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[00:00:00] A book of deuteronomy, chapter eight.
[00:00:05] Deuteronomy, chapter eight.
[00:00:09] All the commandment which I command thee this day shall ye observe. To do that ye may live and multiply and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers. And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee these 40 years in the wilderness. That he might humble thee to prove thee to know what was in thy heart whether thou wouldst keep his commandments or not. And he humbled thee and suffered thee to hunger and fed thee with manna which thou knewest not. Neither did thy fathers know that he might make thee know. That man doth not live by bread only but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee. Neither did thy foot swell these 40 years. And thou shalt consider in thy heart that as a man chasteneth his son so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee. And thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God to walk in his ways and fear him. For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land. A land of brooks, of water, of fountains and springs flowing forth in valleys and hills. A land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates. A land of olive trees and honey. A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness thou shalt not lack anything in it. A land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig copper and thou shalt eat and be full and thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware. Lest thou forget the Lord thy God in not keeping his commandments and his ordinances and his statutes which I command thee this day. Lest when thou hast eaten and art full and hast built goodly houses and dwelt therein and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied and all that thou hast is multiplied then thy heart be lifted up. And thou forget the Lord thy God who brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage who led thee through the great and terrible wilderness wherein were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground. Where was no water? Who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint who fed thee in the wilderness with manna which thy fathers knew not. That he might humble thee and that he might prove thee to do thee good at thy latter end. And lest thou say in thy heart my power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth but thou shalt remember the Lord thy God for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant, which he sware unto thy fathers as at this day and it shall be if thou shalt forget the Lord thy God and walk after other gods and serve them and worship them I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations that the Lord maketh to perish before you, so shall ye perish because ye would not hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God.
[00:03:47] Chapter ten, verse twelve chapter ten verse twelve.
[00:03:53] And now Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear the Lord thy God to walk in all his ways and to love him and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes which I command thee this day for thy good. Behold, unto the Lord thy God belongeth heaven and the heaven of heavens the earth with all that is therein. Only the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them and he chose their seed after them even you above all peoples as at this day circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart and be no more stiff necked for the Lord your God. He is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, the mighty and the terrible who regardeth not persons nor taketh reward he doth execute justice for the fatherless and widow and loveth the sojourner in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the sojourner for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, him shalt thou serve and to him shalt thou cleave and by his name shalt thou swear. He is thy praise and he is thy God that hath done for thee these great and terrible things which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude therefore thou shalt love the Lord thy God and keep his charge and his statutes and his ordinances and his commandments always in 1951 all the talk amongst believers who cared was the Hebrides revival.
[00:06:03] I had just come back from Egypt beginning of August of 1951 and all the believers in the company that I was in were talking about this extraordinary and sovereign outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
[00:06:20] Two old ladies who had prayed for six months, every night, unrelentingly, for hours and hours on end, taking hold of the Lord, that somehow or other God would do something in those islands off the coast of northwest Scotland.
[00:06:39] And there were evidently some old gentlemen who had prayed once a week, I believe, for seven years or so for the same thing. And then all of a sudden God acted and men and women were saved all over Lewis, particularly some of the shepherds, out fishermen out in their boats. It was all the talk at the time. I think it was a little destroyed by the number of people who went to look at it.
[00:07:09] But at the time it was all the talk, and everyone through the British Isles spoke of the need of revival and awakening and, oh, that it could come to us now. I had myself been as one can probably bear witness about, as staunch a Baptist as you would find.
[00:07:35] I thought they were the most New Testament lot, and I had sought to influence most of the boys who were saved to get linked up, really, with good evangelical Baptist churches. We had seen something in Egypt, in the work that God did in the canal zone, that had sort of partly opened our eyes to something. We were more in the experience than the definition, which is a good way round. We were in the experience of the body of Christ, but we didn't really know how to define it. And when I came back home, it was a real shock.
[00:08:11] Some thought that perhaps I had grown cold in the Lord. But somehow or other I sat in the congregation and I realized that there were people I'd known for years and years and years. I'd never prayed with them. I didn't really know them properly. They didn't really know me. They were mister so and so, or miss so and so or misses so and so. And somehow or other, the preaching was so fine, so powerful, it was anointed. But it somehow, I don't know, I can't explain it all, and I felt extremely miserable. And at the same time, when I went round to many of the friends, having been brought up in the town, having many, many friends, shopkeepers, many others, in different sort of facets of the life of the town, I found that really, to my horror, the whole of the church could be lifted out of the town and really no one would know the difference. If you took the building with them, they might notice.
[00:09:12] But since so many people came from outside of the area, right outside of the area, it seemed as if really there was very little local impact upon the local people. And yet the situation that I found was very, very sad. All kinds of things. I remember speaking with the police inspector I'd known as a boy about some of the things that were going on in the town, and we became very concerned and burdened about those things. Of course, the believers were so separated from the world that they didn't really know what was going on.
[00:09:47] They belonged to that kind of feeling of being separated in such a way that really, in the end, you hardly know how the world ticks or how they think.
[00:09:56] And when this news of the Hebrides revival came, it coincided with me reading a book which, if ever you want to be disturbed, you ought to read. And if you don't want to be disturbed, don't read. And it's Finney's lectures on revival.
[00:10:11] And I had been reading through this and got to the chat. Dom. Ploughing up the fallow ground.
[00:10:18] Well, I never got beyond that chapter. It bothered me no end, the ploughing up of the fallow ground.
[00:10:24] And I became so stirred up, as did one or two others, my sister and one or two others in the same company. We were very, very bothered about the whole thing. Why weren't local people being. I was always bothered, for one thing, why so many women were in the church as relatively to the men. There were about almost six to eight women to every man. I was always told when I raised this question in the church that it was due to two world wars. But it seemed to me very strange that in the cinemas there were as many men, and in the pubs there were men everywhere there were men, but in the church. And then I wondered about the kind of men that got saved, or at least were Christian. Many of them didn't seem to me to be the type that we read about in the New Testament. The sort of fisherman, the tax collector, the normal kind of fellow, and the thing that bothered me a bit.
[00:11:22] And then when we heard about the Hebrides revival and all these people being saved, and I read Finney's book, well, we thought, really, that's what we need in this era. We need an outpouring of God's spirit that will somehow or other take hold of people. First of all, do a new thing in us, the Lord's people, and make us real and genuine and sincere, and then do something in the world around us. However, we felt, as is so often the case when you read a book and when you hear great stories about revival, we thought, perhaps we are being emotionally disturbed. So we agreed together that we would let go of this whole thing. And we covenanted not to speak about it, even with one another for one whole month.
[00:12:06] And then we said, if at the end of one month, and we will not pray about it and we will not talk about, we will not read about it.
[00:12:13] If at the end of one month, this burden concerning really seeking the Lord in prayer, that we should wait upon the Lord without any hindrance until he answers. If the burden is still upon us at the end of a month, we will give ourselves to the Lord in prayer. Well, at the end of the month the burden was still upon us, this burden somehow that we ought to let drop everything else and really seek the Lord. And so on the 1 September of 1951, we began to meet together for prayer. Now, we were never less than two and we were never more than eight.
[00:12:57] Generally we were about three or four. People sometimes tell me that we were very fortunate to be so free, that we were fortunate to have such a lot of free time. But one of the ones who was with us very often, very regularly, was a mother who'd just given birth to her third daughter, and she was nearly always there. She had to rush out and do ironing and all other kinds of things. Her husband often used to leave. He had his own business, used to leave all his papers and come and pray with us in the other room, and then he would go back to his papers afterwards, some of us, others. I was supposed to be very ill. I wasn't allowed to go to Bible College where I should have been.
