Icabod Or Ebenezer — Charles Price

Icabod Or Ebenezer — Charles Price

Our speaker this evening requires no introduction, I'm sure, but I'm going to introduce him as a fellow Welshman. Charles Price is our guest speaker this evening from People's Church Toronto, and we're so thrilled, brother, that you came to be with us.

Last year, Charles sent us a video to be used at our conference in Wales, and I've seen that video. Of course, like you, I've seen it many, many times on television, and we're just so delighted. We've given him the evening, the rest of the evening, for him to speak to us about his burden for revival, and whatever God has laid upon his heart.

So would you come, brother? And I've invited Clayton Duggan and Bill Tennant, I saw you somewhere, Bill. Would you come and pray for him, please?

Holy Father, we come before you to thank you for the anointing that you have bestowed upon Charles and those who work with him, and the effectiveness of his ministry. We just rejoice in that. And secondly, we simply ask tonight that you would, in a powerful and strong way, speak the truth that we need to hear to each of us.

In Jesus' precious name, amen.

Father, we humble ourselves before you tonight. And God, we want just to say that we are longing to hear from you. We thank you for your faithful servant. Please fill him with your glory tonight. Set him free in the Holy Spirit.

And Lord, bring your word to our hearts, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.

Revival Must Begin With Openness to God

I think if we were to go home at this stage, many of us would have said that we had met with God. I think in the time of singing those songs which were so from the heart, and so worshipful, and even Gareth's story of the origin of this conference has had on it the sense that God is doing something fresh and real and deep.

But the biggest mistake we could make would be to make revival a topic, a subject that we try to analyze, that we dissect, that we try to be clever about, that we try to explain. And my own heart has been challenged very much in these last minutes that we've been here together, because this conference will only be worthwhile and have repercussions throughout eternity if we ourselves are open to a work of God that we may not have expected when we came in here tonight.

It's not a work that's orchestrated or manipulated, but a work of simply letting God be God in our own hearts, in our own lives. My own spiritual history was born in revival. My great-grandfather was a farmer in South Wales.

He was a godless man by all accounts, and in 1904, God visited Wales in a marvelous way. A hundred thousand people were converted in ten weeks at the peak of the Welsh revival. There isn't one explanation for that.

Evan Roberts was the primary instrument in those early days, but not the sole instrument. And my great-grandfather, along with others, mocked the revival, saw it as some kind of religious fanaticism.

And one night he went down to the local pub, bar, where he would apparently go from time to time, perhaps regularly, to meet with friends and drink, and nobody has a record of what happened in that pub that night, other than God was there.

And he was converted. He came home, woke up his wife, my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother, rather. That would have been before the times. She thought he was drunk. He told her he'd become a Christian, not only confirmed that he was drunk, but he woke up the rest of his family, including my grandfather, who was then in his early twenties.

And within the next day or two, I'm not sure how long, altogether, the whole family had come to Christ. So my own spiritual legacy began in a time of revival in a pub, where God was working in such marvelous ways that people were just crying out to God for mercy.

And that's what they're crying out to God for. They weren't asking God for a good life. They were asking for mercy, for forgiveness, for cleansing. We're so often in danger of turning Jesus Christ into our preferred helper, a great physician, a great psychologist, a great provider.

But that isn't who he is. He's a Savior. Not just from the guilt and consequence of our sin, of course, that is where his saving work begins, but from the power and the grip of our sin. And when we make Jesus anything other than primarily a Savior, and that salvation in its fullness involves his filling us with his Holy Spirit, involves his Lordship in our lives, but it might leave you sick.

It might leave you poor. It might leave you in trouble. And if that was our theme tonight, I'll give you lots of evidence of that in Scripture. And Everett Roberts' message was summed up in four parts.

And this message had that impact. Why it was so for such a short a time? Only God in his sovereignty knows that. Though the repercussions of that revival went all over the world. There's a church in Toronto.

We celebrated the 1904 revival in 2004, the 100th anniversary, we invited a team from Wales who came and spent a Sunday with us, and we had a wonderful day. We came very close to that sense of something very unusual happening, and we invited the Welsh church in Toronto to join us, and they did, because it was a nice, for them, cultural exercise.

They're led by a man who doesn't believe the Word of God. But the church was born in 1906 by Welsh migrants who brought with them the revival. But Everett Roberts' four parts were, number one, confess all known sin.

