Pray Without Ceasing — Bill McLeod

Well, good morning. You know, there was a time when I could come up those stairs two at a time, and now I just thank God when I get to the top, you know. I want to read just one verse from Ephesians chapter 6.

Prayer in the Spirit and Spiritual Warfare

And, of course, it's a very well-known verse. Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. And Paul adds, And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds, that therein I may speak boldly as an aunt to speak.

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. I'll get to that in a few moments. I'll not start right there.

I moved from Winnipeg to Saskatoon in 1962, I guess it was, and I pastored a small Baptist church, 175 members. And numbers of people in the congregation were Bible school graduates, was mostly young married couples and university students.

And everybody loved evangelism and missions, but nobody did either. And they were a nice congregation, but they knew how to sleep, I mean spiritually speaking. And they were kind enough to snore now and then to let me know they weren't quite dead.

But you know, they were nice, really nice evangelicals. And I wanted to get this church on the road. And so, first of all, I won't go into all the details how I did it, but I had five teams from the congregation, and one night we were to go out as teams in house calling.

And I told the group, I said, now, if you don't feel you're quite able to handle this, you just stay home and pray. Well, everybody went back home and prayed for the people that didn't go out, because nobody stayed to go out.

So I had to figure that out. And I said, well, I thought to myself, I know what the problem is. They just don't know how to do it. So we had eight weeks of classes on soul winning and so on, good attendance, good faithful attendance.

And then another night we were to go out. And so I told them, I said, now, if you don't feel that you can quite handle this, well, just go home and pray. They all went home and prayed, except for two.

And they were both shaking in their shoes, you know. Canadians call it conservatism. It's not. It's fear. Anyhow, at that point, I realized they didn't have a heart to do it. That was the real problem.

They never had a heart to do it. And I began praying for revival. And I began, apart from our own self, with a deacons prayer meeting on a Saturday night, nine o 'clock. We prayed, I had ten deacons, and we averaged it was around seven or eight.

And we prayed for revival. That's how we started about five years before the revival came. And then our weeknight prayer meeting, Wednesday night, we were running around twenty-five. We had a hundred and seventy-five members.

And I really pushed, oh, I prayed and prayed and prayed and talked about the prayer meeting and urged the people to attend. And I used to tell them, listen, you can miss Sunday mornings if you have to, and miss Sunday evening if you must.

But don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're dead. And you know, it began to grow. And it grew up so physically we got to seventy-five, we got to a hundred, and then we got to a hundred and fifty.

And the odd meeting we were up to a hundred and seventy or more, and we only had a hundred and seventy-five members. And it became the hottest meeting of the week. It wasn't revival, but it was certainly a step towards revival.

And when I saw they were supporting a prayer meeting well, then I suggested we'll have a children's prayer meeting too. And so we'd have thirty or forty children in a separate prayer meeting with one or two adults looking after them.

But the adults were told, now, you're not to lead the meetings for them, you're to train them to lead their own meetings. And the kids just loved it. This meant a few more adults could attend because their kids were in the prayer meeting.

And that was good. And then, praying about it, the Lord showed me to do something else, cottage prayer meetings. So we started cottage prayer meetings. Saskatoon at the time was not a big place, a hundred and twenty thousand.

The Spirit of Prayer and Waiting on God

And so we had some cottage prayer meetings. Then later on, now, if I had put this on the people all at once, it wouldn't have gone. They couldn't have handled it. But there was a spirit of prayer developing, and the book of Zechariah talks about God pouring on his people the spirit of grace and supplication.

One translation says, the spirit of grace to supplicate. So there is such a thing as a spirit of prayer. Now, Finney made much of that. He said if he ever lost the spirit of prayer, he couldn't converse with anybody individually or preach publicly if he ever lost the spirit of prayer.

I know what he's talking about because God gave us a spirit of prayer. And every new idea for prayer I gave the people, they just jumped into it. I suggested, for example, why don't you at night, as you go to bed, why don't you pray and ask God to wake you through the night, shake it up for a little while, and pray for revival.

And people started doing that, and I heard things like this. Brother McLeod, you know, I used to be prayed out in five minutes. I prayed last night for 50 minutes. I could have prayed all night, you know.