[00:13:44] I should have gone back when I came back home from Egypt because I was really very ill indeed. And they threaten me with the most dire consequences if I were to go on with studies or work. So I was supposed to be in a well nigh dying condition at that time.
[00:14:07] So that was the condition of us. But we felt somehow called by God to give ourselves in prayer. And thus we began. Now, it is interesting that during those times of prayer one or two things happen. We had one of the worst fogs. Some of you older ones will remember in the history of London. You will remember it came down and stayed with us for I think it was eleven days and 3000 people died in the greater London area during that time. There was a later one the following spring. And as a result of that, certain studies were made which have resulted in the smokeless zones that we all now have. But that was the terrible fog. All the buses stopped. We never saw across the road for about at least a week, you will remember. But our prayer didn't stop. Sometimes I walked from East Twickenham to East Sheen. We had to do that through the fog with something over our noses, but we always got there. We normally met about 715 or thereabouts, and we would go on playing till about 1015 or thereabouts. Now, the extraordinary about this prayer was, firstly, we didn't know over much about prayer, but we had the most incredible burden. When I look back upon those four months of prayer, I can hardly believe we lived through it, because basically we were praying the same thing every night.
[00:15:38] And it was. I always describe it like a tank of water, you know, that was sort of so full that somehow or other, you had to get relief. And then as it went down, so you felt better and better and. And in the end, you dried up in prayer. Got up. By next morning, it was full again.
[00:15:55] In those times, we covered everything. We covered all the so called nightclubs in the area, all the so called shady joints in the area. We prayed for the public houses. They hadn't been prayed for like we prayed for them in years. We prayed for all kinds of things. Hospitals, local government, churches. Everything came within. The mayors of both Twickenham and Richmond got prayed for the councils. We had a burden. It was a twofold burden. One, that God would do in us, his people, a new thing, and two, that he would start to save the unsaved straight off the street.
[00:16:38] It was about halfway through this time that one evening in my home over in east Twickenham, there were about six of us, I think, there that evening.
[00:16:49] We got to talking.
[00:16:51] We ended a little earlier that night, I remember, and we got to talking and someone said, you know, I believe that if we could get into Milo's, as it was then called, I think it's now a steakhouse near Palm Court. I can't remember its name. Who is it? Ice cream parlour? No, it's still a steakhouse. It's the other side. You've got the wrong corner.
[00:17:16] Anyway, this was Milo's, and it was there that all the young people used to gather, rather like later on, they used to gather at lobbyists. They all used to gather there, the whole crowds from all over the area. And someone said, if we could get in there and really speak to them in contemporary language, many of them surely would believe. And someone else said, well, why don't we do something? We've been praying now for months. Why don't we start to do something? Let's go into the place and let's just sit down. And of course, I mean, don't forget, we were separated believers. We didn't do that kind of. And we thought, well, let's just go in and sit down. We'll have a cup of coffee or whatever, tea or whatever, and we'll just get talking with people. But I suddenly thought, well, is that really? Well, I said, you know, it seems to me that God needs to do something in us first. If he could only get something done in us, then surely the other would start to happen. And so someone else said, well, why don't we do that then? Why don't we meet, say, on a Friday evening just for fellowship? Don't let's call it a Bible study or prayer meeting. Let's just meet together for fellowship. And so we hummed and we hard, and we thought, well, we'll pray about this matter. And then we suddenly all woke up to the fact that at that time we were all baptists and we ought to go and talk with the pastor now. Already a lot of antagonism had started over our prayer meeting. The moment we started praying, although we heard about it continually from the pulpit, the need to pray and the need to take hold of the Lord and the need for awakening and revival. When we had started, all kinds of stories developed. I went to see the pastor, and he said to me, I'm very happy about this prayer meeting. But other people told me that they had been told that he was very unhappy about the prayer meeting. So we just didn't know where we were. And we decided the only thing to do was to get on praying, not to stop. So we went on praying, but I thought, well, we better go. I'll go as spokesman, I said, I'll ask whether we can have something to do with the setup of the place where we can sort of have this kind of formal fellowship.
[00:19:20] I'm afraid that somehow there were some suspicions about this for some time. There was sort of not. It wasn't understood. But finally the pastor said, listen, if it can be in my home, I think it would be a good idea. And I said, well, you don't mind? It'd be lovely to be in your home. If we can have it in your home, that would be marvelous. So he said, well, then I will take it to the diaconate, and I will take it to the YP committee. And a little lady came to me and said, the diaconate have agreed. They're very happy about it. And I was delighted. But he said, I've yet to go to the YPs. A little later, he came to me and said, the young people's committee have thrown the idea out. But he said, I think it's a good idea. You should go out of this church organization and start outside.
[00:20:07] Now, I was a bit surprised because I went to one of the members of the little prayer group who was a deacon in this church, and said, I hear the deacons have agreed. He said, that's very odd. They must have agreed when I wasn't there. So we phoned round the other deacons and to his horror, found that none of them knew anything about it. So then we became a little bit afraid. What was happening later on, we found out they expected us to fizzle out, so they thought we were going to go outside of the organization, start outside, fizzle out, and that would be that. Well, we felt, as we prayed about it, actually, we all felt in one way perhaps it was the best thing. And we started outside on the first Friday of 1952. Now, we had no advertisement, no publicizing of the event, no literature to spread around. But somehow, through all the schools, the word went that there was this getting together of young people just simply in fellowship on a Friday evening. And before long, nearly every single church in the area was represented, from Brethren to Presbyterians. We had pretty well all the different ones in the area in on it. The interesting thing was that we thought, well, now, what shall we call it? And someone dear old, some of you remember dear old Hardingwood, Gr. Hardingwood at that time, he came and gave a wonderful week of lectures on how to study the Bible. And in the course of this, I just come from Canada, and there he said, they've got this thing they call Koinonia fellowship. Oh, we thought, now that sounds good. And, you know, being young, we thought, that's it, that's it. We'll call ourselves Koinonia. It's the New Testament greek word for fellowship. We won't call it, we'll just call it Richmond Koinonia. Now, of course, we had no idea, but some of the older christians got terribly upset because they thought it looked like Russian. They had no idea that it was a New Testament greek word. And they thought Richmond Koinonia sounded very much like something russian. And that's how the story began, that I was a radical and that politically we were going in the wrong direction.
[00:22:23] Of course, it was enough to frighten some parents of the children, of the teenagers who were with us in those days. It was a slightly more authoritarian structure.
[00:22:31] Anyway, the fact was that we began to grow, and from that first Friday in 1952, we grew from week to week until in three months we felt we could have our first squash, as we called it. That is, squash, as many people into a room, as is possible. That was the idea behind calling it a squash in those days. And we had our first time in the Townsend's home, 20 Berwyn Road, which was jam packed. Now, we made it a condition that no one could come unless they had an unsafe friend. They had to go to another house and pray there, another meeting and pray if they couldn't bring a friend. But everyone who could bring an unsafe friend could come. And we were amazed because the place was packed. But both rooms downstairs, all up the staircase into the rooms upstairs. We asked the pastor of the church if he would come and give the word. And of course, when he came and saw that crowd of unsaved young people, he was so excited. Three people got saved that night. I remember that clearly enough. And afterwards he asked if he could have a talk with me. And he got hold of me and he said, now, lance, this has got to come into the church. We cannot let this be outside of the church organization. But I said, now we've got every single denomination in the area represented. So he said, well, can't we get you in summer? Can we print your literature? So I said, we've got no literature to print. So he said, well, can we help you financially? And I said, no, we don't want that. We want to trust the Lord. So that was the beginning of further unhappiness and bitterness. We went on to a series of squashes. We took the Ritz cinema, now pulled down and took the restaurant in the Ritz cinema. The Christians in the town no end. They thought it was terrible that we went into a cinema, of all things, but we thought that was the best place to get unsaved youngsters in. We thought, they won't be a least bit. And lots of them came. I think, Eileen, you were saved there that night, and others too, on that Lindsey Glen came. So then we took a garden squash, I believe it was in my home. We had the garden squash and then we had a steamer. Now, no had ever done anything like that. We took the biggest steamer of Thames lawn chairs and packed them on board. Oh, my gosh. It was a marvellous idea because once they got on board, they couldn't get off. I mean, we never moored up. We went right upstream to Hampton Court, turned round and came back and a number got saved in that. The interesting thing was we used to have a week of prayer before each of these. And I believe I'm right, Ron got saved in one of those. Ron, how? Came regularly to the whole week of prayer to pray for the squash on the boat and got saved in the prayer meeting. This happened again and again. People got saved in our Bible studies. I don't want to ask people here who found the Lord to stand up, but so many in those early days found the Lord simply. We thought they were christians, but they found the Lord in our bibles. There was such power in the Bible studies. It wasn't just literally a thing. We used to share something, discuss it together, and then finally I would give a study. But the amazing thing was, there was such power in the fellowship.
