In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the need for a powerful and impactful response to the preaching of the word of God. He shares examples of people who were left in shock and awe after hearing the message, contrasting it with the apathy and distractions prevalent in modern culture. The preacher highlights the importance of using modern methods to transmit the timeless message of salvation, just like the Salvation Army did in their street movement. He also criticizes the current state of Christianity, where people are getting their theology from movies and getting bored in church. The sermon calls for a revival in preaching the true gospel and a rejection of superficial and worldly distractions.

I'm assuming we can go on from where I normally preach at. Normally I'm going into a place, I'm faced with a bunch of people who are very unaware of holiness and repentance and those kind of things being laid as foundations. I've got to start at the foundation, I've got to build all the foundation because it simply isn't there in most people's lives or half the people there. So that's not always true, but I often find that I have to again and again and again go back to foundational things. And what I want to do today and this whole weekend actually is I want to look at the things that are going to bring us into effective ministry because we have a lot of truth. I don't know if you've noticed this, but just because we have those truths and just because we have an anointing on those truths doesn't mean that we're being incredibly effective out there. It doesn't mean that at all. If any of you have done street ministry in the recent past, we've all been out there doing homeless ministry in Kansas City. We did that for a year. Were we preaching the truth? Did we know the full gospel? Yes we did. We were preaching stuff that we would hear the Wesley's preach. This was our theology. We were prayed up. We were going out there in confidence. Were we seeing the extent of miracles and the extent of power of God that we ought to be seeing? No, fact of the matter, we weren't. Fact of the matter, none of us in this room are. Something's wrong with that picture. There's something wrong with that picture. There's something wrong with the fact that John Wesley walks out the door and 10,000 coal miners gather to hear him preach. And that ain't happening to us. Now, of course, John Wesley had a powerful anointing from God. I believe there's enough prayer going on. I'm confident that we're getting a similar message and we're going out with an anointing from God. Now, where's the evidence and the fruit? We say our society's complacent. Yes, that's true. We say there's little faith in the atmosphere. Well, you know, I want to say to you there's more faith here than has happened in some of the periods of history when they've had revivals. I'd say there's more faith here than was in Samaria when Philip arrived. And within days the entire city was turned upside down and there was powerful revival. So I dare say there's more faith in America than that. So what I want to do this weekend, I want to start by talking about the early Salvation Army. This was a holiness movement that was able to become radical enough in a street way. And this is the key. Most of us holiness people, we're not radical enough to become street wise in our transmission of the truth of God. We become holiness wise. We become hundred year olds in our faith and our everything. You know what I'm saying? The reason I'm saying all of this is I'm not going to preach my traditional thing which you guys already would agree with. I'm assuming some of you have listened to my sermons on Sermon Index or whatever. You already know this kind of stuff. You would already just spend your whole night nodding your heads. I don't want to do that. I want us to go from where we're at and say, okay, we've got to become effective. Now we've got a message. It's worth hearing. I've seen whole rooms full of people just about left with... just about their mouth is hanging open with almost shock at the end of my sermon. What am I preaching? I'm preaching John Wesley stuff. They've never heard it in their lives. Not once. That's the sad, awful truth of the matter is they knew more about the Gospel 250 years ago than most of our trained guys today will ever know. That's the sad fact. Finney knew more about the Gospel 100 years ago, 120 years ago than all of our Bible college guys going through Bible college year after year. That's the fact. It's so shocking when we preach it. When we actually preach stuff that convicts and is getting people's holiness of heart established inside of them, people are just shocked to the core. I preach stuff and people are literally just left almost gasping with shock at it. I've known of guys who just sit in silence. They just sit there in silence at the end of the meeting and they don't do anything. They just sit there kind of staring. Praise God, that's a good response. I wish everybody had that response. Instead of the usual thing, oh, where's the coffee machine? You know where the coffee machine is? Anyway. Salvation Army. Why is it of interest to us? They're a street movement. They used modern methods but had an old message. God's calling us to do the same thing. There's no point in us having an old message and old ways of transmitting it. You might have noticed that we live in a culture that is as modern as it can be. We're using iPods. What's this being recorded on? It's being recorded on a laptop. Many of the youth of today are getting online to get stuff. They're going on YouTube and they're watching videos of things. They're downloading music that they like. This is a fact of life. This is our world. This is our culture. They're sadly watching television for hours at a time. I don't need to tell you what I think of that. They're getting their theology out of the movies. They go to the movies and watch some quasi-spiritual movie and come out and go, wow, mmm, whoa. That's the extent of their theology of the grand, huge total of American youth. They're going to church and getting bored to death. They're going to church and going ice skating. They're going to church and going to the movies. That's the extent of our Christianity. Christianity has fallen. Plummeted is what it's done. Plummeted in its standards, in its way of transmitting itself. And everything about our gospel has disappeared. We don't any longer preach the gospel. If we tried to tell Paul that this is the gospel, he would just shake his head and say, you've invented another religion. I don't recognize that. That's nothing like what we preach. You've invented another religion and slapped the name Christianity on it. Go and have your way with it. I'm not interested in it. I'm going to go to the streets and try and make some converts from scratch because I can't deal with you guys. It's just way off. Paul might even say, you're a cult. You go around to the big mega churches and say, you're a cult. Listen to what you're preaching. I can't have anything to do with it. I don't even know where to begin to try and get your people out of the deception they're in. They think godliness is gain. Gain is godliness. Godliness is gain. Really? Sounds familiar from the heresies of Scripture. We preach it brazenly in most of our