The Church's Strength and Secret — Leonard Ravenhill

Samson and the Secret of His Strength

Let's find the text tonight in the book of Judges. The book of Judges chapter 16, Judges chapter 16 and verse 6. And Delilah said to Samson, tell me I pray thee wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.

There's an old translation of the scriptures in Europe. And it includes an extra word that's not in this King James version. I like the Living Bible, the King James. And in the European version the word that is added is secret.

So then the text reads, tell me I pray thee wherein the secret of thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee. This is really a question of a woman of the world to a man of God.

It will be a great day and God hates in the day when the world asks the church, what is the secret of thy strength? I think right now the world thinks we don't have any. We're living on borrowed capital.

I think in every dimension of life that we're living in abnormal days. They're abnormal economically, they're abnormal geographically. We're living in a shrinking world and an expanding universe. Every new airplane that flies shrinks the world.

You can get from here to there quicker than we ever got there before. And when we look through the telescopes we're discovering there are things out in space that we never dreamed about. Recently there was a series Cosmos on TV, I guess a lot of you saw it.

It was slanted toward evolution. The smart young fellow there said so much he didn't know. And he passed it on very adequately, very eloquently. I really think we should remove the Statue of Liberty and put a model of a statue there of Carl Sagan, because he must be the oldest creature around, he was there before creation.

And he saw the world put together and, oh he staggered us with his statistics, but there's only one, not one Milky Way, you know, there's not one galaxy of stars, there are millions of galaxies with billions and trillions of stars in them.

And it was a kind of a faith-destroying thing, but before he was through I felt I wanted to get up and sing, My God How Great Thou Art. Because you see, it doesn't matter whether you say there are millions or billions or quadrillions of stars.

It says in the 40th chapter of Isaiah that God knows every star by name. That's better than IBM. He knows every star by name. It's an abnormal world. And this abnormal day demands abnormal men with abnormal messages and abnormal methods.

If the Church of Jesus Christ is anything, it's supernatural. If it's not supernatural, it's superficial. You know, years ago a tired English preacher turned around in a swivel chair and he reached for a book, blindly, and he grabbed, without knowing it, the New Testament in Greek.

The Apostolic Church Before Prosperity and Organization

And he began to read through the Acts of the Apostles, and he got down to chapter 5. And he suddenly said this amazing thing, he said, This is the Church of Jesus Christ before it became fat and short of breath by prosperity.

This is the Church of Jesus Christ before it became muscle-bound by over-organization. This is the Church of Jesus Christ where they didn't say prayers, they prayed in the Holy Ghost. And there's a big difference.

This is the Church of Jesus Christ where you didn't sign articles of faith, that's easy to do, but they acted in faith, which is very different. This is the Church of Jesus Christ where they didn't gather together a bunch of intellectuals to study psychosomatic medicine, they just healed a thing.

You know, millions of people come to America for lots of reasons, I mean tourists. They don't come to see the mountains because there are greater mountains elsewhere in the world. But they come to see the Grand Canyon, that awful gap up there in Arizona somewhere, where all the strange things are, up in Arizona.

And I remember seeing that amazing hole. Somebody said it was made because a Scotsman lost a dime and he dug until he found it. That's not the real story, but it's an amazing thing to see it. And you know, when you stand on the southern rim there, there's what they call a legend on a rock, and it says you're at the Grand Canyon, as if you thought it was a cavity in your tooth or something.

This is the Grand Canyon. In the distance, seven miles away, you can see the flow of the Colorado River. If you look straight down, you're looking a mile deep. If you're down in the canyon, the walls are a mile high on either side.

And as we stood there I thought to myself, what would a little child of a year or two years of age do if it was down in that canyon? How could it get out? It sure couldn't swim over the Colorado River, it's 345 feet wide, and it's very rapid.

It couldn't scale the walls on either side, they're almost perpendicular. What would it do? And suddenly I saw a picture of the Church of Jesus Christ. Remember this, the Church of Jesus Christ was not served up to the world on a silver platter.

The Church of Jesus Christ was born in a sophisticated, totalitarian world. It was born in a world under dominion of slavery, the Roman Empire. That little child couldn't get out of that canyon. How is the Church of Jesus Christ going to get out?

It's walled in on this side with the mighty power of the Greeks and all their wisdom. It's walled in on this side with the greatest military machine in history, the Roman Empire. It's obstructed in the front by the flow of the river of monopoly the Jews thought they had on God.

