The Vision of the Francis Asbury
Society
Message by Dennis Kinlaw

How do I understand what the Francis Society is?
First of all, I want to say it has nothing to do with Asbury College
or Asbury Theological Seminary. Now I was at the college for a
number of years and taught also at the Seminary, and have had that
association, but those are institutions, and Francis Asbury Society
was founded, not to build an institution, but to promote a message.
And there’s a great deal of difference in a program to build an
institution, and a program to promote a message. In fact, sometimes
it’s harder to tell people what you’re about when what you’re after
is to promote a message.
Now what is that message? It’s a very simple
biblical one. But it is an incredibly important one. Let me say the
thing we want to let the world know is that the blood of Christ can
cleanse a human heart so that the heart of a person can be clean
from self-interest, from his own desire to keep his thumb on his
life, and have some control over his life, that the blood of Christ
can cleanse the inner heart of a person enough that he can love God
with all of his heart, as Christ said we were supposed to do, with
all of his mind, with all of his soul, And love his neighbor as
himself. Now the scripture uses a number of expressions to describe
that. One of them is just simply the expression, “pure in heart.”
And so in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure
in heart for they shall see God.” And if it’s a pure heart, it is a
single heart, it is an undivided heart. Now that’s what Paul’s
friend was expressing, and there’s not a one of us who hasn’t
experienced it where we’ve had our own thumbs on our own lives, and
our lives, our devotion to Christ has been mingled. There’s been a
division within us. But the scripture speaks about the possibility
that God can take a person’s heart and unite it. The psalmist cried
out, “Unite my heart, O God, make it one.” Another expression is,
“An eye single to the glory of God.” That as you live, the one
purpose in your life is the glory of God, and you have let God take
such total control of you that all you are, all you have, all there
is about you, is devoted to that end, the glory of God. And as we
said, loving Him with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. I
think this is what Jesus was getting at with the rich young ruler.
And this is something that we don’t usually connect with salvation.
But you will remember that this young man came to Jesus and said,
“What do I have to do to be saved? What do I have to do to have
eternal life?” And Jesus said, “Keep the commandments.” And the
young man looked back at Jesus and said, “Master, I’ve kept those.”
And Jesus said, “OK. One thing thou lackest. Go sell all that you
have, give it to the poor, and come take up your cross and follow
me.” Now Jesus wasn’t after his wealth, because Jesus didn’t need
his wealth. What He wanted was that young man. And when Jesus said,
“One thing you lack,” That young man turned and walked away. And
Jesus’ heart was broken because he had lost a young person whom He
wanted, and wanted totally for Himself. I think we in America are
masters of stepping down the requirements for being a disciple of
Jesus, and a follower of Him. We talk about it, believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. And so we make a mental
response to that and think we are saved. But if you will follow the
teachings of Christ, you will find that Christ said there ought to
be a cross in every person’s life, just as there’s a cross in His, a
cross in every person who claims to be a Christian’s life where a
person dies to his own interest, that’s His terminology for getting
your thumb off your life, so that Christ controls it. Die to your
own interest and your own way and come alive wholly and fully and
completely for Christ.