churches. Gain is godliness. Godliness is gain. How we can get away with that, I don't know. So, okay, we're in a culture. If we were missionaries to this culture, we've seen our missionaries around the world. I don't know if you realize, but there's been excellent training has started to take place amongst a lot of missionaries. Some of the first things they do, they take notice of the culture and they adapt to it. We no longer send missionaries around the world that expect the culture of that country to come into line with my little prejudices and our way of doing things. In other words, in the old days, we used to send out missionaries from England and the first thing they drew was try and civilize the natives. Their idea of civilizing the natives was basically getting them to dress in English clothes, getting them to talk like Englishmen, teaching them English. In other words, we changed them into little English guys. This happened in New Zealand. All the Maori people who used to wear grass skirts and run around killing people, thank goodness they stopped that. But you know, oh no, you're not really truly Christian unless you're properly dressed in British clothes and speaking properly. This is what missionaries used to do. And sadly, missionaries used to also get involved on the side of, eventually, this is how they ruined their name, ruined their reputation, get involved in a war on the side of the British against the natives. And that totally destroyed their reputation with the native people. That happened all around the world. We no longer send missionaries out that do that. We send missionaries out now that the first thing they do is they make a huge study of the culture they're going to. Well, I want to say to you, we are lousy at doing that in this country. We are in the midst of literally a cultural revolution in America. The western countries are totally unique. But there are similarities. I look back at the Salvation Army. The early Salvation Army was the most radical movement pretty much I've ever found in history apart from the early church. So if I go right back, I've studied church history for years and years and years. If I look at the early Salvation Army, it is by far one of the most extreme and yet very, very effective. Listen to this for a quote. I was reading an article about the early Salvation Army a couple of days ago and William Booth said this. He said, I would expect that one of my officers should in three days be able to impact 30,000 people. That's what I expect. And that was not even unrealistic because they were so notorious. They were by far the most controversial movement in the world. They were front page news. There was mobs in the streets. They only had to march down the street with six people to cause a riot. No joke. We're going to examine that movement tonight because number one, it's a holiness movement. Number two, they used for a holiness movement extremely unorthodox methods. Why did they do it? Because William Booth saw he still wasn't reaching the common man. That was the key to it. William Booth, who started the Salvation Army, he was a revival guy. He preached in churches. He was a very successful evangelist but always very controversial. Why? Because he couldn't stand the fact that the poor, the masses of people were outside the church not hearing the true gospel and he was stuck inside churches preaching to church people. And it just drove him mad doing that. And he went down to a place, he went down to the east end of London where they estimate there was almost a million people living in this massive slum. He said even five-year-olds were drinking themselves, were drunk by the end of the day. Five-year-olds. Parents would be sending their children to the gin shop. Gin was the cheapest possible drug or liquor that you could get. Parents were sending their children to the gin shop. The children were getting drunk and bringing back the liquor home to their parents. Alcoholism and just every sickness and every form of sin was just rampant. And William Booth would walk down there and he'd be saying, here I am, a preacher. I preach revival every day. I walk past these people and we are doing nothing. And when I try and preach on a street corner it's like the tiniest drop in the tiniest ocean and these people every day we're not affecting them. They never come to church. When I try and even bring them into our churches, all the church people turn up their nose at them. They don't even want them in there. They smell that poor, that poverty stricken. And out of that, out of that, that was in William Booth's heart, he said I'm leaving the church. I'm leaving. And he was part of the Methodist New Connection. That was the group he belonged to. So his wife was fully behind him. She said, we cannot keep doing what we're doing. We can't do it anymore. And he just went out and started what they called, first of all they just called it the Christian Mission. Now you notice in that word mission what are they saying? They're saying we're missionaries to our own country. What happens when you're a missionary? Not just a normal Christian anymore. What does a missionary exist to do? A missionary exists for one purpose only. They have a mission in the land. They're not an ordinary person. They have been sent specially. They are there on a mission. Their mission is get the people converted. Pray and get preaching the Gospel. In other words, missionaries think differently than your ordinary Christian. They're on a mission. They are there for a purpose. They don't exist as a normal church goer sitting in a pew who occasionally witnesses to someone. That's not a missionary. Missionary, you know, we know what that is. And he said, we're going to raise up missionaries and we're going to go into the slums of our own country, which happened to be, believe it or not, renowned as the richest country in the world at that time. England was the head of the empire that circled the globe. And they were by far the most powerful country. And we look at America today, I saw a statistic the other day, 744,000 homeless people in America right now. 744,000. This time of year, where are they? They're crowding south. They're avoiding the weather. They're down here. They're down in Phoenix where we've just shifted to. Tens of thousands. People with children. People who used to have a job. People who are on drugs. People who are drunk. The exact same thing that William Booth faced. How are we going to reach these people? You know, Jesus was sent to the poor. We avoid this fact. We think it's okay to go to rich people. I want to say to you, Jesus did not go to rich people. He went to the poor. So, tonight what I'm doing is I'm talking about Salvation Army. Tomorrow night, I'm going to be talking about what is lacking from our Christianity right now. I believe we're in the process of not just restoring the Gospel, I believe that part of things, we are on track in the circle that I'm talking to right now. I have no problems with saying that. I want to say to you, there's far more to New Testament Christianity that we are lacking and it's making us ineffective. And I want to look at it tomorrow night and literally spell it out. In fact, I want to prioritize it and say, the Gospel is the most important thing to restore New Testament