No Transference of Power Without Contact

No Transference of Power Without Contact

by Reginald (Reg) Goff

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Now I want to try to help you tonight to give you at least one technique that you can use in any church in the world. And I would go so far as to say that I have seen as few as four people change an entire church. But not the way you’re trying to do it. Not by going home and trying to blast off to everybody and tell them they’re all wrong. You know, get what you got. They aren’t too sure what you have, but… If you would demonstrate it until they would come to you and say, “What’s making you different?” Then your witness would be like a mighty fire. It would literally burn into their lives. But when we go home to our pastor, and when he isn’t enthusiastic about it, then we talk about him, and we get against him because he doesn’t believe in prayer, and all these things, and then you get this little group over here, and there it gets the pastor, and there it gets this one, and so on. And then you wonder why you’re not a glorious, you know, example of the Christ Spirit. Well, I know why. And so do you. Now, I believe that God is using every one of us to the fullest extent possible right tonight.

Yet there isn’t a person here that doesn’t want to be used more, including me. There isn’t a person here that doesn’t want to be used more than you’re being used. Now, why aren’t you being used? Well, I asked God that one time, and He shook me. He said, “Because you must be usable and available.” And He didn’t need to tell me that the Methodists had to turn around. All of us are available. Oh, brother. For committees, boards, especially the presidents of the society and all the rest. We’re available. But are we usable? You see, here’s the key to the whole thing. Now, I believe that if prayer groups are going to be effective, they need to turn the entire whole program of prayer around. Now, instead of praying that God change other people, we ought to pray that God change us and make us the kind of people that You would love to use.

Which should you pray as an example? Which should I pray? “God, save my heart”? Or, “God, help me to be such a Christian, my son will walk when I go.” You see the difference? It’s a whole new switch. And I’m beginning to see that when people come to a place that they spend more time in a prayer group, I help themselves be changed into the Christ-likeness, that they become dynamic influences everywhere they go. But when we come together and sit in a row, and each person gives their list of things they want God to do this week, and then they say, “Amen,” and the next one takes off and gives them their grocery list, do this, do that, bless this, bless that, help this, that, bless this, give me this, give me that, Amen. The next person takes off on their list. I’ll throw anything at that as the most permians. You never once listened to God. You insulted Him by spending a half an hour together and never letting Him talk to you. You just talked to Him. Like, not too sure how that was meant.

Now, in our book, and please don’t think I’m trying to sell it, but it’s only about five or six of them left, so don’t worry. I gave you three goals for prayer groups. These really should not be called go of prayer groups, they should be called death groups, growth groups, really. But for a better word, we use prayer. In fact, in our church, we never call them prayer groups. The first goal was to develop a Christian personality. How many times our prayers are canceled out because we don’t look like a Christian and don’t act like a Christian? In one situation, we may cancel out a week’s praying with somebody. I see that happen over and over again. Now, in that, we gave you four things. First, to know you are forgiven, to know you are a Christian. And that’s so simple. He said, if you confess and forgive, it’s just that simple. So go do it. It’s just that simple. Confess, believe that God has forgiven you, accept His forgiveness, and you are forgiven. No questions about it. You are. But you are not if you don’t accept it. Now, the second thing was to take the Sermon on the Mount as your goal of living. Now, that’s a high goal. None of us live it, though we try hard.

The third thing was to get a new concept of God. I had to pray, the first chapter in that book just had to be on God rather than on prayer, even though the book was supposed to be about prayer. Because there isn’t a bit of use in praying to an angry God, a reluctant God, a God who has to have His mind changed, a God who won’t do things unless you get enough praying, unless you pray hard enough, loud enough, and loud enough. Now, if that’s your concept of God, your prayers don’t mean very much. But if you see a God who is yearning over His people, a God who is loving every one of them, and just wanting to bless them, you don’t come begging and whining and screaming to Him and saying, “Please, God, do something.” You don’t do that. My son, a physicist, was the one who helped me more on this than all the books I’ve read and anybody, all the people I’ve ever heard preach on prayer. He said to me, “You aren’t very scientific.” He said, “If I take a problem into the laboratory and I work it and it doesn’t turn out,” he said, “I don’t take the book and throw it in the trash can and say, ‘Boy, that guy didn’t know what he was talking about.’”

“No, I go back into the laboratory, I take the book, and I carefully go every step to see where I made the mistake. The sequence wrong, the weight wrong, some ingredient wrong, the temperature wrong, something was wrong, or it would have worked out right,” you see. But he said, “When you people pray, and you don’t get an answer, you say, ‘Well, God didn’t answer, and God didn’t want to answer, so I’m going to leave it there.’” He said, “If I did that in the scientific laboratory, I’d never get anywhere.” Now, I’m not saying you ought to beat yourself because you failed. This is not what I’m saying. But I am saying that an honest investigation of why these prayers are not being answered might change our world. I mean that. Our world. It could change our world. Now, so, this thing, when we get a different idea of God, and then the last was that we would begin to try to live both with our conscious and our unconscious mind to have those cleansed. And I’ve not got time to go to that. It’s taken an hour to do it. Now, the second goal was to find union with Christ. I don’t mean knowing about Christ. I don’t mean reading your Bible. I mean a personal, noble knowledge that you are in Christ and Christ is in you.