And yet that little bunch of people, unlearned and ignorant, with no financial backing, with no prestige, with no scholarship, that bunch of men got out of that chasm, if you like, that pit in which they were born, and they shook the world.

Isn't it amazing in the day in which we live? Why, the New York Times a while ago ran a critical article on what it called the electronic church, the media, the fellows trying to push the gospel into every home by TV and radio.

And they said it's a new phenomena, we've got an electronic church. The New Testament church was not an electronic church, it was an electrifying church. Finney was right when he said, when the Holy Ghost is in residence in a sanctuary, that is the most attractive thing in the world, because the power of the Spirit pulls people out of the world, and when the Holy Ghost is not resident, then the world pulls people out of the sanctuary.

Here is a woman asking a man of God, what is the secret of your great strength? Why do you do what nobody else is doing? You know, there haven't been many men, fortunately for us, who wanted to conquer the world.

Alexander the Great did it by the age he was twenty-seven, and he sat down and cried because there were no other worlds to conquer. In our day, some of you don't remember, there was a little fellow in Germany with Charlie Chaplin's moustache on his lip and one stripe on his arm, and he set out to conquer the world, and he nearly made it.

And in between you had a little corpulent Corsican by the name of Napoleon. Everywhere he went he was victorious. He subdued his enemies. One day he gathered his warlords together in his office. He had a great map of the world, and he ran his index finger around a great country.

And to those restless officers he said, attention! Look at this! He ran his finger again round the edge of that great country, and he said, look, there lies a sleeping giant. Let it sleep! Because he said if that country wakes up and harnesses its manpower to its mineral power, that country will shake the world.

He said that before 1815 because he was defeated in 1815. On the 18th of June in 1815 he was beaten at Waterloo. And before that he says, there lies a sleeping giant. Let it sleep! Because if that nation wakes up and harnesses its manpower to its mineral power, it will shake the world.

I suggest you change the characters. And instead of seeing a map of the world, you see a map of the ages. Instead of Napoleon pointing at something, you see the devil pointing at something. Instead of pointing at a visible thing, he points, as it were, to the invisible church.

And he says to all his demons, you see, there lies the church of Jesus Christ. Let it sleep! Because if the church of Jesus ever wakens up to the resurrection power and the anointing of the Spirit, it will shake the world.

The Sleeping Church and the Last Days

When I was in school in England as a little boy, all I knew about America was Indians and cowboys, or that loveliest poem about Herewatha. And then one day our teacher told us a story, which is the best-known story throughout the world of all American literature, the story of Rip Van Winkle.

You know, he went up the, somewhere up by the River Hudson there, and up by the famous Bible school. He didn't go to the Bible school, but he fell asleep. And all I remember about the story is that he went to sleep for, well, some say twenty years, some say fifty, some say a hundred, and there the teacher left the story.

He fell asleep. When he came down the hill, he found some men and he argued with them. When he went up the hill, there was a sign outside of the tavern, waving in the breeze. On it was painted the face of George III.

That was when he went up the hill. When he came down the hill, they had erased the face of George III and painted the face of another man of English extraction, George Washington. And the point of the story is not that he slept for a hundred years or fifty years.

The point of the story is that he slept through a revolution. And I suggest to you tonight, that's exactly what the Church of Jesus Christ is doing today. Sweeping through the most amazing revolution in history.

The foundations are being destroyed. People say to me often, do you think we're living in the last days? And I say no. Oh, our preacher's just given us ten lectures on, on why we're living in the last days.

Well, we're not living in the last days. The epistle to the Hebrews begins by saying, God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days, the last days were two thousand years ago.

The book of the Revelation begins by things which will shortly come to pass, and that's two thousand years ago. We're not living in the last days, we're living in the last moments of this dispensation.

We're living in what Hebrews 12 says, that everything that can be shaken will be shaken, that a kingdom that cannot be shaken may remain. Everything is going to be shaken, just to prove that the Church of Jesus Christ is the only God-glorifying thing in the world.

The world is waiting to see again the Church anointed in the Spirit of God. This woman comes with a question, what's the secret of your great strength? And he cracks a few jokes, you know, he says, well, let me tell you, if they bind me with new ropes that were never occupied, there's no sweat on them, sweat is the sign of the curse.

Fasten me with new ropes, he says, in verse 7, and I shall be like another man. I wish he had said that, but he doesn't say that. He says, then shall I be weak like other men. The curse of the Church of Jesus Christ today is mediocrity, there are too many of us who are too much alike.