Christianity. Okay? That's what tomorrow night's about. The final night I'm here, I want to talk about there are different effective ways of prayer that come straight out of revival. I've been studying revivals for many years. We already have a handle on one of these. The second, we don't totally have a handle on. I want to preach on that. And the second thing I want to preach on is how to renounce stuff out of your life that does not seem to be going away just by repenting of it. Very important topic for us all. Because most people I know that are repenting of stuff are still looking at stuff inside them and saying, why has that not gone? I have prayed about that. I've prayed several times. Why is that not gone? Is that certain thing or it could be multiple things? That's what we're looking at on the last night. So I just want to tee up where we're heading with this. But tonight is Salvation Army. Alright. So there's William Booth. They start the Christian mission. It starts to get somewhat successful. So he's got guys out on the street. They've got guys on street corners preaching. They tried their hand at feeding the poor. Powerful thing to do, praise God. That's what the early Salvation Army became known for. Of course nowadays, it's gone so far down that road, but that's pretty much all it's known for. Social work. Helping the poor people. Everybody goes, oh yes, Salvation Army. I always have a warm spot in my heart for Salvation Army. Well, the church people originally hated the guts of the Salvation Army. Why? Because they weren't just about that. They were about preaching the most radical gospel you've ever heard. They were fans of Charles Finney, so they preached the Charles Finney type of gospel out on the streets. They would pray and pray and pray for hours and hours and hours, and the next day they'd be out on the streets doing the most extreme things, gathering a crowd, preaching to them, seeing people converted, bringing them in, having a big march, getting pelted with stones, bricks, dead cats, you know. Half of the course, an average day in the Salvation Army. I don't know what they do today. We don't know. I want to say to you that there were numerous occasions of Salvation Army officers being killed or being beaten up, including even overseas, but especially in England where it started. It was the most radical movement that pretty much the church has ever seen in modern times. We've got to go that radical today because I don't know if you've noticed, everywhere we look is apathy and complacency. And if we're going to break through that, we have to look at the movements that were successful at doing that. They were as much a holiness movement as we are today. I'm talking to the people in this room and I'm assuming about you that you basically are a holiness person, that you believe that when God truly moves upon a person, their heart becomes clean before God, and anything less than that is unacceptable. In fact, it's not even Christianity. My view of Christianity is this. You're either walking before God with a clean conscience right now, or I say to you, pal, you're not walking in Salvation, are you? According to Scripture now, not according to your popular preacher down the road. I want to say, according to Scripture, if your conscience is not clean at this moment, what kind of Christianity is that? I can show you Scriptures that send you straight to hell. Seriously. Seriously. So I'm assuming that we have a fairly basic agreement that holiness and repentance are basic things. And that was the attitude of the Salvation Army. Very much so. They're as much into prayer as we are. Much into prayer as the kind of praying that we're doing tonight over the phone line and everything. They were into all of that. What made the difference? Now, start this Christian mission. Things are going well. They are getting a few people saved. They're starting to get more preachers dotted around. They expanded to more missions. But William Booth is just looking at a situation and he's just saying to himself, we still are not getting to the common people on the level that we have to because there's people being born and dying without hearing the Gospel for one time in our own country. Poverty is appalling. The urgency is so great and we just have this scattering of Christian missions. It's a drop in the ocean. And around about 1878, they started adopting more radical measures. Now bear in mind that they were a holiness movement and they ended up being accused of being a circus and bringing worldliness into the church. Now this is interesting. What was Jesus accused of by the Pharisees? Was he accused of being too holy? No, the answer is the opposite. He was accused of spending all his time with sinners and bringing the standards down. This is an interesting point. I want to go there with John Wesley for a minute. What was John Wesley accused of? They said, Wesley, you're out in the streets preaching, which is totally where you belong, by the way. And not only that, you're raising up chimney sweeps as preachers and anybody can tell that your movement's of the devil. You're bringing the standard of Christianity down. Your preachers don't know what they're talking about. Now these were some of the most anointed guys in history, of course. Your preachers don't know what they're talking about. You're preaching lies. They're preaching lies. And we believe you're bringing terrible compromise into the church. So a lot of the holiness people, believe it or not, in both the cases of the Wesleys and the case of the Salvation Army, stood back and mocked. And in many cases, some of the mobs were led by clergymen against the Salvation Army. And in those mobs, people were literally beaten, sometimes within an inch of their lives. Mobs were led by clergymen. What are we seeing there? We're seeing a holiness movement that suddenly becomes effective on the street. And the devil goes, who can I whip up as opposition to this because I've got to do something quick. I know the church. My guys that I always rely on to do this. I want to say this to you. History shows this totally time and time again. The previous move persecutes the new move. The previous move persecutes the new move. In other words, if we have a massive revival today, who are the most likely people to persecute it? Probably the movement that I've come out of, been part of most of my life. Pentecostal, charismatic Christianity. Why are we likely to get persecuted by that? Number one, they're jealous that they're not the ones having the revival. They've still got just enough fire left to become annoyed that here's this group of upstarts. Why were the Pharisees and the scribes and everything annoyed at Jesus? Here's this upstart coming and usurping our crowd and he's healing and seeing miracles and they love him. The common people hear him gladly and it says they delivered Jesus up out of envy. You ever read that Scripture? Remember that Scripture? They delivered Jesus up out of envy. Who were the holiness guys? Now we've got to get a grip on this. This is one of my key points. Who were the holiness guys of Jesus' time? It was not Jesus and His disciples, although inwardly they were the most holy guys around. Outwardly, they were fishermen and tax collectors that Jesus had collected off the street. Who were the