Are You Prepared (Compilation)

Now I submit to you that for fifty years in America, or longer, pastors as earnest and as sincere as the one who would seek to be sincere standing before you have sought to see revival in America. During these fifty years, the Church has become more cold, less powerful, more meaningless in society, until today the world says the Church is so weak and powerless that it is utterly irrelevant and absurd and just and has no place in such a generation as ours. I submit to you that we can't longer go on waiting for the recalcitrant and the indifferent and the stubborn.

The time has come when those who are of one mind and one heart must begin to meet on the grounds of the Lord's meeting. How will it be? I believe that the answer is going to come when we reestablish again that grounds of fellowship as was done under John Wesley in the class meeting. Hearts that were committed to Christ and they spent hours in the Word, hours in prayer, hours in seeking and discussing and thinking together, until the glory of God came down and men and women were so marvelously transformed that whole communities were shaken for Christ.

The answer? The answer is going to be, under God, that a call will go out. Are you prepared to give a night of your life above all the other responsibilities you have? If you can't give a night, are you prepared to meet at five in the morning for two hours or more? Are you prepared to expend effort and energy and sacrifice of your time because of the hunger of your heart to glorify God? Will you submit to discipline? Will you submit to teaching? Are you prepared to follow in the way of the Word and of the Lord? Will you stand on the grounds of brokenness? I believe the time will come from this pulpit such an invitation will be given and whether it be an elder or a deacon or a Sunday school teacher, they'll be asked to come and stand publicly declaring before all that this is the level of their commitment. Their names will be taken and they will make a commitment to the Lord.

Then it will be that those who have chosen not to come will have made their own choice. But when the invitation has been given and people come and stand there and say, I want to go on with God. I'm desperately concerned for the fullness of Christ.

I'm going to meet Him at any cost. I'm willing to adjust my schedule, adjust my plan. I'm going to find out how to live wholly for Christ.

Then I believe we have found the grounds. It isn't the grounds of a place. It isn't the grounds of a bank.

It's the grounds of a church. And I believe that when this happens, the glory of God will come down upon hungry hearts. And there will be such revelation of His power Therefore it was when you had people of one accord, one faith, one mind, seven days that the Spirit of God poured upon them.

When you had another group of people bound together by their common needs and common commitment and common passion, there are those who stubbornly through years of intrigue and exhortation, such people have every privilege of meeting together, speaking to God's glory and blessing to understand that you are many years older than you were.