Now somebody will say, “But doesn’t everybody who
is a Bible believer believe that? Now unfortunately they don’t. Now
I’m going to talk about some people who tar some positions taken by
people that are my brothers and sisters in Christ, many of whom I
have learned from and profited from. But, you know, my
responsibility and yours, is to take the Word of God and follow it
as God opens it to you. In our day, for instance, there has been a
remarkable reformation in recent years of the Reformation position
that Luther took that a person is at the same time both justified
and a sinner. And so a person will live all his life without ever
being free from sin, but at the same time he can be justified. Now
you know, I read in the scripture to save us from our sins, not to
save us in our sins. I don’t want to play down the sinfulness and
the sinful potential of the human heart, but I would like to address
the question of the power of the blood of Christ to cleanse the
heart, and to unite our hearts, the power of the Spirit to unite our
hearts to where a person loves God with all of his heart, loves Him
more than he loves anything else in his life, or those things that
are related to him. I’m fascinated by the way in the last fifty
years, seventy years in the United States, we’ve had the sweeping
movement that we speak of the charismatic movement. Now I have some
dear friends that are in that. When I was pastoring in New York, one
of the closest friends that I had had, he was the best preacher I
could find was an Assembly of God pastor, a Britisher. I had him
preach for me numbers of time. But, you know, one of the things that
interested me about the charismatic movement is. that it talks a
great deal about the Holy Spirit and talks about the gifts that the
Spirit can give; it talks about the signs and wonders that the
Spirit can perform, but the interesting thing is, I can hardly find
a charismatic theologian in the United States or in the English
speaking world that believes that the baptism of the Holy Spirit
really cleanses the human heart. The emphasis is on the power, not
on the heart purity. But I notice that Jesus says, “Blessed are the
pure in heart for they shall see God.”
I received the other day a book from a major
evangelical press in this country. It was an author’s copy, and was
sent to me as a gift. So I opened it. It was on spiritual power and
spiritual gifts. And I read a very interesting appeal from a man who
has nine books on the market, in the Christian bookstores, and he
talked about the fact that the thing we need to recognize and let be
discovered again the church is the signs and wonders of the Spirit,
the power of the Spirit. He went on to explain that you can be
filled with the Spirit. Some people are filled 25 percent, some
people are filled 50 percent, some people are filled 90 percent, but
at no point did he say it was possible for a person to be filled
fully, completely. In other words, filled. And then he went on to
say, now this has nothing to do with your getting to the place where
there is real victory in your life over sin, because, you see, God
knows that we are twisted and perverted enough that we will never be
able to get away from the contamination of our own carnal
self-interest. So he says, “The wonderful thing is that God has
stepped down the requirement to meet the condition of our heart.”
Now what intrigued me is that that book will be in every Christian
bookstore in a matter of a few days, if it isn’t already there. And
one of the things that troubles me about much of the preaching on
the radio and on TV in our day is the concept that salvation can be
separated from the presence of Christ. You know, if you’ve been born
again, then you’re in, and you’re fixed forever, and your sins past,
present and future are taken care of. And so you don’t have to worry
about those. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re in fellowship with
Christ or not, it’s whether you’ve had that one-time experience that
fixes you. Now I remember the story in the gospels about Jesus in
the boat when the storm came up, and when the disciples were
terrified, they turned to Him and said, “Don’t you care whether we
perish?” It was the presence of Christ in that boat that saved them
in that storm. I do not believe that there is any salvation apart
from the presence of Christ. It is when He comes into my life, and I
keep Him there, live with Him and walk with Him, let Him keep me
through His Spirit, that there is deliverance and freedom and the
power of His Spirit. And that is one of the things that troubles me
so about the end result being to be born again, Bill Clinton’s born
again. And so anybody born again, simply means to be forgiven. It
doesn’t mean to be saved from your sins. I notice that some of the
best theological minds in our day say that’s what is the normal
Christian life. I have a friend, worked with him on a board for a
number of years, he has two articles that are very powerful on
Romans 7 and his conclusion is that when Paul said, “The good which
I would, I can’t do, and the evil which I would not, that is what I
do.” He said that is the normal Christian life because we can never
be free from that permeation of sin within us and its control, until
the resurrection comes. If I were to name him, he would be known by
90 percent of the people in this crowd. But you know, there is
something about me that when I pick up the Bible and read it, I find
that there is a different picture there. And I want to tell you
about something else that happened to me that has affected my
looking at scripture. In 1970, Elsie and I had just gone to the
college and had been there about 16 or 17 months. I came to
Louisville to catch an eight o’clock one Tuesday morning, and was
headed for Alberta. At five o’clock that afternoon, I landed in the
hotel. And as I registered in the hotel, the hotel clerk said, “Mr.
