Mike Bickle emphasizes the urgency of responding to God's call through a Fivefold Action Plan based on the book of Joel, which highlights the seriousness of a broken covenant with God. He calls for a sacred assembly where individuals lament and seek God with all their hearts, recognizing the gravity of their spiritual state and the consequences of their actions. Bickle outlines five key actions: consecrate a fast, call a sacred assembly, gather the elders, gather all the inhabitants, and cry out to the Lord, stressing that these steps are essential for healing and restoration. He illustrates that God's desire for His people is simple yet profound, urging them to prioritize their relationship with Him amidst societal crises. The message serves as a reminder of the importance of corporate prayer and repentance in seeking God's mercy and intervention.

Session six, and those that don't have the notes, we have them at the back. Got a couple hundred extra copies for those that don't have the syllabus. Okay, we're gonna begin, this is our fifth class, but session note six. We're gonna cover the sixth set of notes. Then we're gonna take a break, and then in our sixth class, after the break, we'll do session notes seven and eight. We'll do two, again, sets of notes in one class, like we did earlier. Father, I ask you, in the name of Jesus, for the release of the spirit of revelation. Father, I ask you that as we open our heart to the message, the forerunner message, in the book of Joel, that you would touch us. I ask for those taking the eSchool, those listening right now, live on the internet, that you would release the spirit of revelation and conviction to them. Touch their heart, Lord, even now, as you touch the people in this room. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, session notes number six, the Five-Fold Action Plan. Let's just read the passage straight through. And before I do that, I wanna give a first, a statement of introduction to this section of Scripture, and that's that the theological framework behind a sacred assembly, and a sacred assembly is where they gather for a day or two, and they fast and pray, and they focus on the Lord. That's a solemn assembly or a sacred assembly, both terms are used in the Bible. The theological framework or background to this is the fact that God's in covenant with His people. That's really the underlying theme of the whole book here, of the book of Joel, and what we see is the effects of a broken covenant. That's why there's an agricultural crisis, the locust plague, the military invasion, is because God takes covenant so seriously, and when God makes covenant with a people, the consequences of blessing are greatly increased, but the consequences of judgment are greatly increased if the covenant is broken. And so you don't really understand why the severity of judgment and negativity, or why the great extent of blessing and prosperity, until you understand how seriously God takes the covenant, and when God makes a covenant, He commits Himself in a deep way, and when we make a covenant back to God, or as a whole nation did, the nation of Israel, the Lord requires a deep commitment in return, and He goes, I will crown this covenant with great blessing, but I will disturb the people who make a covenant with me, but do not keep it, because I want them to know how seriously I take the covenant. So there's the negative consequences and the positive blessings, and without understanding that, the book of Joel, you can't quite get really the main storyline that's going on, it's about the relationship that God has with His people based on covenant. And so I just wanted to give that background to this book here, let's read Joel chapter one, verse eight, and then verse 13 and 14, to kind of get the overall flow of it, and then we'll break it down verse by verse. He says, lament, in verse eight, lament like a virgin, girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth, what a graphic picture, of the woman that's betrothed to be married, and her husband dies, we'll look at that in a few moments. He goes, lament, be grieved at that level, because the broken covenant, and the negative consequences of it, are that weighty, and they, it's appropriate to grieve at that level if you understood the reality of what's in front of you. Then he goes on, now he's talking about how to restore the covenant, and how to get it right with the Lord. Verse 13, gird yourself, and lament, you priests, he talks to the professional clergy, to the spiritual leaders of the nation, well, you who minister before the altar, and that altar is in the temple, in Solomon's temple, come and lie all night in sackcloth, you ministers who minister before the Lord. And then he makes an interesting statement that we wouldn't fully appreciate, but in Joel's day, it was really a weighty concept. He said, for the grain offering, and the drink offering, they are withheld from the house of God. Now, what that means is that the grain offering, and the drink offering, they were offered twice a day. They were part of the sacrificial system where they offered animals, and they offered a different grain and offerings to the Lord, food offerings to the Lord. They would offer them to the Lord twice a day as an expression of the covenant. But when the locust plague came, the food was destroyed, so they could not offer the grain and the drink offering because there was not the materials to offer it. And these were expressions of the covenant. Now, the reason this is so serious is because if God would allow the covenant expressions to be suspended, if God allowed the crisis to get to that degree that the suspension of the covenant worship system would be suspended, I mean, what the nation of Israel was to understand is that the blessings were being suspended as well. God is saying, I'm letting the communion table, and I'm letting the ministries, leaders, all go defunct, meaning there's everybody, all the priests are gonna be fired, there's gonna be, in our context, no baptism, no communion, no worship service, no prayer room, it's all bankrupt, it's all gone. And the meaning was, if God would allow a crisis to hit the nation that would interrupt the worship program that he established, then God is very disturbed and very serious about the nation's attention because the covenant blessings