And the way Ruth has been explaining and talking to you, I think, is tremendous. And if we could just know that God is in us, a lot of our fear and a lot of our things would be gone and our lack of faith. So we need to know this union. You see, I gave you the Lord of the night, which my son gave me, no transference of power without contact. You can have the house all wired and everything all set up and all the switches turned on and no lights. Why? Because you’re not in contact with the main source. But when that fuse is put in and contact is made, every light in the house comes on without you asking it at all. Without you begging it. It comes on its own. A man walked up to me the night, a physicist walked up to me the night and said, “You know something about this? Electricity.” He said, “It almost seems as though it’s trying to get in.” You don’t connect the fuse and ask, “Now please, electricity, do your stuff.” No, you don’t. And you don’t get a dozen people around there to make them do it. You know. No, you just make the connection and it flows like that. Quicker than you can measure.

A light outside, the sunlight, the line is pulled. How do you get light in the room? By going to the window, kneeling down, and making a great prayer, “All right, please come in.” No. You just take away the obstruction and the light comes in on its own. If you can see the power of God and Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,” therefore we have a right to use light as an illustration.

Jesus is standing at your door of your life. He’s standing with power equal to anything you can ask. Standing right there. Saying, if you’ll just open the door, if you’ll just make the connection, if you’ll just throw the switch, “I will come in,” and you don’t have to beg Him. I hate to say this from fear I hurt somebody and make them think that I, that, and not understand what I’m saying, but I have come to the place, even though we’ve gone through real crucial things in the last three years in our own family, I have come to a place where begging has gone right out the window. Right out of the window. I don’t believe I have to beg God. Now, if I have developed, even I am developing a Christian personality, which will take all your life and more, if I am united with Christ, He said, behold, or He said, “Without Me you can do nothing. Abide in Me, My words abide in you, you shall ask what you will.” This is the promise of Jesus Himself. Now, this, plus this, builds a redemptive group. Now, what is a redemptive group? It is not a pressure group on God. It is a redemptive group. A redemptive group can only be as wonderful as the persons are redemptive in that group.

The group can’t be redemptive. It has to be the people who make up the group. So, what is a redemptive person? Well, let me give you a simple illustration, a definition. A redemptive person is a person that every situation you are in is better just because you are there.

Always pushing the right way. Always your influences are going the right way. Always it’s better because you’re there. Mouths are shut because you’re there. People won’t talk and talk about things if you’re there. They always know where you stand. Let me illustrate this simply. In the Civil War, there was a great banquet and one of the officers got up and looked around with a delirious look. He was known for his dirty stories. And he looked around the room and he said, “Well, there’s no women here. You’re going to tell a real doozy.” What he didn’t know was the women can tell him just as dirty as men. He didn’t seem to know that but if you’ve been around the world as much as I have, you’ll find that out. Say amen.

She was looking awful serious at me. And this man said, “Well, there’s no women here,” but one of the officers at the head table spoke up lovely and kindly and gently and said, “But there are some gentlemen.” And the story was never told. What a redemptive person. You see, redemption isn’t only waving a flag. Redemption may be the constant push in the right direction. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you are going in the right direction. And this is what I’m trying to say. Now, a redemptive group, and I know that Ruth will agree with me because she’s always said this in other words this very week. A redemptive group never sit around and criticize their preacher.

I’ve got to stop and tell you a story. Well, this is too good to miss. I really feel I must tell that I didn’t tend to. People do awful things to ministers. And they’ll get you in a room, you know, with some derelict and say, “Now save them,” you know.

And one of those godly old grandmother got me in a room with her alcoholic daughter and then in my setting I get her. This woman was one of the most despicable people I had ever dealt with. I knew her record. I knew it. The whole town knew it. Her husband was just the same kind and she tried to match him. Sorry, it’s a sad story if I tell you the whole story. But, after this woman she didn’t know I knew what she was like, you know. And she told me all about what her husband was like, you see. And I listened to the whole thing and then she turned on me rather acid and says, “Now, what would you say if you had a husband like that?” Well, I wanted to say to her I wouldn’t have a husband like that but then I didn’t dare say that. “What would you do if you had a husband like that?” Now, I didn’t have an answer. And I quick prayed. Man, I can pray so fast it’s just like lightning. And God is faster. She said, I am, so it doesn’t take long.

I found myself saying to her, “Honey, now that’s something to call an alcoholic.” I looked at her and I said, “Honey, if your husband is as bad as you say he is, and I’m not questioning it for a minute, then he doesn’t need judgment, he needs pity.” And I’d never thought about that in my life before. The Holy Spirit spoke that through me. “If he’s as bad as you say he is, he does not need judgment. He needs pity.” And then God said to me right afterward, He’s talking about speaking in tongues. I do it great and beautifully in English. Just beautifully. And…

What’s the tongue? What’s the matter with you? Anyway, it doesn’t have to be unknown. But then I found myself saying immediately to her this, “And pity can be the first step toward love.” And I’d never thought of that before. Now that’s a priceless gem. Now what I’m saying, this is a redemptive person we’re talking about. The kind of people who will love and pity rather than curse and judge. And damn if they could sometimes. What we’re trying to build here is a group that can become such a power channel in a church, that no matter what is happening in that church, these people are bringing power to bear on the spot needed most. In our last church we had 17 prayer groups every week. I had 10 of them that I could trust. The other 7 I wasn’t sure. Now what I mean by that is people that won’t talk about what you ask them to pray for. And I’ll tell you there’s more praying ruined by gossip. On a Christian level of course.

