The following is a pre-recorded program. Your heart will be set ablaze today as we talk about the prayer that ignites revival. It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown.
Your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on The Line of Fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Hey friends, welcome to The Line of Fire. Michael Brown, delighted to be with you today, joined by a special guest whom I'll introduce in a moment. I wrote the foreword to the book that we'll be talking about.
I read the book carefully. My own life was stirred by it and I can't wait to share the contents with you. If you are not getting our monthly equipping, edifying, informative, inspirational, frontline newsletter, right now go to TheLineOfFire.org. TheLineOfFire.org and just click subscribe.
It will take you a few seconds to fill out the form and we will get that right out to you. Alright, many of you know I served as a leader in the Brownsville Revival from 1996 to 2000, raised up the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry, which then became Fire School of Ministry. And we had the privilege of training equipping a generation of students over about 25 years.
They've gone around the world. One of the young men, now a dad, actually earned his Doctor of Ministry and is the Director of Prayer and Evangelism at the Assemblies of God. One of the men that God sent through our school, Joe Oden, actually came to faith during that time, came to the school.
So we've watched him grow. We've watched him be raised up by God as he's become a colleague and co-worker. And he wrote a book that'll stir your heart, friends. If you read it, it'll light a fire in you. It'll light a fire in you to pray. It'll light a fire in you in terms of faith for revival. If we'll act on this, if we could see sparks fly around the nation, it is called Prayer That Ignites Revival by Joe Oden, O-D-E-N.
So wherever you get your books, wherever you order them online, wherever you get them from, Joe Oden, O-D-E-N, Prayer That Ignites Revival. Hey, Joe, thanks for joining us on the broadcast today. Dr. Brown, it's an honor to be with you today. Always, always great to have you. So before we get into the contents of the book, we always have to start with your testimony. It's too good to pass up. So go ahead and tell your story, Joe.
Yeah. Well, I was a drug addict, drug dealer, addicted to everything that goes along with that lifestyle. And one night I was doing a drug called LSD.
How many of you know that's not approved by the FDA? And had taken a bit too much of it this particular night and was experiencing an overdose. My back was wrenched. I was curling up in a fetal position. I was frightened. I was contemplating calling the emergency room. And I came home early and I sat down and I began to channel surf in a just frantic kind of a manner. And I stopped on TBN. That is a wild combination, LSD and TBN at the same time. I think so.
I think so. And I wouldn't have stayed long. And it's not an exaggeration to say within the first second, a man that was preaching, his name was Jeff Finholt, the former singer for the group that Ozzy Osbourne had started. And the first thing that he said when he points in the camera, he said, there's some young people that are watching this program and you're hooked on drugs. Not only are you hooked on drugs, but you are in a deep, dark cave of drug addiction. But I have good news for you. Jesus Christ is in the cave with you. He's going to bring you out, set you free, and you're going to preach the gospel around the United States of America. When he said that, the power of God hit me in that La-Z-Boy chair and I was instantaneously sobered off the drug. I'd love to say that I got saved right then.
I didn't. My life continued to spiral downward faster than it ever had before. I'd gone from marijuana to crack, from drinking to just becoming a full-blown alcoholic.
I was high or drunk every single day of my life. And I got arrested. I had an altercation with what appeared to be an undercover police officer. I went to jail. I was in and out of jail.
I'm from Southern Alabama. And the judge that I had, the last time he put me in jail, he put me in for a year. He let me out much earlier.
And he starts to go over my probation. Now, in this process, after the TBN encounter, I had a real encounter with the Holy Spirit and where I was instantly sobered off of the LSD. Now, that doesn't happen. Any of our audience has ever done LSD. You know that you don't instantaneously sober off the drug.
It's a miracle. And after that took place, I knew that God had called me and I'd had an authentic encounter. And so I began to do two things. One, every night before I'd go to bed, I'd pray that God would get me in church. The second thing I began to do, for all the listeners, just give me a moment as I share this. Don't just say, oh, this is heresy. I began to prophesy. I never read the verse in Ezekiel to call things as though they are, even though they're not.
I never read the power of life and death is in the tongue. But I would be at a party strung out on drugs. I'd get everybody's attention.