are suspended as well. So when he said the grain and the drink offerings are withheld, God's not supplying what he requires for the worship system to continue because the Lord doesn't want your worship right now until you return with all your heart. I mean, that was a huge statement. The Lord's saying, I'm not gonna supply the worship system which releases the blessing until you come with all of your heart, I'm even shutting the lights off, so to speak, I'm shutting the system down, I'm closing the buildings down, I don't want you to gather and go on with the worship festivities if your heart is not connected with me. In Malachi chapter one, the prophet Malachi said the same thing, in essence he said, the Lord speaking through the prophet Malachi, the Lord said, I wish that somebody would go in and shut the doors of the worship house rather than have you worship me with this kind of facade. I would rather somebody shut the doors, lock it, and shut the system down rather than you have pretense of worship because God says, I don't want it that way. That's what he's saying here in this passage. It goes on verse 14, he says, consecrate a fast, call a sacred assembly or a solemn assembly, another translation says, gather the elders, gather all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord, that would have been the temple, the Temple of Solomon, which was a very massive, large worship complex in the city of Jerusalem. One of the great wonders of the ancient world was the Temple of Solomon, which was called the house of the Lord, and he said, and cry to the Lord. So that's the passage we're gonna look at. Let's just look at, start there in verse eight. He says in Roman numeral one, the call to lament, the call to get in touch with the reality of the seriousness of the situation, to get in touch with it to such a degree that you respond to it in an appropriate way, which would be lamenting, sorrow, anguish. He goes, if you don't have sorrow and anguish, you're not grasping the gravity of what's at stake, that the covenant has been violated and even nearly suspended, at least the blessings are. God was committed to the covenant, but that generation, they were all but living outside the covenant. And judgment was coming to wake up the nation so that some of them would wake up then, but then the next generations would live in the light of this discipline, and they would not wanna make that mistake again. So sometimes the judgment and discipline of God in one hour is actually preserving the people in the decade to come, and even the generation to come, it's teaching them the seriousness of the covenant so they won't take it so lightly in the years, even the months and years ahead. He says, gird yourself like a virgin, girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. Verse 13, gird yourself and lament. Paragraph A, Joel's calling the nation to come before the Lord, again, to lament, to get in touch with the grief and the pain in light of the crisis, the crisis of the broken covenant and the crisis of the impending judgment. I mean, the judgment that's there, but it's increasing, it's getting worse and more severe as the weeks and months pass. And he's calling them to wholeheartedness. He wants them to understand the severity of what's happening. Paragraph B, Joel saw the severity of the current as well as the coming crisis. He wants them to see it. Joel saw it, but they didn't see it. They were kind of nonchalant. He goes, don't you understand? It is not business as usual right now. They were just going about their day, times are hard, the locust plague had hit. He goes, stop, don't just fix the locust plague with natural ways, trying to like, you know, bolster up the agricultural problem and crisis and fix it. Stop, get in touch with the big picture. Do you know what's happening? God's heart is grieved. God's heart is even angry. God is zealous to correct it, stop. Do you understand how weighty and how serious an hour we're living in from God's point of view? God is not pleased right now and things are going to get worse. That's what he's telling them to do. See, it's Joel's urgent call that the people of God make it a top priority to respond to God, to come with lamentation unto wholeheartedness. They would feel the weightiness of the situation and then it would motivate them, it would spur them on to wholeheartedness. Now what pain and pressure cause, not always, but this is the Lord's desire for the pressure that's happening in that community. The devil has another motive and another desire, but God's desire is that the pressure would cause the people to stop and ask deep questions about their life. When the pressure's there, it's so hard, they're facing discouragement, they stop and they begin to ask questions. Is anything wrong in my walk with God? What is my life about? What is eternity about? What is God about? Pressure creates a situation where people ask questions and God knows that. And so he allows pressure for that reason. Now other people respond to pressure in another way, they just get bitter and they get more determined to sin. But some people actually draw back and ask questions. That's what Isaiah meant in Isaiah 26, 9, when he said the judgments of God teach righteousness to a nation. It means it stops people from business as usual, they take a step back and they ask deep questions about their life in God and about the meaning of their life and what they're doing. And in that process of asking questions, they turn their heart to the Lord or they recommit themselves to a new level of righteousness. Another thing the pressure does is that the pressure moves some of the opportunity for sin. Some of the pressures, the judgments of the Lord, he says, you can't turn off the things that are causing you to sin, so I'll turn the lights off for you so you can't go there. I'm gonna help you because you can't make the decision yourself, I'm gonna create a circumstance, you can't walk that sin out. I'm gonna shut the door, so to speak. I'm gonna cut off the opportunity to help you make sense of what your life is about. Now, in Hosea chapter two, this is not on the notes, verse six and seven, God told Hosea the prophet, Hosea two, verse six and seven, he said, I'm gonna head you in with thorns. Circumstances, I'm gonna hem you in with thorns. Have you ever been hemmed in by