We're satisfied to get out of Egypt, but we won't go possess our possessions in the Promised Land. We're like Lazarus, we've been called forth from the grave. I was with a group of people that don't believe in any second blessing, sanctification, baptism of the Spirit, what have you got?

Well, I've got to get a shot in at them some way. So I said one night, you may not believe in a second blessing, but Lazarus did, Lazarus did. Jesus said, Lazarus, do you know why he said, Lazarus, come forth?

Because if he'd said, come forth, all the cemetery would have come, and it wasn't time for them to come yet. And so Jesus picked him out and said, Lazarus, come forth. And he got up, he was dead, and he came, how did he come?

He came shuffling with his hands bound and his feet and a gag on his mouth. And that's about like 95 of the believers are today. They gag, they're bound, they're in bondage. He was alive. He came out of the grave, shuffling, bound.

And Jesus says, loose him and let him go. And you know, the Church of Jesus Christ is bound tonight, it's bound by tradition, it's bound by fear. It's bound because we're terrified of the cost of really true discipleship.

Spiritual Bondage, Holiness, and the Need for Revival

Come on, when you look at the gap, the grand canon is no gap. Between Matthew and Malachi there's 400 years of religion, a form of godliness, ritualism, wonderful priests, wonderful sanctuaries, wonderful sacrifices, but no breathing of God.

And then suddenly across that midnight darkness, like the flash of lightning at midnight, God sends an incandescent man. Boy, how different from the high priest. The priest had garments of glory and beauty, he had a mitre upon his head, he had a golden circle that said, Holiness unto the Lord, and he was as dead as Pharaoh.

And then God brings a little rugged man out there in the wilderness. Man, isn't it wonderful to think what God does? You talk about taking the foolish things to confound the wise. Taking a nobody. What a change from the priest whose garments were loaded and heavy with decoration, and he trudged through the streets and everybody bowed to his excellence, and here's a rugged man out there, and he's not asking for money.

He can't have been a very good evangelist, but he wasn't asking for money, he wasn't asking for help, he had no mailing list. Isn't it amazing how many gimmicks the Church of Jesus Christ has tonight, and yet the Holy Ghost doesn't come.

Sometimes I wish I could turn the radio back and say to some of these guys always begging for more and more, listen friend, God is not looking for sponsors. You may be, but he isn't. He's looking for slaves.

He's looking for dead men. There are two kinds of people in the world on me, those who are dead in sin, and those who are dead to sin. There's nothing on this earth, nothing in eternity, like the Church of Jesus Christ anointed with the Holy Spirit of God.

What's the secret of thy great strength? And you know when you go to an art gallery, every time you see a picture of Samson, oh brother, he's got muscles like watermelons. He's got a chest like the Rocky Mountains.

He's got legs like redwood trees. You know, the average man in Israel was this height, and Saul the king of Israel was head and shoulders above everybody else in Israel, and Goliath was head and shoulders above Saul, and Samson was 15 feet high.

Now women do some silly things I know, but you think a woman's going to ask a man 15 feet high, hey buddy, what's the secret of your strength? You may as well ask him if he takes Wheaties every day for his breakfast.

I think, if anything, Samson was smaller than anyone else. A poor fellow said the other day, I was sick, I had flu last Sunday, and I lay in bed there, and we have an old beaten up TV, it doesn't show a picture, but it talks.

Sometimes that helps, because what you see on TV, they're such a bunch anyhow. And there's a man saying, you know, I did have a vision of Christ. My building is 600 feet high, and he said, my vision of Christ, Christ was 900 feet high.

I need a Christ bigger than my problem. That's totally ridiculous. Samson was not 12 feet high. The Word of God says it's not by what? Not by, but by my Seth, the Lord of Hosts. And in case you've any doubt, it says in Hebrews 11, those amazing men and women of faith, through faith they subdued kingdoms and wrought righteousness, and time would fail me to tell of David and Barak, and of Jephthah, and of Samson, who threw his muscles, huh?

Doesn't say that in the Amplified even. Samson, Samson, who by faith, by faith, he did what nobody else could do. They locked him up in a city, and he decided to go home. And he didn't want to wait in the gatekeeper at night, so he lifted the gates up, and everybody in the gates, and carried them up the hill and put them down.

Said under his breath, you'll have a bigger job getting them back than I had getting them here anyhow. You know, men of faith can be awfully disturbing. And then one day they tried to arrest him. He picked up the jawbone of an ass.