There is no such thing. But anyway. And I could call these people under any crisis in our church. And I could say to them, “Will you pray about this?” And that was all that was to them. And immediately we’d see things begin to happen. I could call them and say in my counseling, “Will you pray for Mr. and Mrs. John Smith?” Never once would they say, “Oh, are they having problems, Pastor?” Then go around trying to find out to their neighbors what’s going on. No. These people were redemptive. And they would take that love and that couple and begin to send it at home several times a day with love. And I would begin to get results in the counseling room. It wasn’t me at all. This is what I’m talking about, a redemptive group. The kind that can change an office. I can tell you one story of a man that did one little thing in a horrible office and I went back 18 years afterward and was still a clean wonderful office. 18 years it stayed that way. And one of the worst offices you ever heard of. Now, this thing of redemptive group. Now how do you do this? Well, I have listed some things here that will help you I think.

I don’t know why I did that, but I did, didn’t I? I believe there are four things, four steps in developing a powerful prayer group. The first is acceptance. Now my friends, you are never going to have power with God if you can’t accept each other. There’s no such thing as union. As long as there’s a variance between you people, between even two in the group.

Now, acceptance doesn’t mean that you have to accept them as good as you are or as far alone as you are. It does not mean that. It means you accept them as a seeker after Christ as much as you are. Starting from where they start, with their background, with their teaching, whatever it may be. This is it. Acceptance. As soon as you start accepting people, you find you can trust them. And you don’t trust people you don’t accept, do you? No, sir. But the moment you begin to accept them, you find a lovely Methodist minister’s wife drove a hundred miles. By the way, in the next state, where we are right now. Drove a hundred miles to tell me of the victory she’d had, how she hated the little group in the church, that they thought they were spiritual and she thought they were ruining her pastor, her husband. But anyway, she said this. Now listen to this carefully. She said, “When I quit resenting them,” now notice the pronouns, “when I quit resenting them, I found I could begin to love them. It had nothing to do with what other people said it did. Nothing whatsoever. When I quit resenting them, I found I could begin to love them.” And this is just one of the secrets.

So, acceptance, trust, love, and then openness. Let me clarify this. Never put these backwards. You rush into a group that you cannot trust and love and start opening up your heart and see where you come out at. All the hairdressers in the town know it in a week’s time.

Oh yes, I see hundreds of paragraphs go to pieces because somebody unbared their heart. And everybody else talked about it outside. So you see this acceptance, trust, and love. Love is a desire to bless. And I’ll be talking about this tomorrow. Love is a desire to bless with everything you have. God gave me that. I’ll tell you about it later. Now, acceptance, trust, love, openness. Now, let’s come to some scripture, if I may. And let me tell you how this came to me. I was worried about this thing of demanding of God and begging God and whining at God and blaming God and all this stuff. Now, this was really bothering me a few years ago. And one day I read in the Old Testament where Jesus said, He said, “And I looked for a man to stand in the gap, and I found none.” Not Jesus, God. And I said, “What?” You know, I went around for two weeks with that thing ringing through my head. What did God mean by this? “And I looked for a man to stand in the gap. And I found none.” And I came to the conclusion, after finding another parallel passage, one was in Isaiah and one in Ezekiel. I found another one which said, “And I looked for someone to help. And there was none.” And I wondered why there was none.

Did it ever occur to you that God has made this world so that some things will never be done unless man does it? God never built a freeway. God never built an oil well. God never made an airplane fly. But I think He got all the bands in heaven out when the Wrights did it the first night day. I think He would sit there and say, “Man, they’ve done it!” He’d done it! He had put all the things here, all the excitement about doing it. He put it all here for us. And then He sat back and said, “When are they ever going to get off the ground?” You see, after centuries, God had in His dream that man would fly. I believe this. But it never would have been done unless man made the airplane and flew. Now, if this is true, then, there are things when it comes to helping people. Now, we have lived for 10 years on faith with no salary of any kind. And if you think that is easy, having left out of a wonderful, beautiful 13-room parsonage with a church with a budget of 85,000 members, and walk up for nothing in charge of travel across the world, if you think that was easy, you’re crazy. But it has been victorious and glorious.

God never promised it’d be easy, but He sure did promise it’d be victorious. He sure did. So, in this thing of going out like this, nobody has ever… I have never prayed asking God for money when we had to many times we don’t anymore. Not that we have lots of it, but we learn better. The early days, and I think you ought to start a petition. There’s nothing wrong with petition. There’s nothing wrong with petition asking God. Jesus told us to ask and receive. That’s true. But my friend, if you’re just doing nothing but begging, a God that has to be changed is mine, and a God who you have to help understand things, and you have to tell Him all about this person, how good they are, so God will do something. That’s heresy. God knows everything about that person, even the plus and minus. Even among our friends, you know the plus and minus. Now, when I saw this, I saw that God was to help every single person, every single problem in this world.

