Revival in the Church — Bill McLeod

The Church at Ephesus: Returning to First Love

Revelation 2, and we'll read 1 to 5. Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write, These things says he that holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.

I know your works, and your labor, and your patience, and how you cannot bear them who are evil, and you have tried them who say they are apostles and are not, and has found them liars. And has borne, and has patience, and for my name's sake has labored, and has not fainted.

Nevertheless, I am somewhat against you, because you have left your first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works, or else I will come unto you quickly, and will remove your candlestick out of his place, except you repent.

Just that far. Let's just pray, shall we? Father, be with us in our deliberations this afternoon. Draw near to us, dear God, as we seek to draw near to you. Be our teacher, guide us, Lord, in our thinking, and dear God, help us to understand how you see things.

And so far as revival is concerned, we know how close it must be to your heart. And Father, we want it to be close to our hearts also. Guide us, we ask. Bless us together in Christ's name. Amen. Well, we want to consider the question, when may we expect revival to come?

Three Kinds of Revival: National, Local, and Personal

First of all, we have to clear the air, because there's two things to think about. Are we considering a local church revival, a personal revival, or a sweeping revival that will touch a whole nation? So there's three things to think about.

An awakening, as it's sometimes called, a revival that might touch the whole of the country, or a church revival that may touch the church we're associated with, or personal, individual revival. We're going to talk in a later session about personal, individual revival.

In this session, I want to talk more about the possibility of a nationwide awakening, and also about a church, a local church revival. And all of this, I'm sure, is close to the heart of God. The agent of revival is the Holy Spirit.

The instrument of revival is the Word of God. The object of revival is the Christian believer. And it's important to understand these distinctions. In that song that Edwin Orr wrote, O Holy Ghost, there's a line that says, O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee.

Send a revival, start the work in me. That's the last thing he said as a public utterance before he passed away from a heart attack later that same night. O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee. It's not man-made, it's something that God does.

We cooperate and work with God in revival, of course. And that's something that I want to discuss to some extent this afternoon. There are two opinions. There's an opinion that revivals are strictly and only the work of God.

They really have nothing to do with man. They'll come when God pleases, and all we can do is hope that somehow God might send one in our day. This is a very popular idea, and it's linked to the idea that churches used to have that, and this was true in Phinney's day, and Phinney demolished the idea.

The idea was you must not even talk to your own children about Jesus Christ for fear they are not one of the elect. And generally speaking, that's what Christians believed in the days when Phinney came on the scene.

And so a father would not talk to his children about Jesus because they might not be one of the elect, and you would be interfering with the work of God. And so they were hoping for the Holy Spirit to do something in their family, but didn't really believe anything might happen.

Finney, Predestination, and Human Cooperation in Revival

During the revival in Saskatoon, a team went to Germany. Another team went to Holland of Dutch-speaking people from Canada who had experienced revival. And they got to Holland. They were in different churches there, and they found it very, very...

They were in a church, for example, where there were 500 people, and only 20 people knew they were born again. The others didn't know whether they were elect or not. And they had an awful time communicating with these people because they were really trapped in this theology, that you can't really know this is all God's business, don't interfere with the work of God.

So they were going to church and believing all the doctrines of the Bible, no assurance of salvation at all. And they really had little interest in revival. They were more interested in knowing how they could find out they were saved, you know.

Well, anyway, Finney came on the scene and blew this away with his teaching. I think he went to an opposite extreme, which sometimes is necessary to bring the church back to the center, because Finney just totally rejected the idea of predestination, which I personally don't and can't.

I find it's taught in the Bible. But he rejected that totally. He said, I don't understand it. I never talk about it. He has a book on systematic theology, which has some great teaching on sanctification by faith and so on.

But when it comes to predestination, he really has nothing to say. However, I can see the problem this day. His pastor, Dr. Gales, and Finney often talk together. And Finney told him one time, he said, you know, I don't believe in the power of your prayers at all.

Gales was trying to get Finney to attend the prayer meeting. And Finney had done this and he quit going. And so Gales said, why don't you come to our prayer meeting? He said, because if there is any power in your prayers, all the praying I've listened to in your prayer meetings, you should have driven all the devils out of this place long ago.

And nothing has happened. And so Finney couldn't see there. Nothing was happening. They were praying. Nothing was happening. Of course, Gales, a pastor, and the church generally believed, you know, in this extreme view of predestination that you couldn't really know and you couldn't do anything about it.

