America's Spiritual Poverty

"You feel sorry for us in India because of our poverty in material things. We who know the Lord in India feel sorry for you in America because of your spiritual poverty. We pray that God may give you gold tried in the fire which He had promised to those who know the power of His resurrection...

In our churches we spend four or five or six hours in prayer and worship, and frequently our people wait on the Lord in prayer all night; but in America after you have been in church for one hour, you begin to look at your watches. We pray that God may open your eyes to the true meaning of worship....To attract people to meetings, you have a great dependence on posters, on advertising, on promotion, and on the build-up of a human being; in India we have nothing more than the Lord Himself and we find that He is sufficient. Before a Christian meeting in India we never announce who the speaker will be. When the people come, they come to seek the Lord and not a human being or to hear some special favorite speaking to them. We have had as many as 12,000 people come together just to worship the Lord and have fellowship together. We are praying that the people in America might also come to church with a hunger for God and not merely a hunger to see some form of amusement or hear choirs or the voice of any man."

--Bakht Singh (1903-2000)

Corrie Ten Boom's comments on Bakht Singh:

"Bakht Singh was a Sikh who became an internationally known Christian. Born to wealthy parents in 1903, Bakht Singh was converted in 1929 while studying in Manitoba. Knowing that his parents would not accept his conversion, he returned to India with great trepidation. His fears were well-grounded. His wife left him. His parents and relatives rejected him. Despite suffering from a speech impediment, Bakht Singh became an evangelist. He spent hours a day on his knees studying the Scripture. He carried the Bible wherever he went and urged converts to read it daily. His sermons quoted extensively from Scripture. Revival followed wherever he went..."