thorns to go to the right, ouch! You go to the left, ouch! You get hemmed in, he said, so that you would seek me and return to me. So the guy can't stop his immorality, he can't stop the other things. The Lord says, I'll hem you in to make it really hard for you to do it. You don't want the Lord to hem you in because when he hems you in, it's to cause you to turn because he loves you, but he hems us in with thorns. And that doesn't feel good, but the point is of pressure from God's point of view is to get us to ask deep questions, number one, and to hem us in so that we have a, he's helping us make choices we should have made without being hemmed in. Paragraph E, Joel was telling them, and Joel one, if you read throughout the whole of Joel one, there's no class of society exempt from the plague. The righteous and the wicked, everybody was under the pressures that came on the city and the nation. In verse five, the drunkards, they couldn't get their alcohol. They sobered up, and a lot of them came to sound mind when they sober up, and a lot of them don't, undoubtedly. Verse eight, the young couples, they were troubled. Verse 13, the priests, the spiritual leaders. Verse 11, the farmers, the agricultural leaders. Verse three, the elders, the political or the governing leaders of the nation, not just the spiritual leaders, but the actual political ones. Chapter two, verse 16, all the children, everybody was affected by this crisis and pressure that touched the city of Jerusalem and the land of Judah. Paragraph F, Joel gives a graphic picture of the current crisis, but remember, the current crisis is building, so it's gonna turn into a greater crisis. So it's accurate to say the current increasing crisis that's gonna become a worse crisis, but it takes years for the crisis to build, but it builds slowly but steadily to a negative crescendo to get the attention of the nation. That is the track our nation is on right now. We have been in crisis for some time. Different people could pick different dates where it began. For a couple of decades, we've been in crisis, and the crisis is mounting up, and the noose is getting tighter and tighter, and many in the church are becoming more and more compromising, and others are beginning more urgent and asking deeper questions. And many in society are becoming more careless, but others are becoming more concerned, and they're asking deeper questions. And let me tell you, the crisis is going to increase and increase in drought, agriculture, economic, political confusion, military conflicts. They're building, they're building slowly. There's reprieves. The Lord draws back, says, America, I'm trying to give you a chance to respond, and there's people responding all around, because while the pressure's building, at the same time, there's another storyline. People are becoming more committed to the Lord. People are getting saved. The Spirit of God's moving in greater ways. So both dimensions of this vast drama are happening right now, even simultaneously across our nation. But in F, he likens the crisis to a bride who's engaged, who's betrothed. And in our context, it might be the engaged bride or the bride even on her wedding day in an extreme situation. Or in the ancient Israel, they were betrothed maybe a year before they actually had the wedding ceremony and the consummation of their marriage vows. They would be betrothed, which they would be legally married. We would call that engagement. And so what he's telling them here, he says, you've got your wedding dress all ready to put on that day. You've had the ceremony. You're right there having it or you're about to have it. He says, take off the wedding dress and put on sackcloth. I mean, what a horrible picture. The woman preparing for the day of her wedding, she lays aside the wedding dress because a crisis so huge is hitting the land that it's equal to the crisis of her losing her husband suddenly on the day of her wedding or the week before or whatever as the drama is building in her young heart to get married. He says, suddenly the bereavement, the sudden loss of your husband, that is the kind of level of gravity of what's happening in your nation, but you're spiritually not in touch with it. You don't have enough spiritual discernment to see the gravity of what's really happening in the spirit. God is disturbed. And God's patience is allowing time to pass, but he is disturbed. Now I'm gonna say it boldly. God is disturbed at what's happening in America. It's not okay what's going on. And it's getting worse and worse while yes, there are those in the church that are getting more and more on fire, but a collision of two kingdoms is coming together. But many in the church are going in the wrong direction. People in covenant with God, they're getting more loose and more in agreement with the ungodliness in our culture. And the Lord's going to speak louder and louder and louder through judgments, as well as he speaks louder to those that are saying yes through the release of his spirit. So let's go to top of page 54, paragraph H. After four waves of the locust passed, it took some weeks for these four waves. And some would say even longer, a wave of locusts in verse four came, then a second wave, then a third wave, then a fourth wave came. And each time the crisis became more troubling. There was the locust invasion, paragraph H at the bottom, then drought, then the Lord withholds the rain, then the fires. But he says, and then all the economic crisis and the depression in the society. And then Joel says, before long, there's going to be a military invasion. And the people are going, we can't bear this. He goes, I urge you stand before God and get right with him because you're in covenant with him. And therefore the stakes are higher. Whenever the blessing is higher, whenever the relationship with God is higher, the blessings are higher, but so are the consequences for being unfaithful to the covenant. They are higher as well. Roman numeral two, what God wants is so simple and it's so different than what man is seeking. Man is seeking to fix society through different economic means or political arrangements. And that's good to do that actually. But that cannot be the primary thing we do. What God wants is so simple. It's so simple, anyone can do it, but it's so simple that so few do. Top of page 55, the