Transcription
And he forced me to preach every Friday night, and that scared me bad. But I got to liking it, and isn't it wonderful he gave me that opportunity? I may never have preached the gospel if that dear brother Dillard hadn't told me, "T, you either preach or turn white and sit down. You just get up there and do the best you can."
Well, boy, I had prayed. Oh, I had calluses on my knees when we got married. I prayed for hours a day. He taught me I had to.
When did you feel the Lord calling you to overseas work? When did that come? We married in '42, and we went to India as missionaries in '45. So he was on the job a very short time, and then he left it. We went back to California as evangelists, and then we took pastorship at a church in Portland, Oregon.
We found this big tabernacle that was practically abandoned. I think they had 19 people, and we felt the Lord calling us there to pastor. Now, we were 19 and 20, and we built that church up.
In a year, a missionary came to our church one Sunday morning and told us about the need in India. We made one of those decisions: we resigned, started raising our money, and went to India.
God did a wonderful thing for us, though, in California. Up and down California, we preached at that time in the Pentecostal Church of God churches. They had a superintendent named M.F. Corin, who had been a missionary when he was young. He preached India into us and preached giving into us, taught us to give, taught us to love the people overseas. I've always thanked God for the influence of that man.
Now, this is '45. You said the war was coming to a conclusion, and our ship went through the mined waters.
You spent a few years then in India? No, no, 10 months. What were those first days like in India? We went to India to help those poor people. We had heard how poor they were, and we thought, "Well, if they don't know about Jesus, the people over here in America have a chance to know. Why not help them? There's more of them than they need."
By that time, we had our little boy. He was 10 months old, and we sold everything we had. When we got out there, the people were so kind to us. You know, India is the most beautiful country with the most beautiful people.
What stumped me was those Muslims. They were so kind to us. They must have seen us as a young couple from America with our little boy. They must have thought, "That's a terrific young couple." Looking back now, I'm sure they thought that.
They were kind to us, and I began to figure out what I was supposed to tell them. So I decided, "Well, we got to tell them about Jesus." So I told them about Jesus. Yes, they thought Jesus was a wonderful man.
Oh, I thought, "Where am I going to go from here?" They said, "Oh," and they told about their Quran and the teachings of Muhammad and how many of the teachings of Jesus they thought were so wonderful. I thought, "Wow, where do I go from here?"
Well, I told about his miracles. Yeah, they knew he was a healer. I didn't know they believed he was a healer. Yes, they believed in his miracles.
Me trying to convert these pagans, I thought, "What am I going to convert them to?" Then I began to get closer, and I found out, "Well, if thou shalt confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."
Okay, I knew that's what they had to believe. So I told them, "Yeah, it's wonderful he was born of a virgin." No, no, no. "Conceived of the Holy Ghost." No, no, no. "Died for our sins." No, no, no. "His blood was divine." No, no, no. "God raised him from the dead the third day." No, no, no.
Then I saw where we were at. That catapulted us to the issue, Paul, that changed our life.
And I'd like to say to everybody that's listening two things: Daisy and I came from nowhere. God picked us and used us, and God's picking you or you wouldn't be listening. That's right.
No matter where you come from, how young you are, how you may feel out of step or have problems or questions, or you haven't got it together, or you don't know where you're going to go, and you've been diverted by this temptation, God calls TL and Daisy to come on this tube tonight to tell you Jesus is talking to you tonight and wants to use you.
The other thing is I want to say that song he just sung, "Because He Lives, we can live."
I want to tell you here's what Daisy and I had to discover: how do we prove this to these people that this Jesus is alive? What's the use of having a dead Christ? What's the use of having a Christ of the Bible? Beautiful, wow.
You know, we preach to people like that all the time. They know about the Bible. What good does that do? I don't think you're interested in Jesus healing a woman with an issue of blood 2,000 years ago if you've got an issue of blood now.
If you're blind, it's not going to help you to know that Bartimaeus sat by the roadside begging and got healed 2,000 years ago. Will Jesus heal your blind eyes now? That was the issue, Paul, that Daisy and I came to in India: is this Jesus alive?