God made us for wholeness and holiness. The two come from the same root word. God intended that we would live on tiptoe. He did not intend we should have sick bodies and run around crippling the Lord. I don’t believe that for one moment. God made us to be marvelous creatures. But, also, He made us that we have to help each other. I started to say, never once have we ever prayed for money, and come out into the next room and found a hundred silver dollars piled up there on the table. Not once.

But how many times we have prayed, and the next mail came a check from somebody in another state, that was a person who did that, see? God used a person to bless us. But God does not generally come down and fill your pockets with dollars. But He touches somebody else who has an extra supply, can’t carry it around all along and let it give it away to you. That’s what He does. Now, the same thing. “And I looked for a man to stand in the gap, and I found none. And I looked for someone to help, and there was none,” and I wondered why there was none. Now, when I saw this, my whole prayer life changed. Just as much it changed as white to black. My whole prayer life changed. No longer was I talking to a God who had to be persuaded. No longer was I begging God. I now came saying, “God, I know You want this. How can I help You?” Oh, I’ve got to tell you this story. I’ll never get done tonight, but that’s all right. We’ve got tomorrow, haven’t we? I have gone through about five changes in my prayer life, and every one of them almost total climactic changes. The last one was on faith, which I’ll not talk about tonight.

But the second last one happened with Dr. Frank Laubach. I had loved him ever since I had heard of him, and I had never met him. Often we leaders are going two different directions. We never meet. And when he’s preaching in Georgia, I’m preaching way up here in Canada, and we just don’t meet. My family knew him. I had never met him. I had read everything I could find that he’d written. I had heard tapes and tapes and tapes of him, and I loved him. And I had come to love him so much that every time I ever was in a sensitivity group running, they’d say, “Who would you like to be like?” I never have yet given anybody with one name. Frank Laubach. That’s always the one. And then I found out three years ago I was to be a speaker with him at Grand Canyon CFO, and I literally walked out of here. I literally did. I had a man alive, I’m going to spend a week with this guy, you know. But I never dreamed what was going to happen. One afternoon, Dr. Frank Laubach stood there, and with his beautiful way of telling a story, and as full of compassion he is, he said, “You know, there was a time when our whole organization just seemed to go to pieces.”

And he said, people withdrew their money, we had personnel problems, we had every kind of problem. “And here were these silent billions hanging on our soul until I couldn’t stand it.” And he said, “I just almost gave up and collapsed.” And he said, “My son Bob, who was then a teacher at Syracuse University, flew to where I was, and came and sat down with me and said this, ‘Dad, our father, I don’t know which it was, you have problems too big for you to bear. You have things you cannot get done all by yourself. Now I have come to ask you, Dad, how can I help you?’” And Dr. Bob stood there with tears running down his face as he could do and said, “Can you imagine what it was for a broken father, frustrated, his own son to come and say, ‘Dad, how can I help you?’” You know something? I never heard one sentence, Dr. Frank said it, he talked for half an hour after that. I never heard one sentence. If I could have found anywhere in that room, without looking like that, by running out on a great man, I would have gotten out. But I don’t do that to people. I sat there and shut the world completely. I don’t even know what happened in the half hour.

But I found myself so close to God and so closeted with God. And I found myself saying, “Oh God, forgive me for only caring about what I want You to do. Forgive me for the list of things I give You to do and do this and do this. Not caring a thing about what You’re doing. You have a plan for the world and it’s far better than anything I’ve got. And You’ve got a plan for my friends far better than I know.” And then I found myself, and you may think this is silly, but I found myself almost as though I was being translated into an old-fashioned Jewish rabbi. Because I can remember the stories of the Old Testament, how they fell flat on their faces before God. And I, in my spirit, did this. I found myself as prostrate before God as if I was in a real body. And I said, “Oh God, how can I help You?”

And my whole life was changed. Because every day from that day till this, I live it trying my best. I’m not always perfect at it. But I live trying to say, “Oh God, who can I help today that You see needs help? Where can I go today that You want me to go?” Well, it doesn’t say you don’t pray for your prayer list. And it doesn’t say that you don’t pray for your loved ones and all that. But it meant that the drive of my life no longer was Reg’s desire. It was God’s desire. And when that happened in my life, I began getting answers to prayers such as I had never had in all my life. And that just happened three years ago. So what I’m seeing here tonight is, when you start talking about building a redemptive group, I’m talking about becoming the kind of a person that God not will use under pressure, but who God loves to use.

And He will take us and use us. Now then, in Matthew 18, 18, this astounding statement is given, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” I want you to notice that it’s earth first. I didn’t know that for just recently. It’s earth first. Not whatever’s happening up here we can bring down here, no. Whatever you do here will be translated into heavenly realm. And boy, that shook me. I never preached on that sermon in my life. As a pastor, I literally thought that was a nice little piece of Catholics that shoved in our Protestant Bible.