story of Naaman is a classic story. Naaman, paragraph B, he was the commander of the king of Syria. Now the Syrians were enemies of Israel. This was an enemy commander. I mean, he was attacking Israel. He had lepers, he became a leper, a very powerful general. And then in paragraph one, second Kings five, they sent for the prophet Elisha, a Jewish prophet and a Syrian military leader. That's a bad combination, but Elisha said, okay, I have the word of the Lord for you. The Lord wants to show you mercy. He goes, go wash in the Jordan River seven times. This makes this man mad. He goes, what? That's all? Just go take a bath seven times in Jordan River? No way. I want some kind of dramatic, you know, some dramatic kind of miracle service. He goes, no, just go jump in the river seven times and your leprosy will go. He goes, no, that's absolutely ridiculous. Plus the fact that to a Syrian King, the Jordan was the river and the bad guy's river, the enemy river. He goes, no, no. Why don't I go to my own river? Lord says, no. Paragraph two, look at this, second Kings five. And they went and they told the king, I mean, Naaman. They said, Naaman, why are you so upset if Elisha would have asked you to do something great or difficult? If he would have asked you to do something really hard, give a million dollars and, you know, make some great sacrifice, you would have done it. But he's asking you to do something so simple. Why won't you do it? And the answer is, it's too simple. Go jump in a Jewish river? How could that help anything? What God's asking us to do is so simple. He goes, body of Christ, call a meeting, gather the people who love Jesus in the area, spend a day, have them repent, have them worship, have them ask me for mercy. That's it, that's what I ask. Well, anybody can do that, but almost nobody does. Lord says, that's all I want you to do is that. Yes, those other things, fix the economy, those things, work on those. Those are secondary measures. What you need is my favor. You get my favor by doing it my way. I will heal the land is what he's saying. Paragraph C, 2 Chronicles 7. Now, this was what God spoke to Solomon 400 years before Joel. He spoke this word, Solomon 400 years before Joel. Now, let's read this, 2 Chronicles 7, verse 12. The Lord appeared to Solomon. This is where Joel got his doctrine of the solemn assembly, right here. God appeared to Solomon. Where did we get this idea of gathering together to cry out with fasting and prayer? The Lord appeared to Solomon, here it is, 400 years before Joel even was on the scene. And the Lord said to Solomon, I've heard your prayer. He goes, now, I wanna tell you some things, verse 13. When I shut up the heavens and there's no rain, shutting up the heavens means drought. If I cause drought to come to Israel, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or I send a pestilence among you, if I do these things and you all gather together, if my people who are called by my name, if you'll repent, if you'll pray, if you'll gather together, I'll heal the land. I'll heal the economy. I'll heal the agriculture. I'll drive the locusts away. I'll cause the pestilence to leave the nation. And so this is the original idea of how Joel, I mean, this is where Joel got this originally, was from the Lord directly. This is so simple that anybody could do it. And the Lord's awakening more and more people around the nation, more ministries, in the last 10 or 20 years to really take hold of this. I tell you, our own Lou Engle, the Lord has used him so powerfully in stirring up the holy imagination of people across America by solemn assemblies. I've talked to different leaders. They've never had one ever. They thought, we never even thought about it until we went to one of Lou's deals. And now it seems like that's something we should have been doing a long time ago. So I'm so grateful for God raising up Lou and others all through the lands who are calling the people together. It doesn't have to be a massive rally of 50,000 people. It could be 10 people gathering in a home to spend a day in fasting and prayer, crying out for their city, their neighborhood, their region. Sometimes there's a crisis in a neighborhood. There's a crisis of civil unrest or there's strife among the people. There's many types of crisis. And the believers, 10 of them from two or three churches could gather together in a person's home for a day of fasting and prayer, cry out. God will answer those kinds of things. Doesn't have to be a national solemn assembly every time. It can be a neighborhood one. So God gives Joel this thought, paragraph D, this five-fold plan. We're gonna look at this quite straightforward so we don't have to spend a lot of time on each one. It's so plain. It's what he wants. It's like he told Naaman, go dip in the river seven times. And Naaman said, I'd give you a million dollars, but to dip in a river, I mean, only take me a few minutes, but it's dumb. I don't wanna bother with it. It's ridiculous. The Lord says, gather, don't eat lunch that day and tell me what I tell you to tell me and repent of your sin. That's all I'm asking. That's all I'm asking. You don't need any great education. You don't need money to do that. You don't even need food. Matter of fact, you don't need anything. Just sit in a room and tell God what he tells you to tell him and repent of the things that you know are grieving the spirit and ask him for mercy. And God will heal neighborhoods, cities, and nations. It's remarkable. Let's turn to page 56. No, let's go to 57, turn to page 57. Let's get right to the fivefold plan. Number one, I'm looking at Roman numeral three, but number one, consecrate a fast. Number two, call a sacred assembly. Number three, gather the elders. Number four, gather all the inhabitants. Number five, cry out to the Lord. That's it. That's the fivefold plan. There it is. Anybody can do it. Hey, I mean, anybody can participate in it. God has a five-step program. I know that's kind of crass terms, but just five simple things. You say, well, it's not a program. Well, whatever. You know what I mean? It's a very simple solution to a crisis for a nation, whether it's an agricultural crisis, an economic crisis, a weather crisis, a pestilence, military crisis. This is what the nation's supposed to do. I wonder how many people have gathered in light of our economic