So we said, "Yeah." They said, "No." Okay, where do you go from there? They said, "Prove it, and we'll believe it." The best words ever spoken to us.
You remember what we did when they said that? Well, we got our Bibles. You bet. We said, "We'll show you. We'll take you to the scriptures and show you." Here we went.
And you know what they did, Paul? They got their books. Here came their Quran. They laid it there. You can match letter to letter. Both of us had black. I said, "What's that?" They said, "The Holy Quran, the word of God given by the mouth of its prophet, holy prophet Muhammad."
I said, "Who's Muhammad?" "Jesus, I know who." Yeah, hold on. I looked at that. Wow.
Well, Paul, that's where we couldn't prove it. We couldn't prove it. We read it, but they said, "No, it says this," and ours said this, which was right. I couldn't prove it.
Right then, Daisy and I made the decision. We talked and said, "Let's get out of here. We're embarrassing God. We're embarrassing the Christian faith. We're embarrassing ourselves. We're not doing God any good. We're not doing these people any good. Let's go back to America where they already believe the Bible."
We got out of there again. We acted quick. Isn't it amazing how God sometimes can take you bang, bang, bang, bang, bang to put you on focus with all these dumb moves? Yet by the time we were 22 and 23, we got it together, and then we came home in our search to find the answer, and we found the answer.
Okay, let's have it. Yeah, because that drove you, I'm sure, to the word and to your knees and to God. You didn't really see the actual miracles of God in India?
I had never seen a miracle. Now, after I got saved, I was in an Assembly of God church, and they prayed for the sick, and they toughed it out, and they didn't take medicine. Sometimes they died, but I never saw a miracle. I mean an instantaneous miracle.
I never saw. Today, when we say these things that TL and I had to come back from India and have a revelation, find out what the answer was, it sounds so strange because today truth is known so widely.
But I believe there are people looking tonight and sharing this program with us that don't know. I mean, you're just as you're right where TL and I were in India. You've known the gospel. You've grown up in church, but you've never seen a miracle. You need one. We needed one.
So we started our search. I feel in my spirit right now there are many people right on the verge. You're right there at the same point: ministers, pastors, evangelists. That's right. You long to see the miracle-working power of God, but you don't see it yet.
How did you all discover that? So when we came home, we asked God. See, we'd seen the miracles. What's the answer? We were going to see Aimee Semple McPherson, but she died. Oh, we didn't get to see her.
We were going to see Dr. Charles Price, the great man of faith. We took a lot of his magazines. We were struggling. You know, we were really reaching out for healing. We just didn't know.
So we were going to see him. He died just before he came to Brooks, Oregon, to the great Assemblies of God camp meeting. We were at night in McMinnville pastoring at that time, coming home from India.
I'd gone to the church. We prayed, and we would pray and fast together. "Oh Jesus, what's the answer? You've got to help us. Why did we care about those masses?"
When Charles Price died, I went to the church and I wept and I wept. I said, "Oh God, who will now reach these great auditoriums of people? Who will show them the power of God?"
I never dreamed that I was being seated. Isn't that strange? I cannot tell you, Jan and Paul, how I wept that day Charles Price died. Aimee Semple McPherson had died just before that. Smith Wigglesworth had died just before that, and we hadn't gotten to see any of them.
It broke my heart. I came home many times and said, "Lord, I'll go home. I'll see some of these great people of God." One after another dropped.
So we went to Temple, and we saw all the proof that there had been miracles: crutches, braces, and all these kinds of things in glass cases. So the material evidence was there, but we didn't get to see her and see how.
I went and I wept and I wept. That's all I did. I wept, "Lord, who will attract the masses? Who will go to the crowds?"
Then someone told me P.T. Hammond was going to take Charles Price's place. Oh, I know, and she's a precious woman of God still preaching. I just heard.
You see, women have had a great effect upon him: a woman led him to Christ, and now it's had Hammond. So you keep track of these women, and you, my dear.