holy guys? The holiness guys of Jesus' time were the scribes and the Pharisees. Their view of Jesus was you have dropped our standard into the gutter. We don't hang around with the people you hang around with. We don't treat as friends the people you treat as friends. We rebuke them and call them sinners. You invite them in and have lunch with them. In Jewish culture when you have lunch or a meal with someone, that means you accept them. So if you have lunch with sinners, prostitutes and people off the streets who are in sin, people like Zacchaeus and people like that, the Pharisees are just looking in horror. They're saying, I thought these guys stood for holiness. This is a joke. These people welcome sinners. These people eat and drink with the sinners. They cannot be truly holy. Now what's the message for us in this? Is that if our holiness is such that it affects not just our heart and gets us truly right with God, but starts us on a path of separating ourselves from the world. I'm not talking about from worldliness. That's a good thing. Separates us from the people out there and reaching them in the most powerful way. We are like the Pharisees. William Booth was stuck with this problem that his whole movement that he'd come out of had basically become Pharisees. They looked down their nose at the poor people. They looked down upon every person he reached out to. In fact, the attitude was, listen man, these people are hopeless and they deserve everything they're getting. Just leave them alone. It was pretty much the attitude, they pretty much deserve to go to hell. It was almost like, let's just wash our hands of them. Let's get into our cozy cuddle inside church and get rid of that. Not even look at that. William Booth was the opposite of that. He says, we've got to reach these people. These are the people Jesus would go to. He'd leave the church people behind. He says, God sends me to the people that need a doctor. I didn't come here for the righteous. I came to seek and save that which was lost. I'm going out there where those poor people are because why it says that the poor, Jesus turned around to his disciples actually, they were poor as well. He said to them, blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven. It talks about Jesus sending the rich empty away and yet the poor are basically given the chief seats in Jesus' kingdom. The poor are welcomed in Jesus' kingdom. It's the rich that he sends away sad. Remember that? It's all the way through the gospels. Here we are in a rich culture, us rich people, who's Jesus sending us to? He's sending us to the poor man. He wants to turn us into William Booth. If we let him, if we let him, he will turn us into that. And in so doing, we can start walking in the stuff that the officers of the Salvation Army were expected to walk in. You come into a town, man, I would expect 30,000, not converts, but to just be impacted by your presence in that city within three days. I want to tell you a story about what happened in New Zealand. I'll save it for just a second because they did do that in New Zealand. I want to say to you that when they hit New Zealand, which is where I come from, 1883, they sent two guys. I'll tell you about that in a minute because we still haven't got to the point where... So they decided to change the Christian mission thing into an army. And overnight when they did that, and they took on the uniforms, they would start carrying huge flags through the streets with blood and fire written on them. And they were getting guys saved out of the gangs of their day. So the gang guys would be marching down the streets and the other gang guys would look over at them and say, let's get the Jesus freaks, man. And they'd pick up their clubs, pick up their whatever they would pile into people with and get ready for a huge fight. And this was happening continuously because they were being so effective that all the pub owners in England were up in arms against the Salvation Army. They were getting too many drunkards saved. So they became an army. What happens when you become an army? You become militant against the devil. So they start wearing these uniforms which were pretty much similar to army uniforms of the day. They start attracting a lot of attention, both good and bad. Then, the key thing was this. They find the loudest music they can. Basically, William Booth went through this whole series of we're still not getting them. We're still not getting them. We're still not getting them. You've got to see where his heart is at. He's going, I'm going to keep going with this until we find effective means. And we're going to keep preaching the same gospel, the most powerful anointed gospel that probably England had heard for maybe 50 years. That's what the Salvation Army was preaching. To give you an idea, who was Smith Wigglesworth involved with before he became a world famous healing revivalist? He was involved with the Salvation Army. Before he came into the Pentecostal thing, which was like the newest radical thing, he was with the Salvation Army. Why? Because they were the most radical movement. Smith Wigglesworth was only interested in that which was on the front lines and the most radical thing that was doing the best good. So before he was with the Pentecostals, he was with the Salvation Army. So they've got the brass bands. It says, some of the quotes you read about the early brass bands when they went out there are hilarious because they would go out there with instruments held together with string and pieces of rubber and stuff and the guys couldn't even play. Like they'd learn the cornet for like four hours and then they'd go out on the streets trying to play. And so they were out there making this huge noise with a vague resemblance to some Christian song. And the people would be gathering around. And then, further than that, they started, I've got a quote here, I think it's from William Booth's son, he says, it sounds like a brass band has gone out of its mind. So they're going out there. Now a lot of this has application to today. The reason I'm saying this is they were amongst the first to be drenched in a media-oriented culture. A media-oriented culture of which most of the world knows nothing. You have to realise we in the West are way in front. And places like Japan, which is an ultra-technology-based culture, but basically the Western nations, we had lived in media-drenched culture for a vast amount of time. Way before television, they had newspapers, handbills, music halls, all those kinds. That was the technology of the day and that's where everybody went in those days. But what did William Booth start using? He goes, actually he didn't do it. What happened was the brass bands themselves started doing this. They started stealing the music hall and the pub songs, changing the words, and going out on the streets and blasting them at full volume. And so the people are reeling out of the pubs going, that sounds awfully familiar, that song. But they're going, glory to God, and God is majestic and all that stuff. But I honestly sound very familiar to my drunk brain. And that was the basic approach. So what happened is the sinners were coming in droves. And it got to the point where the mobs, they had forming what were called skeleton armies. These were gangsters of their