[00:25:42] It was charismatic, really. We didn't have gifts or anything like that, but the whole thing was alive to God, and we expected God to speak to us, and we found it very exciting because it was somehow something we'd never touched and known before. I'd known a little of it in Egypt, but this was somehow much greater depth, and so on. Then came the day when the pastor asked to see me and the other leaders who were responsible for this, and we were given an ultimatum. Either we went into the organization of the church or we were all to be expelled. That came as a thunderbolt to us.
[00:26:20] Back we went to everybody, and because we had adopted certain things, we didn't know any better.
[00:26:27] We had got the thing we were most used to in congregational Baptist setups, the sort of majority vote. We talked about it, we prayed about it, and then I gave them all a pet talk about splitting the church. I said, you know, you don't want to split the place. They'd say, they've got missionaries all over the world. The things going. The eyes of the world are upon them, and we're going to split it in two. We better not. We ought to go in. And by a narrow majority, there were those who voted that we should go into the organization, and a small minority who said we were doing wrong. Now, it turned out that the ones who said we were doing wrong were right.
[00:27:05] And that was a terrible shock to us, because the moment we went into the church organization and had our meetings announced on the pulpit, it was as if all power went out. Just like a curtain fell down upon us in everything, and we knew that the Lord had left us then we didn't know what to do. Shall we reverse it? Shall we get out? We've made a mistake. Then we thought, that's going to cause even more trouble. Having gone in, now we draw out we can't do it. So we sought the Lord and we said, we will pray. And we got. And one thing we learned, which we have never done again. From that day to this, we threw out the whole system of majority votes.
[00:27:42] We discovered that sometimes the minority is right and the majority is wrong. And so we decided to go on unanimity, oneness, the one mind of Christ in us. And we asked the Lord. And we turned to the scriptures in Exodus where you remember when the children of Israel made a mistake? First God said, go over into the land. And they wouldn't. And then when God said, I am no longer with you because you've disobeyed me, they said, we will go over. And then Moses said, don't go over because you made your first mistake, because you didn't listen to the Lord. Now you think that you will undo that mistake simply by undoing it, instead of listening to the Lord. We learned our lesson there. We would not undo our mistake. We would listen to the Lord. What did the Lord? And we took hold of the Lord. After one month, the pastor asked if he could see me, and he said, it seems to me that this coming into the church has split it more than being outside of it. Therefore, he said, I think it better if you take the whole thing outside. Well, you can't imagine our rejoicing. Oh, we were so full of joy that the Lord just let us out. And out we went with great joy. We went on right the way through that year until September. But it was an unhappy year for many of us. We saw. We experienced renewal. We experienced the power of the Lord. We experienced the Lord's presence. But for many of us, who had many dear friends that we loved greatly, within the churches, it was a year of anguish because fewer and fewer people would speak to us. They wouldn't shake our hands. They wouldn't greet us. My old Sunday school teacher would turn his head the other way. People I'd known from the day I was saved turn their back on you. Literally, even in a bus, they would just turn their back just like that on you. And when you went to church, they would not say good morning to you, good evening to you, wouldn't greet you if you said hello to them. They just looked at you. Stonily. We were a church within a church. We didn't know what to do.
[00:29:40] And so we decided the only thing we could do was to seek the Lord. And for three weeks, some with fasting, some fasted, we prayed. And we said, we will not make a majority block decision. We will not all go out. Now, the story went all around the area that I planned it so that everyone resigned. Three to a post.
[00:30:02] Every post you see came three new resignations to reduce the poor pastor to a nervous breakdown. I had no idea. I didn't even know if my own sister was going. We were so careful on this matter that we would not influence one another, that we didn't talk. But we did all seek the Lord. It ended up with 18 of us out of the 9000 of us that there had been. At the bigger times, we were reduced to eight. And we never did have a membership or anything like that. We didn't like the idea. We just wanted to be members of the Lord, members one of another. But we were down to very few now. The stories that went round gave us great anguish. We were Mormons.
[00:30:41] Parents of the youngsters were told we were Rasolites.
[00:30:45] We worshiped the devil was one thing, the money came from the devil. The people converted amongst us were converted. These were responsible people in churches who said these things. I remember once at Berwyn Road, a young lady shot in the door open. She never took her hat off or her coat. She bolted in, went straight into the corner and sat bolt upright in a chair with a notebook out and a pencil at the ready. Gradually, as the time went on, she relaxed more and more. She had been sent in by a Sunday school superintendent of a place that I will not mention to take notes of the seance we were having.
[00:31:25] Of course, she got so blessed, she stayed.
[00:31:29] And of course, then they said, there you are. That the hypnotic influence of loves, it's your hypnotic influence over them come under that spell and something. They're just different. So it went on. I was giving sex instruction. That was another thing that went round to the parents. That illicit sex instruction was being given to the youngsters in these times.
[00:31:56] Oh, I can't. We won't say anymore. We'll draw a veil over it. But it is incredible what the enemy can do amongst the people of God. The stories that originate where they come from, they come from the pit, but they're passed on from mouth to mouth, embellished as they go along. And in the end, the most incredible stories. A friend of mine on a boat out to India was asked by a bishop at the Church of England, is it really true that Lance Lammet led a group of the young men and smashed up the manse?
[00:32:26] That was the kind of story that went round at the time. And of course, we just didn't know what to do. But we sought the Lord. And then we got a number of scriptures. Some of us. For instance, as we prayed, someone got this word in Isaiah in chapter 52. And verse eleven and twelve. Now it will shock some of you, but you must understand it in the context in which it was given. Depart ye. Depart ye. Go ye out from thence. Touch no unclean thing. Go ye out of the midst of her. Cleanse yourselves, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord, for ye shall not go out in haste, neither shall ye go by flight, for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your reward. And then another one got this scripture in Jeremiah, chapter 15.
[00:33:20] Jeremiah, chapter 15, and verse 19.
[00:33:30] Therefore thus saith the Lord, if thou return, then will I bring thee again, that thou mayest stand before me. And if thou take forth the precious from the vial, thou shalt be as my mouth. They shall return unto thee, but thou shalt not return unto them. And I will make thee unto this people a fortified, brazen wall, and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee, for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord.
[00:33:59] Or again in another place. Ezekiel and chapter twelve and the first three verses.
