The Cost ⧸ Price of Revival

Good evening, good to be here. Now, forgive me if I come down here to be with you. My young friend Malachi spoke day before yesterday. We've been here for a year, I think, and he talked about family. One of the great signs of true revival, that divine deposit that awakens the church first, is people fight to get on the front rows, and the backslidden sit on the back rows. So, I'm serious. I want you to do something for me. I'm an old man, and you don't want to make an old man mad. So, I want you to uncross your legs. If you don't, when you stand up, you'll break your neck. But I want you to uncross your legs. I want you to find somebody that you haven't hugged their neck yet today. That can't be your mate, your wife, your husband, et cetera. And I want you to find them, and then grab them by the neck. And I want you to, you don't have to sit on the front row. Y'all can stay where you are. But I want y'all to come up close enough. I want to get my hands on you, okay? So, uncross your legs, make some noise, it's all right. God doesn't mind Christian fellowship. And just come over this way. Those of you who are backslidden, or right-slidden, and left-slidden, God bless you. Oh, look at this. That's wonderful. Just keep coming, keep coming, keep loving. Bless you in every way he knows you need. Thank you, darling. In the name of Jesus. God bless you, God bless you. In India, they sit, we like our space in America, India. Oh, they sit. Oh, I know, I go to Nepal. I've been there 70 times, yeah, right, right, right. All right, okay, okay, that's enough. I just wanted you to greet one another. I didn't want you to get married and raise children. Now, I want to join all of those who have stood in this place. And say just amen to everything that's been said to this wonderful church, to the staff, to those who've cleaned, to those who've sung and played instruments, to those who've prayed, those who've taken care of the food. And just to the warm hospitality. You know, churches have personalities. And I travel and speak all over the world. And you walk into a church and you feel something. You can feel it. You know, every now and then I get to, I don't ice skate very often, but every now and then I get to ice skate down the aisles of churches. Coldest place on the face of the earth, you know? And then you walk in sometimes and you say, good morning, how are you? You know, are you happy in the Lord? And they look at you and say, yeah. And you say, notify your face. You look like you're somewhere between acid indigestion and a migraine headache. But when I walked into this place, there was a sense of the receptivity, the power and the spirit of God. And as I've walked with my brothers and we've shared and ministered during these days, I've been nurtured and fed. And to those who are joining us online, I want you to know how thankful we are for you. I know that there've been those from the United Kingdom, from Australia, from India. We know there've been some 20 to 30 states that have been joining. I don't know how many are online now. It'd be interesting to have that exact figure, maybe somewhere at the end of this, to know how many people have joined us. But what I'd like to do, and I feel a tremendous burden, I really mean that, what do you say after all of this? I mean, you don't wanna say too much and you don't want me to say too much. I know, I know. But what do you say after all of this? I mean, so much has been said. There's been the rich depth of the richness of the word of God. There's been the exaltation of Jesus Christ. There had been 32 definitions of revival. I've counted them in various forms and it all comes down just to Jesus being in our midst. What do you say? And I'd ask the Lord about that. And I really feel that he gave me clear instructions of what to share with you. And I wanna tell you just a little bit personally from where I come and do not hear what I'm sharing with you as any form of bragging or trying to validate who I am. I want you to know that I do not speak out of an intellectual understanding. I was not a student of revival. I was not. I did not even, oh, I grew up in the Bible Belt of the South. We had revival, you know, every fall and every spring. And we had hellfire and brimstone and we saw people saved and there were deep stirrings of God. But I didn't know what you talked about, brother. I didn't know it. I got all the way to cemetery. I mean, seminary. Excuse me. I got all the way to seminary. And I had learned, I was saved at nine, called to preach at 12, argued with God for three years, committed myself at 15, started preaching, started pastoring as a 17-year-old teenage boy in college in my freshman year. Now I've been back and apologized. Anybody has a teenage pastor deserves an apology. And I had learned very quickly how to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. It's really easy if you'll just pay attention. You can, you know, you can smooze. What's that word you use, Al, smoozing? You know, you can try to brown nose, polish people up, you know, and climb up the ladder. You know, and I was good at it. My wife and I had married when I was 20 and we had began the journey together. My third year in seminary in the spring of 1970, I had been at the point of ready to throw in the towel. I'm very honest with you, I'd just take the mask off and be, I was ready to give up on marriage. I was successful in the pulpit, but miserable in here. I did not know what you meant about this business you talk about as revival. I honestly did not know. I'd been to revival meetings all of my life. I'd been to great meetings where there had been great preaching and many had been saved, but I'd never been in a divine holy visitation where the sovereignty of God dropped down. And so in the spring of 1970, the Jesus movement was sweeping across the United States. I was thinking as Michael was talking just now, what an introduction to what I wanted to say tonight. In fact, to even use one of the terms that I want to talk about, the cost of revival. And as we were moving in those intimate circles in the seventies, the war in Vietnam was winding down. Racial strife was rapid across America. It