Luis Palau, the Argentine-born international evangelist, describes how God expanded his ministry:
I was organizing campaigns for other evangelists, but I wanted to be an evangelist myself. So I was going through a lot of soul-searching and wondering, Will the missionary society I was with understand that I want to be an evangelist? Or do they want me forever to be an organizer of somebody else's campaign?
And the Lord gave me a verse. It sounds a bit bombastic, sort of big-headed, so I don't like to quote it in public. But to paraphrase, the Lord basically says, "I will open up nations to you." I took it personally, as a word from the Lord, and I wrote in the flyleaf of my Bible, "1966 (February, I think it was)—the Lord is going to do this for me."
At that point, we hadn't even had a big campaign in Colombia, let alone anywhere else. We had nice little campaigns. But then in Bologna, Colombia, Dec. 8-12, 1966, we had 30,000 people in the plaza, and the president was watching from the presidential palace. It was a breakthrough, and it just gave me the conviction: God is going to do what he promised.
Once in a while, when I feel things are going slow or income isn't up to par, I go back to that as reassurance. It happened in a great way, but I knew there was still more to come.