[00:34:11] The word of the Lord also came unto me, saying, son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of the rebellious house, that have eyes to see and see nothing, that have ears to hear and hear not, for they are a rebellious house. Therefore, thou, son of man, prepare thee stuff for removing and remove by day in their sight, and thou shalt remove from thy place to another place in their sight. It may be they will consider, though they are a rebellious house. Now, you may find this rather strange, but as we, the 18 of us who were left, got together and shared together the verses given, it was a great comfort to us to find that somehow God had been speaking. We didn't know our bibles that well. Through quite obscure parts of the word to one and another we got one or two things. We were never to go back.
[00:35:03] The Lord had said this. The second thing was even more interesting. We were to remain in their sight. And that gave us a great key as to where we should meet. We began right at the very beginning, meeting in a home.
[00:35:16] Our first meetings were home meetings. The first time we ever met for the Lord's table was in November, on that very foggy morning of November, 1952, in 20 Berwyn Road, East Sheen. We were about 20 people on that first occasion round the Lord's table and the ministry. I gave from that verse those verses in proverbs chapter three that we read earlier on at the beginning of this meeting. Now, it is a very interesting thing that from then on, we began to move. Now, people had said that I had always wanted a church and that this was my idea, it was my passion to get a church and that I had sort of taken all the folks out to form a church. But honestly, before God it had never occurred to us to have a church. As they said, we had never ever thought that we would move out from them. We had prayed that God would do a new thing in his people and that the unsaved would be saved. And somehow or other we just thought that's what was going to happen. And it was a terrible shock to us when finally we found ourselves outside of the whole thing. Now we were just like green youngsters. We didn't know what to do. Most of us were in our teens or very early twenties. We had no idea what to do and we just fell into the arms of God. It was the best thing we ever did. We just. We didn't know what. We didn't read books. We just sort of said, Lord, please show us what shall we do. And by and large, God preserved us from mistakes. It's an interesting thing that that burden for power lifts in January of 1952. And we felt that it was like flogging a dead horse, going on playing. And yet we felt the prayer hadn't been answered. We never for one single moment thought that the Koinonia, as we called it, was the answer. That this may be the way the Lord was renewing us and was going to save people locally.
[00:37:14] We never thought of that.
[00:37:17] Yet the burden lifted.
[00:37:19] That's part of another story that perhaps we'll tell on another one of these evenings. But the fact is that we began to grow in number very slowly. Of course, we were ostracized completely. No one would touch us with a barge pole.
[00:37:38] When we wrote to ask people to come and speak to us, they used to write back. Some of them never even bothered to answer. Others did answer and some even said, we would love to come among you, but it would be misunderstood.
[00:37:50] And so we never. I don't think in those years we ever had anyone except dear Mister Sparks and some of those who came over for whom we have been so tremendously grateful. It was the Lord's goodness, of course. Now when we look at that, look back on the whole thing, I believe, like Joseph, we can say they meant it for evil, but the Lord meant it for good. God was doing that something to protect us from. Protect us from all those people who'd like to come and sit and just kill the whole thing. Those who like to just come to Sunday, go to meeting christians, you know, they kind of will kill anything. And he protected us from all of them, so we never got swamped by spectatorism. But those who really came to us were either saved amongst us or they ran a gauntlet because they were so hungry and in need that they, they wanted something more for which we thank God. Well, after a few months in a private home, we felt that really we'd got to meet someone. We felt we were wearing out these poor folks home and we were all youngsters and very sort of, you know, irresponsible in some ways. And so we thought it would be good to get. And so we, we heard about the community center. Now the community center is next door to the synagogue in the heart of the town. And as near to the place we are, came from the church. I came as you can possibly get.
[00:39:11] They said they had a room on the top floor that they would let to us at a very nice price. It was the Royal Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society room. The walls were covered with the most beautiful photographs, many of which we had to turn to the wall before we could decently meet in that room. One of the steward's jobs was to go through the picture dwelling, anyone alike, and turn certain one to the wall. But to get to this room, we had to go down into the basement through all the stage props, often very ill lit cellar, and then up some rickety steps to the top. Now, sometimes the person who was supposed to open up on Sunday never arrived till about 11:05 and we were supposed to be up there meeting at eleven. And we became more and more disturbed. By now, it was at this time that we were seeking the Lord. We made one big mistake at that time. We created elders and deacons. We did it the most spiritual way we knew how. We had a couple of weeks of prayer and fasting and then we set aside three elders and four deacons.
[00:40:18] They were neither elders nor deacons, but never mind. I mean, that was our big mistake. Later on we were to learn that what a mistake we had had made. But we thought it was a biblical pattern. And we looked in the scripture and we saw that they seemed to always pray and fast about these things. So we thought that was the way to get elders and deacons. The Lord would say, so and so is an elder, so and so and elder, so and so elder, and, you know, we'd get them that way. We made a big mistake there.
[00:40:43] We moved into the community center and at the same time as we were there, we asked the Lord, what about a place to meet? Lord, we would you have us have a place to meet? Now, when I look at the scripture he gave us, I really am amazed at the way we got a hill on Richmond hill out of it. A house on Richmond hill out of it. But it is a well known passage in Isaiah two, and it says, it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall come to it, shall flow to it. Peoples will go and say, come here, and let us go up to the mount of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Now, it was in a prayer meeting. One person got this, which is also in Micah, chapter four, the exact same word. And two other people had the precise same passage. Two of them had never, ever read that passage before, and therefore they felt this was absolutely from the law. Someone else read it out. They said, oh, I've got it. So we knew then that somehow on the mouth of three witnesses, it was established as we prayed. Only the Lord could do this. You see, it was prophecy. It was a prophetic word. We didn't believe in people just speaking in those days, a word from the Lord, but it was a prophetic word. Somehow we all knew that God was going to give us a house on Richmond Hill.
[00:42:08] I find it very funny to think that it came from that verse. But we all understood it clearly, and we were unshakable in our conviction that God was going to give us a house on Richmond Hill. We began to pray for it. We made a few half hearted attempts to find different places. Nothing came. And then one day when I was out in Richmond, I went to look for different places. And on that particular occasion, I went to look at an old warehouse down here in Redline street. Now, Marks and Spencer's and I had passed under the old bombed out arcade. Your older folks will remember it. And above it was rather beautiful. It was the Astor Club, which was closed down for immorality by the police. That was one of the places we'd prayed for every night for four months, and the police closed it down. I met dear old misses Cajer, John and Arthur Cajer's mother. She was a most godly woman and a great prayer intercessor. And she said, what are you doing? I said, I'm looking for a place for us to meet, my dear. She said, that's a big work. So I said, well, I'm just about to give up. Don't give up. She said, I'm shopping, but I'll pray.
[00:43:10] Well, I said, while you're shopping. Oh, no problem at all. I'll pray while I'm shopping. She said, go on, don't give up. So I went up the hill, nothing, came down to this warehouse, nothing. And then went round and suddenly I saw a little note go to Burton's. It said, apply to Burton's for this. This was this place above. I thought, that's funny. Is the Asta club finished then? So I went into the great big man came. I'd never ever asked for anything like this before. And he said, what do you want? And I said, I've come about the advertisement and so on. And he said, really? I said, yes. And he said, what are you? And I said, well, we have a group of christian people. I said, what did you want it for? And I told him, he said, well, that's a very strange thing. Well, I said, I understood that wasn't on the market. He said, it wasn't till an hour ago.
[00:43:55] Now, he said, I will give you the first option. A pound a week, he said, for the whole lot. But he said, you must be prepared to be tipped out with a week's notice.
[00:44:05] Now, the council had an argument with Mister Taylor's, and though they owned this property, the council told them that nothing could be developed for probably 14 years. And so we went into this place. We had to clean the whole place up well and truly. Some things on the walls, written on the walls, really. We had to sort of shut our eyes while we scrubbed it off.