Kinlaw, you have an emergency phone call, and I looked to see who it
was from, and it was from the dean at the college. And those were
the days when we were having riots on the college campuses and
university campuses all over the country. And I thought,
“Emergency.? Wonder what’s happened?” So I went right across the
lobby to a telephone, and I called my dean. I caught him fortunately
at home. He was home for just a few minutes for supper. And when I
got him, I said, “Custer, what’s the problem?’ “Well” he said, “it’s
chapel.” And I said, “Chapel? What do you mean, chapel?” “Well,” he
said, “it isn’t over yet.” And I said, “Custer, chapel was at ten
o’clock this morning. What do you mean, chapel isn’t over?” “Well,”
he said, “Dr. Kinlaw (he always called me that, he was an old
military guy) Hughes Auditorium has more people in it now than it
had at 10 o’clock this morning.” And so that’s the way I learned
about the revival. I remember he would call me every day and tell me
what was taking place. I had never experienced anything quite like
it. I think if not the greatest, certainly one of the two or three
greatest senses for me for the Presence of the Holy Spirit
descending in a telephone booth was when Custer was telling me what
was taking place at Asbury. So I was due back. I landed in
Louisville on Thursday night about midnight. I got in my car and
drove to Wilmore. It’s interesting, the closer I got to Wilmore, the
slower I drove, because I didn’t know whether I was ready to walk
into the Presence of God that was there. And so I probably took
longer than I have ever taken to drive from Louisville to Wilmore. I
walked into the back of the auditorium and sat down in the back
corner seat as far away from the pulpit as I could get, and tried to
look as un-presidential as I could look. I sat for about an hour and
a half, and a student came back and knelt next to me, a girl. She
was probably the best witness team on our campus. She looked up at
me and said, “Dr. Kinlaw, would you pray with me?” I said, “Yes.
What’s the problem?” She said, “I’m a liar.” I said, “What do you
mean, you are a liar?” She said, “I lie so much I don’t know when I
lie.” I said, “Let’s go downstairs where we can be alone and talk
and pray.” She said to me, “What do I do?” I have never been in that
spot, so I said, “Well, why don’t you start back with the last
person you lied to, and go to everybody you can remember that you
lied to, and ask them to forgive you for lying to them.” She said,
“Oh that would kill me.” I said, “No, I don’t think so. I think it
might liberate you.” Three days later that girl came to me, aglow.
And I said, “Did something happen?” “Oh,” she said, “I’m free.” I
said, “How’d you get free?” She said, “Well, I just hit my 34th
person.”
Now I had a seminary student come to me. He was
halfway through seminary. Deeply distressed, and he said, “What do I
do? I had a required course for my graduation, and I cheated on the
final exam in college. If I go and confess that and lose that
credit, then I’ve lost all my seminary work, because you can’t get
into seminary without an A.B. degree. What do I do?” I said, “Well,
do you want to live all the rest of your life knowing that you’re a
cheat?” He said, “No, I don’t like the thought of that.” I said,
“Now why don’t you go, and I named the professor for him to go to.”
And so he went to him, the professor of the class where he had
cheated, and he confessed. And the guy worked out something for him.
He graduated from seminary, and is in the ministry at the present
time. Now he was a seminary student studying for the ministry when
he was in college, but he was cheating on an exam.
On Saturday night I walked into the auditorium
and looked for a seat, and the only seat I could find was on the
second row, down on the left, almost on the left aisle, left row.
And as I walked in and sat down, I found myself sitting beside a
staff person in Wilmore, and we sat for a little while, and finally
he reached over and took my arm, and I thought he was going to break
it, squeezing it. And I looked at him, and his face was crimson. And
he said to me, “Dennis, (we knew each other well) he said, “I’ve got
to tell somebody. Let me tell you.” He said, “My wife, she and I
were missionaries overseas with the Methodist Church for a number of
years. When the bishop appointed us to this appointment here, he
said my wife did not want to come. She said, “I hate the college. I
hate the seminary. I hate the Methodist Church.” She hated
everything about Wilmore.” He said, “This week a student came to my
wife and said, “I need help. Will you pray with me?” He said, “My
wife was terrified.” So he said, “As she sat with the girl, suddenly
she spotted me. So she called me, and I went over and prayed with
the girl. And tonight we were at supper. My son was sitting here and
my daughter here and my wife was sitting across from me.” His wife
was the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Had been a missionary. In
Christian service all her life. In the middle of the meal, she said,
“David, I have something I need to say to you. And to my son and my
daughter.” And he said, “What’s this?” She said, “You know this week
when you were praying with that girl that I got you together with.”
