The Canadian Revival - Part 10 — Bill McLeod

Faith in God's Promise and Persistent Prayer

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, 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's on your knees. So, I just felt I should do it, you know. Now I have to believe God that He will do that, and I think He will.

Pastor Cho's Prophecy of Revival in Canada

You see, some of you have heard of Pastor Cho in 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, and 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, you know, 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.

Prophetic Confirmation Through Duncan Campbell

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 near 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.

Biblical Praying and the Awakening of the Church

So we're all asleep right now, eh? I'm afraid.

I'm afraid. The Bible says in the book of Joel, arise 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 say by many or by a few, the Bible says it doesn't have to be a big beginning.

Haystack and Hebrides Revivals

You know, there's a haystack revival, they called that in the States years ago when a bunch of men were praying to get up 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 the normal situation in the world is for everyone to be asleep in the church as well. Yeah, that's true. It's true. And revival is simply waking up. That's a waking up.

The Moravian Prayer Revival and Missionary Sacrifice

Absolutely. You see, the Heron Hut thing, you know, the Moravians, Kahn Zinzendorf, 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 just praying for revival, and it began at a communion service one Sunday morning. And they started a prayer meeting that 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 the West Indies or somewhere else.

They'd never have a three-year, you know, home for a year stuff, the missionaries have today. They know they'll 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 Westlies to be born again, isn't it?

Whitefield, Wesley, and the Power of Preaching

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.

Whitefield's Influence on Prayer

Yeah? At one time I heard you saying a message that a university professor had read through the autobiographies of George Whitefield. Yes. It just made him, just spurred him on to pray. I was wondering if that was the same fellow you...

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.