Now there's another view, of course, related to that having to do with revival. You can't really do anything about it. You can hope for it and trust that maybe God will do something about it. But we really can't do anything about it personally.

Jonathan Goforth read, he was a Canadian missionary in China, and he was very disturbed at the condition of things there. He went to Korea. There was a revival there, and I think in Japan. And he was quite impressed by something he saw of the work of God there.

And he came across Finney's book on revival. And he came across this teaching that revival is possible anywhere, anytime, if we meet the conditions. Now, I don't think that's totally true personally. I think there's such a thing as a revival epoch, a revival era.

After the 1858 revival, I mentioned this before, there was 40 years of what has been called open skies, and revivals were happening all around the world. And that came to an end after 40 years, until the 1905 awakening.

Then we had open skies once again for maybe another 10 years. So in a period of open skies, I think it's true that anywhere in the world you can pray and believe God, and revivals will come. Now, we are living in the age of the Holy Spirit.

He's been given and never withdrawn. And revivals come through the manifestation of the work, the power of the Holy Spirit. So this says to me, why can't we believe God at any time in this age for a local church revival?

These sweeping revivals that have come in the past, after all, there's only been four of them in the history of the church. So a lot of people feel we're overdue for another one now. Maybe we are. We don't really know.

Meeting Conditions for Local Church Revival

But let's think about church revival, your church, revival in a local church. I think Finney was right when he said that revival can come to a local church any time if God's people will meet the conditions.

Dr. Torrey said the same thing. He was completely convinced that revival could come to a church anywhere in the world if they would meet the conditions. Have you heard of Solomon Stoddard? He was a grandfather to Jonathan Edwards.

He pastored a church in the New England states. In 38 years, he had five powerful revivals in his congregation. No other churches in the New England states were experiencing revival. They were trapped in this other theology that revival only came when God pleased and there was nothing men could do about it.

Stoddard was not trapped by that theology. And what happened finally was a group of pastors came to Stoddard. They said, now God is blessing your church in unusual ways and hundreds are being converted from time to time and nothing is happening in our churches.

Can you tell us why God is favoring you over us? And he said, God is not favoring me over you. We are meeting the conditions laid down in the Word of God. We fast for revival, we pray for revival, we preach for revival, we preach Christ up and we preach men down, was the way he put it.

And we keep on believing God until revival comes. He said there's things we can do as individuals and as local churches to promote revival. He used the word promote in a good sense. This was the answer that Stoddard gave to these pastors.

I don't know, I don't have any record of what happened in their churches, whether they got a hold of this or not. I mentioned Reverend Calvin Colton before in this book he wrote called A History of American Revivals of Religion and it's a valuable book.

I only paid 25 cents for it in a secondhand bookstore in Winnipeg and I wouldn't pay $25 for it, but don't offer me 50, I might. But it's been reprinted. I wish I knew where because I would like to get another copy of it.

My copy is just falling apart. I mean, published in 1832, you could expect that. But it had a lot of good things to say in the book and one of them was this, that in the early 1800s in the United States, a church not expecting revival, not working towards revival, nothing like this going on, would suddenly experience a powerful awakening.

Then another church, then another church, and he said this kind of revival gradually phased out as men learned how to cooperate with God in bringing revival. And so he said we were never happy with, I mentioned this before, insulated, that is isolated conversions.

And they kept on praying and fasting, believing God, a heavy emphasis on believing God, until the Spirit came and took the work out of their hands and then made the whole community aware of God and hundreds would be converted.

And he talks about this in the book. He wrote the book for British Christians who were inquiring as to the revivals in America. They were not happy happening in Great Britain and they want to know if there's anything they could do to promote revival there and hence the book.

He said that this second kind of revival where men cooperated with God was every bit as powerful as the other kind of revival where men were not involved and the results were just as lasting as the results from the other kind.

And so he came to the conclusion, I think he's right, that in the earlier kind of revival, God was training the church so they would know how to work with God in bringing revival to their congregations.

And when they learned the secret of revival, they were able to do this, then revivals became more widespread as churches laid hold of the Word of God and the promises. Remember now, the Holy Spirit's the agent, the Bible, the Word of God is the instrument and the church, the Christians, are the object of revival.