crisis that's getting worse and worse, by the way, no matter what they're telling you in the news. It is getting far more complicated and desperate. How many people are gathering and asking God for mercy? God says, if you do, I will actually help you. Not just you and your neighborhood. I'll help you the whole city and region if you do it. I want somebody to ask me. Stop and look to me and say, we are in a crisis. Help us. The Lord says, I will help if you ask me. B, consecrate a fast. First, you set apart specific periods of time. You pick a day. Tomorrow, we're in Sacramento. September 4, we're gathering. Mostly people from California, some months ago, Lou picked a day. You pick a day. You get a time together. Again, they don't have to be national or even statewide. They can be neighborhood-wide or they can be smaller. Just a few friends get together. Pick a day and set that day aside. Consecrate it. To consecrate it means to make it sacred, meaning it's not optional. It's something you're not gonna do if the day goes good. You set a day aside and you commit it to the Lord and you see that those hours, whether it's six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, two or three days, whatever it is, you consecrate it and it's no longer optional. It's God's time. No, it's time where you're going to focus on your relationship with God and God's purpose for that geographic area. But it's critical that a day is picked and that day is held important. A lot of fasts don't come because nobody actually does step one. Again, you could do it with a few friends. You could do it with a few students. You could do it in a neighborhood. Now, what fasting does, you just read this on your own, fasting doesn't earn us anything, but fasting positions us for our hearts to be touched and when our heart is moved, a moved heart moves God. So God is moved and he inspires us to come and spend time before him. So we come and spend time before him. He moves on us first. So we fast and then when we fast, it positions us to receive more inspiration from the Lord and our hearts are tenderized. Not always the day of the fast. I have found the day I'm fasting, often I feel worse, but it's typically it's after the fast is over, I feel the tenderizing. Every now and then it's in the fast, but mostly it's not. At first that kind of confused me because I thought the fast was supposed to help me, but as I put fasting in my life on a regular basis, I found the tenderizing of my heart began to increase over months and years of staying with it. But I didn't often have the big event during the fast. It was typically after the fast was over, the tenderness and this new resolve to go deeper with the Lord. So the fast positions us to connect with God in a greater way and the moved heart is what God looks at. It's the moved heart and that's what fasting does. Turn to page 58, step number two. Okay, you set apart a day, you called a fast. Now call a sacred assembly. It's not just you set apart a day and you call the fast and you make the fast important. Now you gather people to it. That's a different thing. I mean, picking the date is important and determining to do it. Now you're going to try to rally others, whether you're rallying 10 or 10,000. Now you're gonna go into the next category here of activity and you're gonna call a sacred assembly. You're gonna, God wants communities. He wants groups of people coming together to pursue him. Now, private devotion is very important, but private devotion is not enough to answer a national crisis. One devoted man and one devoted woman, that's important and things will happen in their own life and they can affect a nation. One person can, for sure, but God is a father and he wants the family. He wants this to be a family dynamic. He wants to affect change in a corporate context through the whole family. So he requires corporate gatherings for prayer. Number one, the assembly means to gather together in one place. He wants a place where you gather. Now in that day, it was the temple. Now, one of the side benefits of gathering together with other people is you end up with like-minded people. I mean, you might give the call and only a small number show up, but you have like-minded believers and that's an encouragement and the Lord even knows that's a side benefit of it. Is that the ones that are pressing into God together, they find each other in a geographic area when a fast is called like this. Paragraph three, he says this, Psalm 133, behold, how good and how pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity, for there the Lord commands the blessing. There is a commanded blessing. Now think about that phrase. There is a commanded blessing, a blessing that God commands from heaven that can't be stopped. Beloved, a commanded blessing, no devil can stop it. When God commands it, nothing can resist it. And when God sees a group of people in unity together, in unity with him, that's the place of the commanded blessing. There is so much more we can do together in prayer than we can do apart, although individual prayer is very important and it's effective, but because God is a father and he relates to the earth through his family, he's not just only dealing with the individual, kind of the radical one-off devoted person, he wants devoted communities of believers. He wants clusters of people coming together that are pressing in together and that moves his heart. There's a unique blessing when they do it together. Paragraph four, the greatest place of blessing for a geographic area. This is number four, this is an important one. The greatest place of blessing in a geographic area is when the people of God come together in a unified response of wholeheartedness and they do it repeatedly. Wherever there's clusters of people, whether it's 10, 100, 1,000, whatever the number is, they're gathering regularly in unity, in wholeheartedness, but regularly is a key word. That is the place of optimum blessing. Now, many of you are students and you're gonna be starting families in the years to come and you'll be in other parts of the earth and I wanna urge you to do this, wherever you go, build communities that do the Joel 2 type of activities. Wherever you go, work to motivate people to gather for fasting and prayer, wherever you are. Of course, people are building houses of prayer