Doesn't God use some strange things, the jawbone of an ass? You know, it reminds me of a modernist preacher, and he was preaching and saying he didn't believe the Bible in this, and he didn't believe the Bible in the other.

And he said, you know, these stories like Jonah and the whale are ridiculous, and that story about Samson slaying people with a jawbone of an ass, now that, that, I mean, God doesn't do that anymore. And that inevitable little old lady on the front pew said, he does every Sunday at our church.

Well, if he asked to use a jawbone of an ass, amen. Do you know what I'm wanting? Really badly in my heart what I'm wanting. I'm wanting God to produce a Pentecost that will out Pentecost Pentecost. Pentecost was a sample day.

It wasn't abnormal, it was a normal standard for the church. The church is back sinning today. We've lost our power, we've lost our authority. Oh yes, on our coins we put in God we trust. We don't trust in God, forget it.

If we trusted in God we wouldn't have an Air Force, we wouldn't have a Navy. You'd all be living in Cadillacs, or better still, Mercedes. You'd, we're taxed up to our ears, why? To keep crime down. We don't have policemen outside our churches, you have them outside of taverns.

The way some churches are going, we'll soon need cops around, I think. Oh, we talk so cheaply about God's sovereign power and God's omnipotence in this materialistic age. In God we trust, forget it, we don't trust in God.

We believe in him, but we don't trust him. There's a lovely story in the second book of Kings, the 19th chapter, and it says, and don't look at it, let me read it for you. It came to pass that night, one angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians, one angel smote a hundred, four score, which happens to be eighty, and five thousand people.

One angel killed a hundred and eighty-five thousand people one night. That's more than were killed in Yad Vamati Rosh Hima. One angel killed a hundred and eighty-five thousand people. And on the cross, Jesus could have called twelve legions of angels.

And the smallest denomination of a legion is five thousand. And if he could have called twelve legions, that's sixty thousand. And sixty thousand angels, each killing a hundred and eighty-five thousand people, would have wiped the world's population out that day.

If he called them from heaven, we say we trust in God. If we do, what do we need armies and air forces for? They killed, if those sixty thousand angels each killed a hundred and eighty-five thousand people.

Well, work it out in your calculator. It happens to be about a hundred, one thousand, one hundred and ten million people. We should take care of a few folk, you know. No, no, no, no, we don't trust God.

We don't even trust him in the fundamental church. We don't even trust him in the Pentecostal church. Come on, let's come down to this beautiful place that I've learned to love you this weekend. And I want to keep you on my prayer list, but tell me this.

The people round about, the pastor was saying there's some inquiry. What's happening down at, what do you call it, Central Vida, is that it? Is my Spanish good? What's happening? Oh my God, I pray that just when God was in residence in the Old Testament, there was a pillar of fire over the place.

And I pray there'll be a pillar of fire, Holy Ghost fire. Our God is a consuming fire. And the reason the world goes to hell fire is the church has lost Holy Ghost fire. It's not the liberals. It's not the Catholics.

It's not the Mooniards. It's not the Mormons that obstruct us. It's the lack of faith. It's the lack of purity. It's the lack of vision. It's the lack of power. What's the secret of your great strength?

How do you lift the gates of the city? Nobody else does that. How do you take a job under the nest and slay an army? It's like an atom bomb in your hand. Nobody else does that. Two thousand men try to arrest him.

He gets rid of that bunch. One day he catches six hundred foxes. My, he must have been able to run. And he put a faggot between the tails of two foxes and ran them in the standing corner of the Philistines and burned their crops.

You wonder if people are scratching their heads and saying, What in the world are we going to do? How do you stop this man? But you know, there's a beautiful little phrase, Oh, it is the most amazing thing in this whole wide world.

You know what? You know, some people are filled with the Holy Ghost. They're so greedy. They're grasping for money and everything else. I wish they were grasping for riches of God, like they're grasping for money and social standing.

What's wealth? If you came in this sanctuary tonight with a million dollar ring on your finger and a Christian Dio suit that cost two thousand dollars and handmade silk shirts and all the rest, you're no more valuable than the man that comes through the door in a sackcloth.

God doesn't look at the external. He doesn't look at our social standing. He looks at the heart to see if it's pure, to see if our longings are after God and after holiness. I'm embarrassed to be a Christian these days, in a church that's an embarrassment to God.