Alright, so it started way back then in the 1700s, laid hold of this particular truth. Jonathan Goforth got it from Finney and found it worked in China and there were powerful revivals in China as powerful as anything you can find anywhere in the annals of the church.

Bok Singh and Waiting for God's Direction

Now, Bok Singh in India, they called him at one time the Billy Graham of India because he was a very successful evangelist and the churches there used him as an evangelist. And then Bok Singh came to the conclusion that doing it this way was not the best way of reaching the masses in India, so amicably he broke with the missionaries and went on his own.

He had read about Finney and the power of God and the meetings of Finney and so on, and he said, I thought to myself, why can't this happen in India? And he came to the conclusion, we've lost the glory of God because we've been trying to do the work of God in human ways.

So he got a small group of godly people together and they began searching the scriptures and they came to the conclusion that they could regain the glory of God by starting to do the work of God in God's way.

And here's what they did. Prior to this, they were going to a marketplace in India and you know in India you can give out a million tracts in one day. Operation Mobilization has done that sometimes. You know, India, they have 30 million births every year.

They have 13 million deaths. So they have a net gain of 17 million people every year. They're close to a billion people now. And these billion people live in an area slightly smaller than western Canada.

Can you believe it? Where we have, what, 8 million people or something? Anyway, they had been doing this, running into, you know, these fairs in different places and giving out tracts by the thousands.

And very little ever happened. So they prayed and fasted and God showed their little team very clearly that they were not to do this anymore. They were to pray and ask Him where they were to go and what they were to do.

So they changed this. Instead of going to some needy area, they thought, well there needs a church here, let's start a church there. They didn't do that. They waited until God gave them clear guidance as to where to go.

Then they gave out tracts and still nothing happened. So they went back to God in prayer again and fasting. God, what's wrong? We went where you told us to go. Nothing happened. And God showed them clearly, when you got there, you didn't wait on me for guidance as to what you should be doing.

And so they would go to a place and just wait on God. And God would show them what to do. And He said, that's when the glory of God returned. And He said in a book I read that He wrote, He said, we saw revivals as powerful as anything Finney ever saw.

I'm not sure if he's still preaching. He's probably past 80 now, but I know that some years ago they had over 600 churches and some of them had 2 ,000 and 3 ,000 people in fellowship. They had an annual conference of 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 people.

And the Bach Sing, it's a Brethren style movement. It's not connected with the Brethren movement as a whole at all, but it's a Brethren kind of movement. And God has greatly used this. The return of God's glory.

When we start doing God's work in God's way, the glory of God will return. It's a very simple idea. And I think we need to understand this. I think of one denomination. I'm not criticizing them, only to mention who they are, but they have a thing where they fly over a city and take photographs of the city and then say, okay, we've got a church here.

Now, we can't have another church except a mile from this church here. This is how they operate. So we can put a church in here because it's a mile from this church we already have. And then from this church we can build a church here a mile over.

And this is how they do it. I mean, God isn't consulted. I mean, they just do it this way, by taking photographs from the air. And a lot of Christian work is done this way. What we think is a good thing to do.

Instead of waiting on God for guidance. Because you take in the book of Acts, Paul and company tried to go into Asia, and what happened? The Spirit wouldn't let them. I say to myself, why were they trying to go into Asia if they never had guidance?

But the Spirit closed the door on them. They attempted to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit wouldn't let them. Now, the Spirit let them go into Asia a few years later, in Acts chapter 19, and all of a sudden in Asia you heard the word of the Lord Jesus, but it wasn't the right time then.

So God is trying to teach us through these things, wait on me, let me guide you, I will show you. And if we learn to do this, that's why Henry Blackaby keeps telling us, you know, find out what God is doing.

Find out where God is working. Get in there and work with God. The Father can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees, or the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father doing, Christ said in the Gospel of John.

And it's that principle of waiting on God for guidance. Like Paul, two questions, who are you, Lord? When he got the answer, Lord, what will you have me to do? And then somebody says he spent the rest of his life doing it, finding the will of God and carrying it out.

And that brings revival. Bach Singh wrote a little book called The Return of God's Glory. I don't think it's been published in North America. I got a copy over in India. I have it at home. He's not a great writer, but he lays it out very clearly, what they did and how they saw God work.