And I'd say, one day real soon, I'm going to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ around the United States of America. Now, two years into this, arrested, in and out of jail, I'm standing before the judge. He's being merciful. He's saying, look, I'm letting you out early, but if you mess this up one more time, you're in jail and you're not getting out. And he says, here's what I'm demanding of you.
You have to go to AA every day, NA. And then he said this, and you've got to go to church on Sunday and get the bulletin signed by a pastor, or I'm going to put you in jail for a year. So before I was even saved, God was answering my prayer. And I picked a little assembly of God church in Southern Alabama. And about six months into my church sentence, a gentleman from the Brownsville revival came to my church, actually from the Brownsville revival school of ministry. It was the first semester of the school.
His name was Bob Gladstone. And I heard people that were humorous. I'd heard people give intellectual sermons.
I'd heard people break the Greek down, but I needed someone with a baptism of fire on their life. I didn't need good charisma. I didn't need a cappuccino to get me to come the next week.
I didn't need a nice parking spot. I needed someone with an anointing to break addiction off of my life. And when Bob preached, I was captivated. I wasn't spooked.
I would be the individual that people would say, you need to tone the service down. You need to be more palatable for someone that doesn't know about God. But I was actually attracted to it. He gave a call to receive Christ. I jumped up, ran to the front. I got on my knees. I'd been to three rehabs. I went bound. I left bound. But this moment of bowing my knee to Christ, I stood up, washed in the blood, transformed, saved.
He lays hands on me. I was the first person that he prayed for. I didn't have a frame for this. This had never happened to me. It didn't happen in my church. When he touched me, I got hit by the power of God. I fell to the ground. I got up. I never did drugs again. I never drank again. I broke up with the girl that I was living a moral with and immediately began to share the gospel. I remember sitting in the service that night after that happened. I said, God, if my friends that are hooked on drugs could feel this power that's going through my body right now, they'd get born again. So it was a moment, the twinkling of an eye, I was totally set free and just set out and began to share the gospel, share my faith, and I haven't looked back since. And that's 27 years ago now, correct?
Yes, sir. Praise God. That is the power of the gospel to transform lives.
The thing that's interesting is Bob Gladstone can open up the Greek and teach on an intellectual level and has an earned doctorate as well. But in fact, what drew Joe in was the power of the gospel, the encounter with the living Jesus. He knew he was a sinner.
He knew he was guilty. He needed to encounter God who could set him free. So Joe, you came to our ministry school. Then you went as a missionary to Thailand and then realized your real calling was here primarily in the States. So you've preached all over America and other nations as well, bringing a strong message of repentance and now a leader of the assemblies of God of prayer and evangelism. How did you get to writing this book?
So from this guy, radically saved from drugs and dealing drugs. How did you get from there to writing a book which served as the culmination of your doctorate of ministry degree? Were you like always a really good student, Joe?
No, Dr. Brown, I wasn't. When I came to Brownsville, I was scared to death to come to school because I'd never read a book in my life. I'd never read more than a chapter of a book in my life.
I think the most I'd ever read was two or three pages in a row, and I'm not exaggerating. I cheated throughout high school. And the first test I ever took, my first semester of Brownsville, I studied. I applied myself.
I would study till the late hours of the night. And when I say it was my best, I could not have tried harder. And I got a 67 on the exam, and that was the best that I could do. And so I really, during my time at school, one of the miracles is I remember where I was. I was in my bed. I was praying. And I felt the renewal of the mind.
I can't explain it, but I felt something wash over my mind that was really a miracle, just like getting set free from drugs. So what happened since? Have you done a little better in your studies? Yeah, I've done better.
Yeah. With this degree, I mean, by the grace of God, I got a 4.0. And for all the listeners out there, hard work, applying yourself, and you can do anything.
Yeah, if God calls you to do it, and you give yourself to it. And of course, what matters to me, Joe, as you know, is not just that you got good, solid academics and theology, but that the fire continues to burn in you. So this book is not a theological academic treatise. It is a book on fire. It is a book about prayer that ignites revival.