It was a supernatural thing. It was not a natural thing at all. And then after a while we tried something else, and we had a thing on the bulletin board, a big circle marked off in 15-minute slots like pie-shaped wedges.

And people were to pray about this and look at this thing and decide which time slot would they take to pray every day. And pretty soon we had the whole 24 hours taken up, and in some cases some of the wedges had more than one name.

And so we did nothing but pray. I was talking one time to a missionary. I mentioned our seeking revival. He said, why don't you invite Ralph and Lucifer, who were they? He told me. I contacted them. They couldn't come for several years, so that gave us more time, of course, to prepare.

We didn't do any advertising about the meetings. We just figured God's in this thing, and we're going to trust God. When they came, they brought a great big van. It was about three feet this way and eight feet that way.

It had big words on it about revival. They wanted to set this up on the end of the church. Well, we did. But that very night we had a rainstorm and a big wind, and it blew it down in the mud, and we never, ever used it.

God didn't even want that, you know. So we're just waiting on God. You know, I used to walk, I lived a mile from the church, and I used to walk there every morning, try and get there at least by seven o 'clock.

And I'd have a couple hours and the phone wouldn't be ringing, and I'd just lay on the floor and pray. And prayer, people were always talking about what God was doing. In the prayer meeting, we'd run it like this.

We'd sing it. You know, there was a time when I'd preach for forty minutes in the prayer meeting, and we'd pray for ten minutes and call it a prayer meeting. We'd quit that. I'd preach for ten or fifteen minutes, and then we'd pray for maybe forty minutes.

And we'd do things like this. I'd say, now, have any of you had an answer to prayer this last week? Please tell us about it. Never mind if it's a small thing. Just tell us about it. And people began doing that.

And then we'd put a chair out to a friend and say, now, if you have a personal need, you'd like us to pray for you, just let us know. Just come and kneel to a chair and we'll come and help you. And this began to happen.

And people began talking about how near God was and how God was answering prayers like he'd never done before. And went on and on. And then on a Wednesday night, October the thirteenth, a Wednesday night, Ralph and Lou came.

The Saskatoon Revival and Its Expansion

First meeting, a hundred and fifty people, and I think five stayed behind for prayer. By Saturday, we couldn't get the people into the church. The building was seated about three hundred and fifty. We were packed right out.

So we have to move to a neighboring Anglican church, like your Episcopalian churches. And the pastor didn't have it as long as you want. Well, it was only good for two nights. It would seat six hundred.

We had seven hundred there the first night. So then we have to move. We went, moved to the Alliance Church, seating a thousand. That only lasted two nights. We had to move to a larger, the largest church building in the city would seat seventeen hundred.

I'll never forget the first night in there. We're packed to the doors, people trying to get in. And the caretaker came running. He wasn't a Christian. And he got swearing and said, you've got to get some of these people out of here or the fire marshal will close this place down.

So I went to the pulpit and asked my people to leave and go down to the Alliance Church. We're just a couple of blocks away. And I had a meeting with them there. But after they went out, there were people in the street trying to get in.

They still had the same problem. But you know what happened? The caretaker got saved. And then he said, hang on to life, get them in, Bill. It was great. Well, and that building was too small. So we have to start having double services each night.

And we did that. And then that got to be too small. So we engaged the Centennial Auditorium. It would seat twenty two hundred or more. And we had to have double services there. We had planned to go for a week and a half.

We had to go for seven weeks altogether. And people started coming in from all over the country to see what God was doing. That was an unusual time. I remember one time a ladies meeting. Eight hundred ladies showed up.

The meeting went on for hours, sharing, praying, going off to the prayer room for help. It was a marvelous time. And our song leader, Dr. Virgil Brock, some of you may know who he was. He wrote the song Beyond the Sunset, Sing and Smile and Pray.

He was our son at eighty five years old. He was off key a little bit, but nobody minded. He was so full of God, you know, did a marvelous job. And I remember after that ladies meeting, he said, Brother McLeod, we have witnessed strange, strange things today.

We'd all agree to that. I mean, the things that were happening the way God was working in people's hearts. In my own church, there were two young men about eighteen, nineteen, very athletic, much involved in sports.

