Revival Conference 2007 - Part 1

Bless God. Wonderful to be here this evening in Canton, Ohio. I'd never heard of it until the invitation came. No offense to those that are from here. Lovely town. Wonderful to see people gathered because they want to see a fresh touch of Jesus Christ, not only realized in our own lives, but in our nation as well. Thanks be to God. I have sought the Lord for this meeting. I had a witness of the Holy Spirit to be here this evening, and I have sought the Lord, and he's been faithful, and he has given me a word, and this word is exclusively, thus far, at least anyway, for this evening. And I'm going to ask you to turn in your Bibles to Numbers chapter 11, please, if you will, and if I were to give this a title tonight, I'd like to call it, Let Me Not See My Wretchedness. Let Me Not See My Wretchedness. Let's pray together while you're turning there. Almighty God, Lord, the hour is late. The need is overwhelming, but not to you, Lord. God, I ask you to do something supernatural tonight, something sovereign, something that can only point to the cross. It can't be attributed to anything but the life of God being manifested in our midst. I call out to you, Lord, tonight. I call out to you, Holy Spirit. I ask you, God, to animate me. I ask you to put in my mind and physical body. Lord, I can't deliver this unless you animate me. And it's pointless, Lord, if you don't cause our hearts to want to hear it and come and make it live. I'm asking you, Holy Spirit, to take these simple words and multiply them a thousand ways, and may they speak to every heart, every mind, every situation. God, undo things that need to be undone. Give strength where strength needs to come. Lord, I thank you for it, God. Thank you, Lord, that you're going to do something this evening. You've determined in your heart to do something sovereign. God, we anticipate it and believe it, Lord, and receive it in my own heart. I thank you for this. I thank you that you've been speaking to me all day about this. Lord, you've taken me through this message personally, God, and you've let me apply it to my own heart. And God, I thank you tonight. Give me grace, Lord. Help me, God, to speak with grace. And I thank you for this with everything within me in Jesus' mighty name. Numbers chapter 11. We're going to begin at verse 10. Scripture says, Now, folks, this, believe it or not, is a prayer that you would hope God would never answer. Moses cries out to the Lord, and he's distressed, he's grieved, he's tired. Something gets into him, and he cries out and says, Lord, don't let me see my wretchedness. Now, I tore this apart in the original Hebrew Testament. Let me just expand it for you a little bit. Now, the word see means to see intellectually, to hear something, to feel something, to experience it or to learn something. And the word wretchedness means something that is bad, something that's of inferior quality, something that is wicked, evil, mischievous, something that is injurious, something that will cause or give pain or unhappiness. And Moses cries out to the Lord, he says, Lord, don't let me experience, don't let me see this. I don't want to know, in other words. If there's something in me of inferior quality, if it's mischievous in your sight, if it's injurious, if it will cause pain or bring unhappiness, don't let me see it. Moses says, I'd rather die than to see this thing. You see, folks, there's some cries that we never want God to answer. These cries, they come from carnal reasoning. They come from the sense that I've seen enough, I've done enough, I've gone farther than most men, and I don't want any more pain. Please accept who I am and let's go on from here. Now, that gets into every heart. This is a difficult hour we're living in. And we come to meetings like this and we say, Lord, I want you to bless me. I want to be encouraged, I want to be picked up. I somehow want to come to a meeting like this, I want to be touched by the sovereign hand of God, I want to go out and be a dynamic evangelist, and I want to win thousands to Christ. And I want to do it all without pain. I want to just see nice things. So, Lord, thank you for where you've taken me from, but I don't want to see wretchedness. I don't want to. Some folks are just sick of it. Perhaps you're in a place where it's just week after week, suddenly it's lost, suddenly it's falling apart, and you're just tired of it. I don't want to see this, Lord. Now, Moses himself in Numbers 32, verse 23, said, Be sure your sin will find you out. In other words, everything that a man refuses to see in himself will one day make its way to the forefront of his life. Said through what, by a folk? If there's an issue of the heart, if there's something in you, something in me that's not dealt with, it might be just a little burning coal, it's never been dealt with, and the devil will just leave it alone until you're at the height of your ministry. Then he'll just suddenly fan it with his breath, and it will burst into flames. You find yourself overpowered by something that you thought you could deal with. You put it on the back burner. God is not going to touch this. He doesn't have to deal with it. Now, in Numbers 20, if you'll go ahead with me, please, in your Bibles. Believe it or not, I am talking about the Bible. We will get there eventually. Numbers 20, verse 9. Now, keep in mind, Moses prayed earlier. I don't want to see this wretchedness. I don't want to see this anger in me. He had a burning anger inside towards the people. He did not want to see it. He did not want God to deal with it. Now, a little later into the future, Numbers 20, verse 9, it says, Moses took the rod from before the Lord as he commanded him, and Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said to them, Here now, you rebels, must we fetch you water out of this rock? Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smoked the rock twice, and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, Because you believe me not, and sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this congregation into the land of which I have given them. You see, this anger that Moses didn't want to see caused him to miss the fullness of what God had intended for his life's journey to be. And if there's an area in you or in me that we will not let God touch, we will not let people speak to it, the pastor can't preach to it, nobody who knows us at work can talk to us about it, and ultimately God can't speak to us about it. And this area that we don't want to see, I'm not talking heaven or hell here right now. What I'm talking about is that God had a plan for this man. And this man was going to go further than he went. He was originally going to go into the Promised Land with the people that he was guiding to this place. But now, because of this misrepresentation of God, and that's really what striking the rock was all about, he misrepresented God. God was being merciful, but he was portraying God as angry. And God said, I've often looked at the scripture, and said, why such a severe dealing with this man? I mean, he's paid a price. He's been 40 years in the wilderness. He's walked where nobody else would walk, and he's done what nobody else, seemingly in this generation, had the ability or ability to do, and yet he seemingly makes a mistake, and you deal so utterly, quickly, and severely with him. Why God? Why this severe dealing? And I began to realize that, you see, this had been in him for a long time. I believe it was this impulsiveness and this anger in him that caused him to kill the Egyptians when he was 40 years of age. He had an interior anger that was never dealt with. He killed the Egyptians. He spent 40 years in the wilderness. He came back out. We started with an opening scripture where he was angry, but didn't want to see the root cause of this anger. And by the time he strikes the rock and misrepresents God, it's a moment.