everywhere, but wherever you go do that, be a part of a community that prays and fasts and presses into God, that's the safest place in the earth and that's the place where the greatest blessing is going to be. I determined that years ago as a young pastor, my 20s, when I was just starting out, I said, I'm going to have a community of believers, meaning a local church, we are gonna have regular seasons of fasting and prayer as a regular part of our spiritual diet, because I don't wanna be a part of a church that doesn't do this. And so even when I was in my early 20s, we would have days of fasting and prayer, not that many people came, we're all young adults, but we did it. And all through the years, I've maintained that and my point isn't that I maintained it, that's not my point, my point is, I had the vision and I want you to have this vision, I wanna be with people that pray and fast on a regular basis together and whatever geographic area I am, I wanna be with people who do this. The place of blessing and safety in the future, the greatest blessing and safety will be in a context of unified people who do this, they don't even have to be in the same ministry, but wherever you go, wherever God plants you, look around and say, Lord, where's fasting and prayer going and how can I strengthen it and how can I get more people involved in it? That's a wise thing to raise your family in that kind of context. Okay, look at number seven, sacred, it's a sacred assembly. We're still in C, number seven, paragraph seven. It's sacred in the sense it's dedicated. A sacred assembly speaks of its importance to God. If the gathering, the assembly, the gathering time, I mean, the actual time you gather together, if it's important to God, it needs to be important to us. Some are so casual about sacred assemblies. Well, it's a prayer meeting, I'm gonna drop into it if I get a chance. Now, our context, it's a little different to apply that because we have, we never stop prayer meetings. We have fasting teams every day. So it kind of gets a little confusing because it's like if you take every day, all day, you know, you don't have the strength to do it 24 hours a day, day in and day out. But I'm talking about in a different context in this that as God calls sacred times, and we do have times that are even set apart from just the day in and day out, keeping the fire on the altar in the prayer room. But when the time is called, it's important that it's viewed as sacred or as important, not as casual, not as optional. That's critical. Now, it takes a certain kind of Bible teaching to produce that kind of response in people. Meaning, you're gonna need to be the kind of people that understand the Bible enough to say it to people where it makes sense to them to come to a sacred gathering. To a lot of folks, they go, I love Jesus, but why would I go to a sacred gathering? There's nothing wrong going on. Everything seems good because they don't understand what the Bible says about the hour we live in, and they're not spiritually discerning. They're, I'm happy that they're happy, but they're missing out on a huge dimension of what's going on in the spirit. My point being, without proper teaching, without leaders that will do it, and I'm talking about groups of 10 and 20 and 30. I'm not talking about wait until you have a big ministry. Be a leader that calls people to this. Be a leader that teaches people the relevance of this. With those things in place, then people will view the gathering as sacred. Because until they see it as sacred, it's kind of like just optional. They kind of do it if they want to. There's not something else fun going on. They'll drop in, and the Lord told Joel, tell them it must be a sacred gathering. It must be very, very important to them. I believe the Holy Spirit is awakening the church to the revelation of the sacredness of these gatherings. Again, in our context, it's a little bit hard to apply because we have 24-7, and everybody commits to X amount of hours a day all the time, and those commitments are sacred to us. We call it a sacred trust. But just put the IHOP kind of weekly routine aside for a minute and think about what setting you might be in in the future, and the gathering has been called. It's a solemn assembly, a sacred assembly, and you want to teach and lead in a way where people view that gathering as sacred. That's the part, the point I'm wanting to make clear here. Now, in paragraph eight, I talk about Lou again here, because I, and I wrote these notes years ago, some years ago, and I was so touched. This is even before Lou moved here. It's the energy Lou spent traveling across the nation, stirring up people together in fasting and prayer. It takes time, it takes money, it takes effort, it takes courage, it takes resolve. It's wearisome to mobilize and rally people to go to prayer meetings, and what my point is in telling you that is don't be thrown off if it's wearisome, because it is, and don't be dismayed if it's hard and it's costly, because it is. That's part of the call. When he said gather the people, it meant invest the time, the money, the energy, the risk, and the labor in it. Invest in it, and again, as I've seen Lou do that over the years, I just go, my goodness, what a blessing to our nation, and there's other ministries all around that have been doing this for years and many more that are getting the idea, but understand this, in the days ahead, when you're the one calling the psalm assembly, it's not like you're gonna put a flyer out and everyone's gonna show up. You're gonna have to go rally, recruit, teach, awaken them to the reality of how necessary it is. It takes work to get people to show up to prayer meetings. So as young leaders, you're saying, okay, I buy into that, I'll do that. Paragraph nine, over the years of my pastoring, we had the church I pastored here in Kansas City for 17 years, we had about 100 people on the staff, on the full-time staff, on the pastoral staff and the school, and we would call fasting days three days, three weeks, we had a number of those over the years, and people would make the observation, they would come to me and say, you got 100 full-time salaried pastors and leaders and workers, and they're not doing any work for three weeks because we would come for hours a day in the prayer room, and they said, you know, three weeks