[00:44:27] I mean, it was not a very nice place. And of course, the christians, they got very upset again about us. Oh, they said, first they go to cinemas, then they take steamers, now they're in a nightclub. Whatever next? Where else will that boy lead them? And so we started the nightclub, cleaned it up, devoted it to the Lord. Many of you will remember that place. We had a new carpet and huge interlined curtains, which the Lord provided for us, but it was great picture glass windows. And then we were very happy there we were, right in the center of the town. We could go out fishing. People came in off the street, but it was. We were only there less than a year. And suddenly one day the water poured into the roof. Now, what was the point of our mending the roof or doing it of the big things when we only paid a pound a week and might be out in a week, we just didn't know we had. Unofficially, we'd be there 14 years. But we wondered.
[00:45:22] And then suddenly I came back and I found a man walking, a very officious man. He became a friend later, but he was an extremely officious man. He was going around like this.
[00:45:32] So I went up. I thought he was nuts. I went up to him and I said, excuse me, what are you doing? And he turned round, he said, excuse me. He said, have you got permission to meet in this place? And I said, what's that got to do with you? So he said, I happen to be the chief building inspector for this area.
[00:45:50] He said, I understand that you're meeting here as a church. Have you got. He said, for one thing, he said, that whole fire escape's got to be fireproofed. He said, we can close you down, you know. So then I said, oh, I didn't know anything about this. So he said, well, you better get moving. And then he became reasonably nice. He said, now, you've got to do this. You've got to. When we got a man in about the roof, I think, if I remember right, it was 200 pounds. When we asked about the fireproofing with asbestos of the staircase, it was 250 pounds. 450 pounds. And we all, as always, we prayed about it. We had a prayer time, we shared it with them. What are we to do? We spent 450 pounds on this place. We may be turned out in a week.
[00:46:28] What are we to do? When we asked the Lord this prayer, this promise about a house on the hill came right back to us and everyone said, we're on the move. And I said, oh, but just wait. We've got these new curtains and this new carpet. Surely the Lord doesn't waste like that. And then I suddenly thought, no, he doesn't. That'll be the key to the house. The carpet will fit perfectly and the curtains will fit perfectly. And everyone said, yes, yes, yes, that must be so. And so we started where, I can tell you, we went all over the place. We went to Lord hall, belicious house, which is up east, east Sheen Road, if some of you are at the top of Sheen Common Drive, magnificent house. And I remember when we went in there with that great garden and we went in the ballroom with all white paneling and gilt and parquet flooring. I thought, my goodness, this is it. And then we went into a thing which could have been a lovely library, and then we went into a. A room that was really as big were much bigger than the study downstairs. And it was all lined with royal coburg blue italian mosaic ceiling and floor. It was a sunken roman bath. And of course, as soon as we saw it, I said, the baptistery. We don't have to have a baptistery. Here it is. You know, we were convinced that place was. It was only 7500 pounds. With this as new 1954. Oh, we thought, this is it. This is it. Not a penny came. Not a penny.
[00:47:56] I could have kicked the saints. I thought they could have given something more than that, you know. Only a penny, surely. I thought, some of us can give a five pound note or something. It's a lot to us in those days. But someone could give. No, not a penny. Then anchors to house came up. Oh, we got so excited about anchors House. Some of you will remember that right on the top of Richmond Hill with its own garden into Richmond park, beautiful house with Cumberland Greenslate roof. Oh, it was so beautiful going for auction. That also went for seven or 8000 pounds, if I remember. And we were sure that was it, not a penny came.
[00:48:32] So then we began to wonder. And then on this Tuesday morning, I woke up very early in the morning. And the moment I woke up, I could do nothing but think about a particular house on Richmond Green. Now, the funny thing is Richmond Green. This is the flattest part of Richmond you can get to. It's certainly not on the hill, not in any shape or form. But I had this strange burden. This house had been on the market for a whole year. It, of course, was bought by Richard Attenborough and Sheila Simm. It was for 17,500 pounds was the selling price. I went, I just felt such a burden. I phoned up the other two brothers and said, what shall I do? And they laughed. They said, well, we've only got 50 pounds, 17,900. When I say I've got the most extraordinary burden about, well, they said, if you've got the faith, go. So I went down to Chancellor's, went in. There were a lot of young men, as always, behind desk doing nothing. And then an old white haired gentleman at the end stood up and he said, yes, sir. And while all the other boys were yapping and talking to one another I walked forward to the old white haired gentleman and he said, what can I do for you? I said, I'd come about and such as that. I mentioned the house on the little. On the green and, oh, he said, I'm so sorry. He said, it's been on the market for a whole year. He said, do you know that we signed that this morning at 10:00 he said, and do you know how much it went, boy? It went for 12,500. Oh. I said, I didn't dare tell him we only had 50 pounds. So he then said, please sit down, sir. And I sat down, and he said, could I take the details? And I gave him all the details. He said, now, where do you live? And I told him where I live. And I suppose he thought, well, because he's got money. So he put it all down, you see, and so on. And he said, now, listen, sir. He said, I am quite sure that we will find you the house you want. Rest assured, we will be in contact with you within the next month. And we got up and he escorted me to the door. I felt. I was only, of course, youngster then. I felt very important being escorted to the door by this dignified, silver haired gentleman. But when he got to the door, he was an old man. I reckon he was near 80.
[00:50:33] And when he got to the door, suddenly, he began talking to himself, just even saying, well, you'll be hearing from us, sir. He then said, just wait, just wait. And I wheeled round, and the old man had his hand on his head. No, no, no. He. How silly. I wouldn't even. He wouldn't be interested in it, not if he was prepared to pay a sum like that. So I said, excuse me. What is it? Oh. He said, I don't know why I thought about it. It's been on our dead book for 13 years. I didn't know what a dead book was, of course, in those. He said, I've been on our dead book for 13 years. He said, no, sir. He said, this is not for you. He said, it's got a wood boarding beetle, dry rot. It has no damp. Course.
[00:51:14] He said, it's deadlift, sir. He said, it would be a wild goose chase if you went up there. Wait for us, and we'll find you the right place. Well. I said, I don't know. I'm rather interested in this place. Where is it? He said, it's a school of art in Halford Road. School of art in Halford Road? I said, I've known Halford Road since I was a boy. I've never seen a school of art. He said, oh, yes, sir. He said, it's been there since 1710. So I said, well, I'm very into. Oh, subdube advised. He said, you're just wasting your time. He said, it'll be a load of trouble to you. No, I said, I think I'd like to see her. All right. So he said, if you want to. All right, we'll send someone up with the key. What time? I said, 02:00. So at 02:00 I think. You ken me, I think, and Mister Tad. We stood outside that door. Of course, it wasn't a porch like that, nor a door like that. And we all three thought, uh oh, this is nothing. A little boy came with a great big key. Didn't. And the man didn't come, the old general, nor one. Young men came, put the great key and swung on it. The door creaked open, and the smells that hit us, I shall never forget. When we went in first, there were holes in the floor. That's downstairs. You had to be very careful. He said, mentor, you've got to be very careful where you walk. There were holes. There was fungus growing on the wall in most. Oh, magnificent. I mean, any sort of mycologist, I think they're called, would be so interested in seeing huge things going right up to the ceiling. All the plaster had fallen away in heaps on the ground. There were great gas brackets, like enormous metal mushrooms that came out of the ceilings. Huge pipes came out of the wall, went up. They were painted silver and went back into the wall. We never found out what they were. There were enormous great stoves in the center of the rooms. When we came upstairs to the library door and got hold of the library, the whole handle came away in her hand. And then when I got hold of the door, the whole door came away and just went to powder.