wasn't a Southern problem. Watts had burned down out here. Chicago was aflame. Social psychologists had announced that there would be no need for the church by the turn of the 21st century. There was a professor at Emory University, one of our esteemed theological schools in the South in Atlanta, Georgia, United Methodist School and the Candler School of Theology who announced the death of God theology. Danny, I hope you remember his name. He's dead, God's not. Be careful when you criticize God. He'll kill you and outlive you and bring you to judgment. And in that atmosphere, God had begun out here on the West Coast, a stirring of his spirit. Calvary Chapel came out. Chuck sat on the stool and preached to a bunch of hippie kids and they started baptizing him in the Pacific. I could go on, I could tell you many things about that. The long-haired hippie by the name of Arthur Blessed headed across America, carrying a cross. Stopped on the campus at Southern Seminary where I was a third-year student and I listened to him. He had gathered a group of us together, really our professors had to speak, let him speak in one of our classes. And the morning that he spoke, I never will forget, he didn't have on a tie and a coat and he wasn't graduated from seminary and didn't know Greek and Hebrew and he didn't talk like most preachers talk. And I remember very vividly sitting there and thinking, man, this guy, he didn't know anything. But he began to tell story after story about people encountering Jesus as he walked across America. That day during the course of those moments, I had been getting ripples from what was going on about a hundred miles across the rolling bluegrass at a little school called Asbury College and Theological Seminary, where in February, in fact, it was the morning of February the 3rd, cold February morning. A chapel service had been called and it was mandatory, you had to go to it. And on that particular February the 3rd morning, the professor who was in charge of delivering a homily, you know what a homily is, it's a mini sermon. M-I-N-I, not M-A-N-Y. I'm not gonna do a mini sermon by the way. And mini sermons are like mini skirts, they don't quite cover the subject and leave too much exposed. And well, that's the truth. And what happened was the morning that the professor had finished his brief homily, something had happened and Michael said it while he was giving a testimony a while ago. He said the atmosphere. Something had happened in the atmosphere. And the professor realized that in this 1200 seat chapel called Hughes Auditorium over here and over there and down here and over here, there were students that were weeping. I can't tell you all of the story, but that morning he gave a moment for testimony just like you began to share a while ago when you gave them opportunity. And as the students stood up one after another, about a dozen of them, as the students stood up one after another, gave almost the identical testimony but in different person applications with tears running down their cheeks, often with trembling chins. They talked about a fresh encounter with Almighty God. And they said, we'll never be the same. And they sat down and the atmosphere changed around where that person was as students began to weep all over the auditorium. If you ever wanna read an interesting little book, there's a little book called One Divine Moment. I think it's back in print, written by Dr. Robert Coleman. It's just the testimony of what God did. It's what you were talking about, Dan, when you went and sat and talked with the dean. I never had the privilege to meet him personally but old Bob Coleman and I spent hours talking about it. And God began to do a deep work. One student stood up. He was a senior pre-ministerial student. He was the leader of many things on campus. And that morning when he stood up at the end of the testimony time and was called upon standing in the middle of the auditorium, he said, most of you think I've been a great Christian leader. I've led all the Christian organizations on campus but I'm a fake, I'm a fraud and I'm a hypocrite. And he said, last night on my knees in the basement of this chapel, somewhere between midnight and daylight, I met the Son of God face to face. And he reached up and he symbolically said, I wanna take that religious mask off and I want you to see a new creation. Now I'm paraphrasing his words but then he sat down and a holy hush, an atmosphere swept across that auditory. Professor guided by the spirit, I'm sure, said to the students, I sense some of you want to come to the altar. The kids began running to the altar across the front of Hughes Auditorium. I've been there and seen it. There was a kneeling bench that the Methodists used usually in order to have communion or the Lord's Supper, whatever you wanna call it. It's the breaking of the bread together. And it was filled within seconds. And within a matter of a minute, there was no room between the kneeling rail and the front pew. And so the aisle began to fill up. Long story short, that one hour prayer chapel lasted unabated 24 seven for the next eight days. Classes were dismissed. Students began to be converted. Professors who had had theological arguments with one another began to get on their knees together. The pastor of the largest Pentecostal church and the pastor of the largest Baptist church in town stood up before the body and said openly and honestly, we've spoken very nicely about one another, but behind each other's backs, we've pretty well cut each other apart. And they got on their knees. It's hard to cut a man down on your knees. And God just began to unzipper the glory of heaven. That overflowed onto that little campus, 100 miles away. And that was what I was in the atmosphere of in the spring of 1970, somewhere mid April or so. And they had a chapel service after Arthur had spoken that morning. And when they had that chapel service, it was not one that was planned. One of the professors said, we're gonna have a prayer meeting after lunch over at the chapel. I wasn't really into this praying thing. I was trying to get out of seminary and thinking about how I was gonna make a living when I left the ministry. And