Revival Praying — Leonard Ravenhill

Singing that lovely hymn, Trust and Obey, it's from England of course, but it reminds me of an old Nazarene in England and he used to like that hymn and he would say now we've sung the hymn, Trust and Obey and if you don't you'll rust and decay, which is sound advice.

Outside of the Word of God itself I find the greatest stimulant to faith is reading biographies or better still if you can get them autobiographies. I have a whole shelf in my library which is just made up of again biographies and autobiographies of people stretching back into the 1500s and I marvel at the, I was going to say perspicuity, I don't know whether these precious folk from Africa and elsewhere would know what those words are.

I can't say it in African anyhow. You know I think of men hymn writers like, well the precious man that wrote the hymn We're Marching to Zion and When I Surveyed a Wondrous Cross, you remember his name?

Isaac what? If I remember he was conversant with Greek when he was six and he did some Hebrew when he was nine. Isn't it great they didn't have video games in those days? We'd have missed half of the great hymns that we have.

Family Scripture Reading and the Foundations of Revival

The amazing thing is that way back in the 16th century, 17th century, that people trained their children in the things of God in a way that we've forgotten. I remember talking one morning, I used to rise somewhere around about five and pray with one of the few men that have seen revival in our day, Duncan Campbell.

And he told me about the islands, the little bunch of islands off the west coast of Scotland, the Hebrides as they're called, the New Hebrides away in the South Sea. And he said there's, believe me there's hardly a home in those islands where the father does not take the Bible before the children go to school and he reads it every morning.

He reads a psalm, which is a psalm in English but in their dialect it's a psalm. At night when the children come home from school the dishes are taken off the kitchen table and they're put there in the in the sink and again daddy takes the psalms and he reads them and to the best of his knowledge expounds them.

And from being the size of well as soon as they could articulate almost those those children are conversant with the word of God. On top of that they have to memorize the shorter catechism, which is about as thick as Scotch porridge.

Well then I said I got the answer. That's the answer to revival. Paul plants, Apollos waters, God gives the increase. The word has been lodged in the minds and hearts of those children for 15, 20 years.

And suddenly there's an invasion from heaven and that's what revival is. Revival isn't a big guy coming one Sunday and preaching till the next Sunday. That's a band-aid for a sick church. Revival is a divine invasion.

Revival changes the moral climate of a community. If it doesn't it isn't a revival. A big city-wide crusade may cost you a million dollars today. Revival doesn't cost a cent. Crusades have a dominant personality.

Revivals do not except the personality of the Spirit of God. But again I love to read biographies. I love to read autobiographies. And I can think of some great ones but I won't tell you because I don't get any commission on advertising books.

Revival as Divine Invasion Rather Than Religious Celebrity

But one of the greatest men that crossed the bridge of time. Now I can tell you there's a great study of William Booz in two volumes by a man called Begbie. Now I say this very kindly because you know there's a certain connotation with the word.

They were not Pentecostal though he preached the baptism of the Spirit. But let me tell you what happened. Begbie says when they had their great holiness meeting and the Holy Ghost was on the on the on the crowd that men would be sitting at the back.

You know backsliders usually sit at the back with a lot tonight. But they they would sit at the back of the church and they will be under such conviction they would shred their hymn books. Now don't do that because I'll get fired if you do that.

But be miserable fall on the floor or something that's all right. And he and then he said when people resisted the Holy Ghost. Now listen to this and you've been in some meetings. If the Holy Ghost wasn't there you believed he was.

You clapped your hands and shouted and had a wail of a time and you mistook noise for power. But he says the Spirit of God would lift men from the back of the auditorium and carry them over the congregation and drop them at the altar.

Now how would you like to see that? You say amen but not tonight. See we would like a revival if God would only come on the track that we built for him in our denomination. Or as the old lady says I don't belong your abomination anyhow.

But anyhow. We want revival our way. I've just finished a book Revival God's Way. And the reason I call it that is because we've tried every other way. Now here's a man one of the greatest men that ever crossed the bridge of time.

A man that dealt in the supernatural. A man that raised the dead. A man that strangled the economy of a nation because he thought it was better to die in a revival than live in luxury and go to hell. A man who raised the dead.

Everything supernatural was attached to this man and his life story is summed up in two words in the epistle of James. He prayed. So now you know I mean Elijah. He prayed. Do you think anybody would put that on your tombstone that you prayed?