[00:53:06] I went through it all and I thought, oh, no, no, Lord. I thought to myself, I can think of that scripture. This is how the enemy can get you. It gives you scripture. Sometimes I thought to myself, every good and perfect gift cometh down from the father of lightsaber. I thought, this is not good and it's not perfect. And then I thought, think of the work. Think of the work. But Ken and Mister Townsend said, my, look at the space we've got. Can you believe it? In the center of Richmond, space like this. Got a hundred in that room and many more in this room and downstairs. So we decided, as always, to pray about it. Now, we never told the company what we thought. I never told them that I was against it, and they never told the company that they were for it, or at least that they were more sympathetic. We just said, here is a place.
[00:53:52] It's on the lower part of Richmond Hill. And Mister Townsend said, where all the damp has come, it's come right down the hill to it. But he said, is it the Lord? They want 3000 pounds for this place.
[00:54:06] We prayed and we did something I don't suppose we'd ever do again. We came to a unanimous decision to offer 200.
[00:54:15] Now, for us youngsters, that was an enormous sum of money. We had 50 pounds and none of us were really wage earners. We were all students and we know where are we going to get that sum of money. So we wrote our letter off offering 200 pounds and back came a letter within a few days to say that they were very interested but they felt that our offer was rather low, would we care to reconsider? So we did. We did reconsider and we asked the Lord again and we got the figure 400 pounds. And someone said, why not add the 50 pounds we've got? So we've got to trust the Lord for 400. We'll offer 450 pounds. So we sent the letter in, 450 pounds. Back came the reply, since we believe you're going to do a good work, we have treated or received favorably your offer of 450 pounds, providing you can give it to us in cash within seven days. Now, of course, we were overjoyed and then our knees began to knock because we got 400 pounds in seven days. Where do we find? And we began to pray. It was our first real experience. Now, when we used to have those squashes, the steamer squash, it cost us 30 pounds to hire that steamer in 1952. And we trusted for every penny of it, we never asked anybody, never asked parents or anything for help. We trusted the Lord for everybody and every penny came in. Now we felt we've got to trust for 400 pounds. We didn't write letters, we didn't make telephone calls, we didn't tell anybody. We just trusted the Lord together amongst ourselves. And within one week the pound 400 came, including an extraordinary little gift from New York from a sister who had heard about a work in Richmond, didn't know what it was for, but had sent 23 pounds.
[00:56:02] It was extraordinary how we got that 450 pounds. Of course, we really didn't know too much about the house. Isn't it interesting that we paid 450 pounds for this house? And listen to this, if we had spent the 450 pounds for renewing the other old nightclub premier we were in, we would have lost the whole lot for literally two months later, when we were just about to come into here, every single person in the whole of that area, all the shopkeepers, got a week's notice to get out overnight. Burton sold to Marks and Spencer's, Marks and Spencers were in favour with the town council and they gave them the go ahead for redevelopment.
[00:56:50] Now, we would have spent 450 pounds if we had a new roof, fireproofing, and the whole thing would have been pulled down. Some of the shopkeepers were so angry about us. I remember one of them I'd known from childhood saying to me, fancy treating your friends like that, you Christians. He was jewish. You can never be trusted. Never be trusted. He said.
[00:57:07] He said, you knew. I said, no, we didn't know. He said, dare come off it. He said, of course you knew. You've been searching for a house for these last months. They gave you the tip off because you were a christian organization.
[00:57:18] So I said, no, they did not. I said, we prayed about, and God gave us the tip off. And he looked at me very, very queerly.
[00:57:29] We did so. You see, the 450 pounds we would have spent on that place would have gone down the drain, whereas the 450 pounds was part of a miracle here.
[00:57:41] It was amazing because we didn't really know what we'd bought. That was the funny think. Oh, it must seem very strange for people to believe this story, but we hardly knew what we bought. We knew we had a couple of very old tents next door in the house. Dear old professor Hulla Brown, who was a professor in music and who really looked like a Queen Anne antique. He had Queen Anne Cabriole legs, you know. He was the sweetest old gentleman. He was an agnostic, but he was a dear old gentleman. Always slept. Never slept indoors, always. He lived till he was 97 years of age and he never slept indoors. Once he used to sleep downstairs by the fire escape, out in the open, all through the winter. Think of that, everybody. Yes. Never went in once. Dear old Mister Hullabad. We never knew what the garden consisted of. We had no idea. We knew we had a studio over there that was half falling to pieces. We had no idea. We got an old lady living there. She was also 86 and 40 division.
[00:58:39] Really. It was an extraordinary, extraordinary situation. And the hullabrans were lovely people.
[00:58:50] They paid us one pound 50 for the whole garden and house per week.
[00:59:00] They had the most wonderful old dog that had gone white with age, a cat who had a relapsed back, the stomach dragged on the ground, and an old hen. That was the last of 14 hens they'd had in the war. And these three slept together in the same basket. And those of you who can remember our first meetings here because some of the christians got a bit upset when we used to sing hymns. The dog used to go ooo.
[00:59:25] Do you remember? Yes, just behind the door was. It was the most extraordinary thing. We grew to love the hullabrands. I remember the occasion. I wasn't actually present, but Misses Haller told me when Mister Haller was playing the piano in the corner and all of a sudden the whole piano and hulla brown went down to the floor like a, like a cinema organ and it was the dry rot underneath. And misses Haller just went on knitting. She didn't suddenly she looked up and saw his pink head, you know, his bald with sort of white fringe of hair just a foot above the floor. Well, we didn't really know what we had taken on when we bought this house. The first reconstruction work was not done by Bill, but was done by a firm. They moved in and we had to have four basic things done. The roof, which of course leaked from here, we had water going right down right way through for years. By the way, the place had been empty for 30 years and derelict for 13. This side of it, of the house, the water used to go right and we had to have that done. That was a major thing. We had to have the foundation done because we understood there was no damp course. And the third thing was water had to be put in. And the fourth thing was light. We had no light, no electricity in this place, so that had to be put in. Those were the four main things. It came to 1250 pounds, much more than we paid for the whole property. And we had six weeks in which to find that money. And oh, we were so thrilled, having felt like God had provided the 450 pounds within the six weeks, every penny of the 1250 pounds came in and we were able to pay all our bills on time and we felt it was a marvelous testimony to the Lord. Then, of course, from then on it was we got really basically that downstairs room, that was the meeting room we had downstairs. This was just a great big storeroom at that time.
[01:01:28] From there we went to the study and got the study done, which was the best room in the house, actually, as far as repair was concerned. Then we went to the hall and got the hall done and then of course, we came up here to the library. It was a gradual recovery. Now, by then Bill Richards had come in to us. Many of you know Bill Richards, he's a cockney.
[01:01:52] He was a huge, strong man.
[01:01:56] His arms seemed to me to be the size of my legs and he was able to do anything at that time. We were very, very glad to have him, but he was an agnostic. He said himself he had no faith, didn't believe in that company. And when I remember at the time, you may, some of you will remember this, some folks have very tender consciences in this company. And they felt it was a dreadful thing that we were employing the man and not telling him that we had no money. Now, from my point of view, I couldn't understand their dear tender consciences. I said, that's not his business. It's our business. I mean, as far as I can see, it's our job to try. We know we haven't got any man. We've got to trust the law. Why tell a man who's an agnostic we've got no money and give him problems? But they went on and on and on about. So in the end, I said, all right, I'll go. And I felt such a fool. I went to see Bill, and I said, bill? Yeah. I said, you know, we're christians. Yeah. So then I said, well, we have no money. Is that so? He said, so I said, yes. I said, we're creon people. I said, we've got no money amongst us at all. But I said, we trust God. And I said, we ask God to meet our needs. And he does. So now I said, are you prepared to work all God? Course, of course. He told me later he didn't believe a word I said, you see, he said to me later, he said, of course. He said, I looked at you and I said, I looked at the house. I thought they got money. Got it down the back. That's the way the christians talk. They say, got no money. We trust God. Then they go down to the bank and take it out and give it.
