William Booth our first General was a remarkable man; I have recently been reading a book that was published last year on his visions, with strangely enough the name “William Booth’s Amazing Visions”. In it the editor David Ravenhill mentions that “For far too long the Body of Christ [for the untrained in Christian jargon that is the church] For far too long the Body of Christ has been asleep on the job while the harvest rots in the fields. The enemy [the devil] has blinded our eyes to the desperate needs around us and caused us to focus on temporal things rather than the eternal values we have been called to live by.”
Now that said it is estimated that two million souls were brought to the Lord through General Booth's ministry. Two million souls! I have been thinking how it would be in my ministry to lead two thousand souls to the Lord, I now think it could be I think to small, two hundred thousand!. In the book General Booth describes how he has a vision of heaven where he talks of how he had attended church, visited with friends, the sick and in fact considered himself quite a shining light. These are his words as he recalled his vision. “But I seldom considered the claims of Jesus Christ and the poor, sinning, suffering world about me.” He goes onto mention that he “went on from day to day hoping that all would turn out well at the last.”
The vision he had related to an illness. This was a vision he had while he was the leader of The Salvation, the vision of a man who was daily leading people to the Lord. In the vision he ended up in heaven and we hear of people having these out of body post death type encounters. This is what he recalls in part. “A strange faintness seized me, destroying my consciousness…I was in heaven!” In heaven he was “reminded how, instead of fighting God’s battles, saving souls by bringing them to His feet. And so preparing them for admission to this lovely place, I had been intent on earthly things, selfishly seeking my own carnal interests, worrying about my own personal cares and anxieties, and spending my life in practical unbelief, disloyalty, and disobedience to all my most sacred obligations.” He then had a thought, “would it be possible for me to obtain a commission, or rather a permission, to go back to the world, to that very part of it from which I had come, clothed in some human form and live my life over again; live it in a manner worthy of my profession of Christ.”