The Lord's Prayer and the Priority of Prayer

I'm always fascinated with the fact that disciples came to Jesus and they never said Lord teach us to sing. They didn't say Lord teach us to do miracles. They didn't say Lord that sermon on the mount was the most awesome thing that's ever been preached and it certainly was.

And Lord give us the techniques of preaching. We certainly want to be preachers. No no no they didn't say Lord teach us to sing. They didn't say Lord teach us to do miracles. They did not say Lord teach us to preach.

But they said Lord teach us to pray. I think if I had my time over again I'd start a school for prayer. I take a dozen students every six months and tell them to forget there are such creatures as girls around.

Take them to some big house and not allow them to drive their automobiles and get down to serious study and not only study but exercise of prayer. We've tried everything else but prayer. We've tried organizing and somehow it doesn't work as good as agonizing.

We've forgotten about the upper room so we settle for the supper room. Now Elijah prayed. These men somewhere had heard Jesus pray and they said I'd rather do that than anything on earth. I would. I'd rather I'd rather preach than have my dinner.

But I'd rather pray than preach. I preached with some of the greatest preachers in the world in some of the greatest churches in the world and yet I've never been particularly fascinated with great preachers.

But I know some men who know how to travel in prayer and they certainly move me to the very depths of my being. In preaching we stand before men for God. In praying we stand before God for men. As far as I'm concerned I don't care what diploma you get in the in the seminary or cemetery as folks like to call them.

I don't care what diploma you get. If you get out of that place skilled and you know you're on the top list and you graduate with honors and your grandmother comes and weeps all the time that you have your gown on and all the rest of it.

You know she she looks back to the time she changed your diapers and all those thrilling things. I don't care what happens. If you leave that seminary and you can't pray you're a failure. It's because you have some personality and logic and a good vocabulary and a good way of expressing things.

Or you can get to the top of the ladder. It's not very very high anyhow in preaching. But when it comes to prayer that's a different category entirely. Now again the disciples said Lord teach us to pray.

Lots of people say God has no favorites. I'm sure he has. He had, he has, he always will have. Else why did Jesus take in the critical experiences of his life? Why did he take with him Peter James and John?

To raise the Jairus's daughter, to raise Lazarus from the dead. Why did he take them on the Mount of Transfiguration? And they said Lord teach us to pray. And he took them there. And what did they do?

They fell asleep. I think that's incredible. I don't think I've ever fallen to sleep in a prayer meeting in my life. I used to take teams of students around England. We walked every inch of the way. We had no automobiles couldn't afford a skateboard even.

And so we walked from the south coast to the north up to Scotland and to the east coast to the west and back again. We did the triangle at West. We did on horseback but we'd no horses. We walked. And we did street meetings and we'd come in at night maybe ten o 'clock or after very tired.

And one of the fellows would say well Skipper as they always call me, Skipper I need to pray. And I knew what it meant. It meant that everybody in the team, seven of us, would all pray. And I mean pray.

There's a children's hymn we used to sing in England. I often say my prayers but do I ever pray? Again as J .B. Phillips reminds us that in the early church they did not say prayers but they prayed in the Holy Ghost.

And I don't believe that's praying in tongues either though that could be very precious experience. The highest form of prayer has no speech. Hannah prayed but her voice was not heard. Well it talks about in Romans 8 about groanings which cannot be uttered.

Well if they can't be uttered then they can't be tongues or anything else. There's something deeper in the Spirit. There's a place where vocabulary runs out. Prayer actually. It's soul communion with God.

It's a two-way street. I speak to God, God speaks back to me. But the disciples were privileged to see the holiest man that ever lived and the greatest praying man that ever lived and they fell asleep.

So don't be too sharp on them. I guess you've fallen asleep many a time praying. And they got a second chance. The second chance was in that awesome place, the Garden of Gethsemane. Supposing you were set, you were privileged to just live, relive one day that Jesus had in his, in his three and a half years of ministry.

What day would you choose? An exciting day of raising the dead? Well what would you choose? Oh a long while I said was what I would choose. I would choose not a day. I would, I would like to have crept up to the edge of Gethsemane and heard him pray.

I'm not sure I could take it. There's a scripture that talks about groanings which cannot be uttered. There's that 22nd prophetic psalm where Jesus is saying that he's a worm and no man. You know why you don't pray?

Humility, Spiritual Poverty, and the Cost of Prayer

Because prayer is the language of the poor and you're too smart to pray aren't you? The self-sufficient don't need to pray. The self-satisfied don't want to pray. The self-righteous cannot pray. But David though he's a king, he has armies, everything, he repeatedly says, bow down thine ear and hear me for I am poor and needy.