So it's well-researched. But reading it, even some people I knew, friends like Steve Hill, I learned stuff. John Kilpatrick, men that served in the revival that God used in the Brownsville Revival that I served with day and night for years, I learned things about their own lives, about their own prayer, and what happened.
So we come back on the other side of the break. We're going to spend the rest of this broadcast talking about prayer that ignites revival. And you're going to hear about the prayer lives of some of those that God used. And it's not a matter of trying to pray as much as they prayed or be like that person, but to say, God responds to desperation. God responds to hunger.
God responds to thirst. And when we get to that place, as Leonard Ravenhill used to say, the reason we don't have revival is because we're willing to live without it. We get to that place where we can't live without it. That's when God comes.
That's when God answers the depth of the cry of our heart. We'll talk about what real revival is. Again, the book by Joe Oden, O-D-E-N, prayer that ignites revival. Get a copy for yourself.
Get a copy for your pastor, spiritual leaders as well, because it'll ignite something in their hearts too. It'll be right back. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.
Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back to a special edition of The Line of Fire where you get to tell me what you think I'm wrong. You can do that really any day that the phone lines are open. You can call in and differ with me. And I love that. I look for some that just say, Dr. Brown, I don't see it the way you do. And we have a friendly discussion. And I love it when people are going to call in and tell me I'm ignorant and biased and blind and all that and lay out their argument. And then I get to respond.
That's the joy of live talk radio. I've often said that when people are bold enough to invite me to come on a college campus, which is rare, sadly, but when they do invite me, when Christian groups do invite me, I normally say, can you find someone to do a debate with me? You want me to talk about a controversial issue about politics or culture or theology or something? Can you find someone to debate me, a professor, a qualified spokesperson from the other side, so that the students and the faculty that come can hear both sides?
I love that. And if they say we can't find anyone to do it, then I say, all right, can we make sure we have open mic Q&A at the end so people can challenge me? That is a major reason that we have live radio so you can call in with your differences. Now, if you're unable to call, right, you listen and it's like your work schedule or whatever, it does not permit you to listen live or to call during our live broadcast and you're really mad at me, well, you can just, we've got lots of pictures of me online. Just search for my name. You'll see pictures.
Just take one of those, print it up and put it on a wall, make it into a dartboard. And you can just get all your anger out there. And maybe once you get the anger out, you can just pray that God would bring all of us closer to his heart, to his mind.
All right. So following through with a tweet, interacting with a brother, pastor, honors me in the Lord and the same with him. I honor him in the Lord. Here's why I'm not a Calvinist. As much as I appreciate the Calvinistic emphasis on God being God and God carrying out his purposes on the earth, I see from Genesis to Revelation the emphasis, the call on us to choose, choose, choose, choose. And I see God's pleasure when we choose rightly by his grace. I see God's grief when we reject his free offer of grace. This to me does not speak of predestination, but of freedom within these parameters that God has given us. I also see clearly as I look at scripture that Jesus dies to make the salvation of the entire world possible. That he clearly sheds his blood for each and every human being on the planet. And to infallibly secure the salvation of those who believe. That is another reason that I cannot believe in Calvinism. It's clear he can grieve and quench the spirit who calls us to the Lord, who calls us to the cross. And of course Calvinists would agree with some of what I'm saying, but here's the other point that I want to make with all respect to my Calvinist friends. And Dr. White, if you're driving or rowing or just don't lose your focus, let the adrenaline go in here a little bit. But my dear Calvinist friend with whom I've had some wonderful debates.
And then our favorite is when we get to debate together against others, which we've only gotten to do a couple of times so far. But here's the other big issue I would have with Calvinism. The Calvinist gospel calls on people to do what they cannot do and that God will not empower them to do.
In other words, it calls on a cripple to walk without giving power to that cripple to walk. It calls on a non-believer to believe without giving that believer the power to believe. A Calvinist would say you must be born again before you can believe. So God is to give you a new birth before you can respond.
And if he chooses not to give you a new birth, you cannot respond. Therefore you're called to believe but you're unable to believe if you're not elect. And then even if you did believe, it wouldn't apply because Jesus didn't die for you if you're not elect, according to Calvinism.