[01:03:34] And so actually, every time he needed money, the money came. So naturally he thought we had money. I mean, he used to say, now I shall need a timber bill. I need the money for the timber bill. On Wednesday morning, such and such a time it came, we gave it to him. Then he said, I will need on Thursday morning such and such a sum of money. And it came, and we gave it to him. And there was, you know, really no great problem there as far as he was concerned. And then came this occasion when we needed 300 pounds on Thursday morning. And when it came to Thursday morning, Bill came to me about 10:00. And he said, has that money come? He got to learn our language by then. He said, has that money come? And I said to him, no, it hasn't. And he looked at me very strangely, because afterwards I realized he was really saying, well, have you forgotten to go to the bank. And then he said, well will it come? And I said, have you done the job properly? Well yes. He said, maybe a screw here and a screw there. Well I said, see that, that screw here and there is put in because I said I'm quite sure God will meet the need. I said, when do you have to have it by 02:00 till he said to get it into the bank, my suite. Then I said, it'll be here by two. Oh, he said, I'm so glad. And he went out. Of course he thought I'd forgotten to go to the bank because we hadn't. The first mail had come, no money. Second mail came, no money. There were eleven of us christians around in the house that day. And I remember saying to everybody, look, we've all had to go into the library here and pray. So we, all of us christians went in the library, shut the door, got an Anne's in the circle and began to ask the Lord. Now Mister Luck was in on that, I remember that very well. And Bill came in through the back door, passed kitchen, up these stairs. Now then he didn't knock on the door, he was on very good terms. He just opened the door and to his amazement he saw this eleven circle of eleven christians on their knees praying. And he heard Mister luck saying, lord, we ain't got this 300 pounds, give it to us, we've got to have it now, Lord, within the next ten minutes.
[01:05:30] And of course Bill shut the door. I heard the door open and I heard, and I heard the door shut and I thought, and then I heard.
[01:05:41] And then I heard bump, bump, bump, bumped down the stairs. Of course Bill told us afterwards, he said, I never felt so sick, even when I was drunk. He said, I've never felt so sick as I did. He said, all I could do was God, God, they ain't got no money, they're trusting the Lord.
[01:06:01] What a fool I'd be. And he went down the stairs and on the doormat at the bottom of the stairs he found 301 pound notes. He scooped up this great mass and there was a terrific noise. As he came up those and he opened the door, he said, you can all stop playing, the money's come.
[01:06:21] It was 301 pound notes. Now to this day I know how it happened, because he had walked past that door just a few moments before. Did someone stand outside the front door flicking through 301 pound notes through a very small letterbox? In those days, how did they had as much faith that we'd get it as we had, that they would give it because in actual fact, anyone could come and taken the whole 300 pounds and gone.
[01:06:45] It was amazing. But we thanked God. But then I began to think, and I say this, this against myself because I suppose there are many of you like myself. Immediately we get to work in our little noddles and we begin to think. Now, I thought, one of us here is wealthy.
[01:07:04] Must be, must be. I thought to myself, that's amazing. Fancy keeping that a secret all this time. I know. And yet we've got someone here riding on the inner side who hears us playing and then goes to the bank, takes it out and gets it.
[01:07:20] So deceitful are we all in our ways of thinking. And then. And then. God has great humour. Bill came late one Wednesday evening, I shall never forget it, at about 07:00. And he said to me, here, he said, lance, I forgot to tell you earlier, he said, I need a hundred pounds for timber first thing tomorrow morning. And I was so annoyed, I said, bill, fancy coming up this time. I said, what do you expect us to do at this time? You should have told us. Oh, he said, but I thought you prayed. Of course I prayed. I said, of course I can. I said, it's the ethics of it. Actually, I was being quite deceitful because in my little head I was thinking, there's no prayer meeting tonight and the person with the money is not there to hear the prayer.
[01:08:06] I mean, that's how we all think, really, when you come down to you, I'm being honest, so you can judge me on this matter, but really, we're all very much like that. We taught to think to ourselves. Well, well, well, so and so must be the one who gives. And so I swallowed it and said, oh, yes, Bill, yes, of course the Lord will provide. And she drew and went off and I went back home and I said, oh, God, you really have got to meet this need. Now I'm the only one who knows. And Bill. Bill doesn't even know you. And next morning I came. I. I swear that I almost heard a divine chuckle. There were two bills and the third letter was from the Hebrides, posted four days, posted three days before and in it a check dated four days before. The cheque was for 100 pounds. And the letter said, I've had you on my heart for three weeks and I can't get you off. I. The only way I can do it is by giving you this checkpoint. I don't know what it's for, but you must surely know. Well, I did.
[01:09:09] I felt as if the Lord was saying, now, who is this rich person in your prayer meeting who hears there are many other such things as that. Of course, when you realize that when we first came here we didn't even have chairs to sit on. Well, we had some of them because we had a few we'd bought for the other house, but that was literally all. We hadn't got an easy chair, we hadn't any tables or anything really like that. And of course the first piece of furniture that really came was the old grandfather clock downstairs. This belonged to a dear old jewish antique dealer in Richmond that I'd known for years. He was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and he used to have periodic rows with his wife. And on this occasion he had a triffic round with his life who told him that this clock which was lumbering up her hall was either to go or she would go. And so Mister Wolfe, he got hold of me and got me into the shop and said, do you want the clock? And I said no, we don't want a clock. But he said, but this is the most wonderful clock. So I said yes, I know it might be a wonderful clock, but we don't need a clock. I said, we need chairs to sit on. I said, and take to eat from. I said, we don't need a clock, but you must have this clock. You will never have such three pounds. No, no. And then I said to him, what's it like? Oh, he said, it is magnificent. Now my friend Betty, some of you know her, appeared behind him and signaled to me, take it.
[01:10:37] And so I said to Mister Wolf, oh well, all right then, if it helps you, I said, I'll take it. Three pounds. Yes, three pounds. So he said, well bring it up. Yes, bring it up. And this old grandfather, everyone here, those of you who are present know how people sat down almost on the ground and wept with laughter. They said, you must be nuts, you've got a grandfather clock. We haven't got anything to sit on. Well, I said, I don't know. But I said, and they said it doesn't even go. Because they said to me afterwards, does it go well? I said, wolf, he says it goes. How do you know he sold you something you don't know? Well, I said, someone will come in and put it right. And do you know my mother suddenly walked in at lunchtime with a friend that we've known as uncle for many, many years. And he came, as he walked round and looked at the old house, he said, what's that down there? He said, lovely old clock. Yes. I said, grandfather, does it go? He said, I have no idea. He said, I'll take away and get it going. I didn't know you did. Oh, he says, my hobby. He took away the clock and he did it, and it sort of gone ever since. Of course, Mister Fowler has got to work on it and done a bit more work on it, but I mean, it went beautifully. And then the most extraordinary thing of all, those of you will never forget this. Those of you were there that evening. We were all cleaning up downstairs when there was a knock, knock, knock on the door. And I went to the door, and there was a strange man, looks if he stepped out of. Out of a story of Dickens. And he said, I am Lord Asquith's french polisher. And I said, really?
