups across the campus and engage in prayer and personal examination.

I will stop there, friends. That revival that swept Wheaton College in 1948 all began with a broken Stephen Oldford out of bed and on his knees all night before God in desperate prayer. Brother pastor, when was the last time you stayed out of bed all night in intercessory prayer for your congregation? When was the last time you had personal examination before God in prayer? Well, that's my little introduction, friends, to my message this evening.

My message is entitled Tonight, I Washed My Hands in the Mississippi River and Got a Touch of Heaven. I believe this will be a transformational message to some. You know, friends, God is looking for the Moses who will take the time to turn aside and encounter him so God can send that man to deliver a nation.

My text can be found in the book of Ezekiel in chapter three. You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends. We will be in verses 16 through 19.

Here now is the word of God and may the spirit of the Lord attend the reading of his holy word. And it came to pass at the end of seven days that the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel. Therefore, hear the word at my mouth and give them warning from me.

When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die. And thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way to save his life. The same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thine hand.

Yet, if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity. But thou hast delivered thy soul. I will stop there, friends.

The prophet Jeremiah had a call on his life to be God's watchman and to warn men of their danger of dying in their sins. He was God's man with God's message for sinful man. I believe you can be a popular preacher and have a sincere heart, but still have a wrong head.

There's nothing wrong with popularity in ministry, but there is something wrong to the one who is using his ministry to gain popularity. Jesus had his crowds, but he was not a popular preacher. His first sermon divided his crowd, and they tried to hurl him off a cliff.

His penetrating preaching and searching sermons angered the lost religious crowd and led to his crucifixion. I want to share with you, friends, the following story, especially for my brother preachers, because I know you will relate to it. How you react to it is an entirely different story.

When I was doing my research on my biography of the Calvinistic evangelist Rolf Barnard, who was used of God in several powerful revivals over a 40-year itinerant ministry all across America, I uncovered a story he told as it was related to him personally by Dr. R.G. Lee when they shared a Bible conference in the South. Dr. Lee was the pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee from 1927 to 1960. He is known for his famous sermon, Payday Someday, but here's a remarkable story about him you probably don't know, and this is a story that R.G. Lee told Rolf Barnard.

There was a member in Dr. Lee's congregation, an attorney, and this man had to be out of town a lot on business, but no matter where this lawyer went, he made sure to catch a train back to Memphis on Saturday night so he could hear Dr. Lee preach the next morning. Why, that man just loved to hear R.G. Lee preach, but one day this lawyer got cancer, and he was in the hospital dying, and he called for his pastor to come to his bedside. R.G. Lee entered the downtown hospital room whose windows overlooked the Mississippi River.

As R.G. Lee sat by the man's bedside, the man told him the following story. He said, I want you to know how much I've enjoyed your preaching through the years, and I never missed a Sunday if I could help it. Now I lie here all eaten up with cancer, and the doctors tell me I only have a few weeks left to live at best, but I didn't call you here for that.

I want to chastise you, sir. Your sermons were full of enjoyable stories that kept me on the edge of my seat, but I never knew how to be saved. You never preached the cross to where I could see it.

You never put the blood out there where I could reach it. Now I'm a dying, and I may die in my sins, and I reprimand you, sir, for your lack. Well, R.G. Lee left that man's hospital room with his head hung down low, feeling berated and guilty as charged.

It was now dark outside, and he decided to take a walk down to the banks of the Mississippi River. Once there, he got down on his knees in the mud, getting his white suit pants dirty in the process. The river ran silent with a beam of moonlight across the water.

R.G. Lee rolled up his sleeves as he leaned forward and dipped his hands in the cold, dark water. He remained in that position for a while as he pondered that man's penetrating words. Looking up towards heaven, he promised God, right there and then, that from that point forward he would preach the cross and the blood, and he changed his message that night.

And in a month's time, there was such a move of grace at that church that four blocks of downtown Memphis were shaken with revival. I love that story, friends. I gotta confess, it gets to me every single time, and that's the end of that remarkable story, friends.

I know personally, I had to come to the place in my own ministry where I had to choose between two roads. I could continue to preach the same kind of sermons that made me a popular preacher, or I could ruin my reputation and go all out on a limb, preaching disturbing messages by pointed preaching with uncomfortable search and sermons that uncovered sin and exposed false foundations, losing much of my audience and all my support. But I had to ask myself, was I preaching for acceptance, or was I preaching for eternity? There was a reason George Whitefield was pelted with stones and had pieces of dead cats thrown at him, and he was shut out of the churches and had to preach in the open air.

I faced that crisis in my ministry, and a time came when I got serious with God, and I washed my hands in the Mississippi River, so to speak, and changed my message. And I've got the scars to prove it, but I also know what it's like to taste revival. Brother pastor, maybe it's time for you to grapple with what is between you and a holy God in regard to your preaching.

Maybe it's time for you to come to the river and get down on your knees and get your suit pants dirty in the process and get low before God as you get honest with God. Can you honestly say before God that you've been his watchman, that you've been warning men and women and boys and girls about the dangerous damnation in a devil's hell? Have you warned them about a future judgment that awaits all mankind, or have you been soft-soaping the gospel to grow your church? Have you been warning men about the terrors of the Lord? Can you say that you have been active in your ministry, preaching hard against sin and warning against hell and informing men of their duty of repentance and the rudder necessity of regeneration? Have you feared your deacons and wealthier members more than God? Are you preaching to impress others with your acquired knowledge like that Wheaton pastor? Are you preaching for acceptance in your congregation, or are you preaching to be accepting before Jesus Christ in heaven? Can you say before a holy God right now that you have been warning the wicked to turn from the wicked ways so they won't perish in an everlasting burn in hell? If you were to stand before God's mirror right now, would you look down on bloody hands? It is time to go wash in the river like R.G. Lee and get a touch heaven that will shake your church and community with revival. God gets serious with those who get serious with him.

The sun is setting. The day is far spent. The night is at hand.

What will you do? Let us pray.