You know, because they’re preaching, you know, release things and forgive things. And I just ignore that deal, you know. But, I have come to find out that this is one of the most real things in the world. And listen, I wish I had a week to preach on how husbands and wives bind each other. And how parents bind their children out to the kingdom of God. Good Christian people. Yet the very things they’re doing are keeping their children out. And their families out. Binding and releasing. Now, this union and agreement, brought on top of this fantastic promise of binding and releasing. Jesus said, now remember this is the… Oh, I don’t like these expressions. My bad life, a prodigal, so long that my language… My wife says my language is much more expressive than beautiful. And I guess she’s… I think she’s right. By the sense I was supposed to say a minute ago, some of you would have been shocked. But… In this thing in here, in this fantastic promise that God has given to us. Binding and releasing. Now on top of this, He said, “If two of you shall agree as touching anything, you may ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you.” Now listen. Let’s be honest tonight.

Can we be real brutally honest? How many times have you and I… gotten together with somebody and prayed as we thought in agreement and nothing happened? How many times? Hundreds of times. And you know it. Then there must be a key here. There’s got to be a key here that we have not yet seen. And these are things I want to discuss the next 50 minutes I’ve got and perhaps tomorrow morning. Now… In this… I want you to notice this in here… I’m gonna read something here for you if I can find it for you.

I said I’m trying to do too much here one night. Yeah, I can’t find it. In Romans 15, 5 to 6, this is the New Berkeley translation. Listen to this carefully. Now what are we talking about? Agreement and union. This is what we’re talking about. In agreement. “And may the God who gives patience and encouragement grant you such mutual understanding and agreement with Jesus Christ. That together, as one voice, you praise God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is what we’re talking about in agreement. Two people, not only in agreement with each other, and feeding the pulse of the same impetus, but also those two people being perfectly in agreement with Christ. This is the thing. And this is the key to the whole thing. I think this is where the… where small groups come in. Let me show you this. If I may have a very simple illustration. If you don’t like my eraser, you get me a better one.

Now I’m a real artist. You’ll know. You’ll see this. This is a cartwheel. And we’ll put a little circle inside and make it look more like a cartwheel. And we’ll put a center in it. And we’ll put a few spokes in here.

Now, this is the prayer group. Now we have a Mr. A here. They all say, why do they all say women? We’ll say men this time. Mr. B and Mr. C here. Now we said we’re going to have three goals. One, to develop a Christian personality. Second, vital union with Christ. And third, a redemptive group. Or like Christ, who was the epitome of all redemptive personalities. So, we’ll put Jesus in the middle of the circle. And each one of us are going to come down our old road, our time, our path, toward Jesus Christ. In other words, I am going to get more like Christ, and more like Christ, and more like Christ. This man is going to become more like Christ, and more like Christ. They may not come at the same speed. Maybe not through the same experiences, but they’ll come. They’re all growing toward Christ. Now, in the beginning, when a group stops, you may be, A and B may be a long ways apart. In fact, this person may be a wet Christian, that’s a Baptist. And this person may be a dry Christian, a Methodist. Now, they may be a long ways apart, see? But they’re coming down and they’re accepting each other and they’re beginning to develop the Christian life.

Now notice carefully. This is tremendously important. There are long ways apart here, but as this person comes near to Jesus, and the other person does too, they’re coming closer to each other. At every move they make toward Christ, they’re getting closer to each other and when they get to here, they are in union. They are in union with each other. They are in union with the thoughts and the mind of Christ. This is where study and all of this comes in. I have seen a few prayer groups so united that no matter what anybody would say, the rest would all say, “That’s right.” If I ever know what they’re saying, I mean, they just think along. They pray alike. I don’t mean in form and all that, in words. But their minds have become what they… what each one of them means, “Yes, I believe this is God’s will,” you see. And when they do like this, you are finding the union we’re talking about where Jesus said, in agreement.

Now, I find that as we take this agreement, we are doing something here that’s very, very important. And I wish I had two hours to talk on this one subject, and don’t ask me to do it because I’m not going on.

But, if you take a flashlight, again, my beautiful artistry, is it? When the light goes out, it goes out here in all directions. And it’s diffused. It goes every direction. And pretty soon there’s less and less, and pretty soon there’s none out here. All right. If you take a light, a white light, and put it through a prism, it goes through here, it comes out here in seven rays. Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, if I remember right. You have what you call a prism here. Now, this is so because this white light is incoherent light. Incoherent means does not stick together. Each ray in its own wavelength is in there put together in white light. But the prism breaks it up and sends each one out on its own wavelength. Therefore, you get each color separate all by itself. And you’ve got a rainbow or a prism. This is called incoherent light. For many, many years, we have known in many areas of life the power of union and rhythm. For instance, a regiment of soldiers walking across the country, coming to even a small bridge, would be immediately ordered to break step. Why? Because if they were over that bridge in lockstep, they would smash the bridge. I’ve been told that a regiment of soldiers going across Golden Gate Bridge would smash it if they went in lockstep in rhythm.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly true in the idea. So, they break the step. Now, man has been saying, or the scientists have been saying for years, what in the world would happen if we could put all these lights in lockstep? And I don’t know how many, at least three of the major scientific schools in America were working and trying to do this. In 1960, Ted Maiman, a young scientist, went back one night to a laboratory to finish out an experiment that he’d been doing. Now, they had taken a man-made ruby, and they had put electrical currents around it to excite this and put wires to it. The end of this ruby was solid silver, so nothing could go out. The end of this ruby was solid except a little tiny hole out here. Now, when they turned this light on here, or turned the flash of light that came through this power source, lo and behold you, on the far side of the room appeared a little tiny pink dot. Now, it was pink because the ruby gave it the colors going through a man-made ruby. And as it landed on the pink dot out here, Ted Maiman cried out, “It lased! Lased!” And man, for the first time in history and science, had put together this very thing.

