This sermon emphasizes the importance of seeking revival and spiritual awakening, highlighting the need to focus on God's grace and mercy rather than relying solely on prayer or human understanding. It warns against idolizing past revivals and academic knowledge, stressing the significance of upholding Christ and honoring Him in all aspects of life. The sermon also discusses the dangers of succumbing to temptation and the importance of passing on God's law and wisdom to future generations.

Ecclesia. Winky Prattney has been a conduit for the life of Christ to masses of youth around the globe, as well as many leaders and adults in the body of Christ. He has written more than a dozen books and is often a guest on television and radio programs. A true father in the faith, Winky has been a friend and mentor to people in ministries like Keith Green, Teen Challenge, Youth with a Mission, Young Life, and many others. Winky also serves on the Ecclesia College Board of Regents. Recently, the Revival Study Bible has been released by Armour Publishing. Winky was the main editor and a contributor to the project, pouring into it decades of study and experience. This video was recorded at Winky's Revival Library in Lyndale, Texas. To find out more about Winky, please visit winkyprattney.com. Now let's listen to what Winky has to say about Revival. Revival has been given so many definitions, but each of those definitions done by people who have looked at it are things that God may do among us. This is specifically in the Church as a special supernatural visitation. A number of those definitions, one of my favorites, Finney, called Revival a new beginning of obedience to God. It's a simple and a wonderful truth. My own take on it would be Revival is a divine intervention in the life of God, invading fallen structures and systems, principality and powers, to restore and reclaim His greatness and glory and bring a new return to intimacy with Christ and loyalty. Now that's to His word. Now that's kind of a pretty long thing. So another simple way to say that is that sometimes God gets so disappointed by our disobedience and dumb religious misrepresentation that He finally shows up in person to kick butt and take names. That's my take on it. When we look at what we could call common elements that recur in every real revival, we can cite things like the appearance of unusual prayer and unexpected unity. So those things, unusual prayer, unexpected unity. Acts 2 has been a great breakdown on some of those major key areas that very often recur as what we could call ingredients of revival. But each part of the statement of the Scriptures gives us a little block. For instance, when the day of Pentecost was fully come, and that has to do with the sovereignty of God. There is a divine sovereignty of God, something on His timing, not on ours. And it says they were all together in one place, in one accord, in supplication and prayer. So you're looking there at that unusual prayer and unexpected unity. They're all coming from different places. And then it says suddenly. There is always an element of shock and surprise in revivals. Not at all the way people expect. And there's a spontaneous working there from heaven. This is not an earth-based thing. It's not how many bus programs we've put together or the particular study and the amount of investment we've made. There's something about revival that's heavenly. It comes from another world. And then it talks about the core element is God consciousness, that fear came. It is amazing that when you meet someone or something that is much bigger and much more astonishing and amazing and scary than you, then the first and fundamental response would be fear came. And there is a fear of God that always underlines revival. We call it God consciousness. And then the result was that they become anointed vessels. They're all filled with the Spirit. And this outpouring of supernaturally given anointings connected with them concerning the work of the Holy Spirit fits in all major revivals. And there are unusual supernatural manifestations. Here they spoke in other languages, languages they didn't understand, didn't know. And all of them spoke in those different languages. So there were people that, as they burst out into the streets, heard them speaking, many of them in their own languages. So some of them are human languages, some are ones from another world. And then there was a divine magnetism that is caused. The multitudes came together. So there's an attractiveness when Christ's presence and the work of the Holy Spirit begins to show Himself among us. And there is like almost a magnetism that brings things together. Some people have described revival as a radiation zone that strikes an area and then spreads. But it also has not only a spreading out, but a pulling others towards it. And then finally, as a consequence, it results in what we call apostolic preaching, the holding up of Jesus, who is the star of the show in every revival. Tremendous blessing, 3,000 people came to the Lord in that one first outpouring. And this also is a great surprise, the number of people that have changed and altered, not only in the church, but on the streets. And then there is a simplicity, what we call the divine simplicity. Revival is not a complex thing when it happens, but there is a simplicity of heart and a simplicity of statement that is filled with power. So that simplicity of heart, again, is about the living God. When we think about common traits among revivalists, what do we think a real revivalist should look like? What sort of Christian would God call to be a vessel of His power and love in an unexpected and unusual breakthrough like what a revival is? So what we are really thinking of is what kind of people were they and what did they do to see this thing, revival. So in compiling a list of those recorded as participants, both past and present, this list covers 2,000 years, it is a serious list, on the people that God used and who were involved some way in revivals. But to put a list together of people who would be a great example of this common trait among revivalists, that is no easy task. The people, they all come from different places, they come from different nations, from different backgrounds and they represent so many streams of the variety and the wonder of His work in His church over the centuries. As John said and supposed, if all the works Jesus did were to be written in books, the world could not contain them. John 21-25 is a really true thing. There have been so many marvelous books written about the works of God, but revival encompasses many more things than just simply a stirring in the church. So looking at those traits, I think these would be a summary of three things I found and I actually used this, though not discussed, when we put this study Bible together, trying to find out of the many, literally hundreds of thousands of people that might have been included in these historical researches. For me, I think there are three things every revivalist could find true about their own lives and they're quite simple, but that's what I used in putting this contributors list of over 104 contributors over those 20 centuries. The first would be this, they loved God unconditionally, without reservation, until the day they died. Without caution, without carelessness or any compromise. Whatever their past was, wherever they came from, that would be the mark of their lives. They were lovers of God. And you could say they loved God, as Scripture says, with all their heart and soul and mind and strength. And that flow of description goes from Deuteronomy 11.1, 13 and 22, 13.3, 38, 16 and 20, Joshua 22.5, Mark 12.30, Luke 10.27, all of these say the essential characteristic of being used of God is that you love Him, it's a simple thing. But that little extra that's put