time. Lucky they didn't have guns in those days. They were gangsters of their time that would form huge armies to march against the Salvation Army when the Salvation Army would march. And so the newspaper guys would all be crowding in. The skeleton army would be marching. The Salvation Army would be marching. And... Like that. That happened in New Zealand a lot. The authorities were starting to arrest the Salvation Army guys for making disturbance on the streets. And so they were throwing dozens of them in jail. It brings me to mind that scripture where it says those who have turned the whole world upside down have come here also. Who did they speak that of? They spoke it of Paul. Was it Silas or Barnabas? Okay. Booth's motto. One of the mottos was this. Our home is in the open air. That was one of his mottos. Another one was this. Go for souls and go for the worst. Now that's a key point there. Who are the worst that we can find? Well, they're either in prison or they're about to be. What did Jesus mean when he says... First of all, he goes, Okay, go to the righteous people first and see if they're interested in being part of the wedding supper. The servants come back, No, they all made excuses. He says, Okay, go to the streets and see if they'll be interested in coming to the wedding supper. He comes back, They weren't that interested. We got a few in. He goes, Go to the highways and byways and force them to come in. What's he saying with the highways and byways? Well, highways and byways, they're the thieves and robbers. They're like the criminals. That's the last people you go to. But Jesus is basically saying to his disciples, and they're apparently saying, Listen guys, if you want to really have the success at filling up the wedding feast, get in amongst the criminals. Because I tell you, they know they're sinners. They do know they're sinners. That's one thing they know. Their view of this is, Jesus didn't die to forgive me. Jesus died for those nice church people that dress up nice and stuff. I am a hopeless case. I'm not going near the church. I know I feel terrible. I know I don't seem to be able to find a way out of what I'm doing. I know my grandmother and everything is praying for me. This is the way it is out there. I'm telling you, you start talking to the homeless people and the criminal class. These guys, quite a few of them have been to Sunday school when they were a kid. Amongst the black community, some of them were raised in church, and they have gone out and they're literally carrying guns and they are knocking people off. They're blowing people away. And they know in their heart, this is what they think they know, Jesus didn't die for me. He didn't die for me. He died for the nice people. That's what they think. These people, in a lot of cases, if we will dare, I believe are right for the gospel. I want to say this to you as well, is that if we start traveling amongst that class of people, somebody amongst our friends, some of us are going to get hurt. There were women officers of the Salvation Army that were kicked to death. There were officers of the Salvation Army that had lime thrown in their face which was burning lime like acid which blinded them. Permanent blindness. We're dealing with criminals who literally they're carrying handguns. That's where we're at in our society. It's worse than it was then. Some of these people are on crack, they're on meth, which is worse. Mostly crack in the black neighborhoods, mostly meth in the white neighborhoods. That's the situation we're in. We've seen our soldiers out there. I believe it's inevitable that we're going to produce martyrs in our day and we'll produce them in our own country. These people are within half an hour's drive of here. It's a radical thing to say, to say go for souls and go for the worst. The music side of things and the church's reaction to it basically was these guys have brought Christianity down to the level of a circus. In those days, you have to remember transmitting that into their form of entertainment. The circus was the entertainment that clowns and everything would go by once every couple of months. That was like the worst possible thing for a holiness group to do. It's kind of like what you're saying is we have made Christianity worldly. We've turned it into a joke. We've turned it into the clowns of the ... And Winnie and Booth would just say, listen, we're not dealing with you nice people. We're dealing with people who look forward to the circus, who will spend their last penny to get into the circus because they have nothing bright in their lives at all. That's the level of people we're dealing with. You ask us why we make such a loud noise with our music, why we're taking the musical songs, the drinking songs out of the pubs, and it's because of who we're dealing with. We don't want you nice people. Go away. Get out of my face. We want the sinners. And so they started getting these guys brawlers saved. Next thing you know, they'd be printing all these handbills out. Come in here. No, they'd make it even more extravagant. They'd go, fight of the decade. Hear such and such. Tell of his fight with the devil. And they'd get a crowd that way. They didn't care, man. Next thing you know, the guy would get up and give a huge testimony and then William Booth would get up and just lay into everybody with the gospel, you know. Meanwhile, this huge brass band thing going on. When they started sending them to jail in New Zealand, these guys would hold this huge rally all the way to the jail. It was like the worst outcome for the judge and the police. It was kind of like, what are these guys doing? Anyone would think that they're celebrating people going to prison. Yes, they are. Believe it or not. They're celebrating. Praise God. They're getting 60 people saved on the way to jail. It's an opportunity for a parade. Glory to God. Then the guys in the prison would make up songs to sing on the way out. So they'd have a huge parade to and a huge parade out. It's kind of like, eventually the authorities, one of the reasons that they repealed all the laws against the Salvation Army was because nothing worked. Nothing ever worked. It always made it worse. In 1883, two guys came to New Zealand. Now, New Zealand is a small country. We've only got four million now. I'm sure we probably only had less than two million then. 1883, William Booth was, by this time, so wildly successful because as soon as they became an army, something happened. As soon as they went with the music thing, they exploded worldwide. They were getting letters, enormous quantity of letters just saying, please send someone here. We've got poor people. We don't know how to reach these people. You know how to do it. Please send someone. Well, by the time they got to New Zealand, they sent these two guys. One was 19 years old. One was 20 years old. This is a youth movement, by the way. New Zealand is a long way away. But even so, William Booth was always sending young guys out. That was what the Salvation Army was made of. Old people didn't want anything to do with it. It was way too extreme for that. You know, you can't sit in church and hallelujah, praise the Lord, and next minute you're out getting your face kicked in out on the street. It just doesn't match. It's a mismatch. You either be