But anyway, she was there. What did she preach on? "If you ever see Jesus, you will never be the same again." Oh my!
Oh, Paul, I can never tell you what that meant to me. John 1: "Come and see." I wept. We both wept when we went out of there. We sat in the car a long time.
We held hands and said, "That's what we need: to see Jesus." The next morning at 6:00, Jesus walked into our bedroom, and I looked on him.
Oh, thank God for that moment. You know, I feel he's walking in your life tonight, whether you see him or whether you may dream or you may see a vision or you may feel his presence.
We wouldn't be talking like this if it wasn't for you. What's this program about, people? You, individual, why are you listening? You are marked by destiny tonight to meet Jesus Christ in a new way.
He walked into my life. I lay there as one dead. I could not move a finger or a toe. Water poured out of my eyes, yet I didn't weep. I wasn't conscious of weeping.
I saw the Master. After a long time, I was able to get out of bed and lay on the floor. I crawled on my belly. The presence was so awesome into a little anteroom that I used for my study.
I lay there on my face until the early afternoon. When I walked out of there, one thing had changed in me: Jesus Christ was not a dead religion.
See, I'd come from India. We had come from that religion: everything was religion, religion, religion. Now I had more than a religion. I knew.
They talked about Muhammad, and they knew he was dead. I knew that Jesus I was talking about was not dead. Amen!
He was alive. Go to his grave. He's not there. He's alive. He's in me. He's coming to you. That's what I knew.
Now, when that happened, I saw Jesus. Right quick after that, William Branham came to Portland. That dear little man, his ministry was so precious and so great.
I heard about it. We went. We saw Jesus in a man when we saw the miracles. Ten thousand voices world over my head said, "You can do that! You can do that!"
Oh, I was thinking of India. Oh boy, you know I get excited about that. Go ahead. The people need the living Jesus.
They said, "You can do that! You can do that!" I knew I could do that. We went home.
What did you see in some of those meetings? I've heard so much about William Branham, but I never saw him or got to meet him.
The first person was what you call a hunchback: a person with an extreme curved spine, bent over him with a big hump on the back. This gentle man, he didn't weigh more than 3 pounds, small, had about a third-grade education, such a quiet voice.
I mean, we came from rambunctious meetings where you had to talk loud for people to hear what you were preaching. This gentleman preached, and he came in and didn't even touch him.
He just spoke, commanded the spirit to leave, and then he just touched his back, and that man just straightened up, and that hump just disappeared.
Then we saw deaf and dumb. He just whispered real soft, and in those days they had the tick-tick wristwatches, you know, pocket watches.
He put that to his ear, held it out here, and that child could hear it, could speak, could repeat everything he heard. Blind, we saw every person healed. People came out of wheelchairs, off of beds, people healed.
But you see, the thing that clicked: he rebuked the spirit of infirmity. He called it. He preached that sickness comes from the devil.
Well, we knew that. We thought it came from germs. Everybody had sickness, but he preached that it's the work of the devil.
He started in the Garden of Eden and took it right on through to Christ, showed our redemption, and he showed our authority. When we accept Jesus, he gives us his name and gives us his nature.
He says, "You can use my name. I give you power over all devils, cast them out, cure the sick." He just said, "You spirit of deafness, leave the child. You spirit that crossed these eyes, come out of the J. Amen! Eyes go straight."
And those voices said, "You can do that! You can do that! That's the way Jesus did it. That's the way Peter did it. That's the way Paul did it. That proves the Bible ways today. You can do that!"
When we went home, I'm about to get excited. My Lord! When we went home, we said, "Honey," we said to each other, "let's make a pact."
You remember what it was? "Let's open these gospels and read it as though we never read it before in our life. Read it fresh. Whatever he said to do, let's do."
Oh my! Whatever he said he'd do, let's expect him to do it. And that's it. It's that simple.
We saw Jesus in the vision. We saw Jesus in a man. We found Jesus in his word. We went out and acted on it, got on the radio, called the people, they came, we prayed, cast out devils.