He said, “Yes.” She said, “While she was getting into the kingdom, I
got in. And I want to tell you that for the first time in our
married life, I’m on your team.” He was convulsed with weeping,
joyous weeping.
Now I lived through a number of experiences like
that. Do you know what the bottom line of conclusion I came to was?
That there are stacks of Christians with defeat in their lives at
the point of sin. And there’s guilt and impotence, unhappiness,
frustration, but there is the power in the Spirit of God that can
set a person free, clean his heart, clean him up, make him free, and
as the girl who said she was a liar, said to me, “For the first time
in my life, I’m free.” You notice she was on a gospel team.
Then we had something else happen in that same
general period. It was in 1771 that Francis Asbury came to the
United States. He was 26 years of age. He lived, died in 1816, and
for 44 years of that time during the Revolutionary War, he was under
house arrest for awhile, and so he had a room and a bed. The rest of
his life, he never owned a bed, never slept at home because his home
was the saddle, and he covered America. He did more to lay the
spiritual foundation for America than any other single figure, and
the Methodist Church does not even provide a biography for him,
because he had only one passion. I went through his journal looking
for Christmas devotional notes, because we’d send out a Christmas
card every Christmas. So I thought if I could get a good Christmas
thought from Francis Asbury then I’ve have the perfect Asbury
Christmas card. So I searched, and do you know what I found? The
typical one, “I rose at four, preached at five, and at seven was on
my way to my next preaching appointment.” Only one passion! And let
me tell you what kind of a man he was. He was riding, I think it was
in Wilmington, North Carolina, he was going into the city on his
horse. He passed a slave. He spoke, “Good day, Sir.” The slave
responded. He was very interested in slaves. And for years he had a
black preacher travel with him, Black Harry. He went on his way, and
the Spirit spoke to him and said, “You should have witnessed to that
person.” So he turned his horse around and went back, and the black
was still there. And so he got off his horse and came to him, and
said, “Sir, what is your name?” And the guy said, “I don’t know.
I’ve never known my name. I’m a slave.” Isn’t that incredible the
degradation that we put human beings through our sinfulness. He
said, “They all call me Punch, because I fight so much.” So Asbury
opened the scripture, told him about Christ, about the power of God
to save, prayed with him, and went on his way. Twenty years later,
Asbury was back in that community. So as he was preaching in the
church, at the end of the service, a black came up to him, looked at
him, and said, “Bishop, I’m Punch.” And Bishop Asbury said, “Tell me
the story.” He said, “Well, you know, you talked to me about Jesus,
prayed with me. “ He said, “I went to my room, got down on my knees,
confessed my sins, asked Him to forgive me, and my room was filled
with an incredible light. And, you know, I’ve never fought or cursed
or played cards since. And I’ve got 300 people out here that call me
their pastor.” Now that’s the kind of guy Francis Asbury was. So I
got interested in that kind of gospel. And do you know what I found?
It had incredible power in it. In 1771, there were 2000 Methodists
in the United States, and by 1860 one out of every three church
members in the United States was a Methodist. Now that’s power,
isn’t it? But the interesting thing is, what was the essence of the
gospel that he preached? If you will read his journal, you will find
that he was saying at one point, he had been sick and had to stop
ministry briefly, and he said, “God spoke to me I have not put
enough emphasis on entire sanctification and personal holiness. That
is what will make this nation, change this nation.” And so he
preached it. Do you know the interesting thing is, it had enough
power in it that it broke across denominational lines. Henry Clay
Morrison was the president of Asbury College, but before that he was
a pastor in Danville, Kentucky. His heart was hungry as a pastor. He
talked with the Presbyterian preacher. The Presbyterian preacher
said, “Henry what you need is what Wesley called entire
sanctification, and what we Presbyterians call the deeper life. You
need to know the victory that God can give you with a clean heart.”
