The Manifest Presence Of God (talk with Dan Biser ⧸ David Ford ⧸ Douglas Small)

Doug, can you hear us, brother? I can. I can. Am I okay? Can you hear me okay? Okay. I can hear. I can hear. Hey, brother Doug. Bless you, brother. Hey, listen. What are some of the salient ingredients in the moves of God in history? You've written all those books on prayer and God's hand is on your life. What do you think is like the top three things you notice in historic revival? Desperation, humility. It's hard to press them into three. Unity. That's a fruit of humility. We get desperate enough that even we Pentecostals are willing to pray with Baptists like you. See, that's real desperation. I think too, George used to talk about a kind of desperation for God's holiness. The end of holiness or the manifestation of holiness is God's glory. There's no glory. The blossom is glory. The root is holiness. I think this hunger to be like God and realize that we can't be like him and only he can transform us. Your voice, I think, David, reaching not only into the Southern Baptist circles, but across lines and your passion and your connections with all those wonderful historic types, just extraordinary. I just pray for God's great, great blessing upon you and incredible open doors for you and what God wants to do. I really do believe that this is an age for the no-name people. I don't think it's just a coincidence that we've gone through the season where we've lost Dr. Graham and Ravi Zacharias and Reinhart Buckey and on and on. You look around, there's kind of a vacuum, but I think this is the time for no-name people and young and, as you said, old who just say, God, I'm just desperate enough. I want to see you do something that my grandchildren will tell their grandchildren in Jesus' name. Yeah. One last thing, then you guys can take it over. Do you see the need in churches where I think maybe there are people who really don't know what revival looks like historically. In like scripture and Psalms, tell your children and grandchildren the mighty works of God. Like I have right here, I have a couple of books. If people can get them. In the Day of Thy Power by Arthur Wallace, a tremendous book on revival. Get it. There's their stories in there. Then here, Brian Edwards on revival, the community of people saturated with God. You think, what can we do, and then we'll segue over to you and you guys take it, to get these stories back into the hearts of pulpits and young people and teenagers so they can know what to expect because they're honest. They want to move of God, but they don't know what it looks like sometimes. How can we change that? Dan, you can say that. I think the stories, as you say, that Tom Phillips of the Billy Graham Association, he talks about how the truth of God, the presence of God rides on the back of story. Habner used to say that the average Christian is so subnormal that when you meet one that's are certain that he's abnormal. I think we've settled for such a low now. What you're really talking about is the need for vision. It's the need to begin to invent, what does it look like to live a normal Christian life? To live one full of the Spirit. Normal Christianity is being a prophet. That scares the daylights out of Pentecostals, much less other Baptists. Normal Christianity is being a priest. It's standing in the uncomfortable middle between God and the hurting world and others and praying and expecting God's power to show up. It's letting God love people through us that makes us uncomfortable in that process. I think we've settled for a kind of, I'll come and I'll sit in the back pew and I'll listen to you pastor at least halfway and that's kind of a check. I've done my thing. And I don't even realize, I don't even think we realize that we're in apostasy. Right, right. Doug Galatians talks about there, he that ministers the Spirit unto you, does he do it by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Can you speak to what that is? What is that hearing of faith? Because that's crucial in revival. If we don't understand how the Spirit of God is moving and how to minister the Spirit to the people, Paul said in Galatians, how are we going to see revival? So can you speak to that, what it means to the hearing of faith? I think you may be able to speak to that as much as I can. I think, you know, there's a part of my movement that has really convoluted faith and they've made it presumption. There's another part of the movement that has resisted faith and seen it more or less as a kind of confidence. Not that moment where you are seized by supernatural capacity to believe the Word of God and that that Word will manifest itself and God will write upon it and perform and execute His own Word. I think sometimes we think we're going to make something happen. Well, then you work it. You manipulate it. You push it out of shape. Or we've become so used to seeing fake stuff and the sham and the manipulation that we have become far too cynical. Yeah, I'm usually in Baptist, Methodist, Church of whatever, Church of God, the gamut, but what I discovered in my own conviction, and I'm sure you have too, Dan and Brother Doug, when the Spirit of God, like I said, Isaiah 5, it says, my glory should be your canopy. When the Spirit of God canopies down over an audience, all that signage goes away. I like what the brother years ago, Lewis Drummond, he said in Memphis at Dr. Ofer's ministry site, he said that, I believe that 2 Chronicles 7, 14 is not only a prescription for revival. He said, I believe it's a description of revival. And when we think about it, what happens, like you're saying, Doug, when God sets down on an audience or a community, what happens? They humble themselves. They pray like never before. They seek God's face like never before. They began turning from their wicked ways like never before. So I think sometimes we're waiting, and Dan, feel free to address this, we're waiting so much on fulfilling the prescription of 7, 14, that if we just get back and he says, he sent forth his word and did melt them, he caused the wind to blow and the waters did flow. If we get back to the manifest presence of God, the result is we humble ourselves, pray, et cetera. And so the heart should be, those of us on platforms, dear God, may we just be such a conduit of your glory. When we stand on the platform, you come on your manifest presence and all of that 7, 14 happens. When I spoke at Liberty University, 8,500 students in the gymnasium, I start to preach the spirit of God sets down on that arena. Doug, they just began coming to the arena floor, flooding, no invitation given, flooding the arena floor. They filled the whole arena floor. And what began happening in the manifest presence of God was through Chronicles 7, 14. Our brother mentioned a while ago there, and he's moved now, Richard Owen Roberts, and correct me if I'm wrong, but he talks about the omnipresence of God. God's everywhere, we know that. Then the cultivated presence of God, our daily quiet time, our personal prayer time, et cetera. But often I think, and I've been guilty, we stop right there and we think that's sufficient. But he said, the third aspect is the manifest presence of God. And haven't we seen, haven't you seen in history and in our own, maybe some in our own experiences a little bit, it's not just the omnipresence. And when someone says to me in the church, oh, God's always here at our church, you know, wherever two or three are together, I know he didn't know what I'm talking about. He didn't know about the manifest presence of God. I mean, when you're in the manifest presence of God, it is totally different than everything else in the world. That's what I think people are hungry for. And so we've got to get to that point. And David, I think, let me just come back and make another pass at this. I think what really the Lord has been dealing with me about for the last 10 days, two weeks especially, is that I tend to be heavy on content and I don't wait, I think at times and build in a group of people to whom I'm addressing a sense of expectation of God's presence in the place. And I think the more we begin to build that sense of expectation of God's presence, that even as you said, when the word goes forth, there will be healings, heart healings, soul healings, emotional healings, and physical healings, that God will manifest himself in the course of the word going forth. And I think that we've become so left brain oriented and so rationalistic and so bent by the enlightenment ourself that we don't expect the place to be associated with the presence of God. You're so right. I think every time any, let's just say preachers, Sunday School teacher, whatever it is, anytime we pray with somebody, I believe we need to go into that pulpit expecting God to show up. Expectation is the atmosphere of revival. It's the atmosphere. We talk about a culture change in our nation. Well, cultures are affected by climate. Climate is affected by atmosphere. So if there's an atmosphere of expectation of the moving of the spirit of God, of souls being saved, that God's going to show up in church today, or God's going to show up in this home prayer meeting or whatever it is, it's that atmosphere that changes the climate and develops the climate of expectation in or out of the church building. And that's what changes the culture. Great. Great summation. Great. Absolutely.