These are just a few of the reasons, with all respect, I don't believe in Calvinism. The reason I don't believe in cessationism is because, again with no insult intended from my cessationist friends, the New Testament is explicit that the gifts will continue until Jesus returns. That the outpouring of the Spirit and prophecy and dreams and visions are for the last days. That it is not until we see the Lord face to face that these things will pass away. And on the flip side, we are exhorted, like 1 Corinthians 14 and 1, to earnestly desire the gifts especially that we can prophesy. So if we're not earnestly desiring them, then we're disobeying a divine mandate. I tried to become a Calvinist, late 70s, early 80s, I distanced myself, to become a cessationist, excuse me.
I tried to. I read books against gifts and power of the Spirit today. I question things. But the Testament of Scripture was too strong and then confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit in my own life. Just check out a book like Craig Keener's Miracles today. It's so overwhelming, the abundance of documented evidence of miraculous healings.
I mean, overwhelming that you can't deny God's supernatural healing on a regular basis around the world today. As for post-millennial, the reason I don't believe that the Gospel will triumph over the entire world, that the entire world will be, quote, Christianized in the best sense of the world before Jesus returns, is because there's so much in Scripture about the end of the age being a time of parallel extremes. That the wheat and the tares are there right to the end. That the harvest is the end of the age with both good and bad. That when Jesus returns, he's going to destroy an antichrist and destroy the wicked.
It's just overwhelming testimony of the presence of the wicked on the earth. 2 Thessalonians 1, Zechariah 12, Zechariah 14, many other passages. End time prophecies in the New Testament about deception. So, just as you have end time prophecies about outpouring, you have deception. As for covenant theology, if God's promises to Israel are not true, if they're not going to be literally fulfilled with a return to the land, and with a massive national turning in faith, then how can you trust any promises God's made? I mean, just Jeremiah 31, verse 31 to 37, the New Covenant's made, but look at what follows in verses 35 to 37. This is to me a matter of the integrity of God.
But thanks for posting that. Grace for the prize, you believe with the Reformers that true faith will always result in obedience, but the 600,000 men who crossed the Red Sea, Hebrews 11, 29, notes their faith, went on to be unfaithful in the desert. True faith is therefore a no true Scotsman fallacy. 1 John 2, 19, not withstanding it, namely those who went out from us, speaking about the antichrists among us. Those who went out from us were not really among us. If they really were, they would have believed. Well, of course, you do have to deal with 1 John 2, 19 with the no true Scotsman fallacy.
In other words, setting something up that can't exist. But let me just point out something to you in Hebrews, since Hebrews 11, 29 was quoted. Let's just take a look in, oh, let's see, Hebrews, let me get this up here, Hebrews, there we go. Let's go to Hebrews, the third chapter, all right, Hebrews chapter three.
And let's see what's written there. So, it's a call for us to follow Jesus, the apostle and the high priest of our confession. Today, if we hear his voice, we don't harden our hearts like the Israelites did when they tested God. See to it, my brothers, verse 12, that no evil, unbelieving heart is found in any of you, as shown by your turning away from the living God. And now it goes on, you know, why didn't those who came out of the wilderness receive rest?
And let's get to the next chapter. It says this, therefore, as long as the promise of entering as rest remains valid, let us be afraid, otherwise some of you will fail to reach it, because we have had the good news told to us, as well as to them, but the message they heard did not help them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened to it. Hebrews 4 is telling us, after warning us not to harden our hearts in the third chapter, and then repeating that warning from Psalm 95, it's telling us that many of the Israelites who came out of Egypt did not mix these words with faith.
And that's why they perished. If they had true faith, it would have been manifest in obedience. And Jacob, James chapter 2, is quite explicit on that. Show me your faith by your works, right? By faith they went through the Red Sea as if it were dry land. It doesn't say that they all had faith. They went through, listening to Moses, Moses had faith, right? So they trusted Moses, Moses had faith and obeyed God, so they stepped in by faith, but did they have saving faith? Did they have faith in God themselves?
No, Hebrews 4 tells us that they did not. So true faith will be accompanied by obedience. If it's not, it's not saving faith. It's not true faith. As James Edward Moore said, the only proof of the new birth is the new life.
