Episode Transcript
...questions because the questions very often bring out things that we don't talk about when we give a talk. I really don't know what I have to say here tonight. I understand that some of you would like to hear something about my testimony and possibly it's quite a good idea because missionaries are not born missionaries.
We don't become missionaries, as someone says, by crossing the seas. A missionary is nothing unusual. He's just a man like anyone else, flesh and blood. Even of Elijah, it was said he was a man of flesh and blood and like passions as ourselves.
So how much more am I like you? We have our moments when we feel we are no good at all. We have our moments when we might have packed up and come back. So I'll start from the beginning as best I can.
I was in Italy during the war days and like many of the military, the soldiers, went through the 8th army campaign and never thought anything about going back to Italy. However, I will say this, that while I was in the army there was lurking at the back of my mind the thought and quite a predominant thought that somehow I wasn't my own.
Somehow God had a claim on me. And when God speaks, if anyone is seeking the clear, the leading of God, there's absolutely no doubt. There may be a doubt at the beginning. You may not be sure whether it's you thinking the thoughts or whether it is the Holy Spirit.
If it is of God, I can say absolutely it will increase and you will have no peace until finally you either accept or reject. And there is a terrible possibility that God may leave you in peace and never speak to you again about that.
But it will be a peace that will be interrupted at the end. I thank God that when I was in the army, towards the end I had to do some hard thinking and I thought now, if I am going to serve the Lord as I'd already spoken to my family, my mother, I said I felt that God was calling me to Christian service. I realised that before I was demobbed I had to make my decision. And that was in 1945. And at that time I was stationed in the extreme northeast of Italy, near Trieste.
And I was stationed in a lighthouse strange to say, in a lighthouse. Previously I was at a big barracks in one of the nearby towns and we enjoyed good Christian fellowship. And the Christian soldiers on a Sunday evening would take over the YMCA or the NAAFI bar, we used to call it.
And we would stand up and sing our choruses and someone would play and another testify. And we were enjoying how good it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. And then one day, as it can happen, I suddenly was sent away from this group of good Christian friends down to the most remote, desolate place possible. It was a day in the winter, I can't remember exactly what month, but it was foggy and dismal. And the further we went and the longer we went, the more I was saying, well, what is the purpose of this? Finally came to a lighthouse right down on the coast and there were seven of us.
And for months it went on like this until one day I suddenly felt a burden, a burden or a thought rather than a burden. Thought I'd give a Gospel of John to the woman who does the washing for us. Started just from an insignificant little thing.
I thought, I don't know what her reactions are going to be. I was afraid, I can say, on that occasion I thought, Well, I don't what her reactions are going to be. However, I said, if you like to take this book, I didn't speak Italian, just a few words and she took it and that was that. Next day she came to me and she said, you remember the book that you gave me? And I thought, oh, that's done it. And she said, My husband saw it last night and he read the whole book.
And she said, as best she could explain, would it be possible for him to have a Bible. Oh that just took my breath away. And I thought, well, how can I get a Bible for him? I got a Bible through the Christian, Italian Christians, a few Italian Christians in a nearby town. And then there was a problem. The man didn't know how to read the Bible, where to start or where to begin. And every evening I used to go down into that kitchen in that lighthouse, and I had my Bible in English, and he had his Bible in Italian.
And it was an object lesson right before my eyes. I saw the old local farmers come in and smoking their old clay pipe, it may be, or someone else doing their knitting. There wasn't all that reverence, but they were just sitting around and gossiping.
And as the lighthouse keeper read from the Bible, every now and again they would look up and say, I didn't know that was in the Bible. And there I was, sort of looking and looking and listening and seeing.
And night after night when I went there, it got more and more obvious to me what God was saying. Did you see what's happening? You see these people here? These are people that can be spoken to. They are people that I love.
They have a need. They haven't anyone who can teach them. And it got more and more obvious. However, we try to act like Jonah sometimes. And I fained to not understand. I pretended not to understand what God was saying to me.
However, in my correspondence back home, I wrote to my father and said what had been happening. And lo and behold, a letter came, which was a confirmation and an unsought for and undesired confirmation.