[01:12:04] Yes. He said. He said, I believe there's some furniture here to be polished. I said, furniture? I said, we haven't got any furniture in this place. I said, we've got a few metal chairs, and that's about all we've got. And then I thought, the clock. The clock. I said, we've got the case of an old clock. I said, it's in the kitchen. Come in. I said, never look. And he looked at this old clock. It was black, because if it'd been painted black with woolworths. Black paint, you know, jet. And he said, I'll get that done for you. And he opened the little bag, and he started. And I was on the other side of the thing in that, in the study, and I remember this old gentleman coming across. He said, yes, sir, you must come. You must come. He said, that's a very valuable clock. I said, is it? He said, where did you get it from? So I said, well, it's an old friend of mine in the town. I said, I bought it for three pounds. Oh. He said, I'm sure it's a catalogue clock. He said, look at it. When I went, I couldn't believe it. He'd got all the stuff. And there was that beautiful clock downstairs, all that work inside. Of course, it was a clock from 1710, same age as the house. We couldn't get over it. We were amazed, because Wolfie never got over it either.
[01:13:11] The whole jewish community in Richmond used to stop me about that clock and say, wasn't it funny about Wolfie at the club?
[01:13:20] Oh, yes. The fact of the matter was that we saw some amazing things. You take that. That library there. There's not a stick of furniture in that library. That wasn't a miracle. We wanted to get it ready for Brian and Ivy's wedding. They wanted to have the wedding here so that the family wouldn't all get there wouldn't be a booze up at the wedding. And we prayed like that. We wanted a real christian wedding for these two. And so we had to get that room done, but we didn't know what to do, so. So we prayed about it very much, you see, but it seemed as if it was going behind and behind and behind and behind. And I remember when we beeswaxed that floor, no one could stand when you stood on it, you stuck to it.
[01:13:56] And we had to get carpets for it. And we prayed so much about the carpets. And then misses Manclark phoned up and she said, lunch. She said, have you thought of going to Hamptons, misses mancluck? I said, hamptons of Kensington? I said, the most expensive carpet people in London. No, she said, you can get some, some real bargains sometimes. She's like, they've actually got the sales on today. She said, why don't you phone up the manager, get onto him? She'd just ask him. Well, I said, well, I've tried everywhere else and there's just nothing. I said, I will. We felt we had to have carpets down there. We couldn't have the wedding reception. That was the point, really. So we. I phoned up and I thought, I'll speak to the manager. Got through to the manager. The manager came. Yes, sir. I said, excuse me. I said, we are wanting two medium quality Wilton broad loom of the same loom, cedar green carpets, a twelve by ten.
[01:14:48] Oh, he said, you've seen our advert.
[01:14:52] So I said, no, I've not seen any. Oh, he said, well, he said, he said, that's extraordinary. You mean you haven't seen the advert? No, I said, but he said, it's in the Evening standard.
[01:15:01] He said, didn't you see it? It was out at lunchtime. No. Well, he said, he said, we're selling these carpets, but he said, we've put down a few things. And he said, one of our bargains is 212 by ten, super quality cedar green. He said, listen, if you come today, they will be 120 pounds each, but if you come tomorrow, you can have them both for 100 pounds.
[01:15:25] So then we went up. Misses Manclark took me out my car. We looked at the car. As soon as we saw than we knew that was it.
[01:15:32] So we said we had ten pounds. We put it down as a deposit, we had no more. And when I came back, there on the desk was the rest, 90 pounds by carpet. So the carpets came. That old lamp in there that people used to criticize so much cost 27 pounds.
[01:15:54] Solid old lamb.
[01:15:58] I remember the curtains came, they arrived on the front doorstep, a bale of purple velour.
[01:16:06] We couldn't afford that because everyone said, oh, they're getting so magnificent at Halford House. I mean, why are they spending all that money? But in actual fact, we weren't spending anything from the treasury. It just came in the most extraordinary ways. The wallpaper there. We had such a fuss over that wallpaper because it cost in those days, if I remember, twelve and six are roll. And everyone said, there's no need to have twelve and six a roll. Why didn't we have one of the three and four shilling or five shilling ones out there? The boy did. It's been there since 1956. He put on another wallpaper, you couldn't have had it there for. But it was so amazing that it was given to us and we put it on the wall still. People sort of said, oh dear, dear, dear, it shouldn't be, shouldn't be. But we. Brian and Ivy's wedding came. We had the reception there and we were full of praise for what God did you know the old cornfield by constable, that is in fact supposed to be a real constable. The story behind it, it belonged to the old gentleman who was the warehouse under us in the arcade now Marx and Spencer's. And he always looked upon us as his lucky mascot. He said, since you people moved above, above me, the Lord God has blessed my business.
[01:17:16] And he surely did. He was the only one who had a 14 year lease. The Marks and Spencers couldn't get him out, so they gave him thousands of pounds for every year of his lease. Overnight he made a fortune. And he was so thankful to us. He gave me the picture in the study downstairs and one or two others, and he said, you know that cornfield, I'll keep it for you. No one else is going to get it now, I used to think. I'm sure it's all talk. He said, it's a real constable. No, it can't be a. Three years later, the library was ready. I went to his old shop down queue Road, peered through the window. I couldn't see any constable there. And I went in, I said, mister Arnold, where's that old constable? Did you really keep it? And he said, of course I did. How dare you doubt me? He said, it's behind that great victorian sideboard. I've had dealers from all over the country. After that, I've shoved it behind there. He said, you can still have it for the price size. Said, you could have it ten pounds.
[01:18:05] And that's the coast. Of course, many of the other pictures were the same.
[01:18:09] Of course, this didn't come out of the treasury. You understand that, like many of the other pictures downstairs, the old stag, Monica the glen, four shillings and sixpence. The Glencoe picture and the one in here of the river hipsy in south Wales, ten shillings each, 50 p inch.
[01:18:27] The Heaton Cooper ones downstairs, 25 shillings.
[01:18:32] They were in the old money. I mean, it was amazing the way all these things just came in. The furniture, the furnishings, everything. And all with a blend. So that in the end, we were amazed that, in fact, people said, what taste. It's all been put together so beautiful. But in actual fact, God changed our ideas. We had a certain ideas, but we had to go by what God provided. And God just quietly changed it. And it turned to be infinitely more tasteful. Now, I think, well, leave the story there. There are many others which I will go on tomorrow and tell you a little more. And then I'll tell you a little bit about why we believe God did this with us. But don't you think that is amazing? Haven't we a cause to praise the Lord? Of course, it's continued right up to the present, only we've got more used to it, I think, of exactly what's happened over the past year or two. It is just as amazing. But, of course, we are so used to it that we're in danger of forgetting to thank the Lord. Now, I don't believe that God just does this with bricks and mortar anywhere. There's a reason for it. And that's what we've got to get to the root of. Why did God do it? Why did he favor us? It wasn't because we were special as people. It was because he wanted to reveal something and express something. And therefore it is a trust. It's as if God is saying, like he did to the jewish people, I chose you because I loved you, not because you were anything in yourself. Because I wanted to give you a responsibility for the rest.
[01:20:15] I wanted, through you, to reveal something. Now, that means that upon every member of this part of the family of God, a most solemn responsibility lies. May God help us both to be thankful, to be encouraged in faith, to be devoted to the Lord. And committed to all that he means in what he has done. Let us pray.
[01:20:46] Dear Lord, we've told a little bit of this extraordinary story this evening and to morrow. We will go on.
[01:20:55] But, Lord, we pray that thou wilt not allow it to be entertainment.
[01:21:00] Don't just, Lord, let it be a tickling of our fancy, a kind of titivating of us. O father, we pray that we may be challenged to trust thee. Challenge, Lord, to commit ourselves 100% to thee. O Lord, where does partial blindness give us sight? Where we don't understand what thou art doing? And thy ways open our hearts to thee in fuller ways, Lord. But Lord, our prayer is do something in all our hearts.
[01:21:36] We pray this, Lord, for the youngest here tonight. That they may be encouraged to trust in thee. Because thou art not just altogether in the invisible, but that thou dost do things that are quite practical in the scene, in the material, in the physical. Lord, hear us and we shall give to thee all the praise and the worship in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