Hebrews itself explicitly repeats this idea. So let's read the word in context, and let's not find an excuse for disobedience. This is how we rise up. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on The Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.
Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back, friends, to The Line of Fire. The subject we're talking about today, prayer. The night's revival with my guest, Joe Oden, author of the book. It's something that to this day remains a call, a cry in my own life, recognizing that there are things that God's promised me that I would see in my own life and ministry.
I've seen many of them already, but others, some of the biggest, I haven't yet. And I know they can only come out of prayer and seek in the face of God. In other words, I know no amount of my effort, and the efforts are there. I'm a hard worker, but no amount of my effort can produce what I long to see.
It's only God who can produce it, and that can only come out of his presence. Joe, in the book, you give lots of stirring examples. I find these very inspirational as I read them. Tell me some stories from the life of Charles Finney or some of the intercessions that God raised up for him, some of the stories that you have in your book, Prayer That Ignites Revival. Yeah, you know, one of the things that Finney said is that he didn't preach a message from an outline or a just pre-written message for the first ten years of his life. Now, you know, there's a lot of homiletics teachers that would make them throw their hands up, but he said he only preached out of divine unction, and there's something to be said for that.
I really believe it's a lost art, if I could use that language in America today. It's not that we don't have people that know how to preach and articulate and communicate, but there is something that the entire room feels when a man or woman of God stands up and begins to preach out of the unction of what the Holy Spirit is saying in that moment. A case in point, Finney, early in his ministry, he's invited to a particular city. It was either, if I can recall, it was either Nantwich or Antwerp, and he's invited by the only saved person in that city. He doesn't know it at this point. He just knows he's got an invitation from an old man or an older brother to come and preach, and he doesn't know what he's getting into on the way. Okay, go ahead.
Correct, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So he shows up, and he's in a schoolhouse where two to three hundred people are that don't know God, and the individual that invited him, history tells us, was the only one saved in that village, that city. And Finney gets there, and he doesn't have a word from God. You could say, well, how could you show up without a word from God?
He preached out of divine unction. So he gets there, and he gets on his knees, and there's three hundred people in the room, and he prays fifteen minutes. Nobody leaves, and Finney doesn't move.
He doesn't have a word from God. He stays on his knees thirty minutes. Nobody leaves, and Finney doesn't move.
Forty-five minutes go by. Finney's still on his knees, and nobody leaves. Now, I would beg to say, in the American church today, with a room full of people that are Christians, you would be hard-pressed for people not to begin to leave in ten or fifteen minutes if there's no music, if there's nobody talking, if there's not an announcement. People get very nervous. Energy begins to happen, and people just don't know what to do with themselves because, really, we haven't made the house of God, what Jesus called, a house of prayer. We've made it a house of preaching, a house of worship, a house of fellowship, but very little prayer. Finney, however, was a direct antithesis to that.
He totally went against that thought. Forty-five minutes he's on his knees. An hour he's praying, and no one leaves.
That's supernatural. That's the power of God. And an hour in, he gets a word up out of this place, for I shall destroy it. So he knew it was Genesis. He couldn't remember the chapter. He couldn't remember the verse.
He knew it was the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot. So he gets up, and he starts preaching on this. And about three minutes in, he notices the crowd is aggravated. They're agitated. They're angry. They're frustrated.
They're mad. He's looking in their eyes, and he's thinking they want to do violence. And he began to get afraid.
He preaches about ten minutes. This is building and building and building, and he stops for a moment. And when he's stopped, the power of God, a lady on the second or third row of chairs, gets hit by the power, and she begins to cry out at the top of her lungs.
She begins to shriek. Suddenly it hit the entire room. It wasn't just eight or ten or a couple of dozen. It was the entire – everyone in attendance was under the power of God. Some were on the floor shaking. They're all crying out. Finney tries to calm them down, and he can't.
And so he leads everyone to Christ. He goes to their ear and begins to shout at the top of his lungs because the cries were so deafening. He'd shout the gospel. They'd calm down. They'd begin to weep. And then he'd go to the next person.
About four hours into this, it was late at night. He had to leave. He had a meeting the next day. He turns the meeting over to the individual that invited him. He goes to fulfill his next assignment.