Now you can strut in the pulpit. You can show your skill, you can juggle with the Greek and impress people. But I challenge you to strut when you've shut the door and you strut, you pray. Strut before God.

Do you think you dare do it? Is there anything that cuts us down to size more than going into the closet and waiting on God in prayer? I find it incredible at least with Peter, James and John that after they failed him on the Mount of Transfiguration, that they should again in the Garden of Gethsemane, they failed him.

He came and found them sleeping and he went away. He came a second time and they were sleeping, he went away. He came a third time and he said as though he'd abandoned them, sleep on now. I said last night, I say again that your church, the Sunday morning crowd in your church proves how popular the church is.

The Sunday night crowd proves how popular the preacher is. The prayer meeting proves how popular God is. No, the disciples didn't say, Lord teach us to sing. I live in an atmosphere of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity but they are.

David Wilkinson lives across the road from us. Dallas Home lives behind us in a field there. Winky Prattney lives just up the road. The Gaffney folk are up the road. The Last Days are up the road here.

The Calvary Commission's down the road there. Until recently, Barry McGuire lived up the road just, just near to us. And Keith Green lived a mile from my home. All these celebrities. And Barry McGuire came in the house.

He's a beautiful guy, wonderful guy. And I was teasing him. I said well, when I, when I see you I think of that scripture where the disciples came to Jesus and said, Lord teach us to sing. And he said that Jesus didn't say that.

Oh no, I got it mixed up. I'm sorry. It was Paul who said sing without ceasing. No, no, no. It was Jesus said my house shall be a house of song. Huh? Is any among you sick? Let them sing one to the other.

If you heard a lot of the modern singing, you'd be sick after it too. The emphasis is on prayer. Listen, no man is greater than his prayer life. No church is stronger than its, than its prayer meeting.

I don't care where it is. I go to churches with five, six, ten thousand members. And I say the same thing. And the deacons don't like it, you know. You're going to be a preacher? What kind? Are you going to go into the mold of other preachers?

If you do, you may get moldy too. But are you going to get in the mold? Nor would you like to really be a New Testament preacher. Because if you're a New Testament preacher, you've only two things to do.

According to what the fifth or sixth chapter in Acts, all you have to do is give yourself continually to prayer and the Word of God. Many of you have read, or will read perhaps, the great expositions of Scripture by Dr. Alexander McLaren.

He, boy that was a great time in English history. McLaren was preaching in Manchester. Alexander White was preaching in Scotland. Dale, who wrote that volume on the Atonement, was preaching at Cars Lane Chapel.

Spurgeon was in London, and the best preacher of them all as far as I'm concerned. The most lofty preacher. The man who could lift you out of the meeting into eternity in the first five minutes you were there.

Which doesn't seem to operate anymore because there's a terrible poverty in pulpit praying. Sunday morning it's usually bow your head, Lord bless us, we thank you for the lovely weather. We're here again, bless the offering, bless the choir, amen.

Why don't you fire the pastor and get a tape recorder? No more inspiration in it. But Dr. Parker, that'll lift you into eternity. Immediately close your eyes, he's saying, O thou that dwellest between the cherubims.

When did your pastor last pray something like that? Shine upon us. No, they had a touch of the other world about them that we don't have. Well, I say to my dear wife often, and I'm sure you will pray for her, she's in an awful lot of pain, and I say, Sweetheart, look there's a bus going down the road.

Did you count it? Baptist, Second Baptist Church, Third Baptist. It's usually First Baptist. I never go to a First Church, because the first should be last. But anyhow, you see a sign and it says, First Baptist Church Choir on Tour.

Or some college choir on tour. Or some seminary maybe, choir on tour. But I never saw a prayer meeting on tour, did you? I preached in a church a while ago, and the president of a local holiness church was there, very nice guy, and they asked him to come and introduce his quartet.

And he came up and said, you know, they're wonderful, they've won prizes singing, and they're very popular, and they go out every weekend. Of course, we have three other teams too. We, we send out four quartets every weekend.

So when it got nice and cozy in the meeting, I said, Well, Mr. President, I'd like to ask you a question. You ever send four quartets of praying people out to help these little churches? I thought I was in heaven.

There was silence for the space of half an hour. We don't stress prayer. You go to a church, they have a minister, they have an assistant minister, they have a minister of music, they have a minister of young people, they have a minister of something else.

