AN INFIDEL WHO WAS LED TO THE CHRIST BY BRO. BRANHAM

The following excerpt is taken from the last but one sermon (LEADERSHIP Covina, CA December 7, 1965 Vol. 65, No. 48) preached by bro.Branham before he went to be with the Lord.
."....And we was talking the other day about how the sun rises in the morning---it’s a little baby, real weak, not much strength to it at all.  And as the day goes on, it gets stronger and stronger.  About eight o’clock it enters school, like a young boy or young girl.  And then about eleven o’clock it’s out of school, and it’s ready for its service.  And then across till about three o’clock it changes, in the middle life into old age.  And then dies in the afternoon.  Is that the end of the sun?  No.  It comes back the next morning to testify that there is a life, a death, a burial, a resurrection, see.   
25 We watch the trees, how they move and what they do.  I was some time ago down in Kentucky---I like to squirrel hunt---and I went down in the fall of the year there to squirrel hunt with a friend of mine.  And it got very dry.   
26 And anyone ever hunted gray squirrel, know that . . . how hard it is to slip up on them when the leaves just crack.  And, oh, Houdini is an amateur escape artist to those fellows, how they can get away!  And then trying to shoot eye shots at fifty yards, it takes some good hunting to get your limit in a day.   
27 So, Mr. Wood, a friend of mine, a converted Jehovah Witness, was with me.  And he said, “I know a farm over here where there’s a man that’s got a lot of (we call them there) hollers.”   
28 How many know what a holler is?  Well, what part of Kentucky you from, anyhow?  See?  And that’s where I am from.   
29 Like here in one of the chapters not long ago (I have to tell this to Brother Williams and them), they said, “We will now stand and sing the national anthem.”   
30 And I said, “For My Old Kentucky Home.”  Nobody joined in with me, so. . . .    That  was  the  only  anthem  I  knew.   
And  so  we  was,  now. . . .     
31 [Brother Branham is handed a note.]  “Please have prayer, for a lady in here now is bleeding at the nose.”  All right, 
sir.  Let us pray.   
32 Dear God, I ask You, Lord, Thou art the great healer and I ask that your grace and mercy will touch this dear woman 
just now and stop that blood.  As a believing people who’s assembled together. . . .    The  lady  has  come  here  to  enjoy  the 
Word of the Lord and the fellowship of the people, and I ask You, Lord, just now, to rebuke the enemy and stop the blood.  In Jesus Christ’s name.  Amen.  (And we believe it.  We believe it.) 
33 On with the little story just to kind of get a feeling before we get right down in the few notes I’ve got written here, and some scriptures.   
34 Now, he said, “Well, this old man, we’ll go over and see him.  He’s got a lot of hollows in his place,” he said, “but he’s an infidel.”  He said, “He’d just about curse us out if we went over there.”   
35 I said, “But we’re not getting no squirrels here.”  We’d been camping two weeks, and we was dirty, and beard all out over our face.   
36 He said, “Well, let’s go over.”   
37 So, we went a few miles down, about twenty miles.  I’d been in the country down there once before, for three nights at a Methodist campground, where there had been some great things the Lord had did---a great healing service amongst the Methodist people.  And then we went way back over some hills and hollows and ridges.  And you just have to know Kentucky to know it, what kind of a place you had to get into.  And while we went back there, we come to a house; and there sat an old man . . . two old men sitting out there with their old hats slouched down over their face.  And he said, “There he is,” and said, “he’s a tough one.”  Said, “He hates that word of a ‘preacher.’ ”   
38 So I said, “Well, I just better sit in the car, or we won’t get to hunt at all.”  I said, “You go in and ask him if we can hunt.”   
39 So, he got out, started walking in.  He spoke to them.  And in Kentucky, always, you know, it’s “come in,” and so forth.  And so, he went up there, and he said, “I just wondered if we could hunt a while on your place.”   
40 The old man sitting there, about seventy-five years old, tobacco running down his mouth, he said . . . spit, and he said, “What’s your name?”   
 He said, “My name is Wood.”   He  said,  “Are  you  any  relation  to  old  man  Jim  that  used  to  live. . . .”     He said, “Yeah, I’m Jim’s boy.”  Said, “I’m Banks.”   
41 “Well,” he said, “old man Jim was an honest man.”  Said, “Certainly, help yourself.”  He said, “Are you by yourself?”   
 He said, “No, my pastor is out there.”  
 He said, “What?”   
 He said, “My pastor is out in the car.”  Said, “He’s hunting with me.”   