And he connects back with this individual a few days later, and they begin to talk about the meeting. And the individual says to Finney, did you notice these people were aggravated? They were angry. He said, I did.
I was going to bring that up to you. Why were they so aggravated? He said, because the nickname of this city is Sodom, and my nickname is Lot. And they thought we had talked, and I told you what to preach. And so Finney comes in, and he preaches a prophetic message without any prior knowledge that brought conviction to every heart in that building, and everyone got saved. One of the hallmarks of the Second Great Awakening, 15 years later, historians would go to cities just like this, and 90 to 95 percent of the people were still in church. They didn't get saved because of a good intellectual presentation, and they agreed with some fundamental beliefs.
They were transformed through prophetic preaching under the unction of the Holy Spirit, and that is greatly needed today. That story, I remember Finney's words. He said, if I had a sword in each hand, I could not have cut them down as fast as they were falling. And as they were wailing and screaming, undone by their guilt in the sight of God, he's shouting in the rear, you're not yet in hell.
You can pray. What a scene. And again, this is like, Joe, the leaves and the fruit coming out from the tree, whereas the trunk and then the roots down deep in the ground, that's the prayer that was behind us, and the depth of the work of the Spirit that was going on. What about Finney's coworker, Daniel Nash, one of the two prayer warriors, along with Abel Clary, that supported Finney in prayer.
What can you tell us about Daniel Nash? Yeah, Father Nash and Abel Clary were two individuals that worked with Finney for about ten years, and there was a ten-year span of Finney's ministry during the Second Great Awakening where 500,000 people came to Christ. This is before any modern technology in any shape, form, or fashion. And he would send in Nash and Clary into a city about 30 days before he would get there. And they didn't go and get all the pastors in the community to come together and share the vision. They didn't go and hand out flyers to every business and to every house.
It's fine to do all that. Nothing wrong with doing that, but that wasn't their method. Wasn't their method. They would rent an apartment and they would pray for 30 days in 12-hour shifts. They would fast. They would pray in 12-hour shifts for souls. For people to get saved. And when Finney would get there, entire cities, entire villages, entire regions would come to Christ.
I just want to tell our audience today, as you're listening to this story, this is something that God can do today. This was not in Alabama. This wasn't in Arkansas.
This was in New York. And God did it then. He can do it again today, and one of the cities that Finney went to, Finney gets there a few days early.
They've possibly been praying 27, 28 days by now. And when Finney would get there, he visited a factory one time, and I'm going to make a long story short. When Finney walked in, he didn't have his Bible. He wasn't going to give a sermon to the people in the factory. The factory owner was unsaved. The supervisor that was working that shift was unsaved. And Finney walked in, and when he did, the Holy Spirit walked in with him.
They had already won the victory in prayer. And when Finney walked in, he looks at a young lady, and he notices she begins to act peculiar. All of a sudden, she gets hit by the power of God.
She begins to weep profusely, crumbles to the ground. This didn't happen with a few. The entire factory came under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and within three days, it was around 95% of that factory completely gave their lives to Christ. And this was a hallmark of Finney's ministry through prayer, and it's something that I'm praying for today. And it was at Brownsville, and every revival that you study, we think, boy, it would be great if God would do more miracles, and I believe we need more miracles. It would be great if we saw more healings, and there was a greater manifestation of the word of knowledge and word of wisdom.
I think we need that. But in the second great awakening, the hallmark wasn't just people crying out and falling to the ground. It was the conviction of God over the sin that they were committing.
There was a fresh baptism of the fear of the Lord that didn't just fall on church people. It fell on alcoholics. It fell on prostitutes. It fell on pimps. It fell on bar owners. It fell on gamblers. It fell on fornicators.
The conviction of God began to fall on a society, and I believe that is what America is in desperate need of, is conviction that comes out of the place of prayer. We must have it. All right, friends, we'll be right back.