I'm convinced the church of Jesus Christ embarrasses God every day. We're so void of supernatural power. You can explain our success by clever business practices, by Madison Avenue techniques, by clever presentation on TV and all the rest of it.

But where is the manifestation of supernatural power in the church of Jesus Christ? I see Samson as a type of Israel. Israel began with supernatural splendor. God sent cereal from heaven every morning.

They called it manna. He split a rock and the water followed them wherever they went. He delivered them when their enemies were pressing behind them. Time and again the Word of God says He delivered them out of their distresses.

But what did they do? They did like we do. They forgot God when they got out of trouble. He's a type of the early church. Again I say the church began in the upper room with men agonizing and it's ending in the supper room with women organizing.

We mistake rattle for revival and commotion for creation and action for entrance. Again I say that 99 of people that went to the church today, even fundamental churches, Pentecostal churches, they did not go there to meet God.

They went to hear a sermon about God today. We didn't expect to walk out of the sanctuary breathless and say the one who walked in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks was walking in the midst. I could feel him so near.

The church is becoming almost a social club, a better elite club, a nicer club. There's no drinking but it's a nice place to fellowship and have a little kind of Christian fun, sanctified fun. But listen dear friend, outside there's a world going to hell fire quicker than ever.

It's gone! And what the church has had in the last 25 years has not made any impression. Recently in the Agape Forest near where we live there's a young man preaching. He's the head of YWAM in America, North and South America, Leland, Paris.

It's about three months since he was there and he said a few days ago, I was in a meeting with a lot of distinguished preachers and the speaker was Bill Bright of Campus Crusade. And Bill Bright said we have just made a survey from one coast of America to the other to Christians.

Listen to this awesome statistic. He said 95 of the people that we interviewed said either I am a carnal Christian or I'm a baby in Christ. That's staggering. 95 of professing Christians, in other words, say I'm immature.

I'm not facetious, but it's like checking with the Air Force and the Army and the fellows at sea in those great aircraft carriers and you check them all up and say we've checked the Army, Navy and all the cadets and West Point and we've discovered that 95 of them are Cub Scouts.

Would you feel comfortable living in a nation that right now has one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest military machine in the world and they're all Cub Scouts? Come on, come on, come on. Where are we spiritually tonight?

Is the world asking of us individually or collectively? What's the secret of that great strength? Why at Central Veda do things happen that don't happen anywhere else? Why is God in residence there? Yes, this man took the job under the mask, sure.

He lifted the gates of the city, sure. He pushed 2 ,000 men away. But you see, he was very normal in one sense. He fell in love with a girl, a girl that lived down in Timnath and he could go that way to Timnath, he could go this way to Timnath but you mustn't go that way to Timnath.

Why? Because there's a lion in the way. Now listen, if Samson is a type of a spirit-filled man, and I believe he is, if Samson is a type of a spirit-anointed church, and I believe he is, then the lion in the way surely must be a type of the devil that goeth about seeking whom he may devour.

And Samson goes that way and instead of being nervous about it, he says to his father and mother, you sit down here a minute, I've a little business to do round the corner. And the lion sees him coming and says, boy, I'm going to have a good lunch today.

And the lion springs at him and he catches it by the jaws and he rips it in two as though it were a kid of the goats. Just destroyed it. Well, I think that's wonderful. I think the more wonderful thing is this, it says that after he destroyed that lion, he said nothing about it.

Well, we'd have photographed the thing at least, wouldn't we? We'd have measured it from the first whisker on its nose to the last one on its tail, and it would be the longest, strongest, fiercest, heaviest, terriblest lion that ever lived, and we killed it.

I'm looking for a revival where no man will get the glory. Such a sovereign act of God, you can't say, Revival is not organized. It's agonized. It cannot be nationalized. It cannot be denominationalized.

It cannot be predicted. It's a sovereign act of God, but there's a preparation for that revival. I've been reading a book recently, and I want to reread it. It's about a Lutheran pastor who, in the end of last century, he read this word of God, he read about these fantastic things that happened in the early church.

And he said, well, then, the church I'm in can't be in the apostolic succession. You know, the Roman Catholic Church says it's in the apostolic succession. The Church of England says it's in the apostolic succession.

The Baptists say they're in the apostolic succession, because John Baptist was the first preacher anyhow. And some other groups say we're in the apostolic succession. Listen, I'm not very clever, but do you know what my definition is?