there in Luke, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's the second thing I would say, that of all the revivalists, they loved all people likewise, regardless of their background, regardless of those people's failures or their own foibles or fears. They loved their neighbors, which is anybody in reach of your influence, deeply, passionately and if need be, to the point of dying in their place for them, if it might open for them the doors of the kingdom of heaven. And that again is many, many times emphasized in Scripture. You've got Exodus 32, 32, 33, 2 Samuel 18.33, right into Romans 5, 6 and 8, and 8.34, all of them talk about us living the way God lives. He loves people unconditionally. I've seen atheists get healed and get up, healed atheists, and if I was God I wouldn't do that, but thank God I'm not God. And the third thing, and this is an unusual one, but it is really I think an optimum standard for any real revivalist. I call it they carried no knives under the table for others that did not have or share or even agree with what God was doing in their lives. And 1 Corinthians 9, 12-25, 10, 23-33, all of these verses we have accounts of the willingness to love people without reservation and to become all things to all men, not to take the strength of what is happening in our lives if God is bringing a new kind of awakening as a way of putting down or putting away others, but to simply to love the way God loves without holding any secret weapons that you might use if people do not agree with you. I remember the disciples going out saying, Lord, we found this group and they didn't walk with us, and Jesus said, you don't know what manner of spirit you are. Now this is a serious project that has taken so long to do, and if I had died as I did five years ago, not long enough to write a book about it, this never would have got finished. So there are three general editors in this work, but it has been a real labor of love. It's not really our work, it's a collection of his work, and this book is not about us, this book is about him. So you mentioned one or two less well-known revivals or revivalists that people have not heard about, but where God has worked greatly. So I picked a couple. There are multitudes of revivals, miniature revivals, that will probably never be published. People don't know what God is doing, because God's work is global, and things happen by his hand in places, all with people who are unknown or unheard of, except in heaven, where everyday headlines are often quite different from ours. So God is doing many, many things in many, many nations, in many, many areas, with different levels of response, and the vast majority of people in other countries and other places have no clue what is going on. Much, much larger than any of us can imagine, and it's growing all the time. I picked two of them that are past situations, not present ones, but two of my favorites would be Hans Nielsen Hauger, a Lutheran 25-year-old in Norway. And many, many people, even in the Western world, have not heard of Hans Nielsen Hauger. And I remember when Lauren Cunningham was visiting the King of Norway, and he asked him this question, he said, this nation, Your Majesty, he said, was once one of the most broken nations, if you like, we could say. It was the most illiterate nation in all of Europe, and the most insecure. You had to get a visa to even go to another village, and extremely poor. The nation had few natural resources and industries, and was victimized by lack of entrepreneurial vision. So that's really what it was like. And he said, how is it that in just 200 years, Norway has become one of the most wonderful nations on earth? So he mentioned today that Norway is one of the most financially stable and literate nations in all of Europe. And it was Hans' converts that helped write the nation's constitution, one of the most wonderful constitutions. I think for many reasons, it's because very few people speak Norwegian. And yet, for many years, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other nation in the world. And today, a grateful nation, sometimes remember Hans as, when Lauren asked the King, he said, how did that happen? He said, I really don't know. And Lauren said, what about Hans Nielsen Haage? He said, of course, I forgot about Hans. There's even a little plaque in the field that says, here is where the Holy Spirit fell on Hans Nielsen Haage. And so, in terms of the background of this, which is an account of revival. When, remember this young man, he's 25 years old, and this is 103 years before Zuza's story. He received this powerful visitation of the Holy Spirit that, under Christ, affected an entire nation. And this is basically what happened. When he's first given, he's given a Bible by somebody, and he's told, this is not just a book about God. It is a book about everything. And so, two days past his 25th birthday, he is visited by the Holy Spirit. He said, one day I was working outside under the open sky, and I sang from memory a hymn, Jesus, I long for your blessed communion. That's really what revival is about. At this point, my mind, he said, became so exalted, I was not myself aware of, nor can I express what took place in my own soul, for I was beside myself. As soon as I came to my senses, I was filled with regret. I had not served this loving, transcendentally good God. It seemed to me that nothing in this world was worthy of any regard. And this was wonderful, that my soul possessed something supernatural, a gift that was given to it by God. Divine and blessed, there was a glory no tongue could utter. I remember as clearly as if it had happened only a few days ago. It is now nearly 20 years since the love of God visited me so abundantly. So some of these elements of revival, you see there's only one single man, it's not a whole church, it's not even a team, it's one young man, 25 years old. Now I wanted very much to serve God, I asked Him to reveal to me what I should do. Hans's ministry was misunderstood by the church of his day, and he was jailed nine times for what he began to do in his nation. He only lived 30 more years after this call, but during the short time he began, remember this is one person, over a thousand factories and businesses, and over a thousand home churches. And now we know the long term results. As a matter of fact, people can show you, because he had to walk everywhere, the places that Hans was able to visit, and the places he missed, the differences in the cities. So that's one example of what the Scripture says in Proverbs 14, 34, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. And history is his story, that's the whole heart of it. So that's one that happened many years ago, and Lauren's visit would have been in the last two decades. But I have another one here, and this again is an unknown person. I haven't picked people from other nations here, but we could do that just as easily. And so here's a letter I got within the last month. A person said, I wanted to pass along an incredible testimony of the Revival Bible. My daughter Chloe is 17 years old and walks in a powerful intercourt ministry to the Lord. She sits along with the Lord, hours each day, worshiping and pouring out her heart. Over the last few months there's been a growing, ever increasing discontent with simply committing herself to the intercourt and prayer. She was longing for a greater identity in Christ. During this time I was sitting before the Lord asking God for a greater fire in my heart. I heard the Revival Bible is now ready. I purchased the Bible. When I got it, my own life began to burn afresh with a desire to live out a life of revival. I showed Chloe page 659, which highlighted the story of Kate Shepard, who happened to be 17 years old as well. So here's a little bit of the story. I made a little quote of what happened. Kate