We've got one last segment. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on The Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Friends, I pray your hearts are getting sturdy. My name is Michael Brown, and I'm here with my colleague, co-worker, Joe Olden, his book, Prayer That Ignites Revival. It'll stir you with revival stories, and it'll stir you above all with a bird to pray and go after God and seek Him for yourself. You know, Joe, as an eyewitness to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of services in Brownsville, and hundreds and hundreds of classes, and then meetings when I travel out and saw God do things I dreamt about, prayed for for years, and I was sitting in front of our eyes, and things beyond our wildest expectations at times. Things can be exaggerated. There can be stories that seem like tall tales, but when you're in the midst of revival, it's actually happening. The impossible stuff is actually happening. And even if someone said, ah, I'm most skeptical of that story. The fact is, even if something was exaggerated, even if half of a factory got saved, or half of a city got saved, I mean, this is why we talk about it.
This is why stories are written about it. This is why people came from over 130 nations to the Brownsville Revival, where people would come and get online, stand online, outside the building, beginning at six in the morning, for the media to start at seven at night. And they did this for years, because God was moving, God was doing something. Joe, in your studies, as you interviewed, you worked with Steve Hale side by side for some years, then you interviewed his widow Jerry as well, you interviewed John Kilpatrick, the pastor of Brownsville Assembly, Steve, the evangelist God used to ignite it. What did you learn that may have been new, or that even deepened your convictions about prayer and the Brownsville Revival?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I start the book with that. And I really believe that Steve is really a general in the faith. And I think that I really wanted to write about him because I haven't seen any writings on him, and so I reached out to Jerry. One of the things that Steve would always tell me is, Joe, keep your circle tight, and only hang around people that are on fire. The last text he ever sent to me before he passed away was, Joe, never hang around lukewarm people, because if you hang around them, you'll become like them. And so Steve always kept his circle tight. And right after he got saved, he was a heroin addict, I don't have time to go into his salvation, but right after he got saved, he began to go to David Wilkerson's Bible college.
Leonard Ravenhill was a professor. Now I can't imagine sitting under those two men and how that would shape your embryonic foundation. And so immediately you see Steve doing that, and he began to pray two hours a day right out of the gate. Right out of the gate, he's seeking God, he's spending time with God, and he goes on to be a youth pastor.
God calls him to Argentina. And here again, you see Steve, he's praying a couple hours a day, but now he's getting around other people that are on fire, like Carlos Anacondia. He would go to Anacondia meetings, and he would see the mass deliverance that would take place.
And they asked him, they said, Steve, would you like to see the secret behind this great move of God, this great Argentine revival, and he said, well, absolutely. So they take him behind the platform, and they began to pull a curtain back, and as they did, it was hundreds of intercessors under the platform crying out to God. There were people in those meetings, you know, there's 10, 20, 30 thousand people, people being delivered of demons by the thousand, but not just in the stadium, across the street on the sidewalk.
The power would come down, and people would be hit by the power and begin to manifest demons and get set free outside of the meeting. That is not good preaching, it's prayer. And Anacondia was showing Steve the power of proclamation and prayer. When prayer and evangelism merged, the product is revival, it's awakening. So it begins to change his prayer life. He begins to pray, God, I've worked for you, work through me. So he starts fasting every outreach that he would do. He would fast the entire week.
He's praying more now, it seems by my research, he's praying three and four hours now a day. And he goes to Chile, I'm not going to get into, there was a rainstorm, the mountains were muddy, he had to go through a mile long train tunnel that was used, he was determined to get there. They got there to the city in Chile, and when they set up the platform, they set up everything, they plugged the speakers into the electrical outlet, and that was the last thing that they needed to do, and everything was set for them to take the microphone. When that happened, Steve told me this personally, but I interviewed a gentleman that was with him, Larry Art, the heavens opened. And I asked Larry, I said, now did everybody get hit by the power?
I said, I'm writing, this is for research, I've got to be accurate here. He paused Dr. Brown, he said for a week, anyone that walked onto the park got hit by the power, they were undone by the presence. Cars were pulling off the side of the road, people were weeping in the car, Steve would jump in the car and lead them to Christ. They didn't know what was happening, the presence of God descended on that park.