42 He said, “Wood, you don’t mean you’ve got so low down till you have to tote a preacher with you wherever you go?”   
43 So, he was a rough old character.  So, I thought I’d better get out of the car, you know.  So, I got out and walked around, and he said, “Well, then you’re a preacher, huh?”   
44 I said, “Yes, sir.”  He looked me up and down (squirrel blood, and dirt), and he said . . . I said, “Don’t look much like it.”   
45 Said, “Well, I kind of like that.”  He said, “You know, I want to tell you something.”  He said, “I’m supposed to be an infidel.”   
46 I said, “Yes, sir, I understood that.”  I said, “I don’t think it’s much to brag about, though.  Do you?”   
47 And he said, “Well,” he said, “I don’t know.”  He said, “I’m going to tell you what I think of you guys.”   
 I said, “All right.”   
48 He said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”  And how many knows what that means?  See?  It means it’s a lying 
dog, you see; the coon’s not up there at all, see.  He said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”   
 I said, “That’s to opinion.”   
49 And he said, “Well,” he said, “look, you see that old chimney standing up there?   
 I said, “Yes.”   
50 I was born up there, seventy-five years ago.”  And said, “I’ve lived right here in these hills all around through all these years.”  And said, “I’ve looked towards the skies, I’ve looked here and there, and surely, in all these seventy-five years, I would have seen something that looked like God.  Didn’t you think so?”   
51 I said, “Well, it depends on what you’re looking at, what you’re looking for.”   
52 And he said, “Well,” he said, “I certainly don’t believe there is such a creature.  And I believe you fellows just simply get out and swindle the people out of their money and everything.  And that’s the way it goes.”   
53 I said, “Well, you’re an American citizen, you have a right to your own thinking.”   
54  He  said,  “There’s  one  guy,  one  time,  that  I  heard  of,”  he  said,  “that  I  would  sure. . . .    If  I  would  ever  get  to  talk  with that fellow,” said, “I’d like to ask him a few questions.”   
 I said, “Yes, sir.”   
55 He said, “It was a preacher; you might know him.”  Said, “He had a meeting up here in Campbellsville, not long ago, in a church yard up there, a campground.”  And he said, “I forget his name.”  Said, “He was from Indiana.”   And I said, “Oh?  Yes, sir.”   
56 And Brother Wood started to say, “Well, I. . . .”     
  (“Don’t  say  that.”)    So  he  said. . . .    I  said,  “What  about him?”   
57 He said, “Well,” he said, “Old Lady [somebody] up there on the hill. . . .”    Said,  “You know, she was dying with cancer.”  And said, “Wife and I would go up there of a morning to change her bed.”  Said, “They couldn’t even raise her up high enough to put her on the bedpan.”  Said, “They just had to pull a draw sheet.”  And said, “She was dying.  She had been to Louisville, and,” said, “the doctors had give her up and said she was going to die.”   
58 “And her sister went up to that meeting.”  And said, “That preacher was standing up there on the platform, looked back over the audience and called this woman by name, and told her when she left she took a handkerchief and put it in her purse.  And called this woman’s name down here, twenty miles below here, and said how she was suffering with cancer, what her name was, and all she’d been through; said, ‘Take that handkerchief and go lay it on the woman,’ and said that ‘the woman will be healed of her cancer.’ '  
59 And said, “They come down here that night.”  And said, “Honest, I heard the awfullest screaming up there.  I thought they had the Salvation Army turned loose on top of the hill up there.”  Said, “‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess the old sister’s dead.’  Said, ‘Tomorrow we’ll go and get the wagon (and how we’d take her out to get to the main road),’ and said, ‘so they can take her to the undertaker.’ ”  And said, “We waited.  No need of going up that time of night,” said, “about a mile up on the hill here.”  Said, “We went up there the next morning, and you know what happened?”   I said, “No, sir.”   
60 He said, “She was sitting there eating fried apple pies and drinking coffee with her husband.”   
 I said, “You mean that?”    He said, “Yes, sir.”   
 “Oh,” I said, “now, mister, you really don’t mean that.”   
61 He said, “What bothers me is what . . . how did that man, and never in this country, and knew that?”   
 And I said, “Oh, you don’t believe that.”    He said, “It’s the truth.”   
 I said, “You believe that?”   
62 He said, “Well, go right up there on the hill; I can prove it to you.”  He’s preaching back to me now, you see.   
63 I said, “Hmm-mmm.”  I picked up an apple, and I said, “Can I have one of these apples?” and I rubbed it on my clothes.   
64  He  said,  “Well,  the  yellow  jackets  are  eating  them  up,  I  guess  you  can  have  one.”    And  now  I  said,  “Well. . . .”    I  bit  into it, and I said, “That’s a nice apple.”   