And so the man who became president of Asbury College was helped by
a Presbyterian. It’s interesting that it jumped across all lines to
where there was a Unitarian pastor in New England that preached and
witnessed to entire sanctification. Total surrender. Being possessed
by God. Getting your thumb off your life. Simply letting God possess
you.
One of the greatest outbursts of Christian
influence and effectiveness in human history came in the latter part
of the 19th century that came out of that message that jumped across
the Baptists and Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, and even as
we said others, all the denominations. The Keswick movement
developed out of that. And so the modern missionary movement came
out of that. Christian colleges were formed. Gordon. Interesting,
the main street in front of Wheaton is John Wesley Street. Gordon
was founded by a Baptist who had a deeper experience. Biola was
founded by a man, Moody would send for him and he said, “I want you
to preach two sermons, ten reasons why you believe the Bible to be
the Word of God, and your sermon on the baptism of the Holy Spirit
which he meant, not tongues, but to be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Ira Torrey who was a Yale graduate. It had incredible power. It
changed the American landscape. It was a major factor in defeating
the forces that wanted to hold onto slavery. It was the kind of
force that George Will said about Wesley and the women, “In England,
they saved England from gin.” I love that line. But incredible moral
power!
But what about the 20th century? It’s a very
interesting story, so different. When I first was converted as a
teenager, I looked for a Christian bookstore. I finally found one in
the state of North Carolina. It was in the capitol Riley. I got
books there to nurture my soul. There was not a Christian radio
station in North Carolina. I didn’t know one in the country. Do you
know that now there is a Christian bookstore in every town in the
United States practically. You can’t get out of hearing distance of
a Christian radio station in most of the sections of the country.
They’re everywhere. Christian TV goes around the world now. And the
more Christian bookstores we get and the more radio stations we get,
the more the moral life of the country collapses. Now are you going
to tell me there isn’t something wrong with the message that we’re
preaching?
I go back to 1970, and think of Christians that
were in Christian service, in Christian work, but in their inner
hearts, there was enough pollution and defilement to keep them from
knowing the power of God and the freedom of God.
Now I believe that God can make Christians real
Christians. And that’s what our business is, to preach that gospel
of an undivided heart, of an eye single, of a heart filled with love
for God where the person’s got his hands off, and Christ possesses
him. And when it happens, it’s a different product and it has a
different impact.
One of the stories that has its roots in that
last century and in that message came home to me in a very real way.
I had the privilege of serving on the board of a missionary society
in this country for a number of years. At that time we had a rule
that when a person reached a 72, he had to retire from the board. We
had on the board a man who was very special. A business man. He had
been saved as a door to door salesman by a lady who led him to
Christ. At that time he was giving about two million dollars a year
to the missionary society that I was on the board of. So his
retirement came. And I was assigned the duty of giving him a gift,
and thanking him and telling him goodbye. I’d never felt more stupid
in my life. Giving a book to a guy who was giving two million
dollars a year. He was retiring from our board; he wasn’t retiring
from work. This past year I think he gave something like four
million to Christian missions around the world. So I gave him the
book. And he looked at me and said, “May I say something?” Well,
what do you do with a guy who gives you two million dollars. You
say, “Yes, Sir.” So he said, “I want to tell you why I got
interested in this mission.” He said, “I became a Christian as a
door to door salesman. Found a buddy, and we prayed together every
Thursday night. God began to deal with my heart, and I wanted my
life to count. An evangelist came to our church, and he said to me,
“Stanley, you need to see a mission field. Go with me to Korea. So,”
he said, “I found myself in Los Angeles overnight, in the old days
before flying onto Korea.” He said, “My evangelist friend said to
me. “There’s a lady here I’d like for you to meet. So,” he said, “he
took me to meet a lady by the name of Lettie B. Cowman.” She’s the
one who put together the book, Streams in the Desert. I suspect the
second most influential devotional book that’s ever been published.