People that were walking through that were businessmen, lawyers, one of the manifestations, it was like their feet were pinned to the floor and they were stuck. When Steve came back from that crusade, he saw what God could do, and it wasn't just God using Anacondia, it wasn't God just using Ravenhill and Wilkerson, he saw what God could do through him, and that stoked his fire. He moves back to Texas one week- Yeah, I'm just going to jump in. By God's grace, I got close to Leonard Ravenhill in the last five years of his life, we were dear friends, I was 48 years old when he was 82, I was 34, we became dear, dear friends and he poured into me so, so deeply, and he was the connection with Steve Hill and me, that's how we got to know each other, and Len would tell Steve, Steve came back from meetings just like this, and he'd tell Ravenhill, he'd say, I felt like we just stayed another day, revival would break out, and Len would say, then why are you here?
Then why are you here? And that stuck with him, and shortly before Len passed away, so September of 84 he had a stroke, never came out of it, went to be with the Lord November of 94, so he turned to Steve Hill one day and said, Steve, Stevie as he called him, the opportunity of a lifetime must be seized during the lifetime of the opportunity, and those words stayed with Steve, so when God used him in Brown's revival, once revival broke, he knew, focus, stay here. We got four minutes, so back to you, he comes back to Texas, you can take the story. He wants Leonard to disciple him, he goes to Leonard, and Leonard agrees, and so the next day he gets a phone call at 4am, and he picks up the phone, and it's Leonard Ravenhill, he said, what are you doing, Steve, he said, I'm asleep, and Leonard said, I thought you wanted revival, and hung up on him. Now I interviewed his secretary, and she told me for years up until that moment, Steve was praying four or five hours a day, all he did was read revival books and pray until noon, one o'clock every day that he wasn't traveling, he was in prayer, he would not take a meeting with anyone until 12 or one, so he's praying four or five hours a day, so it's not like he's lukewarm, it's not like he's backslidden, God is using this man to provoke him to the next level, and I just want to say it's not about praying four or five hours a day, it's about being obedient, but that's where Steve was. Long story short, one night, he does this for about a month, he calls Steve, same thing, what are you doing, and he said, I'm asleep, and Leonard said, I've been up all night praying for you for eight hours, God wants to use you Steve, you need to get serious about God. Now to tell someone they need to get serious about God that's praying four or five hours a day, there's few people that could do that, and one was Leonard Ravenhill. So it provokes Steve, he starts getting up at four, he's praying seven hours a day, long story short, he gets to the Brownsville assembly of God for one meeting, he preaches, the power comes down, they come back that night, they don't get out until five o'clock in the morning. But a lot of us know about Brownsville, but I want to say this, Steve's life, his prayer life didn't change. He prayed every day during the revival from eight to two, took a nap, then prayed from four to five, and then when he got there, he would pray one, two, three hours at church with people, with the prayer team.
He was praying seven to nine to 10 hours a day, and he fasted every day of the revival until the service was over and ate a small sandwich and a bowl of soup at midnight, one o'clock in the morning. What you got to do to birth revival, you got to do to sustain it, and Steve's prayer life showed us that. Hi friends, the book by Joe Oden, it'll challenge you, start where you are, start where you are, and just say, oh God, give me a deeper hunger, give me a vision of what revival could look like, a vision of revival in my own life, and wherever you are, start with your God, I want to go after you, if it's praying two minutes more, if it's skipping a meal, God, I've got to see a breakthrough. The new book, Prayer That Ignites Revival by Joe Oden. Hey Joe, thanks so much for joining us, and I know in your own life the hunger remains, the thirst remains. God is going to hear the cry of your heart, my brother. Thank you, Dr. Brown, it was an honor to be with you today. All right friends, once more, Joe Oden, the prayer that ignites revival, all kinds of inspiring, encouraging stories, and yet that sounds just like Leonard Ravenhill, and I can attest to my own life as God's got hold of me, deep in my burden, my desire, he answers the cries of our hearts, his strength made perfect in all weakness. All right, if you're not getting our weekly updates, latest videos, articles, and our monthly Frontline newsletter, don't forget to sign up, thelionoffire.org, click subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure you're getting all of our videos, click subscribe, and hit that button so you'll be notified. God is here. This is how we rise, oh, it's our resistance, you can't resist us.