And they didn't they didn't want to go to the meetings, but their parents were after them. And so the two of them were talking on the telephone one day and the mother of one was listening in. She shouldn't have been, but she was.

And they promised each other, you're not going for it, right? No, we're not going for no matter what happened. No, no matter what happened, I'm not going for it. So they planned to sit there and turn off their ears, make their parents happy.

The one fellow sitting on the left side of the church got saved that morning. The other guy on the other side, the deacons brought him into my office afterwards and said, Phil, I don't know what's wrong.

He's just saying something funny. So I got him into my office and he knelt there and he was shaking his head and he was saying, no way. Never again. Never again. Never again. I said, Phil, what's the problem?

He said, never again. Can I doubt the reality of Jesus Christ? He said he tore my heart wide open. He revealed himself to me and he was saved on the spot, you know. Thank God. The other boy is a civil engineer in Denver, Colorado area now.

I checked him out a couple of years ago, doing fine. Thank God. So a lot of things like that were going on. Many people, they just, they stayed away and sometimes they couldn't stay away and they'd say, I don't even know how I got here now.

I didn't want to come, but just had to come. And so every night there were people saved and every night there were Christians revived. And you know, it seemed to start with the Christian, the Christian workers, pastors, evangelists, missionaries, Sunday school workers, and so on.

These were the people that first of all seemed to be responding. And naturally when that happened, the other people felt quite free to respond also. Ralph and Lou were a great couple. They never pushed people.

They just preached. God worked and we prayed. We didn't stop praying when the revival began. We kept praying. It was a wonderful, wonderful time of blessing. And then teams began going out. We visited every province in Canada.

I had crusades in every province except two small provinces in the East and I made places in the States. A fellow from Portland, Oregon, he passed through the Baptist church. He showed up in the meetings I was holding in Winnipeg right after Saskatoon.

And he said, I have a great need in my life. I'm just not right with God somehow. And so we talked together and we prayed together and we knelt at a chair and I led him in three simple steps of revival.

When he got to his feet, here's what he said. I don't feel one bit different now than I did before I knelt at the chair. But when I knelt at that chair, I gave God everything I am, everything I have. I gave everything to God.

He went back to his church in Portland, Oregon, began to preach and a revival erupted. They had to have meetings for 11 weeks, 11 weeks. They prayed with 3 ,000 people over that period of time. They set up a revival center in Portland.

They sent teams into other neighboring states and so on. It was just another revival in another place. And things like that were happening. God was so good. And you know, we get requests constantly from all over the country.

Send us a team, send us a team. It got to the place where we never had any teams left. They were all busy. All the preachers were busy. Some were preaching, you know. In one case, it was in the Denver, Colorado area.

They wanted a team. They said, we have 10 days. We've got a bunch of churches together. Please send us someone. So we sent them two revived farmers. They were just farmers, you know. And they had wonderful meetings, revival meetings.

People were saved. People were blessed. And so things like that were happening too. The lay people got deeply involved in many of these teams. I thank God for what I saw happening. In my office one day during those revival times, the telephone rang.

Revival, Repentance, and Restitution

And it was a man from my church who worked in the university. And he was crying. I couldn't make out what he was saying, except he wanted to see me. I said, well, come. Fifteen minutes later, he ran into my office.

He fell on his knees at my desk and put his head on the desk and just cried and cried. I thought one of his kids had been killed or something terrible has happened. And then he told me what happened. He said I was sitting on my office desk and he said, well, all I can say is the spirit of God torn my heart wide open and showed me every sin I'd ever committed from the time I was a child.

He said, Pastor, it was like looking into hell. He said it was awful. He said I was familiar with a woman, not my wife. I've got to go make it right with my wife. I falsified a workman's compensation form.

I got thousands of dollars for something that didn't happen on the job. I got some friends where it happened on the job. I got all this money falsely. I've got to go to the government and confess this.

And then he said this. He said, I don't care if I lose my money. I don't care if I lose my wife. I don't care if I lose my job. I don't care if I go to jail, but I've got to be right with God. I can't stand this.

