New Understanding from Rees Howells

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Once again, the Spirit carried out His plan in our lives in an unpredictable way. I was back home attending the Keswick Convention. A man I had vaguely heard about in relation to a revival in South Africa called one afternoon with his wife. He was an imposing powerful figure, formerly a Welsh coal miner at the pit face; and his wife was equally imposing. My first sight of them rather scared me. What did they want with such as myself—merely a missionary on furlough?

They invited me in quite urgent terms to come and visit them in their new Bible College at Swansea in South Wales. The two were Mr. and Mrs. Rees Howells. I had not the faintest idea of the enormous impact his life was to have on me. My first reaction was not to accept their invitation. What were they up to? However, having said I would go, a few weeks later I did go.

Mr. Howells suggested we take a walk together. That was the end of my reluctances and the beginning of a great light shining into me in some
particular realms. Our conversation was like a pure, flowing stream of the Spirit. I was caught indeed, becoming almost like a son to him. Each time I returned home from my continual visits to The College, Pauline would ask nervously what new thing I had come back with this time!

That “new thing” became a new understanding of the principle of faith in action, as plainly seen in the men of the Bible in Hebrews Eleven. This was not just how to walk and live by faith in the happenings of daily life. It was how to be confronted with the impossible and incredible, as were those Bible men and as I saw in Rees Howells’ life, and then to see how faith was to be changed into substance.

There was also the whole principle of what Rees Howells called, in Bible terms, the life of the intercessor—the highest calling possible to a
redeemed human. This is what has made the book Rees Howells, Intercessor, with the shocks it imparts and which I had the privilege of
writing, such an atomic explosion.

It is a best seller, even called by some the greatest book they have read outside the Bible. One man distributed 50,000 and another 20,000.
Additionally, Doris Ruscoe has since given insights into this life of intercession in a further small book, The Intercession of Rees Howells.

This reality of being an intercessor lies at the heart of each of my life’s experiences which I’m sharing here. Hopefully, others can begin to
recognize the Spirit Intercessor in action in their own lives and come alive to His further “high callings.” It was God’s marvelous purpose in those early years to give me such training for my coming major intercessions through my constant visits to Rees Howells.

He was continually referring to the intercession of C.T. Studd, whom he had never met. Insistently he said he “knew” him in the Spirit as an
intercessor for the gospel to go to “every creature.” Studd had paid the full intercessor’s price for gaining it, Mr. Howells said. God would only pass on the baton, as it were, to another who had paid the same price, and thus would walk in the same prevailing faith and sacrifice. Rees
Howells evidently foresaw what had certainly never occurred to me, that Pauline and I were being prepared and fitted for that “high calling.”