Confession, Holiness, Obedience, and Public Faith

Number two, deal with and get rid of anything that's doubtful in your life. You may not know if it's wrong or not. If it's doubtful, said Roberts, get rid of it. Be ready to obey the Holy Spirit instantly was his third point, and fourthly, confess Christ publicly.

I was in Wales two months ago to speak at the Cardiff Men's Convention, which is an annual event that draws a big crowd of men from all over Wales, and I got hold of an old book that I hold together with an elastic band because it really is divided.

Published in 1906, Everett Roberts, the great Welsh revivalist and his work, written in an old style with appendix that lists the towns and villages and the numbers of people who came to Christ in those towns and villages.

I read this on the flight from London back to Toronto, eight-hour flight, and I read almost the entire book, stopping many times to pray and to wipe my eyes at the wonder of what God did. So recently in world history, I began to preach when I was 16 years of age.

I'd been a Christian for four years, and I tried hard to live the Christian life for four years, and I discovered I can't live the Christian life, only Jesus Christ can. And the Christian life was not me living for him, it was he living in and through me.

It was not me serving him. Jesus said, I don't want servants, I came not to be served. You ever noticed he said that? He wants people who make themselves available for him to work in and through them.

And with a friend, we started to go to coffee bars and try and reach young people. We used to hang out in coffee bars. I lived then in Hereford, which is on the English side of the Welsh border, or in Herefordshire.

And then we started to preach on the streets. We got permission on Saturday afternoons, and one day a lady walked by, and she came from a little Welsh village just across the border. She said, we have a small church, and we don't have many people there, and we would love if you young men would come and take a service for us on a Sunday night.

Sunday night was the main time when they met. We said we'd love to. We went down to this village, had a church, many seats. In the aftermath of the revival, they built this big church. Today there were only, or then, there was only half a dozen people there.

We began to speak in other little churches. By the time I was 17, every Sunday night we were going into these little churches that had no pastors, a handful of people. There was a team of four of us. We grew to six.

We all went into full-time ministry eventually. Sometimes, we'd sit on the platform usually. Sometimes there were more of us on the platform than there were in the congregation. I remember once there was one lady in the congregation, one lady at the organ who never left the organ.

Her back was to us, and we took it in turns to preach. We sang. We gave testimonies. We preached. It was my turn to preach that night. I didn't know how to preach freely. I kept to my notes, and I said, maybe there's somebody here tonight, and this poor lady, oh, it must be me, you know.

But some of these buildings had almost as many seats as the population. One village up in the Black Mountains we went to, little village, you'd have to look hard to find on a map, had a chapel with a balcony, horseshoe-shaped.

Balcony hadn't been used for decades, few people down below, and they said, we built, this chapel was built in the early 1900s with the expectancy that God would reach every person in this village. There's as many seats in this chapel as there are people living in the village.

One for everybody. It raises a big question. Why did the revival not last? And that causes me to look more deeply into my own heart and ask the same question of myself. Why is it that times of meeting with God, times of great experience of God, times of a great consciousness of God, why do they sometimes pass?

1 Samuel 4: The Ark Cannot Substitute for God

I'm going to ask you to turn in your Bible to 1 Samuel chapter 4. And I hope you brought a Bible with you, because the only words that'll be authoritative this week will be those that come to us from the Word of God.

And you'll probably find this week that every speaker who is looking for revival stories will be looking in the Old Testament, as we did this afternoon when Don McClure took us to Genesis 22. If you want to find stories of revival, you have to go to the Old Testament.

If you want to find stories of evangelism, go to the New Testament. But the Old Testament is the story of the people of God. It was the old covenant, not the new covenant. It was exclusive to the Jewish nation, the descendants of Abraham, not to the spiritual body of Christ, which now is universal and comprises every nation.

But so many truths and principles are the same. These were the people of God who intended to walk with God, and to enjoy God, and to experience God, and to be a blessing to the nations. But again and again, they failed to be that.

And they failed to be that for similar reasons why the church of Jesus Christ today can be described in so many of the sad, tragic ways we heard described on the screen a few minutes ago. We've lost the plot.

Or we've retained the form, but lost the life. And in 1 Samuel chapter 4, I want to read you just a few verses, but keep your Bible open because I want to look at a very important story here that addresses this issue.