You ever find a minister of prayer? I only know one church that has that. I know when I'm coming down the road, the cops are pretty keen in our area of Texas, and I'll say to my wife, or my wife says, Len, why don't you go after, look at our truck, how he's going.

Why don't you keep up with him? I say, Well, sweetheart, I don't want to go to jail. Oh, he's speeding down the road. And now they've got tandem trucks, you know, they've got this other thing at the back, they're frightening, they're terrifying, they make the road shake.

Now, I don't know much about engineering, I couldn't tell you the difference between a Mack truck and a Ford truck, but I'll tell you this, I know that when that monster goes down the road at 70 miles an hour, with all that weight on it, it does not have a Volkswagen motor in it.

Now, you've learned something tonight, I hope. You say, Wife, it had a Volkswagen motor, he put it in gear, you'd rip the thing to pieces, he'd pull the gears out. Exactly. But we've got a lot of 18-wheeler churches with Volkswagen prayer meetings in them.

Elijah's Prayer and Prophetic Confrontation

This amazing man was able to pray. He prayed, the scripture says, he prayed the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man. He came into the history of Israel, he walks on the stage. If I asked you how he came, you, oh, you know how he went.

He went up in the chariot of fire. How did he come on the stage? Tell me who were his father and mother. Tell me what district he came from. He's a fish-bite or a, from Thebes, but, and nobody can locate that place.

His father and mother, we don't know. He suddenly comes a full-grown man, he comes in a crisis period, and an evangelist, pardon me, not evangelist, but prophets are God's emergency men for crisis hours.

And they have no price tags, and they have no denominational labels, and they can't be corrupted. They've got a mandate from God. God is preparing them in America today and in other countries. Men that are going to come out before too long, and they're going to do what prophets always do.

They bypass, they should get me fired tonight. They're going to bypass organized Christianity. Not one squeak of an amen. So I better tell you again, they're going to bypass organized Christianity. Thank you.

You're not all asleep. Thank you. Very good. Where did John Baptist go? Did he go and ask permission of the high priest if he could preach? Did he say give me a license in case somebody comes and checks on me?

You think between Matthew and Malachi there's a gap of 400 years. 400 years of darkness without any prophetic light. 400 years of stillness without any prophetic voice. And suddenly, dramatically, a man of men appears of all the places in the wilderness.

I don't know how the fellow lived. He didn't even have a newsletter, and he didn't have a radio broadcast. A good man said to me one day, Ravenhill, I like your preaching, but you know you need to hide away for a while and get the gift of healing, and then you could pack any church in the world, I think.

Well, I can go to countries where I can get 40 ,000, 50 ,000 a night. That's not too bad. But I said, you know, the greatest revivalist ever was a man by the name of John Baptist, and scripture says very clearly he did no miracle.

They didn't run after him with the sick and the blind and the lame and scream, have mercy on my son, he's a lunatic. He did no miracle. He did a greater miracle than raising the dead. He raised a dead nation without any support.

He didn't have broken down footballers and ex-folk from Hollywood, shimmering and shining and telling you they're born again, and their half-naked breasts that they have, and all the rest of it. The next time you see them, they told us about a guy was saved last year, and right after that he took his eighth wife.

No man saved would do a crazy thing like that anyhow. But there's John Baptist in the wilderness. Revival comes at the darkest points in history. Our hope is not in, not in the new crop of preachers as good as they are.

I'm at the end of the line, I'm not envious. But you see what the church has had in the last 25, has not moved this nation to God. We have more perverts, we've more drunkards, we've more divorcees, we've more crowds in jails than ever we have had in history, despite million-dollar crusades.

John comes on the, pardon me, here's how this man comes on the stage. He comes 58 years after the dividing of the kingdom. He comes like everybody, every other prophet, he comes without permission from anybody.

He has a divine mandate. He has what's repeatedly called in the scripture, the burden of the Lord. Now you can tie the Apostle Paul to a post and lash him 195 times, because he said, I was beaten 50 times, I was beat 40 stripes save one, that's 39.

And they did that five times, and so he was lashed 195 times. He hung on a piece of wood in the Mediterranean for 36 hours, a night and a day I was in the deep. In weariness, in fasting, in painfulness, in perils amongst false brethren, in perils, and he stacks the whole thing up.

And if you think he wasn't a despair to the devil, well you differ from my opinion of him, because the devil just about exhausted every devilish weapon he had. And he put enough on that man to crush the whole nation.