My father said, very thrilled to hear about what is happening out there in Italy. Who knows that God is not calling you to serve him in Italy? And that word just seemed to hit home. And I thought, Well, I don't know how, it's all right to be here in the army with armoured cars about, with soldiers, with troops and I felt secure. And Satan sometimes pictures terrible things before us. Talk about fear. He said, no, you're here surrounded by your your friends. If you come back here, you'll be all alone, have to walk along these streets alone.
There'll be no one with you. How will you manage? You don't know the language, you don't know this and that. But when God speaks, he speaks. And I shall remember one day I spoke to the lighthouse keeper and I told him, you know, I said, I believe that God is calling me back to Italy.
And I said, I have to go to Udini, this is a nearby town to a little group of Christians and I'm wondering whether I should try to speak in Italian. That man he just sort of gave me, in typical warmth of Italian, gave me his hand.
He said, if you come back to Italy, said, I'll be right by your side, I'll stand by you. He said, we could do with a hundred such missionaries he said. You must come. And he encouraged me. And I was quite surprised.
Praise God, that man's still living. He's not very far along with the Lord but he's still a friend of ours and we know him. So in the lighthouse a miracle happened. One day, coming back on the lorry, one of the workers, one of the seven workers there, he turned to me and he said, Always a question I want to ask you a question which, by the way, I don't get now any longer.
He said, what's the difference between your religion and ours? Now the Italian is not interested in religion, he's just interested in reality. If he's seeking anything at all, he's not interested in religion.
You can have any religion you like. But if there is reality and that reality is in a person, then he's interested. I don't get these questions any longer now, but then I did. And so I said to him, well, if you're interested, you come up to my room.
I had room to myself and I said, I'll be happy to speak to you. And he did. He came up every day and he got converted and we prayed together and we knelt together in that room. The lighthouse keeper too, had an experience and he did undoubtedly have an experience at that time with the Lord.
And we used to meet together for prayer and for praise and singing some of the hymns. And that is where I heard the call of God, in the lighthouse. We've been back to the lighthouse, of course. My wife has, my sister Molly, she's been back and every visitor that comes to that part of Italy goes down to the lighthouse. We don't go down to the lighthouse for a pilgrimage. We go down for a very mundane thing. It's a beautiful beach there and there's no tourism and no one knows about the place, so we go for swimming and we go to just enjoy it on a private beach.
But going there, we've met the lighthouse keeper who has still been there. And every time I see that lighthouse, I feel, Lord, that's symbolic. That lighthouse to me speaks of what you have been doing in these 23 years in Italy.
Then the time came to keep our promises. After I've been back in England four years and had a time of preparation in Bible school training and also in mission work, the time came when the Lord renewed his vision, as he did with Sarah.
He visited Sarah as he promised. And when God visits a person, you can't just sit still. The Lord says, now, what about Italy? And I thought, well, I'm talking about Italy here in England. I'm going round to churches and I'm telling about the need.
And the Lord says, no, you you've got to go back. And we made the decision. It wasn't an easy decision because I was in a mission and I had a salary and we were quite comfortable, and we lived here in Richmond, so this is my hometown.
And then we had to face the question and the council of the mission, a very nice mission, a very good mission, a mission that we've never lost fellowship with in that sense. But they came to me and they said, well, now, what is your decision?
If you're going to stay with us, we want to know because we've got our program and we got our itineraries to make out, if you're not going to stay with us, then let us know. That's that. And it came to a day, Friday of that particular week, I had to meet the mission council.
And all during that week, we had a special time of prayer and praying. And when it came to the actual day, there was just no doubt whatsoever. The word of God was so clear. It was all on trusting Him and going out in faith.
People warned us and said, you know, you've got a child. We had a son, 18 months old, just a baby, and said, well, you know, it's a big responsibility and you're going to go out and you won't have a salary and you won't have anyone to take care of you and all this.
And like Abraham going out, not knowing wither. And the Lord spoke to me, said, now, if you want to go to Italy and you want to be free to do my will, (I don't say this is for everyone, I'm not laying down a rule, I'm just talking my personal testimony) He said, You've got to pay the price. There's a price to pay. You just can't go out and expect men to back you in everything you do. You must be willing to follow me, cost what it may. And I thank God for the price because it keeps us back and back again.