is what they call a Hallelujah lassie. She was a Salvation Army teenager. This is born in 1861. It's in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. Saw what Catherine Booth's biographer called one of the most powerful revivals the world has ever seen. This is somebody that people don't know and hardly know where that valley is. Buildings were too small to contain the crowds who flocked to listen to the girl preacher. For hours in the open air under the shadow of the Welsh mountains, people by the thousands would hang on her words. And when, with lifted face and closed eyes, standing in her cart pulpit, she burst into a torrent of prayer, it seemed as if a pinfall would have jarred the breathless silence of the audience. Kate's power in prayer was unique. It was not so much what she said as the way she said it. Lord, Lord, you know they are miserable, she would begin, and the heart of every sinner in the congregation to echo back almost audibly, you know we are miserable. The prayer finished, the clear, sweet voice would ring through the air, and some popular refrain adapted to spiritual words hardly taken up by the crowd, that's a conversion of well-known songs into some Christian base. And then followed a simple testimony to God's saving grace, an appeal upon appeal for every sinner to decide then and there the question of his soul's salvation. Won't you come? You'll be sorry for it some day. Yes, you will. And the large, dark, earnest eyes, brimful of tears, enforced the argument with a power lacking in the pulpit ministrations of today. No wonder hundreds and hundreds of the roughest class flocked like little children to the penitent form and entered the kingdom of heaven through the labors of the girl of seventeen, who dropped down suddenly in the midst like an angel from the skies. For ten years she contended a faithful and successful ministry, neither daunted by opposition nor puffed up by flattery. Six offers of marriage the first seven weeks, including two for ministers, did not cause her to falter or draw back from the path of duty. When at length permanently worn out by the exhausting toil of her early years, she married and retired from public life, she manifested in private the Christian graces that had made her ministry so successful. So that is Kate's story. Now let me tell you what the person who sent the thing said. I showed her this page of Kate Shepard, who happened to be also seventeen years old. Chloe tore into the story with incredible excitement and began to proclaim, I know now who I am. I am a Revivalist. She read everything she could that night on the life of Kate Shepard. And now the Hallelujah Lassies on the next day began to gather the girls from her high school. Chloe started a simple church and twelve girls showed up and were powerfully met by the same power Chloe had read about days before. Soon this band of young warriors decided to gather all of the girls from their school to hear the gospel and sell out their hearts to Jesus. They decided since Kate Shepard could preach, they themselves would do all the preaching and pray for the girls themselves. So there are some amazing stories. And the consequence, my own wife has not put down this Bible, has become incredibly revived in spirit. I bought four more for Keith. Youth Revivalists here in Kona. We're running a school for young college age Revivalists. We expect three hundred wild hearted Evangelists to arrive here. We'll be sending them out to save, revive and train young people in L.A. at the end of the school. That is when we touch some of the things that happened in the past like that. Is there a common element in the divine visitation? The simple answer is no. Though there are many common elements again. There are often similar signs in divine visitation to those recorded in Acts. For instance, we looked at that initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. But like all of the works of God in history, no two visitations are ever identical. Just like two people are never identical. And when we look at nature, which is what God says, if you want to find out what I'm like, then you study what I've made. We see the fractal structures of the world that He built around us. Everything is different. Every snowflake is different. Every cloud is different. Every leaf is different. Even the leaves, identical grass, two leaves beside each other are different. There's no two things exactly alike. So God has structures that have very real boundaries, but they're unpredictable. There's a boundary of unpredictability in all the work of God. One of the key ways we see that is in the way locusts move. When you have a locust plague, they don't all move at once. There's early moving and then some later. And then it's huge amounts and then sometimes massive amounts. And there may even be a year later a couple of locusts still thinking something's going on. Revivalists are like that. They break out. A few here and people go, this is it. And it is it, but it's small. And then something bigger. And one day it's so huge it overwhelms. And then sometimes years later people go, oh, there may be a revival one day and it's still there. So we'd say this then. God's works and ways may have common parameters or often recognizable evidences that mirror his law and his character, but like the reality of all the things we've talked about in creation, no two things in his design are ever exactly alike. So the two ones you asked for were a couple of them maybe in church history. The Welsh revival under Evan Roberts came during a nationwide series of meetings well over a decade, actually closer to two or three decades, that involved much preaching and prayer on God's visitation, more than one real but local return to God. So there's miniature little revivals going on, almost like that locust beginning. Yet what became known as the best-known awakenings of that time was not characterized by how much the early preachers powerfully said or how many churches were in prayer about revival. As a matter of fact, Evan's reply to those who asked what others might do to see something the same happen among them, like what he had seen, were always short and succinct. So I put down what he said, people coming from all other nations coming to ask him. So they're expecting some five-week explanation of things and pretty much it all boiled down to about four things. Here's what he said. The past must be cleared. Every sin confessed to God. Any wrong to men must be put right. That's one. Two, everything doubtful must be removed out of our lives for once and for all. Is there anything in your life you cannot decide whether it's good or evil? Away with it. There must be not a trace of a cloud between you and God. Have you forgiven everybody? Large capitals. Everybody. If not, don't expect forgiveness for your sin. Better offend 10,000 friends than grieve the Spirit of God a quenching. That's point two. Three, obedience. Prompt implicit unquestioning to the Spirit of God. Whatever the cost, do what the Holy Spirit prompts without hesitation or fear. Finally, public confession of Christ. Multitudes are guilty of long and loud profession. Confession of Christ as Lord is of recent date. We forget there's a Trinity in the Godhead and the three persons are in absolute equality. Is not He the Holy Spirit ignored entirely in hundreds of churches? Hear the word of the Lord. Do not quench the Spirit. That is the one way to revival. When the fire burns, it purifies. And when purified, you're fit to be used for the work of God. Christ said, and I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me. There it is. Christ is all in all. You could fit that all in 300 words. And that was total difference from all of the early sermons that went. But this was the biggest one of them all. So that, when Edwards began, many people thought that's going to affect a lot of people. Maybe even 30,000 people. J. Edwin Orr, one of the great historians of revival, said over 2 million people were touched by the Welsh Revival. The effect spread around the world. The second one, a brief one, touches the revivals that touched and transformed England in the 17th century, during the time of Wesleyan Whitfield, flowed from two friends with almost opposite emphasis and theology message in the manner of their living. Yet visitation became real to both of them. How do we explain such human differences? Scripture says prophecy came not of the will of man, but holy man spoke, moved by the Holy Ghost. 