Now, let me show you. Don’t worry, I’m going to give it to you. The word laser comes from this. Light… Now, I’ll give it back to you if you want to copy it. Light amplification… by stimulated emissions of radiation. L-A-S-E-R.

Light amplification… of stimulated emissions of radiation. Now, this is oversimplified, but I have to do it because I have to do it for me, whether I do it for you or not. They have learned that by exciting the electrons in this ruby, and going up to a very much higher point, as they came back to the normal point of light, they gave off a photon. And a photon is the basic power of light. And when these things went back and forth here, going like this over millions of times a second, and suddenly it made one burst through the little knot in here, and came out here in perfect lockstep. And man had produced something which will change your life more than any other scientific invention known to man up till now. I could give you an hour lecture on that. I was doing this in West Virginia one day, and a man came up and he said, “Man, you’re interested in that.” I said, “Yeah, I am.” He said, “I happen to be an expert on that for the Bell Telephone, or the Western Telephone, or the telephone company down there.” And so he brought me a whole lot of charts, which I use in the prayer schools, to show what it does. And this is what I have.

Now, man had no idea what they’d done. You see, this incoherent light that goes out like this has very little power. But this coherent light… Remember, incoherent means it doesn’t stick together. Coherent means in one step, in lockstep. This coherent light, when they turned it on a diamond… Now, I’m a lapidarius, and I cut stones. A diamond is number 10. An agate is 6 or 8, according to the materials in it. Chalk is number 1. And we go on a scale. But a diamond is the hardest one. We test everything else by the diamond. And when they took this ray, a very, very weak laser, nothing at all of what we have today, and turned it on a diamond, it made a hole right through the diamond. No drill, no steel, no press, just a beam of light. Now, there’s two things about this laser. One is its controllability. Now, this has much to do with prayer. Its controllability. Being able to pinpoint power in one direction, with all the power going in one direction on one thing. Now, this is very important. The second thing is, not only is it controllable, it is multiplied until man yet still does not know the power of the laser. They took a weak laser and turned it at the moon.

And it went all the way from here to the moon, and only widened about a half a mile in that distance. And hit the moon and bounced right back to Earth again. And man said, “What in the world have we got?” You remember when the men went to the moon and left something out there to talk to? It was a laser. That’s what they left on the moon. A laser they could talk to. Now, this thing here has become such a fantastic thing. Let me give you just a few. I’m going to have to quit on this point, so I’ll just give you a few. First of all, this very day, in America, in perhaps a dozen hospitals in America, people have come into the hospital, and their eyes have been examined and measured, of course, very, very carefully, before, and the experiment was all ready. These people came into the hospital and they were blind, and they were blind. Because the retina had been torn away from the back of the eye. And you can’t see when that happens. And they can take a laser beam, so powerful, that if it came out of a flashlight, it would destroy every optic nerve you’ve got. You’d never see again, be blinded out of it. But it’s so controllable, that they can take, if the back of the eye is like this and say the retina is here, they can cross two beams through your eye, with this fantastic power, never hurt a thing in the eyeball, and weld this together.

Recovery, no operation, no blood and nothing. Is there anybody in the room that had this done to them? You’re one of the first groups I’ve been in, and I don’t know why. Nearly every group I talk to, there’s one or two people stand up and say, “This is done to me.” And they tell the group. This is happening in about a dozen hospitals every day of the year, every working day of the year in the hospital. And people are saying, “No, that could never have been done, with any light that man ever had before.” But with a laser beam, so controllable, and so powerful, they can do it. Now let me give you one of the things that will shock you. One laser beam can carry at one time, simultaneously, all the telephone calls in America, all of the telegrams in America, all of the radio programs in America, and all the TV programs in America, on one beam with no interference of any kind.

You can’t… I mean, it’s just… I was up at Stanford University, and they had their two young men, with a scientist. One young man had in his hand, a handful of sand. And they said, “Would you believe it? This was a piece of granite.” Well, you know how the word granite is. And with a few pulses of a laser, it became sand in the man’s hand. They said, this portrays, or portrays the time, when man could drill a hole through a mountain, with no danger to anybody. Just a pulse of light, sweep out the sand, another pulse would go on through the mountain. It’s fantastic. Well, I could sit here for an hour and tell you these things that are happening, but I haven’t time to do it. What I’m saying here is, the two things I want you to get tonight is, the controllability of this. Now listen, Jim says, and I think he’s right, that I’ve had these scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, have verified what I’m giving you. But when I went to these scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the highest level of learning in the world, over 900 PhDs in that little bitty town, and most of their wives had master’s degrees, and some of them had doctor’s degrees.

