The Country Boy Who Fathered a Nation, Part 1

The name Hans Nielsen Hauge (pronounced Ho-ger) is largely unknown outside his native Norway. This is surprising, given the far-ranging social, economic, political and spiritual impact of his life.

It all began in 1796, when the 25-year-old farmer's son was ploughing a field. He suddenly felt an overwhelming experience of the real presence of God. He burned with love for Jesus and for mankind. 'My mind became so exalted that I can scarcely express what took place in my soul', he wrote later. 'I asked Him to reveal to me what I should do. The answer echoed in my heart: "You shall confess My name before the people; exhort them to repent and seek Me while I may be found and call upon Me while I am near; and touch their hearts that they may turn from darkness to light".'

He first shared the good news with his brothers and sisters, who were all converted. Then he set off as an itinerant evangelist. He developed a pattern of walking great distances every day, holding three or four meetings in villages and reaching large numbers of ordinary people. In the 8 years he was free to do this, it is estimated he covered 15,000 km. He often knitted as he walked; the gloves and socks were then given away to the poor who needed them. Many people came to saving faith in Jesus as a result and then they themselves went out to preach the gospel. A grass-roots revival began to spread among the rural communities.

Hauge was a humble and practical man, full of initiative. He saw the need to educate and equip the common people as well as save their souls. He had an amazing capacity for work, which, combined with his pioneering spirit, made him an entrepreneur to rank with the best.

For Hauge, running a business and preaching went hand in hand. He started a company in Bergen in 1801 to secure a sound economic base for his gospel activities. Thereafter, there was no stopping him! Over the next eight years, he founded fishing industries, brickyards, spinning mills, shipping yards, salt and mineral mines, paper mills and printing works. These created jobs for people who needed work and taught them how to make a living for themselves. He delegated the daily management to those he thought were the most capable, but he was the strategist who planned and motivated the whole enterprise. The profits were always used to invest in new activities.

Hauge became an inspiration to all who wanted to take Norway out of the 'middle ages' and into a new day. New agricultural and industrial methods were developed, and literacy rates rose. A new confidence led to greater economic freedom as Christians were challenged to rebuild society. Norway began to change.

Preacher Burns His Sermons And Catches Fire Himself!

Destitute of the fire of God, nothing else counts; possessing fire, nothing else matters.

Samuel Chadwick was born in the industrial north of England in 1860. His father worked long hours in the cotton mill and, when he was only eight, Samuel went to work there, too, as a means of supporting the family. Devout Methodists, they attended chapel three times on Sunday, and as a young boy, Chadwick gave his heart to Christ. Listening to God's word week by week, he often felt the inner call to serve Jesus. It seemed impossible, as he was poor and uneducated, but in faith he made preparations. After a twelve-hour factory shift he would rush home for five hours of prayer and study.

At the age of 21 he was appointed lay pastor of a chapel at Stacksteads, Lancashire. He found the congregation self-satisfied, but Chadwick threw himself into the work with great optimism. He had been trained to prepare well-researched and interesting sermons as the sure way to bring in the crowds. He recalled later: "This led unconsciously to a false aim in my work. I lived and laboured for my sermons, and was unfortunately more concerned about their excellence and reputation than the repentance of the people."

Soon, however, his sermons were exhausted and nothing had changed. Staring defeat in the face and sensing his lack of real power, an intense hunger was kindled within him for more of God. At this point he heard the testimony of someone who had been revitalised by an experience of the Holy Spirit. So, with a few friends he covenanted to pray and search the scriptures until God sent revival.

One evening he was praying over his next sermon, when a powerful sense of conviction settled on him. His pride, blindness and reliance on human methods paraded before his eyes as God humbled him to the dust. Well into the night he wrestled and repented, then he got out his pile of precious sermons and threw them on the fire!

The result was immediate – he was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire [Luke 3:16]. "I could not explain what had happened, but it was a bigger thing than I had ever known. There came into my soul a deep peace, a thrilling joy, and a new sense of power. My mind was quickened. I felt I had received a new faculty of understanding. Every power was vitalised. My body was quickened. There was a new sense of spring and vitality, a new power of endurance and a strong man's exhilaration in big things."

The tide turned. At his next service, seven people were converted ("one for each of my barren years"), and he called the whole congregation to a week of prayer. The following weekend most of the church was filled with the Holy Spirit and revival began to spread through the valleys. In the space of a few months, hundreds were converted to Jesus, among them some of the most notorious sinners in the area.

The pattern was repeated over the next few years as Chadwick moved to various places. 1890 saw him in Leeds, where the power of God was so strongly upon him that the chapel was full half an hour before the service began, and police had to control the crowds. Chadwick records: "We were always praying and fighting [the devil], singing and rejoicing, doing the impossible and planning still bigger things. The newspapers never left us alone, and people came from far and wide." Within a few years, the chapel had to be demolished and a substantial Mission Hall built.

Always a man of the people, Chadwick would spend his Saturdays mixing with local workers. Once, when his wife was away, he teasingly invited anyone who was lonely to come for Saturday tea. He expected about a dozen. Six hundred turned up! Yet God had already catered: one church member was a baker and had been awoken by the Lord with the order to bake for all he was worth!

Chadwick was a man of prayer and urged others to it too. "The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying,” he wrote. “He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom - but trembles when we pray!"

The final phase of Chadwick's life was spent as Principal of Cliff College, a Methodist training school for preachers, and it was here that he wrote his famous book, The Way to Pentecost, which was being printed when he died in 1932. In it we read: "I owe everything to the gift of Pentecost. For fifty days the facts of the Gospel were complete, but no conversions were recorded. Pentecost registered three thousand souls. It is by fire that a holy passion is kindled in the soul whereby we live the life of God. The soul's safety is in its heat. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, make for a Church without power."

Overcoming Limitations: Quaker Martyr James Parnell

Courageous faith isn’t just for special, brave people. Some of God’s heroes had to overcome serious limitations, even to get started. One such was James Parnell. He was a delicate lad, short for his age and sensitive. He loved Jesus and sensed there must be more than going to the parish church.

In 1653, when he was 16, he heard of George Fox, the leader of the Quakers, who was in prison in Carlisle. Weak as he was, James walked the 150 miles and, fainting with exhaustion, was allowed to visit Fox. We have no record of their conversation, but Parnell was filled with the Holy Spirit and commissioned by Fox to be an evangelist.

He had just two years of life left, but they were amazingly fruitful. A colleague at the time wrote: ‘He was of a poor appearance, a mere youth, coming against giants; yet the wisdom of man was made to bow before the Spirit by which he spoke.'

Disinherited and turned out of home by his parents, Parnell set about the work of the gospel. Sometimes with a partner, sometimes alone, he went from house to house, as his colleague reported, ‘preaching, praying, exhorting, and turning the minds of all sorts of people to the light of Jesus.’ He was ridiculed for his size, and often after preaching he was exhausted. Faith kept him going. Hearing that two Quakers had been whipped at Cambridge, he went there and preached himself.

Finally, Parnell was arrested and imprisoned in Colchester. “I am committed to be kept a prisoner, but I am the Lord’s free-man,” he wrote. His jailers starved him for days at a time, then let him climb down a rope to get food. The jailer’s wife and daughter used to beat him, and on occasions he was locked outside in mid-winter. It was too much for his weak constitution. One day he had no strength left to climb the rope but fell to the concrete below, and died of his injuries, aged 18. He was the first of several hundred Quaker martyrs. His last words to the Essex brethren were: "Be willing that self shall suffer for the truth, and not the truth for self."