He said, “We spent some time with this very regal lady.” He said,
“We came to the end of the conversation, and she said, “Mr. Tam, may
I tell you a story before you go?” And he said, “Yes, certainly.”
She said, “My husband and I were young people in Chicago. He was a
young executive with Western Union. Had a 110 telegraphers under
him.” She said, “I attended a Methodist Church revival and was
converted, and I came home and tried to witness to my husband, but
he would have nothing to do with it. And then one night he agreed to
go with me to church, and when he came home, he got down on his
knees by our bed, and my husband found Christ.” And she said, “When
he found Christ, a great hunger developed within him to serve Him.”
She said, “One Friday we were on the street car and we passed Moody
Memorial Church. Said there was a sign out front – Missionary
Conference, A. B. Simpson, speaking.” Now, she said, neither one of
us had ever been to a missionary conference. It was the first time
we had ever heard of one. But,” he said, “Lettie, let’s go.” So that
night they went to the missionary conference. A. B. Simpson, who
interestingly enough pastored a Presbyterian Church in Louisville,
had gotten a hunger in his heart for something he didn’t have, and
he had a profound experience of being with the Spirit, and it
transformed his life. And missions became his passion. And so that
night, he preached, and they had never heard a message like that.
When he got through, he said, “Now, we must take an offering. Now,”
he said, “the offering is going to be different, because when the
collection plates comes you’ll notice they’re full of instead of
empty. They’re full of watches. Now they’re not gold watches, but
they’re good watches. And if you have a gold watch, if you’ll put
yours in the plate, you can take one of the others out, and we’ll
sell those gold watches so that the gospel can be carried around the
world.” She said, “We’d never seen anything like this.” She said,
“Here came the plate, and it was full of watches. A person handed it
to me, and I handed it to Charley. And,” she said, “he took it with
his left hand, and with his right hand he reached into his watch
pocket and pulled out the gold watch that I had scrimped and saved
for months to buy him. And he dropped it in the plate. I turned and
looked at him and said, “I gave that to you. But” she said, “the
plate was gone.” She said, “A. B. Simpson came back to the pulpit
and said, “Now we must take another offering. This time you will
notice the plates are empty. There are a lot of us who wear more
jewelry than is necessary for good grooming. And if you’ll just take
that jewelry that you don’t need for good grooming and put it in the
plate, we’ll sell it all, and send the gospel of Christ across the
world.” She said, “Here came the plate.” She said, “I handed it to
Charley, he took it with his left hand and with his right hand he
reached over and took my left hand, and he pulled my engagement ring
off and he dropped it in the plate. And I turned to him and said,
“You gave that to me. But, “she said, “the plate was gone.” She said
A. B. Simpson came back to the pulpit and said, “We must take
another offering. This time we must take a money offering.” She
said, “It was Friday. It was pay day. My husband had in his pocket
the pay for two weeks.” She said, “When the plate came, he reached
in his pocket and pulled it out and dropped it in the plate. And I
said, “What are we going to live on for the next two weeks?,” she
said, but it was gone. Then Simpson came and said, “Now we must take
the real offering. We must take the offering of life, because there
are people here who need to give themselves wholly to God, so He can
do with them as He pleases. Send them where He will, and if that’s
you, we want you to stand.” And she said, “To my horror, Charley
stood up.” She said, “The most decisive moment in my life came then.
I knew Charley well enough that if he said he was going to do
anything, he’d do it whether I went with him or not, and I didn’t
want to live alone. So I stood up too. So, “she said, “Mr. Tam, our
whole lives have been different because of that moment.”