And when we've got a way and there's things have gone wrong, automatically we've come back to the Lord and we've had to examine our lives. And so 23 years ago, we started out that way. 23 years and God has been faithful.
First years were very adventurous experiences. We went to the north of Italy, to the Trieste area, and started out in a little house, just a very small place, very unknown. The local priests then were very contrary, hostile.
They said, Luther has come and he's living under the shadow of the church steeple and all this sort of thing. And we were ostracised and looked suspiciously at. The first years were very, very different to what they are now.
I used to go everywhere on my bicycle, which I suppose ought to be in the museum by now, in all sorts of weather. I can say that, it's right to say that, sometimes 20 degrees below freezing, it's very cold in that part of Italy at times.
Paper around my legs, paper inside here to keep warm. And this was part of our life. Once a week, I always used to cycle out to a town about seven or eight miles out, once or twice, till further, and cycling was part of my life.
I used to stop people along the road with an excuse for this or that and start up a conversation and got into any number of homes. I had a lot to learn. We got into a number of homes and I used to go to these homes and take the knowledge of the Bible every week.
But I got nowhere. I got nowhere. Didn't see conversions, really good conversions. One or two people came round and professed interest and never seemed to get anywhere. And this went on for some time until eventually we moved house and we did start one or two meetings in our homes, a very motley crowd.
People that came and afterwards found that they were not loyal, not true. Saying one thing to us and saying another thing behind my back. I was a bit comforted recently thinking about C.T Studd, some of his conversions, his conversions, the conversions that he had in Africa in the last 17 years of his life.
The early conversions were far from satisfactory and they had to reorganise their whole activity in order that God might bless. Carey's first conversions were far from good conversions. They were utter disappointments.
And knowing these facts, it's a little bit comforting. However, the real thing began to move about 13 or more years ago when we were due to have a campaign. A very good man of God from Switzerland, Italian speaking, over the Easter period.
And I felt before the Lord that it wasn't right to invite this man to come and speak without at least preparing myself in prayer. So I decided to go down to the little church that we had organised and we had a church building because the group that met in our home couldn't be contained and neighbours were beginning to complain and we felt we had to move out and have this church building.
And as I prayed week by week, the Lord spoke very sweetly but very really. He said, Pray for yourself. If this campaign is going to be a blessing, you are the one. You pray for yourself. And as I began to pray for myself it was really a terribly humiliating experience.
I think I can say this, the experience I've had in missionary work has been an undoing experience until the present day. It's by no means been glamorous. Don't know how to say these things. There have been times when I've been in the 7th Heaven.
There have been times when people have been so grateful for the ministry. There have been times when they put me on a pedestal, they've come and run after me and they've come and sought counsel. And the more they've done this, the more wretched I felt.
I thought, Lord, but how can they be blessed if I'm like this? How is it? And I've asked the Lord, don't bless people if I'm going to be a failure. And this is all the battle of a missionary. Missionary, shall we say anyone who's serving the Lord.
The loneliness, the isolation, the somewhat position of Christ, except he was without sin, where the disciples themselves didn't understand. They were walking with him. And Jesus was in the little company of disciples and he wasn't known.
And I've spoken to other people like this and they've been comforted, other servants of God, and they've corroborated, they've confirmed it. They said, yes, I didn't think anyone else knew these experiences, the awful isolation.
You see, you preach, you stand before people and the people only see you on the platform and they see you under the anointing of God and they see you blessed of God and they hear the word go forth and that's their ideal of the person.
But they don't realise that for every hour here, there's 23 hours in the rest of the day. And there's times when we're alone, and there's times when Satan attacks us. There's time when demon forces and the powers of darkness and black magic are practiced against us.
Should never forget a time, I just say this in parentheses, when we had almost a fatal accident coming back one day from a happy visit. And the car went against the trees and Niddy went over into the ditch as I tried to avoid, right in the middle of the road, a calf.
Excuse me, I was thinking in Italian. A calf. "Vitello" that's what you say in Italian. I was going to say "vitello", but you wouldn't have appreciated that. And this was on the road and I thought it was a bag of paper of sort of one of the containers of, say, potatoes or something like that.
And I saw this thing on the road and it was going quite fast and the man was flashing his lights, trying to warn me, but he blinded me and I went against it. It went against the trees and we had a lot of damage to the car.