full-on radical or don't bother. He was only interested in the full-on radical guys. So it was all young guys and ladies. You know, young women, young men. Apart from the leadership, that was pretty much the Salvation Army. So this 19-year-old and this 20-year-old arrive in New Zealand. They look at the country and they say, it's got two islands. I tell you what, I'll start at the bottom of the South Island, you start at the top of the North Island, and I'll meet you in the middle. You can say that's false bravado, but you've got to remember by this time, Salvation Army was so notorious that all the papers were full of it. Salvation Army arrives in New Zealand. And so their meetings were packed out. They got 5,000 converts in nine months in this tiny little country. And where do all these people come from? They come from the gutters. They're coming out of the gangs. They're coming out of the prisons. These are people that Jesus would preach to all the time. They're the sinners. Jesus came. It's lost. We go and try and seek and save that which thinks it is righteous and wonder why they don't listen to us. We go to the people that Jesus literally ignored. Have you even noticed that? Have you even noticed the parables He told about rich people? He goes, Oh yeah, I want to tell you a parable today. It's about Lazarus and the rich man. Lazarus was the poor guy eating the crumbs off the rich man's table. Where does the rich man go? Well, of course the rich man goes straight to hell. And he's there in the fire. And Lazarus is over in paradise. And there's a big gulf between them. This is the kind of story Jesus would tell. Highly offensive to rich people. But then again, Jesus didn't care. You have to realize Jesus didn't care about that. He says, Woe to you that are rich. You have already received your consolation. Don't expect me to come around rewarding you. Don't expect to find a happy ending when you get up in front of me on judgment day. What's the judgment of the sheep and the goats about? It's all about how you treat the poor. Nothing else. You would imagine from the sheep and the goats parable that when we get up to heaven, the only thing that matters, seriously, only thing, is how we have treated the poor in our life. And nothing else is important. That's what you'd get out of reading that parable. It's a very long parable. Jesus is massively emphasizing it. One of the final things that is ever said in the book of Matthew before Jesus is gone is the judgment of the sheep and the goats. So where are we getting to? Well, let me read to you what a judge said to one of these in New Zealand. He told this group of Salvation Army guys, read and meditate. To read and meditate on their Bibles a little more. To talk less. To trust less to the hideous clamor of drums and brass instruments. Drums and trumpets were fit accompaniment for a circus, he said, but out of place on Sunday in a quiet town like Milton. So, of course, he sent them to jail. The other thing they would do is he would say, Right, I'm going to fine you three pounds or whatever and you just pay the three pounds and we won't send you to jail. And they'd say, No, I'm sorry, we're not paying that. And they'd say, Why? And he'd say, By principle, we have free speech in this country like every other western country around the world and we are not going to pay that fine. And so they would refuse to pay fines they'd get sent to jail all the time. Until they passed laws banning people, banning judges from sending Salvation Army guys to jail. Which they did. It was passed in the main parliament of New Zealand. Such was the outcry because after a while everybody started going, These guys are doing good work. They're working amongst the poor. They're feeding people. They're clothing people. That we don't even touch. And they're doing so much good work and they're preaching the gospel and they're getting people saved that never looked like getting saved. And you're sending them to jail. So the parliament, actually in England as well, all around the world passed special laws about the Salvation Army. Don't send Salvation Army guys to jail. Don't bother doing it. And they became, that sadly was the beginning of the end. They slowly became respectable. Slowly became accepted. By the time he died, William Booth was a worldwide figure of renown. He would go into a country, they'd roll out the red carpet and he would meet with the prime minister. He'd meet with the top officials of the land. They would ask him, How's your work going? How can we help you? It was totally the opposite by the time he died. They had revival in the Salvation Army for 30 or 40 years. 30 or 40 years. They were the most extreme radical group on earth. Now, I want to put it to you that the lessons out of this for us, you know, the lessons are obvious. The lessons are obvious. First of all, where'd my glass of water go? Okay, the lessons from not just the Salvation Army, I wanted to share with you some dreams that a guy had. I was into the early Salvation Army and we had street bands and stuff like that doing fairly, you know, pathetic work out on the streets way back, 20 years ago, almost, not quite 20 years ago. And my wife and I are musicians. We have friends that are musicians. So we read about the early Salvation Army and thought, Man, that is so powerful. Let's get out there and try some of this stuff. So we were doing it years ago. At one time in New Zealand, quite some time after that, you know, God was speaking to me for years about this. It was kind of like I couldn't get the Salvation Army out of my mind. I was studying Finney. I was studying Wesley. I would be studying Whitefield. I'd be studying Martin Luther. I'd be studying all revivals, you know, Jonathan Gofford. Revivalists, nobody's even heard of, you know. I studied revival history for years. I couldn't get the Salvation Army out of my mind because the thing about the Salvation Army that was different was they succeeded in breaking into a resistant culture such that a missionary would do. If a missionary in their wildest dreams had the success of the Salvation Army in approaching a culture with the gospel of repentance and holiness and everything, and yet, wham, having a massive impact amongst the lowest class of people, I mean, most missionaries dream of that. Now, the Salvation Army managed it. By the way, Wesley's movement managed it too in the beginning with very similar methods. Very similar, but not as drastic. Similar, but not as drastic. Okay. Let me tell you about these dreams. As I say, we were into this stuff. And in 1993, I got this tape from the United States about this prophetic guy who had had these series of dreams. And in the dream, I was told by my friends, man, you've got to listen to this. This is right up your alley. This is the kind of stuff you talk about all the time, Andrew. You've got to listen to this series of dreams. Well, this guy, way back in 89, I think, his name was James Ryle, a pretty well-known preacher. He had had this series of dreams. In the first one, he's watching this. It's outdoors. It seems to be in a big arena like maybe one of the county fairs or something like that. And he says, on the stage are these two blue, brilliant blue guitars. He said he could tell that was symbolic of something. It wasn't like the color