Chapters: 1. Why Don't Men Obey God?
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9 A
CHILD'S PRAYER
In June of 1925 Standard Oil transferred my father to
Yorktown, some fifteen miles west. Dad had been preaching in
Carlos City those three years we were in Parker, and in Yorktown
he was called to preach in a little church at Reed Station. It
was there, at the age of nine years, that I took part in my first
revival, helping my father by leading the singing.
While in prayer one day, the Lord spoke to my mother
concerning my father's ministry. After she had put us boys to
bed that night she came out and said, "Eldon, God has revealed to
me that you will be called by the District Elder of the church to
preach in his district."
"Oh, no!" he remarked. "That couldn't be! I have only a
fifth grade education. I don't know much about speaking
grammatically correct. I haven't had any training. I'm not
qualified, Mary."
"Yes," she answered, "but Jesus has told me that you will be
called soon into full-time ministry."
"I just hardly think so," Dad insisted.
Some four days later we were eating lunch when the phone
rang. A voice requested, "Mr. A.E. Helm, please." When Dad took
the phone, it was the District Elder. "Eldon," he said, "I want
you to take Centenary Church (now Trinity) in New Castle. I
can't guarantee you much--about sixteen hundred dollars a year at
the most. I will need to know your answer by four o'clock
today."
My mother said that my father's face turned as white as
67 death. "Mary!" he managed to say. He was shocked; but my mother
was expecting the call. Glory to God! She knew it was coming.
But my father felt so unworthy, so feeble, so limited in
education. Surely he wouldn't be called. "Do you think I can do
it, Mary?" he asked.
"Of course you can," my Mother replied. She knew that God
was in it. Here my father had a job with Standard Oil paying a
few thousand dollars a year; and three or four thousand dollars a
year income before the depression was times and times more than
that amount now. He had a wonderful position.
He was a born salesman and doing well. What he was sold on,
he could sell. He was so talented in selling that when he
started in Kimmel Circuit in 1945, many years after that, he
decided to sell a Christian publication to as many as he could.
There had been seventeen subscriptions the year before he came
but five had cancelled, leaving them with only twelve people
subscribing. The first year, my father went from home to home
selling this publication and signed seventy-seven subscribers,
the highest increase in the entire conference.
Now he had but four hours to decide what he was going to do.
He then had four little boys and was expecting another child,
which turned out to be two more boys at one time. Would he
remain with the business which was supplying him with an
excellent income and promised him much more; or would he take
this small church which could afford only a limited salary way
below his present earnings?
With such a short time to decide, my father was praying with
Mother, "What will we do, Lord? Will we give up this job and all
its potential to go to a precious little church? What do you
want us to do?" They earnestly prayed to know God's will. A few
hours later my father called the District Elder and told him,
"The Lord being my Helper, I will assume this pastorate."
I shall never forget going with my father the next Sunday
68 to that little church. Do you know how many persons were there
that January morning?--I think there were four women, one man and
a few children. Five adults! Did that look very promising to a
man who had left a profitable and growing business?
But Dad bought himself a good pair of shoes and began to go
from house to house working with the people, praying with them,
talking with them, and loving them. It wasn't long before there
were twenty in service. Soon there were forty. Not long after
there were sixty, then eighty, and one hundred. God was bringing
in the people.
After several months, father felt that the church needed
revival; so he began leading services himself. For about two or
three weeks he preached his heart out, and although the Lord was
helping him, the folk did not respond. They weren't really
listening. Nobody would move. Even today, the heartbreaking
fact is that a great number of people in the church really aren't
obedient. There are very few people who actually obey God. We
simply gather together, preach, testify and pray a little, and
think that this is ninety percent of Christianity. But that is
only about ten percent.
Ninety percent of Christianity is our walking with God:
denying Self--what we want, what we desire and what we think is
good or reasonable--to do what God wants; pressing to obey the
Holy Spirit; assuming the cross joyfully; dying out to the carnal
nature minute by minute and second by second. Actually
living for Christ is true Christianity, and it has
seldom been lived consistently in the ages.
Dad preached and preached, but the key individuals, like
keys on an organ, wouldn't operate, and the divine melody was
unable to play. If the key people would only get right with God,
Jesus would be able to save communities by the thousands.
Once I shared from a pulpit God's revelation to me that if
the key people of that congregation would humble themselves,
confess their faults, and get everything right with God, then
69 there would be hundreds of souls brought into the Kingdom within
a short time. God revealed to me that there were eight thousand
individuals ready to be saved within a radius of three miles of
the church at that time, if we could only persuade everyone in
the church to get right with God.
When God showed me this that night, I was so surprised. I
shared it from the pulpit, and it witnessed to the pastor's heart
strongly. He scarcely had ever had a burden hit his heart with
such power. Several of the congregation also said that when this
revelation was shared, it struck their hearts like an arrow.
You see, it is God who brings the sinners in. We can't do
it. Preaching doesn't do it. Singing won't do it. People and
personalities can't do it. It is the power of God that brings
sinners in and changes them.
Many churches want you to have revival by "Caesarean birth."
This is the method whereby the revival services are scheduled at
the time the church wishes, with the assumption that the
evangelist will bring the sinners in and get them saved. We
might manage to get a few saved in this manner, but if the church
is not cleansed of its criticism, disobedience, and hidden sins,
before long the lambs die. They die on spoiled milk and
clabbered fellowship. Lambs feed primarily from the flock. They
can seldom feed from the shepherd. Many think that the pastor
should take care of the new converts, but it is the sheep who
feed and care for the newborn lambs.
The "milk" on which the lambs feed is the "joy of the Lord."
The new converts feedon the joy which the congregation has in
Jesus. They are fed on the praise flowing from obedient hearts.