And Paul says, you know, our light affliction, which is for a moment, must have had a sense of humor. Why? Some folk from the past, they think they've got a hangnail, they think they should have a healing meeting that night.

Somebody hurt my feeling, I need some help. Oh come on, that'll never do much in the kingdom of God. Maybe the last thing we tell converts, we tell them about all the privilege of being saved. The last thing we tell them is, the moment they got saved, they lost all the rights to themselves.

You became a soldier, and a soldier can't say, well I'd like to go to war, but my, and I love America, but my wife can't sleep by herself. We've only been married a month, and she's very nervous. And in any case, I uh, my father went to the other war, and he came back minus a leg, and oh I'd hate to lose a leg.

Brother, once you sign on the dotted line, you become anything the government wants you to be. Not it'll send us a number back, and say number so and so was liquidated in war. You've got no right. And in case you don't know it, the most severe, the most severe form of Christian warfare is in prayer.

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world. And as I said last night, Samson, pull down strongholds. Do you pull any strongholds down in your prayer meeting?

Or is it, Lord bless the church, and we need some money. Lord send in the money for a new organ, or send in the money, oh mercy on us. That which troubles the modern church the most, troubled the New Testament church the least.

They were caught up in God. The prophet sees as God sees. I say again, if you claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whether you believe in tongues or not, you claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Look, if you claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the things that grieve the Holy Spirit should grieve you. If not, you're not on the right wavelength. The saddest thing in the world, I believe, in God's eyes tonight, is this church.

So restricted, so confined. Like Lazarus, Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb, and he comes out shuffling, and there he is, but his feet are down, and he's gagged, and his hands are bound. He's alive, all right.

Jesus says, get up and come, and Lazarus got up and came. But then he says, loose him. We've got millions of church members that are not loose. Take them to a prayer meeting, they'll sit all through it, never open their mouths.

We're tied up by tradition, we're tied up by customs, we're tied up by fear. And all these fetters must go, we must be liberated, and as the good book says, put on the whole armor of God. Anyhow, look at the bad weather that this man contacted as soon as he gets mature.

It says, and you get the account of it, I won't read it all, in the first book of Kings, in the 16th chapter, verse 30 says, Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him.

Now there had been six kings before him, and the second king did more evil than the first, and the third did more evil than the second, and the fourth did more evil than the third. And when he comes down to the end, this one king does more evil than all the aggregate iniquity of all the kings that were before him.

Now notice, will you, that this marvelous man, Elijah, did not raise a committee. He did not raise an organization. He didn't even go to the school of the prophets which existed at that time. He comes on the scene in the most dreadful hour.

Every kind of iniquity and impurity and impiety was operating here, if you read this list through. Idolatry, iniquity, impiety, impurity, the whole land was smothered with it. The trouble with us, we don't get roused about anything hardly, except somebody disagrees with your theory on pre-trib or post-trib, and that gets you angry.

But a world going to hell fire doesn't trouble you too much. But when you see things from God's perspective, you'll get a, you'll get what Dr. Tozer said to me once when, if you're going to have any form of prophetic ministry, and that's not speaking about the future, it's speaking forth the word of God in the context of our lives.

If you're going to do that, you need a little bit of anger on your soul. Jesus was angry, went to the temple angry, he whipped them, but wait a minute, before he went into the temple, he stopped on the shoulder of the hill, and he saw Jerusalem, and he wept over it.

So if you're going to whip them, weep before you whip. Jesus looks at them with those holy eyes of his, and he's saying, my God, my Father, do you think Jeremiah walked down this street, Isaiah walked down this street, Zechariah walked down this street.

They are these amazing men we call minor prophets, and my nation's so deaf and blind, they never recognize them, and they'll never listen to them. Do you remember the word of Jesus? He says, won't you Bethsaida, and won't you Corathin, it will be better for you in the day of judgment, if you'd been like Sodom and Gomorrah, than to have heard all that you've heard, and be so lifeless and unconvinced, and undisturbed.

Remember when Paul, that colossal character, he was born in the ancient capital of the world, he finished up in the military capital of the world, he went to the religious capital of the world, Jerusalem, he went to the intellectual capital of the world, which was Athens, and he went on the mountainside where the Stoics and poets and philosophers and all you've got stood, and he preached.

But he says, as I went down Main Street, I saw temples to strange gods, and in the sleepy Elizabethan English of the King James Version, it says that he, his spirit was stirred within him. The Amplified and some other issues say that when he saw these temples to strange god, he was angry about it.