Verse 1, and in my Bible, the NIV, it is the middle of verse 1, I'm going to start. Now, the Israelites went out to fight against the Philistines. The Israelites camped at Ebenezer and the Philistines at Aphek.

The Philistines deployed their forces to meet Israel, and as the battle spread, Israel was defeated by the Philistines, who killed about 4 ,000 of them on the battlefield. When the soldiers returned to the camp, the elders of Israel asked, why did the Lord bring defeat upon us today before the Philistines?

And they came up with a solution. Let us bring the ark of the Lord's covenant from Shiloh so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of our enemies. So as far as I'll read for the moment, Israel is in combat with the Philistines, a ferocious little neighbor that lived on their southwestern border, and whenever they appear in the Old Testament, they're fighting.

I don't know if there are any Irish people here, but I think they are the ancestors of the Irish. And in this case, Israel goes into battle with them, and by the way, the reason why the Israelites fight the Philistines is because God had given them territory, and when they came into Canaan back in the book of Joshua, there were seven nations inhabiting Canaan.

The Philistines were not one of them. They had migrated across from Phoenicia, across to the area today just south of Gaza, and in the wake of the Israelite conquering of Canaan, they came up behind them, hoping in the slipstream they would gain some advantage and get a foothold.

In other words, they were out to take what God had given to Israel as their territory, their land. And so they're not just fighting the Israelites, they're fighting the purposes of God. And they go to meet them, the Israelites go to meet them, and as they do so, the Philistines beat them and kill 4 ,000 of them.

And so the Israelites retreat with their tail between their legs, and they ask the question, the elders ask the question, why did the Lord bring defeat upon us today at the hands of the Philistines? In other words, they said, why is it that we, the people of God, who have been given this land by God, go into battle against an enemy of God, and we ourselves, instead of being victorious, we're beaten, thrashed, 4 ,000 of our men killed?

What are we going to do? And this is what they decided, let us bring, verse 3, middle of verse 3, let us bring the Ark of the Lord's Covenant from Shiloh, so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of our enemies.

And let me explain what lies behind this. The Ark of the Covenant, as many of you will know, was the most important piece of furniture that God told Moses to build for the tabernacle. It was a rectangular box about 1 .1 meters long, about 70 centimeters wide, it wasn't huge, it was made of acacia wood, it was covered with pure gold, and on top was what the King James calls the mercy seat, the NIV calls it the atonement cover, which isn't quite as romantic, and one translation calls it the lid.

The mercy seat is the best description. On the top, on the lid, the mercy seat, were two cherubim with outstretched wings. The wings of the cherubim touched each other's wings, forming a sort of ark. And God said that they were to place this into the holy of holies, the inner part of the temple, and God said when He told them to consecrate the ark, there I will meet with you, and there I will speak with you, and there I will give you all my commandments.

That's in Exodus 25. In other words, you want to meet with God, you meet Him at the ark. And once a year only, the high priest entered the holy of holies, and he sprinkled the ark with blood, the blood of atonement, and God spoke with him, and they met with him.

And several times when God refers to the ark of the covenant, He describes it as the place where I will meet with you. That's six times. It isn't called the ark, the place where I meet with you, and you know exactly what He's talking about.

You're talking about the ark. And so the ark represented the presence of God. That's why it was located in the holy of holies. Because what made the holy of holies holy was that God was there, and His presence was represented by the ark of the covenant.

Now the thinking behind the suggestion was straightforward. Although the ark was kept in the holy of holies, there had been times in their history when Israel's back had been against the wall, and they didn't know what to do, and they'd taken the ark of the covenant out of the holy of holies, and they'd taken it into the situation of conflict, and God had given them victory.

In fact, in Numbers chapter 10 and verse 35, when they were in the wilderness, it says this, whenever the ark set out, Moses said, rise up, O Lord, may your enemies be scattered, may your foes flee before you.

It was like a liturgy, that they would put the ark on the shoulders of the priests, and Moses would say, rise up, O Lord, may your enemies be scattered, because this ark represents the fact God is present among us, and God is going to give us victory, and He did.

And so in a number of examples, Numbers 31, they went into battle with the Midianites, and it says in verse 6 of Numbers 31, Moses sent them into battle, a thousand from each tribe along with Phinehas, son of Eliezer, the priest, who took with him articles from the sanctuary and trumpets for signaling.