2 Peter 1.21. So both of these men were there, holy man, coming not from their prophetic lives by the will of man, but spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. That would be my take on two of them. Is it possible that manifestations of some sort are part of the fruit of the Spirit? It is possible. You could say that sometimes manifestations of some sort would be part of the fruit of the Spirit. But specifically that passage, and dominant focus is on the character and behavior of the one who seeks to be seen or known as somebody who knows and follows God. So the whole passage as part of this begins with how we treat others, that part I mentioned earlier, a very important thing. If you want to see revival, how do you treat others? What is their impression of God when they meet you? And then James 3.11-14 and 4.1-11 speaks about the difference between that which poses as wisdom that comes from beneath, the wisdom of hell if you wanted to call it that, or the wisdom that comes from above. And that description is first pure and peaceable and gentle, easy to be entreated. You would imagine it would say powerful, wonderful, amazing, fundamentally astonishing to others. Those aren't the things that are listed here. It has to do with the character and the quality of the life. And so we would say then it posts limits on what you may pass on to others. Do not give the holy to those who would dishonor such a gift. God doesn't do that. He doesn't dishonor anybody who will dishonor his work. He doesn't give gifts away. It moves to the basis of answered prayer for those who forsake not only their own sins, but also their shame in seeking, asking, and finding. Luke 11.1-10 talks about that. Remember that when Christ died on the cross, he not only died for the sin of the world, he was stripped naked before a jeering crowd for the shame of the world. And a revivalist has to be a person who has given up their shameful response. You won't get an answer to prayer according to Scripture unless you are a person without shame in your life. I think a lot of times the reason why people never have answered prayer is they still carry great shame. And revival is one of the things that in its manifestation breaks those chains of that shame. And then it shows divine provision as faithful, trustworthy, and wonderful. And so it sums up all the law and the prophets by the golden rule in doing things for others like the way you would want for your own life. And it warns of those who claim to be prophets whether they are in quote-unquote a revival or not. Which is the question, is this later? Is there such a thing as counterfeit revival? It is possible to be a counterfeit prophet who seeks instead to feed on the lives of those they are supposed to be feeding or to help. We cannot serve God then by living a life that is unlike God no matter what our claim of our calling is supposed to be. The devil is a copycat. I learned that a long time. He doesn't do original things. He simply copies a divine thing and twists it towards his own ends. So yes, there is such a thing as counterfeit revival. We do mention some of those in the study Bible which contains an amazing 22-year long study of the word revive. Many people think there's only a few verses, perhaps 30-something verses in the whole of Scripture. Since most of those words are in the Old Testament, some even go as far to say that revival is only an Old Testament word. The only revivals that are now are revivals of evil. And there are people who actually embrace that as a fundamental. The reason why they don't seek God for revival is they don't think they happen anymore. And that is a very sad situation because they do happen. They are happening all over the place. And that particular study done for the study Bible is larger than the original Thompson Chain reference. It covers a research project of 22 years and comes out of finding 50 synonyms for the word revive. And every time you plug those in, it's hard to find two open pages of the Bible where the word revive or one of those synonyms is somehow mentioned or talked about. So I would say this then. The devil does the best he can do really is parrot what God says and parade something that seems for a time to be like the real thing. It is difficult to be the devil, not that we want to be, but it is hard actually to be the devil because how do you call people to be like God? By surrender to you when you do not live or behave or seek to be like the real God yourself. So to seek to be Him is not to live like Him. To call people to a life that believes in God's own unique control and power, which is unique about Him, is what anyone should seek in order to be like Him, is an utter folly. It is the fundamental way so many people who start well get destroyed because they assume that if I'm going to really be like God, I should seek also the same kind of power and control He has. And yet the God, the real God, does not deal with us by using those elements Himself. So here is one of the least understood elements of revival. Conviction is not founded in any form of religious bitterness, spiritual arrogance, or sought eminence. Those three things. Religious bitterness, being hurt by others because they haven't done anything, so we seek God for revival in order to show people that we were right. Or spiritual arrogance, we carry all our studies around understandings of things and this is why God should do something wonderful for us too. Or sought eminence. There is a way, some people think, if only this revival which has come would happen anytime I'm there, it means that God has made a special person out of me and all this is my doing. All of those are false. The spirit of revival, with all its awesome sense of the terror of the Lord, and I've been a number of times, the shaking, frightening sense of conviction, has at its heart not a judgmental, vicious violence against the lost, but a yearning, grieved love. That's always the mark of the real revival. It's not angry shouting and screaming, it is the dove, the not wanting to ever grieve the dove so that he just leaves. And I've watched situations where that's been violated, where God just takes his hand, right off something and leaves. It doesn't matter what you do, he's not coming back. So true revival, Scripture would say, seeks not its own. You know, I've thought about that a lot over these last 50 years, but I think the church is always going to have to face, in revival, especially if we're seeking God, in order for a closer walk with him and a restoration. There are ancient attacks that always come back. The return of ones from the West, ones from the East, one I call the return of the ancient Western antinomianism. It's a suggestion that is made to the church that God's laws are no longer practical, they worked once but they don't work now, that our advanced understanding and discoveries have superseded those things that were said before. And we're really looking at an ancient heresy called antinomianism, a life without law. It's the exact opposite of what God has given us, his law. And then another one would be just plain religious arrogance. We reach a point where we assume that our knowledge today, with all the