You get angry about it, you go down the street, see a Roman Catholic deception, and call it a gorgeous church, Jehovah's Witnesses, what a pretty building they've got. Somebody else is going, does it hurt you?

You say it's a trap to get people to perdition? No, no, no, no. He was, spirit was more than stirred, he was angry. The billions of dollars invested in these things, the deception of the priest, the deception of the people.

Oh, come on, if you want to see something in the way of devotion and concentration and sacrifice. I preached in a great Curacao convention in Japan a few years ago, to missionaries from Japan and much of the far Middle East, and what have you got.

Two years after that in Rockford, Illinois, I looked in a newspaper, a little city newspaper, and there was an announcement that the president of that group, he's an American, that he would be speaking at the Wesleyan Methodist Church on the Tuesday night.

So I said to my wife, sweetheart, let's go and hear this brother. He's a good brother, he chaired the meetings I had, with another, with a speaker from Wheaton. And I went, and after the meeting he looked quite weary, quite exhausted.

And I said, you, you, you seem very tired. Yeah. Jet lag? No. Are you sick? Yeah. What's wrong? Nothing. Well, what do you mean you're sick and nothing's wrong? Well, I'm not sick here, or here, or here.

I'm sick in my spirit. I've been nursing an aching heart across the 14 hours flying from or whatever it was. For what? Well, he said, last night, just before I left Tokyo, I, I went in a barber shop, I sat in the chair, and this little fellow comes along, clips my hair for so long, and then suddenly he says, uh, so you're a Yankee?

He said, no sir, not a Yankee, I'm an American, I suppose that's what, yeah, you're an American. You are a businessman? No. Ah, you are a tourist? No. Well, sir, what are you? He said, um, I'm a missionary.

Oh, oh, oh, little man clapped his scissors, and he's combed together, and he said, and I am a missionary too. You're a missionary? Ah, you seem to me to be like a hairdresser. Ah, yeah, I cut hair in the morning, uh, from nine o 'clock till five at night.

I go home, I bathe, I fill my pockets with tracks, I take my little phonograph, and, and I go out to, to, to the houses. I have some lectures, seven lectures. I knock on a door, say, please, could I come in your house?

I want to teach you, I think I call it surigaki or something, it's a combination of religion and, and politics. And he said, this is going to do a miracle. Do you know 2 ,000 years after Jesus Christ came, there has never been a Christian revival in Japan?

Nor has there ever been one in a Mohammedan country? Do you know right now, through the money that we've given back to those big fat guys there, with all their money, they're in the oil industry, they're building 22 Islam universities around the world?

I reminded you last night, in the last 20 years, 21 years in England, the Church of England has closed down 600 branch churches, and in the time that they've closed down 600 testimonies, the Mohammedans have built 350 Mohammedan mosques, in a country that gave the world the Bible, in a country that mothered the Salvation Army, in the revival, pardon me, in a country that, that saw the Methodist revival, in a country that basically has done more for Christianity than any other nation, going back to the, for two or three centuries.

And now it's so pagan. What, you were upset with a little, uh, haircutting Japanese fella? Because he said to me, look, I go out every night at seven o 'clock. I come to your house and say, I give you lecture number one.

Next week I give you lecture number two. I will come seven weeks. I go in Holmes, and he said, I, I finish at two o 'clock in the morning. And he said, I was pretty angry about this. I said to him, well, how long have you done this?

Oh, he said, for seven years. You go out for seven years every night at six o 'clock, and you don't get to bed till two in the morning? I didn't say that. You did say that. I didn't say that. You did say that.

No, I didn't. What did you say? I said, I go home at two o 'clock in the morning, and then I pull a curtain on one side, and I have, uh, I, I, I worship for two hours. I wait upon God, these were his literal words, to renew my strength.

Sounds a bit like Isaiah 40, they that wait upon the Lord. Here's a pagan, here's a man who's totally out of touch with God, as we would say. And yet he works without any pay, from six at night till two in the morning, manages to get home by two o 'clock, has two hours of study, goes to bed at four, and gets up at half past seven, and has done that for seven years.

Come on now, you supermen, you strong men with all your muscles, what are you building them for? Not a tennis ball around, or a golf ball. These people put us to shame. And the young man in my office, just the other week from Nigeria, I guess it's a big country, and he was so excited, I said, well what were the meetings like?