Had three children, small children, not my own, that I was taking with me, and the husband and wife. And the witness said it was only a miracle. I thought, this man is going to kill himself and me and everyone else here.
And he sort of shut his eyes and he was amazed to see us on the road. Afterwards, we had, I'm not a visionary, but I do believe in visions. We had someone visiting us who had a vision and she saw clearly two people practicing black magic against us in that area.
Strange to say, this might be a scandal to some people, they were two nuns. And she said, Now I know why certain things are happening and I believe it. I believe it. But the Lord kept us on the road, literally on the road.
That's a physical thing. But he's kept us on the road spiritually. So I was praying for this campaign and the undoing began. And then after weeks of humiliating experiences, the same voice of the spirit said, now it's not all up.
Don't despair. There's an answer. The Spirit of God. Now, no one had sort of pumped me or forced me or told me what to do along these things. I knew there were such people as Pentecostal, people I had preached to down in the church about ten years previously in Rome in the Pentecostal church. And I felt extremely uncomfortable. I didn't understand their way. I didn't understand their ejaculations. Of course, the Italian Pentecostal people are noisy people.
They're noisy, in any case. And I tried to put a few sparks and fire into the preaching. I thought, well, that would that would convince them. And the pastor there, he invited me to preach, but I just felt uncomfortable, to be perfectly honest, and never thought any more about it.
But during the years, we used to have quite a number of soldiers staying with us in northern Italy, just very humble boys doing a military service, and they would come into the home, and many of these were Pentecostal boys.
I should never forget how their presence, just sitting at the table, having a meal or just being in the home was a challenge every time I saw them, to such an extent that one of them, very lovingly, but he said to me after a Sunday morning service, he said, Brother, you know, if you were baptised in the Spirit, you would have so much more power in preaching.
I could have been very offended because people came to listen to the preaching, and I could have felt, well, who are you to tell me that? And he had only done the second class, elementary class, as we say in Italy, second or third.
But I knew that he had said something. I thought I would be foolish to reject the testimony of just a humble person. He spoke to me, and all this was going on in that period. And the Lord said, Seek the Spirit.
He didn't say seek tongues. He didn't say this. He said, Seek the Spirit, the quickener, the reviver, the one who can do all God's work. The Holy Ghost must do God's work. We can't. And I began to seek the Holy Spirit of God.
Now, this may be a very terrible and solemn warning, and the Lord answered, or was going to answer, but I wasn't ready. I was in my home there in Udoni at that time. And one day this same Pentecostal boy came and visited us.
It was Easter Monday, I can still remember it. And we sat at the table, he one end and I the other. And we started to speak and I felt he was just fixed on me. He looked at me and I was afraid. I was afraid. And as he looked at me and he was praying, obviously in his spirit for me, some thing happened.
Now, I'm not sensational in that sense but I felt a warmth coming over my whole body. Something strange, a warmth. And I felt, Lord, who knows, what's happening to me? Are you going to fill me with your Spirit or is it something of the devil?
And all this sort of reaction. And I put my fist on that table just like that. And I held tight for about two or three minutes. And as it came, it just went. The moment had gone, the moment it had gone, I knew that I grieved the Spirit.
I knew that it was of the Lord the moment it finished. My wife, now, of course, she is here. She was in the kitchen and my other sister. And I thought, what will they think? Supposing something happens to me?
Supposing I begin to speak in tongues? Oh this fear. And I thought, Lord, no, no, no, not here. And I said to this boy afterwards, I said, I feel I grieved the Spirit. And I told him the reason. So we decided to go down to the church.
If you miss God's time, you can stay for 10 hours or ten years and nothing will happen. We went down to the church and we prayed and we prayed for hours, not minutes this time. Nothing happened. The campaign came.
It was a total failure. This visit of this boy was just before the campaign and it was the answer to my prayers. The preacher came. He was a good preacher. We had a good choir. We had everything. We had just no results at all, as far as I know.
No doubt God's word will not return void. But he didn't give us anything in that church. Rather, it was a withdrawing. For two months afterwards, I preached until I just dried up. Literally dried up. And I'm not exaggerating.