advances we've had in communication and study, is better than what it was before. And then there's another one, again coming from ancient fallen, I call neoplatonic Eastern perceptions. It is a picture of God that is not actually biblical at all. It comes from a great deal of Greek philosophy to begin with, instead of a Hebrew description of what God is like. But it occurs again and again in Eastern thought forms that there are pictures of God that are actually unlike him. Though they're powerful and great and huge, they're not like him at all. So we put those three things together. We'd say this first one, antinomianism, seeks to replace God's laws with our own. A great danger to substitute what he says with our own ideas of what he meant. Two, this whole thing about religious arrogance is to substitute the creation for the creator, to take what he gave us and put it in the place of the one who gave it to us. And the third, the Eastern neoplatonic Greek idea, is to try and build our houses on sand, to build an edifice that's supposed to go up at the base on which it is working. It's utterly false and will fail. So what takes us from reality in God is to walk away from what he clearly says in his book and who he really is in our practical and ethical lives. Now scripture warns us specifically, beware of vain philosophy and deceit. That's Colossians 2.8. And oppositions of science falsely so-called, 1 Timothy 6.20. So for me, the boil-down consequence of leaving the Lord, walking away from God, taking something other than what he's given us, is a three-fold fall into forms of foolishness, pride, and insanity. So to sum those up, we could say, if we walk away from Christ, we'll inherit the wind instead and give us these three things, a life of stupidity. All of these grow. Growing stupidity, growing selfishness, and growing unreality. James 15.3-17, again, talks about that kind of darkness that comes from below that looks true and looks real. It's not the one that comes from heaven. And it's in those realms where revival faces its enemies. It both looks like the same thing, but it isn't. They come from two totally different streams and have two totally different consequences. We often forget a simple thing, and that is that when the world first sent with a fall spread with such tremendous, explosive, destructive power in the world, there was no provision for prisons, for law courts, for execution. None of those things were part. And the destruction came almost like a dam breaking on the world. And so we have a story of one family, just one faithful to God, that preserves the world. And Noah and his sons are the ones with the rest of their little retinue of animals and creatures that are restored when that end of the world comes, as it really does, to a whole new world again. We forget this, that God told Noah to take of the clean and the unclean, not the bad and the good, but the safe and the risky. And of the safe, they were to take seven of those, and only two of the risky. They were all to be put on and taken care of. He doesn't tell them how to know what safe and risky is. He just tells them, take them. And a thousand years later in Moab, he tells Moses, this is how you can tell safe and risky. Mosaic law is not the first law. The law that works to the heart, the law that speaks to the consciousness, the law of the Lord, the love of God, is always being first. Mosaic law is given because you have now a nation that's fallen, that eats anything that moves, and then if it doesn't move, you kick it and then you eat it, and you have to be told, there are some risky and dangerous things, here's how you will understand them. And then when we come right through the 300 years between the old and the new covenants, the old and the new, we have something even greater and more wonderful than the law of Moses. Hence, Scripture is very clear, do not return to the old way. What I'm giving you is better. It is not to say that the statements of the mosaic law have no value nor any worth, but it is to emphasize that the law of God is not primarily to be a motivation. It is a description of reality, not the reason why we should obey Him. And it's important to know that because a great deal of attempts to return to mosaic structures and law is a little like watching a building being built with an external scaffolding. And when the building is built inside, you don't need the scaffold anymore. It's valuable and worthwhile and has a shape very much like the real thing. But when the real comes, the scaffolding is no longer necessary. We don't have to go and find some red heifers and re-memorize and maintain all the old covenant things. What we do have to do is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We have to listen to what God told Abraham when he was an Iranian third way from everything. What he said to him long before the Jewish people even came into some great prominence in history. So the original is always greater than the legal, which is put in between, to help describe for us what that reality looks like. But when we make that thing the reason why we obey, we've walked away from the truth and we've now become something less than what God requires. What is the role of the Bible in your life? That's a very large question. I did a PowerPoint on that. I have it here and we could go into some detail on it. But I'll just sum it up. The charismatic movement affected many parts of the world involving at least three different streams of the church. We have what we could call traditional denominations. One side like Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians coming from reform streams or from early revival streams. And the Catholics on the other side often looked at as the bad guys as was looked in the opposite direction. Both of those works, traditional, well-known, ancient commitments for their strengths or their weaknesses were all affected by the charismatic movement. So we had all these manifestations of spiritual things happening to the surprise and shock sometimes of people on the other side of those traditional denominations. Then a second would be more recent evangelical traditions of movements. We would call them like the Baptists which didn't start with John but moved on including a return to the roots of Pentecostal heritages. Those also were affected sometimes in unusual ways by the charismatic movements. This is a hundred years on further from Azusa Strait where the roots of Pentecostal heritage came. It also affected Pentecostal churches which might seem strange but sometimes people were caught up with the beauty of what they had and actually forgot what some of these other areas were like. So the third area and probably the one that most touched me was estranged, unreached, street-based cultures that found a return to God like the Jesus movement. All of these are mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can look it up on Google and look at all the details and backgrounds of it. But focus on the latter out of my own calling and concern for youth movements and their connection to revival led to a summary of such blessing and concerns. I call it in the PowerPoint Rebirthing the Jesus Movement. And there's a bunch of those and if you're interested I can read quickly these to you. But I'll just give it as fast as I can. But there's a whole bunch of good things that happened in the Jesus movement and some wonderful things. But I would never actually call the Jesus movement a classical revival. I would call it more an awakening. And the reason is because there are areas of it that do not actually fit a full revival description. So I'll go back to the heart of this and just say two lots of things. First, the strengths of it. And this is the original Jesus movement. Here's three of them. They were very childlike. Jesus said, remember, unless you'd be converted