times 100 salaries, that's thousands and thousands of dollars. You're throwing it away, and I said, it is costly to have solemn assemblies. It actually costs money like that. I go, it's worth it to me, and some of the leaders would go, well, that's 100 people, three weeks, salaries, whatever, whatever, that's thousands of dollars. How can you justify this? I go, because God appeared to Solomon and said, Solomon, when there's trouble in the land, gather before me and cry out, and I will heal the land, or I will heal the church, or I will heal the neighborhood, or I will heal the city, or I will heal the family, or I will heal the relationship, I will heal if you will gather and humble yourself and cry out. Now, I'll give you a verse I don't have on the notes, Genesis 18, 32. The question is, how many people have to show up? Just write down Genesis 18, 32. Abraham had an encounter with the Lord, and the Lord says, I'm gonna destroy Sodom, one of the most wicked cities in history, and Abraham said, this whole city, Abraham said, if I get 50 people, will you spare the whole city if only 50 show up at the prayer room? God says, I'll do it for 50. The entire city would be spared if 50 people were engaged in the solemn assembly. Well, it's more than a one-day meeting, but 50 righteous ones that would adhere to their walk with God and press into God together. Well, Abraham worked it down. God said yes to 50, then Abraham said, how about 45? God said, I'll do it 45. Abraham said, how about 40? How about 20? Genesis 18, read the story. God said, yeah, I'll save the whole city for 40 that make it to the prayer room. Abraham says, hey, I'm on a roll. How about 30? God says, yes, 20. I'll spare the whole city for 20. Abraham says, oh, Lord, he said, this is the last time, I promise. How about 10? Genesis 18, verse 32. God said, I'll spare the whole region for 10 people that press in. How many people do we need to press into God for America, for the judgment that's on America to be lifted instead of increased? It's already on America. Somebody says, is the judgment coming? I go, it's been on us for some decades. It's God's in his patience. He's trying to wake us up. And again, the noose is getting tighter and tighter. The pressure's increasing. I don't know what the number is, but I know in Sodom, it was only 10. Of course, the cities were little back then. And I don't know what God will require from America because of our history of several hundred years of blessed history, God will require more. Because Sodom was a city of great perversion, so even a small response would move God's mercy. But there's the verse in Luke chapter 12. I think it's verse 38 or 39. God says to who much is given, much is required to a nation like America that's been given these hundreds of years of blessing, the Lord says, no, I want more than 10. I've given you more reason to have more people than that responding to my heart. I don't know what the number is. We can never know the number, but I know one thing, we're gonna keep pressing people to gather and cry out to God because I know that's the answer. Paragraph D, he said, gather the elders. God honors the authority structure. I have found through the years, number one under D, the most difficult people to gather are the leaders. And it's because they're the busiest. It's not just because they don't care. I'm talking about, because the elders are not just the elders of the church like we think of it, the elders were the elders of the city, which would be the political leaders as well as the spiritual leaders of the city. They were more than that. They were the political leaders of the city that were supposed to be spiritual. He said, I want them involved. And again, that's a hard group to gather because the very fact they're elders, they got a lot of responsibility and a lot of people pulling on their time. But he said, go get them, go to the elders, work on getting them. Paragraph two, it takes persuasion, relationship building. It takes time, effort, money to gather elders. It's not easy to gather elders, but do it anyway. E, then gather all the people. That's expensive as well. As I was talking about just a few moments ago in our little setting, in our little church world, the hundred pastors, I mean, staff, it was expensive for people to come 21 days. And even other people, the congregation, our congregation was a couple thousand people. And a lot of people would gather for two or three days. And sometimes we had a couple of 21 dayers and they lost money by taking time off to do it. It was expensive as a community collectively. It'd be interesting to, you never could really quite do it, get all the information, but be interesting to figure out how much money people really did lose by drawing back three weeks of work in the way they were doing it. And then when they were doing it, they were a bit spacey. They wasn't doing it so well. I'd like to measure that. Then I'd like to take the same group of people and 10 years later to see how the Lord answered back, even in the economic arena, because I assure you the Lord pays back and then he doubles it or he multiplies it. It's a better way to say it. But he asked just a little time delay, that's all. In order to gather the people, you've got to have prophetic preaching. You have to preach about the good and the terrible things that God has planned. You can't just do the good or just the terrible. You have to have the right diet or the people won't see any reason to gather. People don't just gather because the leaders say gather. They go, why? And there has to be a theological framework in place in their understanding or they won't even gather. So it takes even planning to gather the people. It doesn't just happen in a vacuum because envisioned people gather, instructed people gather. People with revelation that there is a revival and there is a crisis and they're both unfolding now. Those kinds of people of insight, those are the ones that gather, but it takes time to get that in them. Then step five, the sounds almost, just irrelevant to mention or redundant is the word I'm trying to say, cry out to God. I have found through the years, going to prayer meetings through the years, you get a bunch of leaders together in a prayer room, one of the least things that happens is prayer. I've watched this over the years at all