They are nourished by the thanksgiving of mature saints, the
sharing of how Jesus has led and directed. When the church is not
in glorious victory, however; when God is not able to be leading
His people and accomplishing His will through them, many times
the new converts are discouraged and soon gone. They are some-
70 times in a worse condition than they were prior to a knowledge of
salvation.
The power of God will work through any church to draw
sinners to Jesus as soon as that body of believers pays the
price. Isaiah tells us: "...for as soon as Zion
travailed, she brought forth her children." (Isaiah 66:8)
Very few people have ever come to soul travail. I have preached
forty years throughout the United States, and I have seen only
two people in soul travail, let alone an entire church body able
to arrive at this holy place of agonizing intercessory prayer.
Why, beloved, it requires a price; it takes yieldedness and
going with God completely before we know much about a "soul
burden." To come, then, to "intercessory prayer" is some
distance beyond this. But far, far, far beyond "soul burden" is
the "City of Soul Travail," and I know very few people who have
ever arrived there.
We make our way to soul travail by self denial, under a
cross, yielded, obedient, and faithful to Christ: letting God
remove from us all carnal characteristics which hinder His Spirit
and wound others. Waiting on God is a necessary requisite of
this pruning process. But, once God can find a body of believers
willing to make the sacrifice--who will come to brokenness
together, confessing all hidden resentments and criticisms--He
could prepare that body to come to travail in the Spirit, and
thousands would be brought into the Kingdom, wonderfully
transformed.
The grand impediment to such glorious victory through Christ
is simply this: the church acknowledges adultery, murder,
cursing, stealing, and drunkenness as sin; but very few church
people are aware that if Satan can manage to inject the slightest
tinge of malice or criticism into only one heart, he has stopped
the spiritual progress of that body just as surely as if that
person had committed a more obvious wickedness.
The reason a number of our churches are bearing little
71 fruit for Jesus is because our roots are planted in the bitter
springs of the carnal mind. Dear ones harbor a touch of malice,
nurse a time-worn grudge, linger over resentments, or conceal a
private criticism in their hearts. These carnal patterns are of
Satan, not of Jesus.
The natural mind tends to minimize the intense seriousness
of these inner attitudes of the heart; but they are as
devastating to the true spiritual effectiveness of the church
body as those evils which we commonly recognize as sin. They are
wicked, horrid, vile, abominable unrighteousness, and grievous to
God. Like any other sin, they stop the entire spiritual life of
the church.
When such carnal attitudes are not confessed and put under
the blood of Jesus, that church body is rendered powerless in the
Spirit. Powerless! Oh, the program and activities of the church
may proceed apparently undisturbed, but the true fire of God will
not be operating in its midst.
Paul tells us in Ephesians that Christ so loved the Church
and gave Himself for it in order that "...He might present
it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or
any such thing; but that it should be holy, without spot or
blemish." God wants His purpose to be fulfilled through holy
people in His church.
My father had preached diligently to these precious people
night after night with no results. One night, Dad asked the
people to come up around the altar that they might pray. They
were willing to come, but none would pray. I was only ten or
eleven at the time, but felt so strongly my father's situation
that I began to pray. "Jesus," I cried, "come down here and help
my daddy! Come into this church, Lord. We've got to have help!"
I don't know what all I prayed, but it seemed to reach the
hearts of these dear people. They began to weep, and before long
the Lord had sent a little awakening. Jesus used a little boy to
break the stony hearts of those good church people. But the Lord
wants to work through adults as well as the
72 children. He wishes to operate in our lives. He longs to move
in our souls.
My father had relinquished his job and a secure future to go
with God, and Jesus honored his trust by saving souls in that
community. Hearts were truly converted. Individuals were
transformed by the power of His blood, and God began to raise up
a faithful people.
Dad preached there from January, 1926, to April, 1928,
although we moved back to Parker in September, 1927. Father
didn't think he could live thirty miles away and still do justice
to his charge, but the congregation said, "We want you to
continue to pastor the church here." So he drove thirty miles
each way from Parker to the south edge of New Castle to conduct
services throughout the winter.
Mother and Dad owned a Chevrolet, at that time, which had no
side windows; but only curtains, which flopped back and forth in
the wind. Our folks would cover the six of us boys with
blankets, and we would huddle as close together as possible.
With the temperature sometimes down to zero and the wind pouring
through those curtains all the way home--my, it was cold!
Sometimes it was rather late when we started home. I recall one
night when my father prayed till midnight with one man before he
met Jesus.
On one journey I was with my father alone, and it was so
cold driving home. Dad said that I would have frozen to death if
he hadn't sheltered me from the wind. But because he protected
me with his own body, he was so frozen by the time we arrived
home that Mother thought she would never get him warm. She had
to heat comforts and blankets to put over him for several hours,
and he was quite sick the following two or three days.
On another occasion, returning home late one particular
Sunday, it was so cold that the radiator froze. Dad stopped by
a stream and told Mother, "I'm going to see if I can find a can
or a pail underneath the bridge here, then go down to that patch
of swift water to fill the radiator." If you can,
73 picture my father out in the bitter cold of this dark night,
groping through the snow beneath that bridge hoping to discover a
can or pail. The chances of him finding even a tiny can in
condition to hold water were mighty slim. In the meantime, his
family of seven all sat shivering in blankets, trusting that he
would get them home safely.
Suddenly his foot clanked on something! He reached down,
and up from the snow rolled a five-gallon pail with a scoop on
it, and the bottom was still in it! Praise the Lord. My father
made his way to the rippling water where the stream hadn't
frozen, and with that pail carried the water necessary to fill
the radiator. He wrapped a blanket around it and it didn't
freeze again all the way home.
My parents were striving to be faithful to the purpose God
had for them, and He, in turn, provided for them time after time.
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