It's this. There's only one way to prove that you're in the apostolic succession. Do you know what it is? Have apostolic success. I'm not concerned that you found a bit of old paper that has somebody's definition of, you know, that some old guy, three, two thousand years ago, came out of the upper room and he anointed somebody else, who anointed somebody else, who anointed somebody else, so what?

The world out there, a critical, carnal world, more cynical than ever it's been. Do you know what the state of the world is? Let me give you some modern authors. Anthony Storr says, at present, we are the cruelest and most ruthless species of humanity that has ever lived.

Have you been round here a hundred years ago or more? Maybe you'll be walking down the street, if there was a street, or down the path and, oh, oh, those wicked Indians, somebody shot in the back. Savages that they are.

Now we're not savages, we're refined intellectuals. We don't take an arrow and shoot it in the back. We go drop a bomb on a city and burn the thing to a cinder. That's education, that's science, that's progress.

How kind can you be when you're so full of scientific achievement? We're the cruelest and most ruthless species in the world. Right now we're not concerned too much about detente. And if detente went through, all they're doing, they're not suggesting we abolish war, they're trying to find what degree to roast us at.

That's all they're doing. If Russia will use smaller bombs, we'll use smaller bombs. If you promise not to kill more than a million people, we won't kill more than a million people. Modern life is a hell.

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation or microbes or cancer, but man himself, who is the greatest danger to mankind. The dance of death, the dance of violence, goes round about us, on round about us endlessly, says Paul Tormier.

And another man, whose name I don't know, said the world is a theatre of the absurd. You see, when the storms don't cry out, and when the preachers don't cry out, God has to touch men in the world outside to let us see the absurd situation in which we live.

This Lutheran preacher said the glory of God has departed. I say again, there's one reason we don't have a Holy Ghost Revival. And I don't mean a good meeting. I mean the descent of God on an area where the lights don't work, in a sanctuary for months, where meetings last 24 hours a day.

Mrs. Goffault says about the meetings in China, in the great Shantung revival there, it was awesome to go into the meeting house, because people would stand and praise God for six or seven hours without sitting down.

And all the praise of God's people was shattering. And you'd go another day, and people would pray five or six or seven hours, hundreds and hundreds all praying at the same time. And the agony was like the waves of the sea that roared.

Sometimes it was like a clap of thunder when people were anointed in the Spirit praying. And then she says some days you would go and you'd be there for hours and hours and hours. And nobody would sing and nobody would speak.

And God was there. You see, there are two kinds of stillness. A stillness that kills and a stillness that creates. And she said the most awesome thing was not the majestic singing. It was not the awesome prayer.

It was the stillness of God in the sanctuary. And then there would be an outburst of confession. It would last for hours. People who had hidden sin in their lives. Men that you thought were ideal men would confess that years back they'd been living in adultery or they'd stolen money or they'd done some other thing.

Oh, when revival comes the sewers open up and all the corruption that's been hindering God comes out. And revival begins in the sanctuary amongst God's people. Revival is a divine invasion of God's people.

Evangelism is those people illuminated and cleansed and freed and going out and saying I don't care what's in your life. God is able to set you free from it. Somebody came to this Lutheran minister and said well why don't you perform what Jesus said go into all the world, preach the gospel, heal the sick, cleanse the leper, raise the dead.

There's a girl down the road there and she's in a bad state of demon possession. And he went. And God mercifully answered his prayer. The girl was delivered. And before long it became noise abroad that this man had a kind of real deliverance ministry.

And one day they called him up a mountainside and said there's a girl there you'll not get healed. She must have a demon in hell inside of her. He went up and prayed. If I remember correctly he knelt eight hours, eight hours at the side of that bed.

He had someone else in the room so that nobody could say there were wrong things going on. And all the girl did was tear her flesh and pull her hair and make herself naked. And foam would come out of her mouth.

And she'd use every obscenity. You'd think that she had the vocabulary from hell itself. And her face was livid and her eyes were like lamps. And she cursed and raved and cursed God and cursed the Holy Ghost and cursed people.

And he would come out of that room wringing wet and tired and the devil would say there you are. If I remember correctly he went and knelt at the side of that bed eight hours every day for ten months.

One day he said I felt a special anointing of the Spirit. And I knew this was the day. And he stood over that girl as he'd done before and the devil marked and said you're going to say the same things.

It's only a recitation. It's only a scripture. It's only words. But he said I felt that divine authority. And he stood over that girl and said in the name of the Christ of God who died, who led captive and he captive and gave gifts unto men in the power of the blood of Jesus rise and be delivered.