kinds of different gatherings where the pastors gather and pray. I'm just talking about over 30 years of watching it. They come, they talk, they exhort, they testify, they bless each other. The Lord says, when you gather, pray, be quiet, stop. You got an hour, you got two hours. Don't take over X amount of time, pray. That is not a small thing. Step five, actually mandate the prayer. There is a determination to actually pray. When they get up there, I remember the early days of IHOP, before we put in the policies, people would get up and just, they would take the microphone, the music's going, they'd want to share something. And we had to stop it because everybody wanted to share. There wasn't, if we didn't let it go, there'd be no praying at IHOP. Because one after the other, they had something they wanted to say in exhortation, and the Lord says, pray at IHOP. Don't preach on the microphone, pray, talk to me. Talk to each other in the other room. Talk to me in this room. So when you call prayer meetings in the days to come, actually make sure the majority of the time is prayer worship and not explaining about prayer. Actually do the prayer. Romans, okay, top of page 60, fourfold preparation. I'll just do this just kind of real quick. Number one, four things to prepare. Now we got the fivefold plan. Now we got the four things to prepare in order to walk out the plan. He says in Joel 1.13, gird yourself. To gird yourself means to make preparation in the practical areas so you can actually go to the prayer meeting and be focused. There are many practical things that have to happen in order to have a prayer life or even to go to prayer meetings. I have there paragraph A, and you could put a long list of things. Change your schedule. Organize things. Get things set up to where when you're there, you can be there. It takes time to gird yourself. You know, somebody says, you know, hey, let's have a 21-day fast. Let's do it next week. The Lord's on it. And I've had a few of those over the years. Guys that have said that, I go, no. You can't call a 21-day fast next week. Why not? Because people cannot prepare themselves. You call it, and you can be excited about it, but nobody will actually do it. It takes more time to get prepared to actually go for a 21-day fast. You can call it, but nothing will happen in it. You have to gird yourself. You have to get things ready in your schedule, your finances, some relational dynamics. There's other things that have to be in place, practical issues, if you're going to have a day or a week of prayer. Gird yourself. Let's go to B, the call to lament. He says lament. Get a heart connect. To lament, I mean, how can you command somebody to be sorry? The guy goes, I don't feel any sorry. In the name of Jesus, feel sorry. You can't make a guy feel sorry, but Joel's saying something more fundamental than that. He goes, work on getting the heart connect with God, with the reality of what God's thinking, a heart connect with what's really going to happen. If we don't get right with God, a heart connect of what's going to happen with the people. Train the people and tell the people to quiet themselves a minute and think on it. And when they get in touch with it, they will see the gravity of the situation. But it takes time for that to happen. That happened in a vacuum. It happens with an intentionally doing it. Top of page 61, paragraph C. Lying sackcloth. He says you, chapter one, verse 13, lying sackcloth. Now the lying sackcloth was a call to humility. Paragraph one, sackcloth was made of goat's hair. It's very uncomfortable. But the priest, he's talking to the priest. They had beautiful garments that God ordained. Those garments spoke of their status, their honor, and their prestige. God was not calling them to be uncomfortable. That wasn't the point. The sackcloth, as some groups through the years have thought the sackcloth means be miserable. That's not what Joel's really saying here. He's saying lay down your priestly robes of honor, prestige, your titles. Lay down your position, and everybody is equal before God together. That's what he's saying. Top of page 62. To be on, paragraph two. To be on equal ground before the throne, take off your priestly robes. Lay your ecclesiastical, or that means your church titles. Lay them down. Lay your degrees down. Lay your wealth down. Everybody comes together without status and position. That's what he's saying to them. Because some have misinterpreted the sackcloth thing, and they think if sackcloth is really good because you're miserable, I'll get sackcloth with nails in it. I'll get sackcloth with nails, and I'll stand all night for three days. I'll show God how much I'll suffer. God says, no, I'm not telling you to go on an endurance contest. I actually want to talk to you. I want you to talk to me. I don't want you to be on a physical endurance contest of how much you could suffer. I just want your titles and your status laid down. That's what I'm after. Number four, preparation. All night. He says, come all night. The most radical thing is the night watch. Oh, that was lame, night watch. Now I realize, let's give the night watch a break. It is six in the morning for them right now, okay? So they just got here. You know, it's like you're 6 a.m. They just had their coffee, or they missed it. They got here, and so let's go through that again. The night watch is the most radical thing. Thank you, day watch, for helping out there. Okay, that was called mercy. That was unity. I like that. No, he tells them this. Lie all night. He meant it. He meant do radical, extreme. It's inconvenient. I mean, they didn't do it day in and day out. It wasn't like an occupation, like our true night watch occupation, but he's saying take significant effort. It is a hassle, but do you understand what is happening? This thing deserves more than just a kind of a drop-in for an hour to prayer meeting. Do you understand your nation's in a crisis? Your covenant with God is violated. The blessings are jeopardized, and trouble is coming. Beloved, this thing is worthy of something extreme. That's what he's telling them. Amen. We're gonna take a break, and we're gonna come back, take a 15-minute break, and we're gonna come back and do session seven and eight in our sixth class, session seven and eight. We're gonna do session notes seven and eight.