and become like little children, there was no long-term guile in these people's life. Their whole thing, make love not war, bring a friend, all borrowed from the culture that they came from, could get converted. It was possible to love. It was possible to bring a friend. They were abandoned. They had already lost all. Many of them felt like society had let them down, families had let them down, government had let them down. Everybody was trying to blame them for everything. But having lost all, now they found all in Christ and that was a wonderful thing. Father, new father, new family, new friends, new future. All of those were desperately needed. They were non-conforming. That's a good thing too. They were out of step, like its pagan root culture, the Jesus movement. And it was an attempted counterculture by redeeming the elements of what they already had in a new way. So the strengths was, I mentioned earlier, they were shameless and open witness. Embarrassing, actually. They would talk to people in the middle of anywhere and everywhere. You'd run into Jesus freaks in stores and restaurants. They didn't care whether people heard them or not. They were unafraid to directly and gently confront. They did it all the time. They were media savvy. They understood their culture. The bumper stickers, posters, marches, street people's music, all of them took on new flavors and shapes. And they were alive. In many ways they discovered the absolute difference between religion and relationship. That's a good and powerful thing. God talks about ask, seek, and knock. Again, we mentioned earlier that God answers those without shame. And many of them had already found that. The weaknesses, though, were there. They're very existential, the Jesus movement, living for the now, so they made few and no plans at all for the future. That's simply most of them because they didn't know the Scriptures. When they did start studying the future, it became it's all going to happen in the next two weeks. And so they never looked any further. Unplugged, rejecting the world, they turned it over instead to the Antichrist. It's a sad thing when you think, well, Jesus may come tomorrow, and so we don't have to do anything else except preach the best we can. It's all going to be burned anyway. And it's a sad thing to expect that Jesus may be here next week. So you turn up everything to the Antichrist, and then you find that he's not coming for a while. But the Antichrist will gladly borrow what you've got. So two things bring destruction. Lost vision, failure to see Jesus lifted up, and lost wisdom, rejection of God's descriptions of reality, which we call His laws. And again, that's Proverbs 29, 18, Hosea 4, 6. So going back to the weaknesses, to become experience-centered, to not have things rooted in Scripture, to be divorced from history and not aware of that real divergence. You're embracing something new, but you're moving away from the reality of what used to be. To be polluted, not to be held to the centrality of a biblically holy life. The word holy was not there in the Jesus movement. It was loving and kind and gentle and many things. But the word holy did not appear in a great manner at all. But Scripture says, Hosea 4, 6, because you've rejected the law of your God, I will also forget your children. That's what happened to many in the Jesus movement. So the early days were astonishing. Actually hundreds of thousands of people talking about Jesus being baptized in the ocean. But even some of the great leaders of it had terrible crashes and burns along the way simply because of the missing elements that weren't there. The localing, the little global consciousness so often isolated them from any larger world mission. It was here and now. So I say the Jesus movement was awakening. I call it a powerful supernatural demonstration. God had not forgotten the children of the modern world. They birthed new music, broke old prejudices and launched many new churches and ministries. And they're all around today. But the first Jesus movement may with wisdom, with the right revelation of what God wanted to give them from the past, may become a global full-scale revival. But for all its power it really knew its own weaknesses. And we must learn what God has in His heart for the one yet to come. It didn't have a history. It was fueled by powerful experiences and in-house Bible studies. The Jesus movement often failed to connect with the lessons learned from the other Jesus freaks, the true saints of the past, some who died, giving up their lives. Its purity was often polluted by lax morality and carnal security. Antinomianism struck that too. It began to treat blessing from mercy when at Calvary's cost was a deserved thing. And it finally grew weary in well-doing. Many simply tanked or dropped out, like Galatians 6 and 9 speaks. I love what Tom Skinner said, Newark evangelist, former gang member who got saved. He said, yesterday's radical is today's conservative. Because he's so busy trying to conserve the things he got by being radical, he cannot afford to be radical anymore. They took but did not commit. They failed to pass on core truth. Scripture talks about laying up these words. His words in your heart. Teach them to your children. Deuteronomy 11, 18-21. That God has no grandchildren. Every generation needs vision. Rediscovering. They became disillusioned sometimes. What one writer called them the needless casualties of war. They sometimes chose demonic targets far beyond their prayer preparation. Spiritual presumption, like Uzzah and the Ark. And children were destroyed. Because they simply thought, by simply taking on these things, we will be able to break them. But they weren't ready for what actually happened. 2 Samuel 6, 4-6. He reached out to try and stop the Ark from shaking and died instantly. The delayed bridegroom was the other thing. An unreal or unscriptural eschatology left many wholly unprepared for persecution, loss, or death. There are five generations in truth. Paul the Apostle in 2 Timothy 2 says, The things you received of me, which is Jesus, Paul, and then Timothy, the same commit, not give, to faithful witnesses who will be able to teach others also. That's five generations in one commitment. It's not a give that stops with you. And then they didn't have a future mind. They shut out God's ultimate party. The five foolish virgins differ in only one thing from those wise virgins. They did not anticipate any delay of the bridegroom, nor prepare in advance for its possibility. If we too do not prepare for the future, we will not rule in it or serve it. That's what a future mind is. They quit the fight too soon. For God of one battle is not yet of one war. Remember the man who smoked three times and stopped, the man of God. In 2 Kings 14, 13-20 said you should have smitten five or six times, then you would have smitten Syria until you consumed it. So they became draft dodgers. And some finally even left their children to fight on their own. Psalm 79 is a record of two such generations to which a war came. And it says that they might set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments and might not be as their fathers, a stubborn, rebellious generation, a generation that set not their heart alight and whose spirit was not steadfast with God. So I tell kids, you're going to see an awakening. This is not your father's revival. That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born, which should arise and declare them to their children. God will not forget his promises to the children in this deadly war. And I love that whole psalm, Psalm 78, 4-7. I call it ex lusus lor. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children that they might set their hope in God and not forget the words, the works of God, but keep his commandments. And so I believe there can be a rebirth of what happened in the Jesus movement. So it did wonderful things, but I would never call it a true revival in the sense that it was a reviving and an awakening. But for the long-term results, there has to be restoration of not only God's voice, but also his law. It must be part of it. Since revival is always connected to some form of, again, unusual return to prayer, from more than one source, where two or more are gathered together, that thing here, this is before divine outpouring. Evidence of such a hunger among different churches is a fulfillment of Jesus' words in Matthew 18-20, where two or more of you are gathered together. In my name, there am I. That's what a revival is. His appearance, his showing up in an unexpected and unusual way. But there must be more than one person. And that's why Hans Nilsson Hauger's thing is so amazing, because you don't have an entire team. And yet, within those 30 years, a thousand churches, home churches, still, many of them still there, as well as the thousand factories and businesses. So, though prayer like obedience is not the root of a revival, and this is a very core thing, again, very often misunderstood, people ask, I've done all this, we've done a lot of prayer about this, and nothing has happened, and I'm very discouraged, and I don't believe in revival anymore. Prayer is not the root of revival. We think it is. We think if I only pray, or if I only say these things, or do these things, what I can do, I will do those things, then God will bring a revival. But he doesn't have to, and that's the point. Prayer is not the ground of a spiritual awakening. It's not the reason for which. It is a not without which. The root of an awakening is always God's grace and His mercy. That if God brings anything, saving us, healing us, bringing a new awakening, it's out of His mercy. He doesn't have to do it. It's not some, you prayed, now I must do it. Our pardon is not rooted in a condition. It's rooted in the ground. It's rooted in God Himself. So, though prayer, like obedience, is not the root of revival, or the ground of spiritual awakening, it cannot be treated as such a commitment, as the basic reason for which a divine visitation occurs. It is certainly a condition, and a condition is a not without which in any revival. In other words, if God graciously wants to bring something and do something in our lives, there are conditions without which it is not wise for Him to do that. And the one core one of that is prayer. So, many movements upholding prayer, from small personal home groups, like Leonard Ravenhill had in his home every week until he died, to national conferences like The Call, like some of these huge hundred thousand, sometimes nearly half a million people coming without advertising who's going to be speaking, what singers are going to be there, coming together for one fundamental reason, to pray for a nation, to see God bring something of Himself to a nation in a revival. So, many movements upholding prayer from these small home groups and national conferences found in these many opportunities a place to cry out to God for His mercy. And that's what we're really aiming at. We're not aiming at revival. We're aiming at Him. The greatest lesson we can learn from the past about revival is that like the law of God, it is a description, not a motivation. I mentioned this earlier. We may see much from those who have been used of God before, so we can learn from their prayers. We have records somewhere of what they said and prayed for, how they prayed, how many people prayed, how they faced and dealt with their own personal battles and really rejoiced in their victories. We saw how they built the beat map, what God did in their lives to bring this. But the greatest enemy of modern revival is the backslidden fruit of the previous one we once exalted. When the thing we were with before, that we saw before, becomes now our description of God and how He's going to be doing the next thing, we are now taking the description and trying to make it the motivation. I said it again. It's always going to be different. You can't lean on the past, though you can learn from it. So we can learn from what our spiritual forefathers faced, but we are not seeking revival. To do that is an idolatry. We are seeking Him. Our goal is not revival. That's a description of what He is and what He does, but it isn't God. So to seek revival, and that being our heart and our desire, is actually an idolatry. Because mankind has so many modern advances and they're seen in forms of major progress and understanding. So areas like science and technology and arts, communication, discovered structures of life, growth and relationship. They all form centers of wonder and new personal possibilities. Things we could do now that we didn't understand before and things we have learned and discovered now we didn't know before. Those are all great things. So we constantly face finds like this in multiple arenas while increasing globalization of world situations give access to other backyards. So we're finding out what they know and they're finding out what we knew. And that is why, for instance, the things that Christians in Africa want to know from the West is not how to start a work, because they've got bigger churches than we do. But what is available in Scripture that we don't have access to? The largest church in the world is not in the West at all. It's in Nigeria. And that's one of the least expected areas. And it's so large that the building itself can only hold a million people. The stage alone will hold close on 10,000 people. But to have a meeting with everybody, you can't put it in that building which is larger than 23 football fields, the largest covered building in the world. That's too small. That's only for the prayer meeting, which is 1,000, a million people. The actual meeting is around 4 million. And it's in the middle of nowhere. So we've found out what they think. They didn't get it from us. They got it from God. They want to know how can we get hold of Scriptures and other things that we do have. So now we have 26 different versions of Scripture we can display. God in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. But there are very few, I'll say this, true new spiritual issues in any generation that find no previous place in the history of God's standing. All of the new things are not new kinds of dangers or new kinds of sins. They aren't. They're the same old ones coming back. So I'll say this. Almost invariably, sin of the present is simply a modern form of sin of the past. And the conviction of the Holy Spirit is not shaped by contextual concerns only for some specific culture. One great danger is we think, let's take this contextually and let's look at this in terms of what we know now about culture as distinct from what they thought they knew in those days. We're simply buying into the same ancient sin that others had to face hundreds of years ago. So old and ancient enemies, some of them we mentioned, return with different names, playing different games. But their goal is the same sordid cell as what happened before. Hence, Scripture calls us to not remove the ancient landmarks planted by their fathers. Proverbs 22, 28. To not move the way it was laid out before just by thinking it's cool now we can change all of these things. They're there for a reason. The reason why they left that pack of stones there. It wasn't just because people didn't know what to do with stones. They were making a mark of what God did in the place that reminded people of what He did hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So when you tear down those ancient landmarks and you move those ancient things in order to get new and fresh ways, you may simply be walking outside of a line that was drawn in the sand a long time ago. I think academics can take us no further