And God gave him a great gift of counseling. Sometimes, you know, they'd be in the files and meetings where they could drive. They'd be there and they had a great gift for counseling. And one time he said, and they sit on the platform with me and I have them give their testimony.

And he said, Pastor, do you know why I sit there smiling? I said, no, why do you? He said, because I know what's going to happen down there and they don't know yet. And it was so exciting, though, to see God moving congregations and blessing certain people.

So many pastors and Christian works got turned inside out and just on fire for God and people who had left the ministry came back into the ministry. And many ordinary people became extraordinary people.

And we saw that in meetings. I went to Woodstock, New Brunswick. It's a small town, maybe 5 ,000 people. We had 50 churches in the area came together for the meetings. And we had a wonderful time. We had it spilled over.

We're supposed to start in Denver, Colorado. We couldn't because we spilled over in Woodstock, New Brunswick. And we had the same manifestations of the power of God in those meetings as well. One Sunday morning, I preached in a neighboring church about 20 miles away.

And the pastor of the home church where I was holding the meetings, he said, Bill, you've got to be back here at least by 1130, because what are we going to do if you don't? So I said, we'll get back.

Don't worry about it. I almost didn't get back on the curve, but I made it OK. But when I got there about 25 to 12, there was about 30 people standing on the platform. And what's going on here? There are people who want to give their testimonies to what God is doing in their life.

And many of them were old. It was an unusual crusade in this that you see old people coming down the aisle at the time of invitation. They walk three steps and hold on to a pew and get their breath. And they walk three steps more and hold on the pew and get their breath to get to the platform to give their testimony.

And then the pastor said, oh, see that girl coming down the aisle? A girl with flaming red hair. What about her? He said she's the shyest person in the world and she couldn't talk to herself in front of a mirror without blushing.

I don't know what she's going to say when she gets up here. And she got up there. I think it took her about 10 minutes. We usually stop people. It gets to be too long. We simply had to listen. She'd been so touched by God, so transformed.

She was filled with the spirit of God and told us all about what a time. And then I never got to preach till about 12 o 'clock that day. You know, you don't worry about things like that in the time of revival.

You just you move with what the spirit of God is doing. In some cases, the odd case, we had no preaching at all. That wasn't normal. We they usually have security preach 40 minutes. If I preach, I preach 40 minutes at least, you know.

And so some rumors were being spread abroad that there was no preaching in the revival. That was entirely untrue. In the seven weeks, we only had two nights where there's no preaching. And because of the heavy sharing going on, people would have people come for something, have a lineup from here, where were they long and over here.

And they had to do it as we invited them. We say, listen, be short. Don't tell your life history. Get to the point. Two minutes. Try and be short because there's other people. And we told them, if you can't find the landing field, we'll help you come down.

And sometimes we had to do that, you know. It was such a great time, though. I thought, you know, 40 people giving their testimony one night, still with the spirit of God saying, telling you what God had done, what God had done, not what we had done, what God had done.

That's revival, you know. It's Christians coming up to a New Testament level. That's all it is, revival, you know. And it was a marvelous time. Well, we want to talk about all prayer. You remember that we have the text of Ephesians 6 .18.

Praying Everywhere in Faith

But in 1st Timothy 2 .8, Paul said, I will, therefore, that men pray everywhere, everywhere, lifting up holy hands and doubting. Do you pray everywhere? No, we don't do that. I mean, two Christians meet, they talk about the crops, they talk about the latest sports event, latest political furor, whatever, you know.

But we don't pray, no. I pastored a church years back in a place called Berto, Manitoba. And one day a lady phoned and wanted me to come and see her. She was an older lady. She was born in Wales. And she, as a young girl, had seen a revival.

And she said, in those days, I remember I'd be walking down the sidewalk and here would be six or eight men kneeling on the sidewalk with their arms around each other praying. And she said, oh, how those men prayed.

And she said, I've known ever since, and I never had what they had. And I want to have whatever it is. I want to have it. And she accepted Christ that day. Those men would never have known that the little girl walking past them was going to find Christ as a result of them praying on the sidewalk, you know.