When they came to the conclusion they had to do things in God's way. Actually, it's something that should be obvious to us from the very outset. Now, in Saskatoon, five years before the revival, I got concerned about revival.

Prayer and the Saskatoon Revival

We had evangelistic people come to the church, like an evangelist or singers or whatever, a number of times. And they'd have packet pew programs and all of this stuff, you know, and we'd get busy and do this and that.

Volunteer choirs, remember one fellow came and we had a volunteer choir of about 40 people every night. We had good meetings, lively meetings, you know. Very little ever happened. After these men were gone, in some case a couple, after they were gone, the church was exactly the same as before they came.

I got to the point where I said, Laura, I'm never going to do it again. I'm never going to do it again. I shared this with a missionary and he said, why don't you get Ralph and Lucifer? And I said, who are they?

So he told me. So I wrote them and they said, we can't come for two years. Fine, so? But five years before the revival, I got concerned about this and I decided, God, we've got to have a revival here.

And you're the only one that consented. So I started a Saturday night deacons prayer meeting to pray for revival, 9 o 'clock Saturday night. We had 10 deacons, I think we averaged around six or seven of them attended that particular meeting.

That was the start. Then I began telling people things like this, miss Sunday morning if you have to, miss Sunday evening if you must, but don't ever miss the prayer meeting unless you're dead. This is the most important meeting of the week.

And our prayer meeting started to grow. It went up to 25, to 50, to 75. We eventually got to a place, I remember counting 167 people in the prayer meeting one prayer meeting night, which is about the number of members we had in the church.

But anyway, we really emphasized the Wednesday night prayer meeting. Then we had a prayer wheel, sitting on the bulletin board, and people took 15 minute slots. There was pie-shaped wedges all around the thing, you know, and people would write their name and the time they would take, the 15 minutes they would take to pray.

And after a while we had the whole 24 hours taken out. And this meant that any time of the day or night, somebody from our church was on their knees praying for revival. We ended all our Sunday evening services with a half hour of prayer for revival.

We used to tell the people, it won't be longer than 30 minutes. Stay if you can. Maybe 30 people would stay, and we'd have a time of prayer for revival. We had some cottage prayer meetings going. That didn't take very well.

Very few people attended the cottage prayer meetings, so we kind of gave up on that. We just kept emphasizing these other things. We really did no advertising for the meetings. I remember at one point I thought to myself, if Ralph and Lou phone to find if I've done all these things they've been writing me about, and I have to tell them we haven't done all these things, they may not even come.

But we prayed. And I remember just saying, God, I'm so tired. I'm so tired of seeing what men can do. We want to see what you can do. And we saw. Our church would seat about 350 with a few chairs at the back.

And we started on a Wednesday night with about 150 people. I think three or four people came forward. And by Saturday we were packed out. We couldn't hack it. Sunday was hopeless. We talked to a neighboring Anglican church pastor.

And he said, well, you can use our building. We don't have any Sunday evening meetings. You can have it for weeknights as long as you want. He was quite open to the idea. His church would seat 500 or 600.

I think we lasted there two nights and the building was packed right out. We couldn't handle it. So then the Alliance Church, and they had their annual missionary conference coming up. They already had missionaries in Saskatoon ready for the conference.

But Walter Wolterpass was very sensitive to what he saw God doing because some of his people were attending the meetings being blessed and coming back and sharing what God had been doing in their hearts.

And so they washed up their missionary conference and made their church available to us. And you could pack about 1 ,000 there by a little ingenuity. That didn't last long. It was too small. So we moved in the biggest church building in the city, seating about 1 ,400.

Now never forget the first night. We had that place packed. I mean packed. The caretaker lost his cool. He was cursing. He told me, he said, you've got to get rid of some of these people. The fire marshal will close this place down, man.

We can't have all these people in this building. There was another 200 or 300 outside, you know, yet. So I asked all my people to go down to the, I think, down to the Alliance Church we went. And we had a private meeting with them there.

But when our people went out, a bunch of people came in off the street again. But you know what happened? A week later, the caretaker got saved. And he said, hang them on the lights. Put them everywhere.

Yeah, that was different. Then that church was too small. So we had to start having double services every night. We planned to go for a week and a half. We had to go for seven weeks. And it was a revival.

It was a real revival. Dr. J. Edwin Orr, the expert on revivals, heard about the revival in Canada. And in a public meeting said, it's not a genuine revival. It never moved out of Saskatoon. And it was based on a very strong separatistic note.