I had nothing to say. I didn't know what to preach. I was dried up. I used to stay up to 03:00, 04:00 on a Sunday morning preparing in agony, because I always tried to have a conscience, not to preach for preaching sake, to stand before people and not have a message is a terrible experience.
And it was an agony until I just had nothing to give. And then the fatal thing came. I didn't intend to give this testimony, but I will do for the word of God, the Lord is speaking to me and saying I must do it.
I was sick and I had TB, and that was the last limit. Never would I have thought that I should have had such an awful, horrible disease, such a loathsome thing. It seemed to be like a curse upon my life.
And for eight months I was in this state of up and down, and I nearly lost my life over that business. Until the Lord healed me miraculously and wonderfully. And when the Lord heals, he heals. And sometimes I have to remember that I have had certain things for the life that I'm living and the hours that I'm keeping and all that the Lord is enabling me to do.
Now I'm going to remember what I preach tonight. The glory is his. It's not my energy. It's not my strength. It's the Lord's doings. And if anyone is discouraged tonight, he can do it for you what he's done for me.
This happened all those years ago. And praise the Lord for this miracle. But then, you know, the Lord is good and he doesn't keep his anger forever. And within the year, the miracle came. I was invited to a convention.
And the dear brother, the Lord bless him, it was an American servicemen's convention with their wives and families. He very lovingly said, now, you know, you may not be used to this, you don't know, but if you should hear someone say hallelujah or praise the Lord, he said, don't be worried.
He said, it may be just a little bit different. He needn't have said any of it. When I got into that place, do you know what hit me? It was just the warmth of the love of God. Perhaps we are getting used to this wonderful blessing.
But, you know, coming from an avid, dry sort of church, where the hymns more or less are put up on the board and the verses you're going to sing and the person that's going to pray, and everything's just detailed, and we are afraid to go out of that order.
Coming from that rather rigid atmosphere where the word of God was preached, I am not discussing that. It was preached faithfully. It seemed all new. And I found myself saying, but, Lord, then such people do exist.
You still have this sort of warmth that I've always believed should exist, always believed it. And it was there that God began to work, and he finished the work after. Never shall I forget that night when the Spirit of God came upon me.
And if Moody said, Take your hand off my life, Lord, because he was almost dying for the joy of the presence of the Lord, I felt I had to say the same thing. And I thought, Lord, if this is heaven, what will it be to be with you?
If this is any foretaste of heaven? I felt I could love everyone and everything. You know, the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. If you feel cold, if you feel cold, it's because there isn't a love of God shed abroad by the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost gives us the love of God. And going back from that convention, I came back with the presence of the Lord in my heart. Now things began to move. The church got split up and people went away because they didn't want to stay any longer in such an atmosphere.
Some disagreed and some were offended, but some remained. And out of that little nucleus, the work's gone on. Then my wife was blessed and others were blessed and the family and it spread and it spread and it spread.
From that time, without any seeking on my part, I got a visitor from a brother down in Rome from the Assemblies of God. I am not denomination. I refuse to become denominational, even if I'm working with the Assemblies of God in Italy.
I'm always thankful to be able to say that I had my good upbringing and my background in the evangelical churches in England. And I visit all the churches. I believe we must maintain this, cost what it must, we must.
It's a scandal. It's offensive to the Lord, the idea that God is the God of a denomination. He is the God of his church, and it's wonderful to move about freely. And I believe that's beginning to make its way into God's people.
However, this brother came and he said, brother, we've heard of what's happened here in Udoni, so we can't offer you very much. We can't offer you great intellectuals, we can't offer you this or that, but we can offer you a family of Christian people if you are happy to collaborate with us.
And I said, Amen. I believe this is of the Lord. And for 13 years, or 12 years, we have been working together with the assemblies all over Italy. And we have about 650 or more churches, and we have a very large membership and a great youth camp, a great youth work in our assemblies.
And I do believe that God has willed this up until now. In fact, we can say that during this time, I can say of my own personal experience, where there was the undoing, there's been the building up. And though I haven't been conscious of it myself, others have been conscious.
People might say, well, now, what difference has all this made? Some of you may be even dubious about the wisdom of this so called baptism in the Spirit. You may say, Well, I don't know what it means.
