Surrender
God has many different ways to bring a man or woman to Himself. He used typhoid fever and the threat of dying at the age of twenty-three to bring Rees Howells to the end of himself. For five months the man’s life hung in the balance. Slowly at first, the heart of this future spiritual giant turned God-ward. When the time was right, God brought a converted Jewish evangelist, Maurice Reuben, into Rees’ life to lead him to Christ.
Having initially vowed to serve God if he lived through the typhoid outbreak, Rees Howells returned to Wales to fulfil his vow. It was 1904 and Wales was in revival. Whatever Rees had heard from his grandparents about the 1859 outpouring of God’s Spirit was being re-enacted before his very eyes. The chapels were filled to overflowing day after day with singing, excited, praying people. Rees worked as a coal miner, lived with his family, but spent every available moment furthering the revival.
Caring for the converts drove him and his friends to the realisation of their own need for spiritual power. Many of the converts backslid. “We blamed ourselves,” he said “because we were not in a place to pray them through to victory.” God’s answer came at the Llandridod Convention of 1906. As Evan Hopkins spoke on the Holy Spirit, that same Holy Spirit brought Rees Howells to a place of complete surrender, and then gloriously filled him.
You and I can do nothing that will ever count for God without the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Are you surrendered? Are you empowered? This is where God started with Rees Howells and this is where He starts with us.
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