It wasn't with God. So I wrote him a long letter. I said, you know, we quit counting after 2 ,000 teams went out for Saskatoon. I have no idea how many teams have gone out. I told him, teams went to the British Isles.

Teams went to South America, to India, to the Philippines, to Europe, and so on. He didn't know a thing about this. He completely altered his opinion after he found out what had happened. As a matter of fact, this particular book here, The Flaming Tongue, from which I read a few moments ago, he sent me a copy.

And there's his John Henry there. And he was just admitting that he had made a mistake in evaluating the revival the way he did. He had been fed some information that was not true. In any case, we started having double services.

And then, suddenly, that was too small. So we moved to Centennial Auditorium. And finally, there on Sunday evenings, we had to have double services. And we went for seven weeks. And hundreds of people were touched by God.

And many churches were blessed. And these teams going out was just incredible. We were hearing from all over the continent pretty well. People went, send a team. Send a team. Send a team. Well, we didn't have that many teams, you know.

We just sent who we could. And often it was just a group of lay people that went. And God used them just as he'd use any pastors. So in that sense, it was a lay movement as well. We were all involved.

And thank God for it. I remember three pastors came. They were up from Thompson, Manitoba area. One of them said to me, I can never preach again. If God doesn't meet my need in these meetings, I can never preach again.

And I remember seeing him laying on the floor at the front of the church about an hour waiting on God. And God touched his life. Not long after that, he led an electrician to Christ who was from Scotland, a new immigrant in Canada.

And this guy got so fired up, the Scots guy, Scots remember, he offered to pay the fare for this preacher to fly to Scotland. And he gave him a whole long list of relatives that he could witness to and try and win to Christ.

And he hopped on a plane in Florida, Scotland, and brought 16 of these people to Christ, you know. This was after God touched them in revival in Canada here. Sherwood Work, who was Billy Graham's right-hand man for 25 years, Leonard Ravenhill phoned him and said, Woody, there's a revival in Canada.

Hop a plane and get up there. Revival's next door to heaven. So I don't know where he got my name from. Maybe from Leonard Ravenhill. He phoned me long distance. He said, Where's the revival now? I said, Well, if you're in Minneapolis, we're in Winnipeg, and God's doing great things here.

So Sherwood Work showed up in Winnipeg. And, you know, we had rented Elam Chapel with seat 1 ,200. We started with 600. And finally we were packed out. We had to have double service. Then we had to move to a larger building.

And the same thing began happening. Theirs had happened in Saskatoon. And the night he came, the church was packed to the doors, and he was sitting about the third pew from the front with a notebook, taking down notes.

People were giving testimonies and all this kind of stuff. And before I got to preaching, people started coming forward and kneeling at the front. And pretty soon the whole front of the church was covered with people kneeling, praying.

And then we filled the platform, and then we filled the choir wall. And then I started emptying the front pews in the second tune. And we had to empty the third pew so people could have a place to kneel.

And that's when we got to Sherwood Work. So he came up to me afterwards. He introduced himself, and then he said, I've been involved in evangelism on a larger scale for 25 years, but I've never seen revival.

He said, this is revival. He said, you know, he said, Billy doesn't need it, but the Graham Organization does. He said, they desperately need revival. And my wife, he said, well, he explained to me quietly.

He doesn't say this in his book, but he told me quietly he would have divorced her 25 years before, but he didn't want to hurt Billy Graham. So they just lived in the same house. He said, my wife really needs revival.

I said, oh, that's nice. I just stared at him. And finally he said, and I think I need it too. And through Harry and Evelyn Thiessen's testimony, which he heard that night, God got through to Sherwood Works.

And he experienced revival. He wrote a book called The Afterglow, in which he tells what happened in his life through the revival in Canada. And you know, there's a lot of hidden springs to this. There were people in India, two places in India, one place for four years before the revival in Canada, they had been praying, a group had been praying for revival in western Canada.

Some Gideons from Canada were over in England, and some of these people came and told them what had been going on. Another group in India had been praying for a couple of years for revival, specifically in Saskatoon.

They didn't even know where they got the name Saskatoon from. So there's hidden springs to a lot of this, things God is doing that we can't really see the whole picture. But God was certainly involved.