I've heard people testify. Has there been any difference? Have you felt any advantage from this? And I can say that when I was seeking this experience, which really has divided my missionary life, I wasn't seeking it for something personal to be caught up in into some sort of rapture state.
I was seeking it exclusively for the Church of God. I was exceeding, I can remember the prayers that I prayed. Lord, Italy needs something more than just words. Youth needs more than words. This country, this nation, at this critical hour must have more than preaching.
And I knew that I hadn't got what was in the word of God. And the Lord has done it, is doing it, shall we say, he's doing it. Many years have gone by and some of the things now that I look back on, I can say I would never have had faith before the baptism of the Spirit.
I would never have had faith to pray for a person for their healing. Just one trivial example. It almost makes me ashamed. Now, this same Pentecostal boy that was so zealous I've since visited him and stayed in his home.
And now we can rejoice together because he knew, he knew what I went through. One day he came and Sylvia, I think it was, she was only a baby then. She, one of the children had toothache. And he said, Brother, shall we pray for her?
And I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed. I just didn't know. Pray for the child that has toothache. I said, no. I said, we'll give her an aspirin or something. That's the truth. That's the truth. You see, it seems ridiculous.
Don't bring God into a thing like that. And of course, you cannot. My wife is here, one example. We can say we can say this safely now because it's a period concluded. It's always best to talk about a thing when it can't be spoiled.
This cannot be spoiled because it's finished, this period. I don't know. I can't remember the last time we ever called a doctor into our home. We've had some fatal things happen in our home. One day Peter came running into the kitchen and my wife had some boiling water in a saucepan and he went against her and it went over his face.
And you can imagine the shrieks and the weeping. And in that moment, Satan said, now, you see, you won't be able to give your testimony any longer in the church. Now you've had it. Well, we put him on the bed and first instinct was perhaps to who knows, call a doctor, do something now.
And I thought, Well, I'll get out the first aid book, find out. One needs wisdom. And we saw whether we should cover or not cover his face and so on. And then we went, knelt down, husband and wife. We just prayed.
Child went to sleep. Went to sleep. After half an hour he woke up, he said oh Mummy, can I go and see the television? It was in our neighbour's house then the children's program. Oh, if you feel you want to, you go.
And he had a tiny little sign, just almost invisible. Next day he was perfectly normal. Another time the same boy and I think that Satan really persecutes people at times. And he fell off a concrete wall in the courtyard downstairs and we heard a sort of a dead thud and then he was brought up and sort of vomiting and who knows?
I thought, a terrible thought came, I thought perhaps something's happened inside. We laid him on the bed and we prayed for him and the Lord completely healed him, as in his case, so we could say in my case.
And on one occasion my wife prayed for me when I had a slip disc and people said you've got to be operated, there's no other way. And I thought well Lord, you are either a healer always or never, all the time or nothing.
I couldn't be one thing or another. And she prayed for me one Sunday morning. She didn't want to pray for me. She said I know you'll walk again. It was a half an hour it took me just to fall out of bed.
And the only position I could get in, strange to say, was on my knees. Anyway I was there and I was kneeling and it was a Sunday morning. And Satan said now where's your healing message going to go? You won't be able to talk about me healing, God healing.
You won't be able to say anything. And she prayed for me and then my wife, it's not always easy to obey wives, it says wives obey your husband. But she said well now do something that you couldn't do before, she said raise your hand, raise your knee, and I was doing gymnastics before my wife. And the Lord healed me, healed me. And I never had, never had any care or medical care at all. He's healed me. So you see that's just one aspect. The healing aspect isn't the greatest by any means but it is a very precious aspect.
And as missionaries that means also that we didn't have to spend any money. Italy is the country that spends more money on chemists and medical care than any other nation so I understand. It's a country of chemists and it's a country of pharmacy and it's a country of all this expenditure and it's a testimony in a country like that to be able to say, well, the Lord's our healing.
Thank God that in the church we've also had experiences where we've been able to pray for young people and encourage them to go out and pray for people to receive the baptism of the Spirit and many hundreds have, and this is no exaggeration.
One occasion we went down to the south of Italy. I was alone and I went to the church in Calabria where there's a very fine pastor. You know, when God moves, he does move. After two days in that church, I felt rather down and I thought, well, I haven't come 1000 km just to preach.
