Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!
Here is a story written by Henry McLain for the Azusa Street newspaper in Los Angeles, California in 1906. It's his personal testimony when arrested for street preaching.
When I first went down to Whittier from Los Angeles, as soon as I got on the streetcar to go down, it seemed the power of God came on me, and all the time I was there and during the trial in the courtroom I felt the power of God. I could hardly sit on my chair in the courtroom. I knew it was all in the order of the Lord for me to be arrested and put in jail. The Lord wonderfully used me. I never had such power of God on me as when I was in that jail.
As soon as we we would come in after supper, after working on the chain gang during the day shoveling dirt, I would get my Bible and call the men into the big room and the Lord gave me their tongue, the Spanish language. I did not have that tongue, until I went into the jail.
As I would talk with them, the tears would run down their faces. There was not one of them but was weeping bitterly. Then when I went into my little cell, after I got done preaching, two or three of them would come in and talk with me a long while. Most of the men were from Mexico. Two or three could talk English and they could interpret English for the others. I did not know what I was saying in tongues, except as they interpreted for me.
When I was preaching to them in tongues, I read the 55th chapter of Isaiah to them in the Spanish language, with my Bible in my hand, but I did not know the chapter, nor that I had read it until they told me. I never had the Lord use me so much before as in jail. It seemed wave after wave of power would run over me. There was hardly a night I would sleep more than an hour or two. The Lord was giving me messages to give them.. Bless His holy name.
William James Roop