And then we saw what God could do. With very little human effort, just to be available, that's all. I say again, the Holy Ghost is the agent and the Word of God is the instrument, and we are the object of revival.

Revival, Joy, and the Glory of God

Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee? For all the blessings we have here in Canada, I've traveled a lot. Every time I get home I say to my wife, Honey, I feel like kissing the ground.

Let me give you an example. In the Philippines, in Surigao, in Mindanao, the big island in the south of the Philippines, I mean there's no such thing as garbage pickup, you know. So the people decided to make a certain street garbage street.

And so by common agreement, everybody bought their garbage and dumped it on garbage street. So the garbage was, it covered the sidewalks in the street from this house to that house, a pile six or eight feet high, for three bucks in length.

Rats running through it, pigs running over it, and poor people going around through the garbage with a bag looking for orange peels to take home to have something to eat. Now here in Canada, if the garbage truck is, you know, an hour late, people are foaming the city.

We don't realize all this junk we have doesn't make us any happier. And people were not happy until we're happy in God. Do you know what George Mueller said, the famous man of faith and prayer? He asked this question, What is a Christian's chief duty before God?

You'll be surprised at the answer if you don't know it. He said, The Christian's chief duty before God every day is to have his soul happy in God. Because the joy of the Lord is your strength. If you're not happy in God, if you're not joyful in the Lord, you have no power, you have no strength.

Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people may rejoice in thee? The reason for revival would be right there. And then to bring glory to God. The answers to prayer, the hundreds and hundreds of answers to prayer we saw.

Everything seemed to speed up and just accelerate. I remember down in the Maritimes, I had some meetings in a church, and one of the local pastors was cooperating. There was, I think, maybe 10 churches cooperating.

And one of the local pastors came to talk to me before this meeting. And I just sensed in my heart he had a need. I don't claim to have any gift along those lines, but I just felt he had a need. And he kept telling me about the wonderful things that was happening in his church, missionaries they're sending out, money they're raising for missions, evangelism and all this stuff, you know.

And people had told me about this guy that he had the fastest growing church in the Maritimes. Well, the meeting started. And I had a fellow with me, and he gave his testimony. And I was preaching low-key about 10 minutes when suddenly this pastor began to weep.

And finally he was just absolutely roaring as he wept. And I signaled to my helper, and he went over and took him out to another room in the church. We could hear him for 20 minutes just screaming at the top of his lungs.

Finally, after half an hour, they came in, and I asked this brother if he had anything to share with us, and he told us what happened. And you can interpret this any way you want. He said, I was sitting there.

Brother McCloud was speaking. He said, I don't know what happened. He said, but Jesus came and stood right in front of me, and he demanded that I give him my all. He said, I'd never done that. And he said, he broke me.

Nobody else saw Jesus, you know. This is what God did and how God handled that problem. A man, a pastor from about 300 miles away, drove over with one of his men from the church. His wife wanted to come and couldn't come.

And soon he came over and experienced revival. He could hardly wait to get home and tell his wife what happened. So he roars in the house and says, Honey, where are you? God revived me! She said, God revived me when you were gone.

Let me tell you what happened. And what happened, she couldn't sleep at night, and she got out of bed at 2 o 'clock, and she got on her knees and started to pray. And she said, Jesus Christ came, and she said, he just, he said to me, give me everything.

She said, I gave him everything. And she was just so full of God, he could hardly, he couldn't believe it, you know. And she hadn't even been in a meeting. Some of those things, I believe them. These people have nothing to, they're not telling the story of some kind.

Especially when you see the after effects of what happened at that time. I was praying with a pastor one time, and he had me misappropriating funds in his church and making eyes at the ladies, and he wouldn't admit anything.

So I said, well, brother, let's pray. There was a big pillar right here, and his chair was here, and I was kneeling here. And I began to pray for him, that God would speak to him. And suddenly he screamed.

I looked, he had both arms around the pillar, he was holding on for dear life. And he kept crying, Oh God, don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me. And he kept screaming and crying, God, don't kill me, don't kill me.

Afterwards, he told me that the hand of God came around his body and began to squeeze him, and he thought he was going to die. And it wasn't hard to get honest when that happened. Well, we don't ask God to do things of that kind, but we can't deny, like in Acts chapter 4, when they prayed for boldness to preach the word of God, they asked the Lord to work miracles and so on.