than accepted and embraced information. We will get certain amounts of information and it would be great that we learn more things. However, we cannot always assume that that which we've embraced is true. Not always so. We can learn more and more things about things but there's always more things to discover about the things we've just discovered. So one curse in learning is to succumb to the temptation to rely on our own understanding for inherent personal acceptance while ignoring His revelation. He's got other things He wants to say to us and sometimes we get so caught up with what we have learned and what we do know which has given us our structure of acceptance in the culture that we're working with, especially in the academic world, that we become lovers of wisdom and it is possible to even know Scripture and to think by knowing what God said that we know God. As Jesus said, search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life and these are they that testify of me but you will not come to me that you might have the life. So here is the top academics of their time, the top spiritual and religious academics of their time who knew in their own minds they had mastered to the jot and tittle of that which was available for them to learn to such a point as that they could quote things backwards and tell you which rabbi believed what on which. But it is possible to have all of that training and still go to hell. That's the great danger. So we put it down like this. The curse in learning is to succumb to temptation to rely on our own understanding while ignoring its revelation. So what sometimes we lack in our studies is deliverance from a modern version of the trap of that ancient tree first faced but then failed by our fallen forefathers in the garden. It was the tree of the knowledge. This was the one temptation in the garden given above and before all other temptations. It was there in the garden. You can touch anything, go look, check everything out, use everything but not this. It is the tree not of the knowledge of evil but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that the violation of that command means that now you are taking the creation and making it the same value as the creator or to assume that by giving yourself to that which is made you're also including the creator. But that's Romans 1. It describes what happens when people begin to worship the creation rather than the creator. And academia can sometimes step into that where the attitude of the person who has learned so much begins to now take on the same attitude of the devil. Now instead of that first pure and peaceable and gentle and easy to be entreated and a constant learner which is what every Christian is supposed to be revived or not. One who four million years from now will still be a learner. That is not the academics whatever we have on our walls that tell us how much work we've done which is good and valuable and wonderful. But the Lord says even though we have mighty men and we have wise people who are wise and people who are powerful that if you want to be excited about things don't be excited about me. Be excited that you know me that I am the one. And then he takes the exact opposite of what those things strip from a relationship to God. What happens if you take from learning a devotion to God? You have an arrogance where people are treated like nothing because they don't know what you know. And with power you have people who having power to do anything will attempt to do it. And so play right into the hands of the demonic world. And that wealth won't do it either. Because we have more Jesus speaking more about money in scripture than pretty much anything else. And his warning is one single deity that he puts in contrast to him and to the triune God is the one who is the God of men. Which means if we think this is what will support us that the person with money might use that to do anything they want to. And that what they want to might not be at all what God is calling people to do. So that fallen tree is still around today. We can buy into something that we think is so close to the creator that it makes us like him. That he wants us to make him the center of everything we learn. Which will make us constantly learners constantly childlike and constantly loving and caring for people who haven't got a clue what we're talking about. We're selling porn in a revival library here that has at least 6,000 research books. I'll put it like this. None of these books are trash. Each section on them has been carefully... There are a few books that I wouldn't have put up there but they're done by friends. I'll put them up here. But this library, unless it's got 10 cents for every mind-blowing thing on it, it's not going to go on this shelf. And they cover all these different fields connected with revival. People ask me, what do you think of which books would you recommend? Really depends on who that young believer is. But I'd say this. Collection of some of the best books over these many years. It's been at least 50 years of sifting for me would be that any book that you're going to buy or get, somehow get hold of, is one that enables you to uphold and honor Christ in all that you do and say. Proverbs 29, 18 says, Without a vision, people perish. So all of those books have to be some way related to upholding Christ and honoring Him. It's got to be a library about Jesus and about the Father and the Holy Spirit. And all of these things. Anything else you look at are all connected. It doesn't matter what the worlds of technology or the worlds of finance, the world of business, or the world, go on, fill in the blanks. Just like standing in the Library of Congress and reading those little, in the original library where they had one single little statement under each one of those alcoves that represented the entire library, millions of books. So to look under religion and find scripture, that what did the Lord thy God require thee to do justly and to love mercy and humble yourself to walk with your God, is under there. And under science, another amazing one, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. But the mind-blower for me was history, which wasn't a scripture, but written by a Christian man. It said one God, one far-off divine, oh yeah, one law, one far-off divine event to which the entire creation moved. An amazing study of what history is. So first thing, find books that uphold and honor Christ in all we do and say, because without a vision, people perish. And two, invest in those that clearly provide insight into God's law. For if we reject or forsake that ancient revelation, we may see a final forsaking of our own children. That if we fail to pass on what God has already told us is true, and with whatever floods come and whatever alternative versions are given to us to look at, that book also must uphold God's law Isaiah 4, 6. I love Finney's take again on when he first was part of opening Oberlin. He would not allow any person to teach in Oberlin unless they were soul winners, because he believed if they were not wise to win souls, they weren't wise at all, publicly. So if you were going to teach music, you had to be a soul-winning music teacher. If you were going to teach philosophy, you had to be a soul-winning philosophy professor. If you were going to teach theology, you had to be a soul winner whose theology did not prevent him from winning souls. And without that, Finney felt, you do not have the wisdom necessary to teach in an institution like this. So that would be my book. I don't know if there's three or 30,000, but they all ought to reflect without the vision, people perish, and the law of God is the fundamental. So those two, Proverbs 29.18 and Hosea 4.6, have been for me the filters through which my whole library has been built over these 50-plus years of study.