of the guitars was important, but it was symbolic of something. And he said these guys came out and they were looking at the guitars and they were looking at the sheet music in their hands. And he said they picked up the guitars and they were about to play. And he could see that as they were about to play, these fishing lines were about to be cast out into the audience and people were about to be reeled in by this music. And he said the only thing, the thing that came flashing into his mind was this is like the Beatles music when it first came. Everybody will love this the instant they hear it. He says they were just about to play and he said the dream stopped. And a couple of months later he had another dream. In this dream he was in an old, no he was in a huge church and he was in the equipment room where they keep all the old junk music gear. And I don't know if you've been into those, but you know, there's like piled up 1970s vintage junk, music junk over in the corner and stuff like that. Broken microphone things. That's what it's like in some of those churches anyway. He goes in there, he's poking around in the corner and he picks up, James Rye was into the Beatles. He loved the Beatles when they first came out. He was just that right age when they first came out. So God kept talking to him about the Beatles. The Beatles, by the way, even to this day, was the most high impact band there has ever been in history. They are the only band in history, for instance in Australia, where in one week all of the top five songs were Beatles songs all at once. You know, we think Michael Jackson sold at the height of his, in the 80s or whatever, which he did. He sold millions. He was nothing on the Beatles. The Beatles have sold one billion records worldwide. One billion. No band has ever done the things that they did. To the 60s generation, it was like a light went on in their minds when the Beatles hit. Of course, the Beatles used it for evil in their latter days. They led the youth of their day into the drug culture, did some of the worst damage you've ever seen. But that doesn't take away from the musical impact that they had. It was the most profoundly powerful music, very simple, very catchy. Okay. So there's this Beatles thing. Next dream he's having, he's poking around in this church equipment room. He picks up this old Vox amplifier, which he knew was the Beatles' brand of amplifier. And he looks at it, and he goes, suddenly it's like this shock hit him. He said, I'm holding the Beatles' power amp. And he knew it represented the power that they had to make music that would impact the generation. He knew it instantly. And the next impression that he had was fear. He said, people will kill me for this. Musicians around the world, if they knew I was holding the power source of the Beatles, would kill me to have it right now. They wouldn't even hesitate. They've been searching for this their whole lives, some of the musicians around the world. And he said instantly, he was transported, I think, out into the main part of the church, and he watched this woman singing. And she was singing, In the name of Jesus Christ the Lord, I say unto you, be saved. He knew it was that same anointing. Something about this powerful music. And people were just falling over under the power of conviction of God as this lady was singing. So it was having this powerful impact, this music. The dream changed again. And this old Salvation Army guy was handing him a scroll. Now I don't even know if James Rowland knew anything about Salvation Army. He certainly didn't ever say to me, I've met him and talked to him and stuff, he certainly didn't say to me that he knew anything about Salvation Army. I knew a lot about it. When I was hearing this the first time, I, at this moment, for the first time I've ever done it, actually only time, I actually fell out of my chair onto the ground and just began to weep. That's the effect it had on me. Because the Salvation Army guy hands him this scroll and on the scroll it says in the last days there will be another Salvation Army. They will take, they will be worshipping warriors that will take a new sound from God out onto the streets. And I honestly, I just, sometimes I've preached on this topic and gotten all choked up just talking about it. I don't know why the Salvation Army has that effect on me, but it still does. So, the next thing I believe he saw, oh he had seen an anointed guy worshipping God. The next huge thing in this dream, it was a massive dream that he had, he said he was over this highway and there was all these Hell's Angels ten lanes thick heading in one direction. All these Hell's Angels, he said it was like a gridlock and people were just heading down the highway. He said he knew it was the broad road that leads to destruction, he said. It was just chock filled as far as the eye could see with thousands and millions of people just literally waiting to drop off the edge into Hell. And they were just sitting there totally worldly people. They were represented by Hell's Angels. That's how God represented them. He said over on the side road was this group that was moving really fast. He said maybe about 30 or 40 guys and they were dressed like Hell's Angels as well. Oh, back before in the vision of the scroll he was told these will be called the Sons of Thunder. Now I don't know if you remember in the Gospels who was called the Sons of Thunder. It was James and John. Part of the reason was they had just asked Jesus can we call lightning down on these people and fry them? Yeah, like Elijah. You see, they were the ones that out of all Jesus' disciples that most had that Elijah like thing. It's a judgment thing. It can be bad. It can be good. On that occasion it was bad. But that sense of Elijah about them. Now, they will be called the Sons of Thunder. Anyways, watching this motorcycle group that was over to the side and he looked on the back of their jackets and they had Sons of Thunder written on the back of their jackets. And he said they were about to get this powerful anointing and this music from wherever or whatever it was and impact all those Hell's Angels on the highway. He knew that was what the whole thing was meant to be. I won't go into it any further than that. I just want to say that there's something about the Salvation Army, their discovery in music, their discovery of how to impact a whole generation, that applies to us. I was saying before, we have a generation that's spending its time online. It's into music in a huge way. Almost bigger than any generation beforehand. What's the biggest download on the internet is music. Music is an enormous draw card on the internet. People download mp3s all the time. What do we have to do to impact our culture today? I believe God's calling us out of our comfort zones. I believe he's causing us to go to the kind of people that William Booth would go to. I believe he's causing us to use the kind of methods that they would use. Why? Because when you go to a missionary culture, the first thing you've got to learn is how to speak the language. And it's kind of like we are speaking Greek to these people. We're holiness people. We speak the language of holiness. Our music is the music of holiness. Our words might as well sound like Shakespeare to half of