65 He said, “Oh, yes.”  Said, “You know what?  I planted that tree there, oh, forty years ago, or something like that.”    I said, “Oh, is that right?”   
 “Yes, sir.”   
66  And  I  said,  “Well,  and  every  year. . . .”    I  said,  “I  notice  we  haven’t  had  no  frost  yet---it’s  early  August.”  And I said,  “Them leaves are falling off the trees.”   
67 “Yes, sir.  That’s right, it’s coming on fall.  Believe we’re going to have an early one this time.”   
68  I  said,  “Yes,  sir.”    Changed  the  subject,  see.    And  he  said. . . .    I  said,  “Well,  you know, it’s strange,” I said, “how that  sap goes out of that tree.”  I said, “And them leaves falls off, and yet there’s no . . . they haven’t had no frost to kill the leaf.”   
69 And he said, “Well,” he said, “what’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?”   
70 And I said, “Well, I was just wondering.”  (You know, Mama always said, “Give a cow enough rope and it’ll hang itself, you know.”  So, I just give him plenty of rope.)   
71 So, he went on out, and he said, “Well, yes, what’s that got to do with it.”   
72 I said, “You know, God brings them apples up, and you enjoy those apples and leaves, and you sit in the shade and so forth.  It goes down in the fall of the year, and,” I said, “comes back up again with the apples and with the leaves again.”   
73 And he said, “Oh, that’s just nature.  See, that’s just nature.”   
74 I said, “Well, of course, that’s nature.”  I said, “That’s nature, but somebody has to control nature.”  See, he said. . . .   “You tell me now what does that?”   
75 He said, “Well, it’s just naturally nature.”   
76 I said, “Who is it that says to that little leaf now, and the. . . ?”    I  said,  “Now,  the  reason  that  leaf  falls  off,  it’s  because the sap goes down into the root.  And what if that sap stayed up in the tree through the wintertime?  What would happen?”   
77 Said, “It would kill the tree.”   
78 “Well,” I said, “now, what intelligence that runs that sap down into the roots, said, ‘Get out of here now, it’s coming fall of the year, get down into the roots and hide’?  And stay down into the roots like a grave, and then next spring comes back up again, brings up more apples, and brings up more leaves and things.”  
79 He said, “That’s just nature; it’ll do it.”  Said, “The weather.  The changing, you know, coming on fall.”   
80 I said, “Set a bucket of water on the post out there, and see if nature runs it down to the bottom of the post and brings it back up again.”   
 “Well,” he said, “you might have something.”   
 I said, “Think of it while we go hunting.”   And he said, “Well,” he said, “hunt where you want to.”   
81 And I said, “When I come back, if you’ll tell me what intelligence runs that sap out of that tree down into the roots to stay all winter and come back the next winter, I’ll tell you that’s the same intelligence that told me about that woman up 
there.”   Said, “Told you?”   
 I said, “Yes, sir.”   
 He said, “You’re not that preacher!”   
 I said, “Would you know his name?”   
 Said, “Yes.”   
 I said, “Branham?”   
 He said, “That’s him.”   
 I said, “That’s right.”  See?   
82 And you know what?  I led the old man to Christ, right there on his own testimony.   
83 And a year later, I was down there and pulled a car (Indiana license on it) in the yard.  They had moved away; he had died.  And so when I come back, there stood his wife to really rake me over.  I thought I had permission to hunt.  And she come out there, she said, “Can’t you read?”   
 I said, “Yes, ma’am.”   
84 She said, “Did you see those signs saying ‘No hunting’?”   
85 I said, “Yes, ma’am, but,” I said, “I have permission.”   
86 “You do not have permission!” she said.  And said, “We got this place posted for many years.”   
87 I said, “Well, sister, I was wrong then.  I’m sorry.”   
88 And said, “Sorry nothing!  Them Indiana license on there, and sit up here . . . you’re the boldest people!”   
  I  said,  “Could  I  just  explain  it?”    I  said. . . .     She said, “Who gave you permission?”   
89 I said, “I don’t know, just. . . .”    I  said,  “It  was  an  elderly  man  sitting out there on the porch, when I was down here last year, and we was talking about God.”  See?   
 And she looked.  She said, “Are you Brother Branham?”   I said, “Yes, ma’am.”   
90 She said, “Forgive me.  I didn’t know who you were.”  She said, “I want to tell you his testimony.  In his last dying hours, he raised up his hands and praised God.”  Said, “He died in Christian faith, and was carried away to God.”  See?