I said to the pastor, I don't want to come all this way at your expense and sacrifice to others just simply to preach. I said, You've got preachers here. We must see God move. You know, we must see God move, brethren. You've got to see Him move here continually, always. If God doesn't move, don't let us get used to preaching without seeing God move. That's terrible. And God moves in answer to prayer. So the pastor and myself, we prayed. From that day something happened.
We went up into the mountains to a little hamlet almost. And there was a very humble country woman there that she did, and this might be a good testimony, perhaps as to what people are willing to do in Italy, she emptied one room, put all the furniture for the meeting into another room and we met in the in the front room. She only had two rooms. The Spirit of God began to move at the end of about an hour's meeting.
One young man had a vision. Now, the program was detailed for the next hour in another church about a few kilometers away. And my friend who was conducting me on this sort of mission, he said, you know, brother, we ought to be going now.
And I thought, Now, Lord, we prayed and we've longed to see you move and you're beginning to move. Can I honestly go when you're moving? And I said to him, you know, brother, the Lord is moving here.
And fortunately, he was taught of the Lord. He said, that's okay with me. He said, it doesn't matter. I said, even if we get late, the Lord will take care of it. We got an hour late to the next church.
And they were all sitting there just reverently waiting. In the next church, the fire fell. Brethren, it was without any laying of on of hands as far as I know, I may have done. But it was the fire that fell.
And God moved one after another in one young person who is now our son-in-law, never would I have thought it then and one or two others. It was a move of the Spirit of God. The Lord is good unto those that wait for him.
We are too clock conscious. We are too time conscious. And if you're going to see God move, I remember a sister said, you cannot pray and keep your eye on the clock at the same time. No, you've got to pray and you've got to let God move as he wants.
And you know, that is one thing in Italy that we are not bound in very many cases by the clock. People are hungry for God. I've seen them stay until midnight. I've seen them stay until late hours.
Let me just give you one example. In a mission that I had recently in Catani in Sicily, every night at 11:30 or 11:00, the young people would come up from the church for a time of prayer beginning at 11:30.
And we prayed through to midnight to 01:00 in the morning, sometimes to 02:00, not for a day, but for nearly a month consecutively. And God is moving amongst those young people. They are hungry for him.
Cost what it may, we say these words, but we must be willing to pay the price. And he's visiting them and they're moving out and things are happening. Well, this happened on that occasion in that village.
And then from there, just going back to that mission in Calabria, the Lord swept through with the Spirit over 150 people, and I'm not exaggerating, about 150 people. One man closed down his shop. Never would he do that because money is short.
But he closed down his shop. He heard what has happened and he said, I must seek the blessing of the Spirit. I can't just be here and working, knowing what's going on. And he shut down his shop and the Lord baptised him and his wife.
One day someone came in to me and said, you know, the latest news, the Holy Spirit has fallen on the Sunday school. All the children are there with their hands up and they're praising God with tears streaming down their cheeks.
You know, I've never seen a thing like that. Little children praying and weeping. This has only happened, oh, it may be just about two weeks ago. We were in a church and it was in a country area, very isolated, just a church with barely any buildings around.
People came up with lamps and torches and it was quite a romantic sort of setting. They just came and I didn't know where they came from, but they filled that little building and it was the last night of a mission.
And I said, now, Lord, what am I going to preach? And I really didn't know what I was going to preach until the last moment. And then I preached and I said, Tonight, brethren, something unusual is going to happen.
I'm going to preach two messages. Man proposes and God disposes. And I said, I'm going to preach one. Then we'll sing something, and then we'll have the second message. So I preached the first message and then I said, we'll sing a chorus that you know, Yesterday, Today, Forever, Jesus is the same. We sang it once and we sang it again. From that point onwards, I can't tell you what happened. All I know is that the Spirit of God swept over that little country church. I couldn't get a word in edgewise.
The Spirit of God was moving. I saw people with their hands up to heaven, saw young children for an hour, for a whole hour they stood in that position. And the pastor said, you know, if this was not of God, where could you see said young people, teenagers, stand there under the power of God and just pray and weep and open their hearts.
And when God moves, you're scared. There's a sense in which we must have a holy fear of God, fear without slavery, a reverence. And when God moves, you sort of feel, Lord, I must stand back. I think we want to see more of this.