them. You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like we get our doctrines pretty much out of Wesley. That's the kind of stuff we preach. We try and modernize the way we put it across. But essentially, what we're trying to do is bring old truths into the new day. And I think unless we learn to speak the language of our culture, which I don't think we've done, we are not going to win this battle. We are not going to be the new Salvation Army if we cannot learn to do that. That is the one thing facing us. And I want to say this to you. As soon as we find the key that opens that lock, many of our colleagues looking at us will say, you're being worldly. Look at what you're doing. Look at the people that you're hanging out with. Just like I said to Jesus. Look at the people you're hanging out with. Look at how you're going about your ministry. I don't agree with that at all. Surely preaching is enough. Listen, I'm one of the biggest preacher guys talking about preaching all the time that there is. I preach about preaching. That's what I do. I want to say to you, preaching is not enough if our language is out of sync with the very people that we're trying to reach. If they're speaking a language of music and other things that may appear worldly to our holiness friends who are happy to sit and discuss holiness doctrine all day. Well, you can do that if you want to. I would actually like to see some people saved. Now this is not the only thing. Tomorrow night, there's a whole side of this from the early church that I want to bring out that we're also not doing. In a lot of ways, it's more important. But I want to say this. There is, in my view, this thing has driven me for years. As a musician, I've given up on, actually, the music side of it, I've totally given up on virtually for five years. And even the vision of it, I lost heart. We had street teams in New Zealand would get up in camouflage gear and go out there. And by the way, I don't recommend camouflage gear because they think you're a militia. At least in New Zealand, the police don't carry guns. But I just want to say to you, you get in trouble for appearing like you're going to shift to Waco and start a cult or something and store guns and ammunition in your backyard. You get in bad trouble doing that. So I just want to say, let's not go the camouflage way, but there is an equivalent and there is an army thing and there is a militancy and there is a street movement waiting for us if we can adjust our language to fit our times and preach repentance and holiness to this generation in a way they can hear. Jesus did that. What did He come as? Did He come as a king? Did He come as a prince riding on a white horse? No, He came as none of that. He was born in a stable and came as a poor man preaching to the poor in their own land. And we do very little of that at the end of the day. We're not just trying to often convert people to holiness as a heart experience. A lot of the time we're too often trying to convert their language system and all that kind of stuff. It's kind of like if you were to go on Sermon Index, I don't know how many of you guys go on Sermon Index, we can listen endlessly to guys with old fashioned accents if we want to. At the end of the day we've got to have a powerful repentance holiness movement now, or in a hundred years time they won't be remembering us except to say that generation lost it completely. They got holiness back and they did fail to transmit it to their generation and it all was lost. And we don't want them to say that about us. Amen? Okay, so really that's the message of tonight. On a practical level, of course, when Jose told me he was a rapper, I thought, Jose's a rapper. So we are going to do some of this music. That's not the important side of it. I just want to say tomorrow, the biggest part that I'm addressing tomorrow night is the power of God. The thing about the Salvation Army is they didn't just go out with music, they went out with the power of God. So tomorrow night I'll be addressing that in a very step-by-step way because we have to grasp it and grab hold of it and walk into it. And we're not there. We're there on the preaching side. We're not there on the power side. We ain't there. Don't try telling me we are because we're not. So, as I've said to Jose, I've already tried the music thing in several different ways. I don't care for it anymore unless it's, number one, anointed. Two, it's preaching a powerful gospel to the people and glorifying God. And number three, it's got to be a company because otherwise we ain't the Salvation Army doesn't matter what we wear. You know what I'm saying? Okay. People, just stand up with me for a minute. We're just going to pray together. Father God, right now, Father, Father, just raise your hands to God and surrender if you want to be part of this thing. And I do want you to consider that decision. And I don't want you to just raise the hands because the preacher is saying, you know, let's all raise our hands. Don't do it unless you want to be part of something like this, okay? Personally, I do. Father God, God, I just pray for those of us who have our hands raised before You, Father God, we want to be part of a new Salvation Army, Father. God, we want to be effective in this generation, reaching this generation out where they are, Father. Not where we are. Not in our nice churches and our beautiful surroundings, Father God. We need to be sent forth, Father God. Please send us with an anointing, God. God, we have our hands raised because God, we desire You to move. You to move upon us with power, with an anointing to preach Your Word, with authority, God. And to go out there with music that's powerful, impacting people's hearts, to lay hands on the sick and see them recovered. To walk in power, God. Father, show us the ways into this, God. Let us walk in Your Spirit. I pray for everybody here that has their hands raised, Father God, that we would become an army, Father. That You would unite an army of young people like the Salvation Army of all those years ago. We'd go to the poor. We'd go to the criminals. And we would risk our lives, God. We would knowingly risk our lives because You did it already on our behalf. And every apostle You ever sent, almost all of them were killed in service, in ministry. So we remember that, God. We know we're going to be seen into dangerous places, God. We raise our hands to You anyway, God. We say, Father, we want to be a generation that is utterly sold out, that does not hold back even our own lives, Father God. It says in the last days, those will arise who love not their lives unto the death, Father God. Father, we pray for anointing. We pray for a tremendous Gospel in our mouths, God. We pray for signs and wonders following. And for many daring young people to join us, God, because this generation loves to be daring, and we don't give them anything to be daring about. And God, we repent of that. We repent of being mediocre and such minimal requirement type of Christianity that we've had, Father God, and the young people despise it. God, let us be utterly extreme and radical, and they will join us in this fight, God. Help us, Father. Anoint us. Unite us. And use us and send us, God. We surrender everything to You, Father. Oh God, we pray these things in Jesus' mighty Name. Amen.