The article from the sanctuary was the ark of the covenant, and they carried it into the battle with the Midianites, and God gave them victory. You may remember that in Joshua chapter 3, when it came time to cross the Jordan River, it says in Joshua chapter 3 and verse 1, earlier in the morning, Joshua and all the Israelites set out from Shittim and went to the Jordan, where they camped before crossing over.

After three days, the officers went throughout the camp, giving orders to the people, when you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God and the priests who are Levites carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it.

That's the cue. When you see the ark of the covenant on the move, on the shoulders of the priests, follow it. And verse 6 says, Joshua said to the priests, take up the ark of the covenant and pass on ahead of the peoples.

They took it up and they went ahead of them. Verse 8 says, tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant, when you reach the edge of the Jordan's water, go and stand in the river. And in chapter 4 and verse 10, the next chapter, it says, now the priests who carried the ark remained standing in the middle of the Jordan until everything the Lord had commanded Moses was done by the people.

Just as Moses had directed Joshua, the people hurried over, as soon as all of them had crossed, the ark of the Lord and the priests came to the other side while the people watched. What happened was this, as they carried the ark into the Jordan River, the moment the feet of the priests carrying the ark touched the water, it stopped flowing.

And you remember, a path opened, they went through. When they came to their next obstacle, which was the city of Jericho in Joshua chapter 6, it says in verse 3, march around the city. You probably know this story well.

March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets or ramshorts in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times with the priests blowing the trumpets.

And when you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout, and the wall of the city will collapse, and the people will go up, every man straight in. So carry the ark around the city, and verse 6 says, so Joshua, son of Nun, called the priests and said to them, take up the ark and come to the Lord and have seven priests carry trumpets, etc.

They marched around the city once a day for six days, seven times on the seventh day. The point is, the ark was being carried in front. The people shouted, and in verse 12, it says, Joshua got up early the next morning and the priests took up the ark of the Lord.

The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets went forward, marching before the ark of the Lord and blowing the trumpet. The armed men went ahead of them, and the rear guard followed the ark of the Lord.

And while the trumpets kept sounding, so on the second day, they marched around the city once and returned to the camp. They did this for six days. And verse 16, the seventh time around, it's on the seventh day, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the people, shout, the Lord has given you the city.

And you remember, the walls collapsed. But the point is, right at the forefront, marching around the city, they carried the ark of the governor. And God had given them victory. Now this is important background to understand what's happening here.

They've gone to fight against the Philistines, 4 ,000 of their own people have been killed. They come back and say, what happened? Why did God desert us? And they said, hey, let's take the ark of the covenant.

Because that is what has happened in our past, and when we did, our enemies were scattered. And so verse 3 says, let us bring the ark of the Lord's covenant from Shiloh so that it may go with us and save us from the hands of our enemies.

And let me read on, if you're still in 1 Samuel 4, what happened. Verse 5, it says, when the ark of the Lord's covenant came into the camp, all Israel raised such a great shout that the ground shook. Hearing the epilogue, the Philistines asked, what's all this shouting in the Hebrew camp?

When they learned that the ark of the Lord had come into the camp, the Philistines were afraid. A God has come into the camp, they said. We're in trouble. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Woe to us.

Who will deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with all kinds of plagues in the desert. Be strong, Philistines, beat men, or you'll be subject to the Hebrews as they have been to you.

Beat men and fight. So notice what's happening. They take the ark into the Philistine camp. The Philistines are scared now. They say they brought their god into the camp. The Philistines said, beat men, fight.

They rallied them and look what happened. Verse 10, so the Philistines fought and the Israelites were defeated. Every man fled to his tent. The slaughter was very great. Israel lost 30 ,000 foot soldiers.

The ark of God was captured and Eli's two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, the ones who carried the ark, Hophni and Phinehas, died. So they carried the ark into the battle. They faced the Philistines with this fresh confidence.

The Philistines characterized by fresh fear, yet the Philistines thrashed the Israelites, steal the ark itself, and kill the priests who were carrying it. This is disaster. Let me read you what happened.

Verse 12, that day a Benjamite ran from the battle line and went to Shiloh, his clothes torn and dust on his head. When he arrived, there was Eli sitting on his chair by the side of the road watching because his heart feared for the ark of God.

When the man entered the town and told what had happened, the whole town sent up a cry. Eli heard the outcry. Eli, of course, was the priest, the father of Hophni and Phinehas, and he's an old man now.

