This sermon emphasizes the importance of anguish in the church and in individual believers' lives, highlighting the need for deep sorrow and distress over the spiritual condition of the church and the world. It calls for a return to true passion for Christ, which is born out of a baptism of anguish and a genuine burden for the things that break God's heart. The message challenges believers to move beyond mere concern to a place of deep prayer, weeping, and seeking God's heart in order to see true renewal and revival.

And I look at the whole religious scene today, and all I see are the inventions and ministries of man and flesh. It's mostly powerless. It has no impact on the world. And I see more of the world coming into the church and impacting the church, rather than the church impacting the world. I see the music taking over the house of God. I see entertainment taking over the house of God. An obsession with entertainment in God's house, a hatred of correction, and a hatred of reproof, nobody wants to hear it anymore. Whatever happened to anguish in the house of God? Whatever happened to anguish in the ministry? It's a word you don't hear in this pampered age. You don't hear it. Anguish means extreme pain and distress. The emotion so stirred that it becomes painful. Acute, deeply felt inner pain because of conditions about you, in you or around you. Anguish, deep pain, deep sorrow, agony of God's heart. We've held on to our religious rhetoric and our revival talk, but we've become so passive. All true passion is born out of anguish. All true passion for Christ comes out of a baptism of anguish. You search the scripture and you'll find that when God determined to recover a ruined situation, He would share His own anguish for what God saw happening to His church and to His people. And He would find a praying man and He would take that man and literally baptize him in anguish. You find it in the book of Nehemiah, Jerusalem is in ruins. How is God going to deal with this? How is God going to restore the ruined? Now, folks, look at me. Nehemiah was not a preacher. He was a career man. But this was a praying man. And God found a man who would not just have a flash of emotion, not just some great sudden burst of concern that they'll let it die. He said, no, I broke down and I wept and I mourned and I fasted. And then I began to pray night and day. Why didn't these other men, why didn't they have an answer? Why didn't God use them in restoration? Why didn't they have a word? Because there was no sign of anguish. No weeping, not a word of prayer. It's all ruined. Does it matter to you today? Does it matter to you at all that God's spiritual Jerusalem, the church, is now married to the world? That there's such a coldness sweeping the land? Closer than that. Does it matter about the Jerusalem that's in our own hearts? The sign of ruin that's slowly draining spiritual power and passion, blind to lukewarmness, blind to the mixture that's peeping in? That's all the devil wants to do is get the fight out of you and kill it. So you won't labor in prayer anymore. You won't weep before God anymore. You can sit and watch television and your family go to hell. Let me ask you, is what I just said convicted you at all? There's a great difference between anguish and concern. Concern is something that you, the biggest interest in. You take an interest in a project or a cause or a concern or a need. Let me tell you something, I've learned over all my years, 50 years of preaching, if it is not born in anguish, if it has not been born by the Holy Spirit, where when you saw and heard of the ruin that drove you to your knees, took you down into a baptism of anguish where you began to pray and seek God, I know now, oh my God, do I know it, until I'm in agony, until I have been anguished over it, and all our projects, all our ministries, everything we do, where are the Sunday school teachers that weep over kids they know are not hearing and they're going to hell? You see, a true prayer life begins at the place of anguish. You see, if you set your heart to pray, God's going to come and start sharing His heart with you. Your heart begins to cry out, oh God, your name is being blasphemed. The Holy Spirit is being mocked. The enemy is out trying to destroy the testimony of the Lord's faithfulness and something has to be done. There's going to be no renewal, no revival, no awakening, until we're willing to let Him once again break us. Folks, it's getting late and it's getting serious. Please don't tell me, don't tell me you're concerned when you're spending hours in front of internet or television. Come on. Lord, there's somebody to get this over and confess, I am not what I was, I'm not where I'm supposed to be. God, I don't have your heart or your burden. I've been, I wanted it easy. This won't be happy. But Lord, true joy comes. True joy comes out of anguish. There's nothing of the flesh will give you joy. I don't care how much money, I don't care what kind of new house there is. Absolutely nothing physical can give you joy. It's only what is accomplished by the Holy Spirit when you obey Him and take on His heart. Build the walls around your family. Build the walls around your own heart. Make you strong and impregnable against the enemy. God, that's what we desire.