I talked to a group one day of 22 men and 19 of them were PhDs. Over 300 of those scientists had given their life to Christ, and become absolutely fantastic Christians, in less than two years. Why? Because a minister, a godly minister, dared them to put it into practice, Christianity, and see what happens. Now these people were agnostics, they were not anti-God. They were agnostics saying, “We don’t believe unless we see,” you see, there’s nothing wrong with that. But when they took the power of prayer into the laboratory of life, they saw miracles happen that you haven’t seen here. These scientists. And when I spoke on this one morning on power, I was scared to do it. And yet God said, “Yes, you better do it.” And I said, “Man, those guys will tear me up. They know so much about, you know, they’re all physicists.” And listen to this. In a morning meeting, twenty-some PhDs left their laboratories in my thomas, and came down to church for a morning session meeting. And when I got done talking on power, I’ll never forget it, well there was a PhD in physics sitting down about where you are, and he got out of his seat and down the alley came and he said, “Man, all I got to say to you is your son really gave you the right stuff.”

So, I don’t worry anymore. I don’t care who hears it. What I’m saying here is, if power, if this is power, if prayer is power, now let’s face it, let’s come to a conclusion here. If prayer is power, and I believe that prayer is actually divine power, which comes from God, moves through me as a channel, or you, to the object that I can direct it to. This is why Dr. Frank could say, “Prayer is the mightiest force in the world.” The biggest atomic bomb you have in the world, dropped on New York, would never touch Los Angeles. But I can stand here, and keep on springs, and I can direct prayer to India, and see an answer happen.

Prayer is the mightiest force in the world. But we are just playing with it. We have never even tried to seek the laws whereby it works. We are just to get together and blast off to God and say, “Please, God, do it.” And then we do that, by the way, without exerting any feet whatsoever. And I probably will tell you about that tomorrow. Yeah. Does anybody want to ask any questions? I started to say, if this is power, it will work by the exact same laws any other power works, or it’s not a universe.

And everyone of us believe it is a universe. You see? So, the least we can do in a scientific age, and I’m not going to give over to science, and I’m not going to bow to spirituality to science, never. And if science and spirituality seem to conflict, I’ll hang out with spirituality personally, and find out which is. Right. Which is. But, what I’m saying here is, what’s wrong with looking at the power and beginning to use it? Now, I have found that these little groups which are formed, these are redemptive groups, who can pinpoint the power of God, and release the power of God, into situations, can change situations such as we have not yet begun to dream. Remember when I asked you a question? It’s one minute after nine.

Really got to stymie it, haven’t I? No questions? Well, I… Yes. Pardon. Pardon. Now, what we’re saying tonight is in perfect accord to everything we’ve been saying, isn’t it, Ruth? The key to this is the multiplication of power and the control. Now, Dr. Glenn Clark, and Dr. Frank, and several others, have at various times made statements, all a little different, but all saying the same thing. That they believe that two people praying in union are much more powerful, even as high as 20 to 100 people, just as good a people praying all over haphazardly. And this is why, right here. This is why. Now, let me say this. Ruth told a story yesterday of the, two ladies, you and another lady, and the hospital experience. And as she told that story, I thought, oh, what a beautiful illustration of everything I’m trying to say tomorrow. Here were two people who let themselves ignore the world temporarily and go to that hospital and then spend the most of the night in prayer, not about the whole world, but about one person. And they saw results. I remember Louise Eggleston telling a story about the healing of her husband. When he was lying there in a coma, the doctor sitting at the bed wasn’t even going to go home because he’s going to die and he should be there and he don’t.

And she and a couple of others went to the church and there together gave themselves as channels of the power of God and her husband came awake and along. Now, it’s almost scary, and I feel this so strongly, I almost feel as if I’m going overboard for most people. They think, well, it isn’t quite that right. But I know this, that in our own personal life, my wife and I, for instance, when we pray together, we rarely ever pray long prayers or a lot of words. We will lie together, we like to pray in bed. Lie flat on our backs and get completely relaxed. And then we will start to pray and whoever wants to pray first prays and then there’s a pause. But if one person says, “Lord, bless Jim,” that’s our boy. The other one will say, “Yes, Lord, bless Jim, let me be a channel,” you see. The other may be a pause and you might say, “Lord, bless the president.” And the other person say, “Yes, Lord, let me be a president, let me be a channel too.” This is the way we pray. We never pray for two things separately. We always pray for the one thing at the one time, the one back and the other one up. And we’ve learned that there’s a tremendous power, a tremendous union here.

And for a husband and wife to do this is marvelous. You never know when you go to sleep. That’s right. It’s so relaxing and so beautiful, you just drift off and after a while you go, oof, she’s starting to sleep. So you go to sleep too.

Literally, you talk about this feverish, excited praying. I don’t want to have any more at all. I want to show by my love and faith in Jesus Christ that I don’t have to scream and yell at them. And I don’t have to repeat it a dozen times either. And I don’t have to get a hundred people to back me up and make them do it. No. Now, let me say this. There is a reason for multiple numbers at certain times. It’s very simple. There are cases where the power that is needed is so great that I am not a big enough channel to do much. For instance, I rarely ever am willing to pray for anybody the healing of the subconscious mind alone. Mostly, I believe those things are so deep-seated and of such magnitude that I feel I am not big enough alone. And I need three or four channels with me. Not crushing God, three or four channels. See what I’m saying? It’s not numbers to make God do something. It’s numbers that God can use, you see. So, in certain cases, for instance, if I would say to you, here’s a box of books lifted off the table and there’s five books in it, well, you’d pick it right up. But if that box had 500 books in it, you’d have to help, wouldn’t you?