Eli heard the cry and asked, what is the meaning of this uproar? The man hurried over to Eli, who was 98 years old and whose eyes were set so that he could not see, and he told Eli, I have just come from the battle line.

I just fled from it this very day. Eli asked, what happened, my son? The man who brought the news replied, Israel fled before the Philistines and the army has suffered heavy losses. Also your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead and the ark of God has been captured.

When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell backward off his chair by the side of the gate. His neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man and heavy, fat and flabby. He'd led Israel for 40 years.

His daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, was pregnant and near the time of delivery when she heard the news that the ark of God had been captured and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she went into labor and gave birth, but was overcome by her labor pains.

And as she was dying, the woman attending her said, don't despair, you've given birth to a son, but she did not respond or pay any attention. She named the boy Ichabod, saying, the glory has departed from Israel because of the capture of the ark of God and the deaths of her father-in-law and her husband.

She said, the glory has departed from Israel for the ark of God has been captured. So now thrashed and beaten, a messenger runs back, Eli says, tell me what's happened. They told him that his sons had been killed.

What happened to the ark? Well, the ark has been stolen. Eli was so shocked he fell off his chair, broke his neck, died. The news got to Phinehas' wife, his daughter-in-law. She went prematurely into labor, gave birth, died in the process, and named the baby with her last breath.

And she called him Ichabod, the glory has departed from Israel. It's a tragic story. But it has its origin in a very simple issue, and forgive me for giving you lots of homework just to be thinking because we'll get to the point in a minute, and you won't get the point if you take a nap when I'm giving you the heavy stuff.

But the simple issue is this. When back in Joshua chapter 3 they crossed the Jordan with the priests carrying the ark in front of them, what Joshua said to the people in verse 5 was, consecrate yourselves for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.

The Lord will do amazing things. In verse 10 he says, this is how you'll know that the living God is among you and that he will drive out your enemies. So the ark that the priests were carrying on their shoulders symbolized the presence of God amongst his people, but it was a symbol, and a symbol only, it's not the symbol we're looking to, they said it's God who's going to deliver us, it's God who's going to get us over into the land.

In Joshua chapter 6 when they went to the city of Jericho, what God said in verse 2 is this, I, that's God, I have delivered Jericho into your hands. In verse 16 it says, shout for the Lord has given you the city.

Now you carry the ark of the covenant on your shoulders, but it's God who's going to give you the city. Now go back to 1 Samuel chapter 4 and verse 3 and read it very carefully. Look at what they say, let us bring the ark of the Lord's covenant from Shiloh so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of our enemies, it will save us.

If you have a King James Bible, it says, let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Shiloh unto us that when it cometh among us, it may save us from the hand of our enemies. There's a lot of it and a lot of us, but nothing of God.

You see what's happened is this, they have taken that which God had given to them as a symbol of his presence amongst them, and they've detached the symbol from God himself, and they began to trust the pattern, the symbol, instead of God himself, and the moment you trust something, even though it may be something good that derives from God, and you begin to trust it instead of God himself, God moves out.

The Danger of Reproducing Revival Patterns

You see, it's always easier to reproduce a pattern than to learn a truth and a principle. If we reduce the Christian life, or if we reduce Christian service to programs that do not require divine initiative, divine originality, divine anointing, and divine activity, we can do them week after week after week, but we've killed them dead.

And Sunday morning worship is simply karaoke, and there's no life. These men, these leaders, these elders of Israel, have become godless men. And so in a fix, beaten by the Philistines, who they should have beaten, they say, let's bring the ark and it will save us, let's take it into the battle, and they're superstitious, they don't know God, they're just following the pattern.

You know, sometimes we hear of a great move of God in some part of the world, and we send our journalists, and our photographers, and our strategists to examine what God is doing in that part of the world, and they reduce it to a program, they turn it into a seminar, they put it into a loose-leaf binder, they come home and they run seminars on how to have a revival, and we wonder why it doesn't work.

God wrote across this list, it was Phineas' wife who came up with the word Ichabod, and you try to reproduce here what God does somewhere else, and God will write Ichabod across it. If there's a real work of God going on in some part of the world, it's not because they've learned a new technique, it's because they're dealing with God.

But that's too costly. So we'd rather bring the ark, and it will do something for us, we think. Reduce what God did there to a seminar and bring it here. In 1905, 500 people from Wales went to the Keswick Convention in the north of England.