We were asked to come with a team from Saskatoon to Winnipeg, 500 miles. And we had five guys in the car, and people was a prayer meeting in the hallway. We didn't see that wonderful herd of black Angus cattle in the field.

We didn't see some big outfit went rolling by on the highway or some car, some home costing a million dollars. We didn't see any of that stuff. It was all pray, pray, pray. I know a missionary. Oh, and they prayed for him.

I know a fellow, and we prayed for him. Whatever it was, it went on and on for 10 hours. When we got to Winnipeg, we got into a motel. And then we said, now let's have a prayer meeting. So we had a great prayer meeting.

And then we had a meeting, and the place was packed to the doors. And there's a fellow there who later on became my song leader. Six foot four, Howard. His name was Howard Gardner. And he was quite critical.

He said, when I heard that you, it happened in your church, I knew it wouldn't be emotional because you're not an emotional person. So he felt it was safe to go, you know. That was his undoing. He was sitting there, and I was preaching on the text, let each esteem other better than themselves.

He said, at that moment, everything changed. It was like God was standing in front of me. He said to me, do you live that way? And he said, yes, Lord, I do. And God said, what about George Bell? Now, George Bell was a fellow pastor.

He couldn't stand. And he said to God, he's such a big windbag. I don't know how you can bless him the way you do. That's what he said to the Lord. And so the Lord said, I want you to go to the altar.

And he, I see him coming down the aisle. I'm in the middle of the sermon. He's coming down now, faces white as snow. And I can't explain what he said. I can only tell you what he said. You'll have to figure it out.

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

And he gave his life totally to God at that moment. He was such a beautiful character, the worker. He prayed by the hour. He wanted people to Christ. He had such a tender, loving spirit. We had a wonderful time.

And then later his health broke down and he couldn't be on the road. And so I missed his companionship very, very much. I don't know what happened when he walked down the aisle. I can't explain it, but Christ met him in some way and he knew it was the Lord.

And things like that were happening. We heard it again and again. I will therefore, men pray everywhere without wrath and without doubting, it says. OK, without doubting, you pray in doubt, you better quit praying and doubting.

All things whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing you shall receive. And we certainly learned that in a powerful way in those days. What things do you desire when you pray, believing you'll receive them, you'll have them.

And, you know, these are just as well as I do and many others like them telling us. Ask in faith, nothing wavering. Wavers are like a wave of the sea, driven by the wind and tossed. Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.

Unbelief kills it. We have to pray in faith. That means, of course, you have to be careful before you pray, but you're praying for something that is the will of God. I will therefore, the men pray everywhere, everywhere.

Persevering Prayer and Anna’s Example

Remember that word. Then there's a word in Luke or in Ephesians 6, 18, persevering, persevering. Christ told a part of Luke 18, that men ought always to pray and not to faint. They asked George Mueller one time, do you ever give up when you're praying for somebody or something?

And he said, George Mueller never gives up. He prayed for two men for 40 years that they might be saved. One was saved a year before he died and one was saved something like a year after he died. Persevering, with all perseverance, it says that word all.

We read about Anna in Luke chapter 2, it says, she never left the temple. She served God with fastings and prayers night and day. I'm sure that there were people that said, or at least thought, what's Anna doing in the temple all the time?

Why doesn't she get out and help the poor? Why doesn't she get out and preach the word of God? What is she doing in the temple? But she was serving God, fasting and praying. And God made sure it got in the Bible so we'd understand there is this kind of ministry, and it's important, and we need it.

Continual Prayer and the Ministry of the Word

Now, the apostles said, we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. We don't do it that way. We give ourselves to the ministry of the word in a hundred different ways, and then if we have a little time left over, we'll pray.

I mean, that's how it goes, right? That's what I see. That's what I hear. That's what I did myself at one time. We will give ourselves. It means we'll just throw ourselves into this. Prayer is the first thing and the most important thing.

If you remember the story of Symbola in New York, when he took over that little church, 20 members, couldn't make payments on the mortgage, no training for the ministry. He said, I didn't know how to do anything, but I knew how to pray.

And that's how it started with 20 people. And today, they have four services every Sunday. All of them are packed, apparently, 1 ,800 people. I don't know how he does it. You should pray for him. We will give ourselves continually to prayer, to prayer.