Now, this is all we’re saying. And this is all I think the numbers have the effect. It’s the offering of more channels for God to work through, but not more pressure on God. And I have to admit this, that in my pilgrimage, for the first 30 years of my Christian life, I, in the back of my mind, I thought God had to if you got enough praying. Really, honestly, I had. You thought that too. Don’t tell me you haven’t.

I said that I think if I get enough people praying, God’s got to do something. I used to call all over the country to groups to pray. I don’t anymore. Just a few minutes here because some just said so. So let me do it. Because I cannot give you all I want. I sat down one day at the typewriter. By the way, if anybody wants to copy this, you’re glad you’re wanting to copy it. It’s not in the book. It will be in my next book. So get your money saved up. But…

No wonder I became a General Motors manager, was it? You know. No. No. I sat down my typewriter. Not a complete, but just listed the things I thought about purpose. You’ll never be able to copy these, so don’t try, because I’m going to give you 14. I’m going to give you them fast.

First, communication rather than socialization. Two. An emphasis on the present and the future without ignoring the past. Doesn’t happen to me, you’re gone. Three. I’m sick and tired of people coming and telling me how they had a bad childhood and therefore they’re bad. My mother kicked me when I was a kid, or my daddy didn’t love me, so I can be a mean heller. I’m sick of that stuff. Four. Three. Personal voluntary sharing. No probing by anybody in the group. Four. Change is encouraged and aided, but never forced. Five. All meaningful experiences should result in action to help others. I love that one. Six. Faith has to come, of course. Without faith it’s impossible to please God. But faith can come from any one of three sources. One. God’s own initiative which you have nothing to do with. Jesus walked by the pool of Siloam. My, thrilled I was when I was there last time, and stood at that place. I was just thrilled to death at that pool. I had to crawl in a really old place to get. Nobody wanted to get down with me. I stood near like Jesus healed that man of poor Siloam. And if you’ve never been to the Holy Land, you’re wrong. But anyway… God’s initiative. Jesus walked by the gate of Nain.

A dead boy was being carried out. Nobody came to him. No committee came and said, “Please, Jesus, do something!” The Methodists had a committee, but… They didn’t… They didn’t do that. You know, someone has said that if the Methodists… If the committee can save the world, the Methodists will do it alone.

Now… I love the Methodists too. God’s initiative. Second, the initiative of the individual. All by themselves. The woman has said, “If I can touch Him.” And she did. And she got the answer. The third, the… The faith of another group completely divorced from the person themselves. This could be in a coma and all these situations. But… In the Bible, four men brought a sick man to Jesus who couldn’t count himself. And they let him down to the roof. And Jesus… Look carefully now. And Jesus seeing their faith. Not his faith. Their faith. Heal the man. So there you have it. Faith can come from any one of these sources. God, the person, or the group. I think that’s a complete compass. I don’t think you need any more than that. All right. Number seven.

Situational praise. Oh, I wish I had a now on this. Let me just illustrate. Here is a wife who has a husband who told her how much he loved her and he couldn’t live without anything else. But after he got her, he wasn’t near the lover boy he had been before. And he doesn’t give her the attention a lot that she needs as a woman. And she begins to be irritated and starts to go down in health. But the moment she gets sick, man. Overnight, he becomes the most solicitous lover you ever saw. Doing everything he can do for her. Getting nurses and all the doctors and everything else. That woman maybe doesn’t want to get well. You see the point? Now, if you’re going to pray for this woman, you better pray for the situation. You see the point? Here is a girl in an office that has a boss breathing down her throat and causing her all kinds of trouble. Well, she isn’t praying for her. You better pray for the situation that she’s in. And you can talk about the president. I already said that to the mom. Why pray for the president? You better pray for all those who are advising him. You better put the whole group together. Because that’s him.

That has to be. I can’t go on. Now, eight. Carry through praying. And I wish I had a better word than that. For the duration. Too many healings are lost. Which have evidence of being started. But as soon as things look as if they’re a little better, everybody quits praying.

And we get a relax. And then the world says, “Oh, they weren’t healed at all.” Oh, yes, they were. But the power that they needed to finish the healing was withdrawn by people who did not know enough or became excited about something else. Somebody else is sick. So we turn our attention to it. I love these little tiny groups, which we’ll be talking about more in the morning. These little groups who will take a problem and say, “We’ll follow this thing through to the end.” Because of what the rest of the church does, we will follow this thing through to the end. And I saw a church take a little child, a little mongrel who had never turned over, who had never cried, who had never grasped his hand, who had never been no mind there. Today he’s earning his own living. He lives by himself in California. But that church followed that boy for eight years. Eight years. Now, how many children have had that kind of backing? A week, a month? Yeah. And then we all start to, you know, feather it out and we forget. No, nine. A new dimension of fellowship.

Sharing, praying, believing, sacrificing, expecting, seeing God work brings a new kind of friendship you cannot get anywhere else in the world. And I’m told this by people all over the nation. Say amen, Ruth. Oh! Oh. So open. I don’t see the presidents enjoy the room. Yeah. That’s dangerous to me. As of this kids are a, seriously, you don’t mind me what I want about.