The Keswick Convention had been running for a number of years, its whole theme was seeking after holiness, and finding God in his fullness. And this contingent from Wales, full of the excitement of the Welsh revival, and you know every year the Keswick Convention published a book which gave all the messages and descriptions that went on, and I wrote a history of the Keswick Convention a couple of years ago, and I got well over a hundred, about 120 of these annual reports, and the 1905 report is interesting.

There was an atmosphere that was electric, but what happened was this. These 500 Welsh people had meetings after the main meetings were over, they went into the night when they sang some of the great songs of the Welsh revival.

Here is love, vast as an ocean, do you know that one? Hope will sing it this week, it's a beautiful revival hymn, you know it. And they stayed late into the night in the hope they would reproduce what God had done in Wales, and it didn't happen, other than there was some sense of yes, there's something different here, but God didn't break through.

And I would venture to suggest that what happened in Wales was that the revival degenerated into song. The Welsh loved to sing, and they had some great songs that encapsulated the atmosphere and the truths of the revival.

They would meet and just sing, and no longer open the word. They tried to bring it, not criticizing, those were wonderful days, but I see the danger. In your own level we hear there's a church down the road that God seems to be blessing and we're struggling, and so we send a couple of spies down the road and find out what they're doing and they come back and they tell us we need a bonfire to burn our hymn books and a few other things.

So we do all of that, and we change our music, and we change our style, and we still don't see the blessing of God, so we send the spies back and they come back next week and say, we forgot to tell you, you have to sing the songs 12 times each.

And, you know, that's not, if God is at work there, that's not the reason. You see, we're trying to imitate the pattern. Sometimes we say, if we look back and say 25 years ago, 30 years ago, God was blessing something in a certain way, let's do it again.

In Toronto, the late 40s and 50s, there's a great work of God done through the Youth for Christ movement. And they used to use the People's Church, which subsequently moved away from the original building when it was down right in the middle of the town, for these Saturday night Youth for Christ rallies, and many people were converted, and there's still people today, old people in our church who were saved in those Youth for Christ rallies.

I myself actually was saved in a Youth for Christ rally in England. A man came to me about a year ago and he said, I want to give you, gave me a number, several thousand dollars to restart Youth for Christ on Saturday nights.

I said, well, that's a wonderful desire. Were you converted in Youth for Christ? He said, yes, I was. He said, if we could recreate those rallies, we would see hundreds come to Christ. I loved his heart, we didn't take his money, we didn't restart Youth for Christ.

Because you see, that's saying, this is what God did then, let's just repeat it now. You don't need to be men and women of God, you don't need to wrestle with God about this, you need to seek Him and just repeat the pattern.

When I was a student, I remember reading the biography of C .T. Studd. Do you know the name of C .T. Studd? He was a great missionary, statesman, and pioneer. China, then Uttarakhand in India, then in Congo, he became the founder of what is known as now as WEC International, which is not that known in Canada, but it's an international mission, which started in Britain.

And Studd was a great pioneer, great man of God. I read his biography, written by his son-in-law, Norman Grubb, and it said in this biography that Studd used to wake up at 3 .30 in the morning and spend an hour in prayer and in the scriptures, and go back to sleep at 4 .30, and he did not miss that hour that he'd been awake.

So, if he normally slept eight hours, he did minus the hour in the middle, but he was just as refreshed as if he'd been in bed all night. And the writer says Studd saw this as the key to his own life.

Well, I read that, and I thought, that's the key. So I set my alarm for 3 .30. I got up, I made a cup of coffee, which Studd didn't do, but I needed to, and I knelt down by my bed. I had a little flat thing to put my coffee on.

I had my Bible, I had my notebook, which was my prayer list, and I knelt down by my bed, and about four hours later, I woke up, and I was stiff, my coffee was cold, and God was saying from heaven, Ichabod.

You see, it's not the 3 .30 in the morning, it's not the pattern, it's the truth. The truth is, Studd took time to meet with God. That was the truth. Now his physiology was such, he could do it in the middle of the night and not miss it.

That isn't my physical makeup. See, none of these things are wrong. Carrying the ark was not in itself wrong. There's no problem with learning from the movements of God in other places. That's why this book moved me so much, and that's why I love to hear and read about these revivals.

I've read all the stuff on the Hebridean revivals in Scotland and the East Anglian revival in England, because I come from England and Britain, and those have been the areas that I've been interested in.