People, we've got to get God into the picture, whatever the picture is. He's waiting. He's only moved by faith and holiness. It is impossible without faith to please God. Impossible. So no kind of plant-based activity will get it.

Let me give you an example. I was in a Southern Baptist church in Rio Hondo, Texas. Rio Hondo thinks about 1 ,200 people. And he was running about 500 Sunday morning. The church would seat about 1 ,000.

And five weeks before I came, he had an evangelistic crusade. He rented an auditorium, seating a couple of thousand, in a high school. And then he did something he'd never done before. He invited a rock band to come so he'd get the kids in there, you know.

So it was packed night after night for a whole week. And they sent a record for Southern Baptist, apparently. They had 1 ,800 professions of salvation in that one week. Five weeks later, I was to come.

He had told me about the wonderful things that God did. When I got there with my song leader, he met the plane. And he was one of the saddest-looking people I'd ever seen. And he said to me, I have a great need.

And I said, well, come on. And he came into the motel. He fell on the floor. He began to weep. Then he told me what had happened. He hadn't baptized one of those converts. He never had one of them attending his church, even.

Not even one. And his wife was very angry with him and almost destroyed their marriage because she said, you compromise your convictions. I don't honor you anymore. She just almost walked out on him. She didn't, thank God.

But it almost came to that. See, God wasn't in that. He was anxious to get a crowd in a worldly way. And he got a crowd, no doubt about that, but he didn't get anything from it. And we've seen things similar to this in Canada and other places where they use methods to get a crowd that meant nothing.

So we have to be careful. We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Paul wrote to the church at Rome, among other things, Romans 15, 30. He called on that, he said, to strive together with me in your prayers to God for me.

He called it striving. And prayer at times will be striving. It's your physique that's involved. You have to give it all you have. And especially in times when God draws near and you begin to see how empty you are and how sinful you have been and all of this.

Prayer as Striving, Helping, and Travail

All right, striving in prayer, striving. Second Corinthians 111 says, you also helping together by prayer. Now, there's a gift of helps in the New Testament. It's not spelled out. It's called the gift of helps.

It's a gift that any Christian can have. And we should be alert and wide to the possibility any day that God may call on me to help somebody else and maybe lead them to Christ. The gift of helps. And here he calls it, you also helping together by prayer.

You know, nobody ever convenes a conference where they're going to seek to get the gift of helps, right? You never hear of that. They convene conferences to get more of the Holy Spirit or something, you know.

What about the gift of helps? They're never going to write a book about you if you have a great gift of helps, you know. You never have anybody invite you to speak and share in a meeting, you know. The gift of helps, what did you do?

Oh, that's not important. What's important is the public thing that goes on, you know. And oftentimes, I'm sure, as far as God is concerned, he's very unhappy. All right. You also helping together by prayer.

Paul said, travailing. Galatians 4 .19, my little children of whom I travail and birth again until Christ be formed in you. So he likens prayer to having a child, you know. It's a painful thing. Travail.

And it's used that way, I mean, in relation to prayer in a number of places in the Word of God. It's work. The Bible speaks about fighting the good fight of faith. It's a faith. It's a work. Faith is a work.

It's a fight because Satan is opposing us. He doesn't mind what we do, but he hates it when he sees us on our knees. And we need to shake him up more than we do. Pray, like it says, without ceasing. In everything, give thanks.

Travailing. Remember, Paul said, you did run well. Who hindered you? One translation says, who drove you back? What happened here? When he left, the last he'd seen these people, they were doing well, walking in the Spirit, things were great.

He comes back, and all of this is ended, and they're back in the flesh. He said, I'm afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor and vain. He observed days and months and times and years. They were going back to the old Jewish ways, you know.

Paul was greatly disturbed. And so, the only way you can correct this is not by talking, it's by praying. There'll be some talking after prayer, perhaps, but prayer is the main thing. I prevail in birth again, which means he'd done it before when he was there, when the churches were established through his ministry.

Now he's doing it again to bring them back to where they should have been and were not. The Bible speaks about, like, watch in the same, watch in the same, with thanksgiving. He's talking about prayer.