It's a holy work, God's work, brethren. But before he can do that, I know it's been very disjointed what I said, but I haven't intended to preach in a sense, but it's got to be breaking up here within us. You know before I was baptised in the Spirit, I was afraid to to go out of my program. I thought, I must keep to a sort of homolateral type of approach to preaching and everything, first, second and third point, and I don't want to decry that, I think order is of God.
Jesus was orderly and God is a God of order. And sometimes I might keep to that order, but more than once, God had just cut right across it. On that particular evening, the second message was never preached.
No one ever asked anything more about it. All I can tell you who cared less, with all respect, I say about a second message when God moves? You see, we have to step down. Another occasion, I was preaching down in the church where we had all that move of the Spirit and I should never forget that at one point I was going to quote the scripture and I seemed to read the verse backwards.
I couldn't understand it. I couldn't get the words out. I seemed to be sort of tied, tongue tied. And, you know, that it was a rather fearful moment. I thought, Lord, is something happening? Perhaps I'm on the verge of a breakdown, perhaps.
And I really didn't know for a moment. My mind wasn't functioning. And as if the Lord was saying, Stop, stop. And I could only do the logical thing. I could have forced it, possibly. But I said, Brethren, shall we just pray?
And we prayed. Thank God. I stepped down from the pulpit and went and sat by the pastor for a whole hour. The church was just swept with a spirit of weeping and prayer and confession and the Lord moved in our midst.
One man said, I saw that you were embarrassed. I realised that something was happening. Thank God. He gives us the wisdom to get out of the scene and let him come forward. The Holy Spirit is God's order.
The Spirit of God won't do anything foolish. Don't be afraid. Don't repeat the experience that I repeated, holding your fist and saying no, no, no, or I would never let God do that. I could never allow myself.
Don't be afraid of the gracious Holy Spirit. He only wants to set us free, bless. The Spirit of God is in the body of Christ and he must have free liberty, complete liberty. That's my experience in Italy, a breaking up of me personally, and perhaps the Lord's got still much more to do.
I don't know. One thing I would like to say in order to be more coherent. We are not talking only of the past. Now, I must be very guarded what I say now. I would just simply, in a general sense, say we are on the verge, a threshold of a completely new experience in Italy, a new work that has been entrusted to us. A work that could indeed make us tremble because it's too momentous and it's far bigger than any human possibility.
I cannot say what it is, as time goes by and I can correspond and send you news, then you'll understand. But it's wise not to speak more. But just remember that it's not a static experience nor a past experience that I'm presenting. When we go back in January beginning and at the end of January there's this new phase and it's something that is tremendously exacting.
I need all your prayers because I believe that God can move in a very wonderful way. And if I cannot say more, just be patient, in the spirit say Lord, perhaps you can reveal to me what it is. But it's a ministry work, of course it's all in the work of the Lord and it has to do with souls and I don't feel I should say anything more, but it's a new phase and something that I would never have foreseen or expected.
But I've had to say Lord, from the time that I said I would serve you, I cannot tell you where to send me or what to do. I must simply say here am I and that's all. And thank God that there's still adventure and there's still blessing and there's still new experiences even to the very end. We don't want to get static. Amy Carmichael said, let me not sink to be a clod; make me thy fuel, Flame of God. Wonderful words. Wonderful words, those and many times I've quoted it.
And I pray that someone tonight may take courage. I feel that what the Lord has put on my heart primarily is this: he must break us up before he can bless. He must break us up, all the hard ground, all our resistance, all our traditions, all our desires.
Don't be afraid of his breaking. He breaks the bread, but then he multiplies it and people get a blessing. They don't want you. They want Jesus. They don't want me. What can I give to people? They want Jesus.
But Jesus will never be seen in a rigid, hard vessel. He wants to break the vessels, as Gideon's vessels were broken and the light shone out. So that's only my testimony. A broken person speaking to you and someone that God has got to still break possibly. But the great thing is that at the end we should say, like Wesley, a sinner saved by grace. Not a great preacher, just a sinner saved by grace, but through the grace of God, others have seen Jesus.
Amen. I hope I haven't taken too long. I haven't looked at the watch because that's the way we do things in Italy.