Do you know what Stanley Tam did? He came home,
got his lawyer and said, “How do I give my business to God.” And the
lawyer said, “What did you say?” He said, “How do I give my business
to God?” And the lawyer said, “That’s impossible.” Stanley said,
“Well, I guess I need another lawyer,” and he got one. Last year he
was involved with, I think, probably 100,000 conversions around the
world.
Now let me ask you, is the world perishing the
way it is because we still have hearts that are full of self,
self-interest, divided, unclean, so that everything we do has the
defilement of self-interest on it somewhere when there’s a power in
the blood of Christ that can clean us up, and make our lives count.
Now that’s what we are about. And do you know? What we are finding
is that there are a people hungry for just that kind of thing. That
girl who said, “I’m a liar,” wanted to be free. And Christ set her
free. That seminary fellow who was studying for the ministry wanted
the guilt gone. And God took it away, and he was free. And that
fellow who sat next to me in Hughes Auditorium on that Saturday
night, his family has never been the same since. His marriage has
never been the same since, because two became one in Christ.
Now that’s what The Francis Asbury Society, is
about. It’s a message. So we try to find evangelists who will preach
it, literature that will express it, retreats that will give people
an opportunity to enter into that kind of experience, support
anything moving in this country or across the world that will bring
the church to the place where Christ died to bring it. That’s what
we are about. Thank you for listening.
There’s another organization that we’ve helped.
And this organization is called Philadelphia Foundation. We helped
them get (note from Helen, I turned tape over and it sounded like
something left out.) And after the party I went to another party. I
like parties. One of the things I was afraid of when I became a
Christian they wouldn’t have any more parties. Now I’ve got so many
parties to go to, it’s hard to choose which one to go to. And I’d
been to one party, and went to this other party. We went over to
Steak and Shake, a bunch of us did, and we got almost thrown out of
there at 11 o’clock at night, and so about a quarter to eleven we
started out. There was about 12 of us. We were out in the parking
lot, and we were talking and carrying on and were going to say
goodbye to one another, and here comes this gangly teenager running
out of the Steak and Shake. It was a little bit scary. He ran out,
and he came running up to me. And he was bigger than me. He said,
“Are you Paul Blair?” And I said, “Yes.” I didn’t know who this guy
was. And he said, “Are you the evangelist?” And I said, “Yes.” He
said, “Well, I want to thank you. Four years ago, you came to my
church. I was drunk on Saturday night, and I didn’t want to go to
church. My parents made me go to church.” And he said, “That night I
got my life straightened out with the Lord.” And he said, “That
night you prayed with me, and you preached.” I didn’t remember the
guy. He said, “I’ve gone to a Christian college, and I’m going into
the ministry, and I’m going to go into seminary” He said, “I’ve
never got to thank you.” Now I’m not just telling that so you can
get to know me better, I say we’ve got 25 other people that are out
there in churches and doing retreats, and they’ve stories like that.
What I want to tell you, Jesus is still changing people’s lives. And
their lives are getting all changed. Marriages are getting changed.
Homes are getting changed. Churches are getting changed. I still
believe in a revival in a church. A lot of people don’t anymore. And
I don’t believe in telling people about it. What I believe is
getting the men, percent of the men in a church, to pray. And get
them to pray for three months. Not go to the Wednesday prayer
meeting, but go to somebody’s house, and pray for one hour for three
months before somebody comes to preach, an evangelist comes to
preach. And do you know, things start happening! Things start
happening before you get there! And it’s interesting, then the
church is like putting popcorn in a microwave and it begins to pop,
and God begins to move, and begins to move on the men of the church.
You can always get the women to pray. They’re always praying, “God,
change my husband.” When the men begin to pray, God begins to work.
He begins to move. I still believe, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen
God work. And I’ve seen Him change people’s lives. Young, old, it
doesn’t matter. Some of you were totally new to this, and you may be
totally scared to death now. But I want you to just get off this
boat. You’ve had a wonderful meal. People provided that for you. And
I want you to go home, and if you want to get involved with a group
of people like this, then let us know about it. |