I drove by the back of that big chapel. As I drove by, I remembered, oh, I've got a paper to write for my pastoral psychology class. And I'll go in and write. I'm sure there'll be a lot of emotions in there. I'll go in and write a paper on the existential experience of emotionalism as it impacts your spiritual journey or some pseudo-sophisticated intellectualized thing like that. And I walked in the back door of that chapel with the intention to sit on the back row and write a paper. I walked into the presence of revival. The holy glory of God enveloped me. Instead of sitting down on the back row, I literally came to the front and sat down for the next three hours, I wept. I wept as I'd never wept before in my life. I wept, and the reason I remember so well, I wept because my handkerchief got so wet from my tears until I wrung it out and I realized I'd made a spot on the carpet and I thought, throw me out of seminary for that. Somewhere about five that afternoon, after three hours on my face before God, not on my face, sitting, crying before God, in this big, beautiful 2,000 seat chapel with about 50 or 75 people when I came in, a man got up with a scraggly face. He reminded me of my dad. My dad had died a week before I graduated from high school and he reminded me of my dad. He was rough and he was tough and you could tell he didn't have good education. My dad was a fifth grade dropout. He started driving a timber truck when he was 12. And when he stood up with brokenness and tears, he said, I've got everything the world has to offer. I learned later he was a rich Texan. He had yachts in foreign ports, homes in foreign countries and a private jet. In fact, it was in that private jet that he had flown into Louisville and he had gone over to Asbury. And when he'd gotten over to Asbury with one of my friends and they'd come back to fly home, a student who had been touched in the early stages of revival at the chapel had gone up and down the hallway at the airport in Louisville, catching people by the collar and said, hey, stand still mister, can I tell you about Jesus? This kid had been broken and shattered in relationship with his mother and daddy. He was determined to go home and hug their necks and tell them. Anyway, that guy showed up and he sat there and I was sitting and he caught my attention because he reminded me of dad. And I thought to myself, this guy murders the English. He has no theological training. He's nothing but a kind of dumb cowboy, it seems like. But Jesus, he knows you better than me. And I wept and I wept. He got through and I thought I'll do what I know to do. My Baptist tradition had taught me to rededicate my life. And so I stood up behind a little microphone that was on a stand like this. And when I stood up and looked out instead of 75 people being there, there were almost a thousand on the bottom floor. When revival comes, you do not need Madison Avenue techniques. The move of the spirit will publicize to public people on the highways and the hedges at a level that no other way can it be publicized. And as I stood there for a moment, I was gonna tell them how bad I'd been and how good I wanted to be. And I was promising God I was going to do better. And all of a sudden I realized that everything I was gonna say focused on what I was going to do. And in total brokenness, I said, I think I'm going to die. If somebody doesn't help me, I don't wanna live anymore. And I fell on my knees. I'd grown up in a little Baptist church where people prayed over people, but never like that crew that prayed over me that day. People have asked me, my Pentecostal friends have asked me, did you get tongues that day? I don't know what I got. I just know it changed my life. You know, there's some people who call it filling of the spirit. Others call it baptism of the Holy Spirit, baptism. Some people call it the right thing and they ain't got it. And some people don't know what to call it. And it's all over. And I didn't know what to call it. But when I stood up, the things of the world had gone strangely dim in the light of the glory and the grace of God Almighty. And I fell, I fell, I fell by accident into the very presence of God, not because I was searching, not because I was desperate, not because I was pleading with him, not because I was holy, not because I was reading this book, but because of the very grace of God and the atmosphere of holy revival that was deposited as that sweeping move of the Jesus culture swept across America. That was my first taste of revival. That afternoon, I went out and got my wife and my newborn boy. He was only, well, he was actually about a month or five weeks old. He's now 48 and he's pastor of the large vineyard church in Coleraine in Ireland. But I got him and brought him in. And I never will forget going out that day, we stopped, I had to stop and get something at McDonald's and God was so moving. You heard Michael talk about it, the atmosphere. He was so moving that in the very McDonald's lobby, there were prayer meetings that were going on. During those days, the holiness of God began to saturate and literally move across the nation. That was my first taste of revival. I've never gotten over it, I've never. And I never intend to. All I had to sort out what I was and who I was and whether I just got born again then or whether I got born again when I was nine. And God worked through all of that and he took me through all of that and I grew in all of that. But the one thing that I'm telling you all of this, because all of a sudden God began to put into my life individuals that I'd never heard of before. The great Shandong Revival in China in the late 20s and the early 30s where Watchman Lee was converted and John Soon was impacted. Wong Ming Tao and his wife ended up in prison for 17 years. I shared this with Sarah the other night. The little missionaries that I knew that were Baptists, Bertha Smith and Olive Lawton, old Dr. Charlie Culpepper, all of a sudden they began to come into my life and pour into my life. And they began to love me and pray over me. And I left seminary and went to pastor a little church down in Southwest Georgia, an old traditional first Baptist church and God sent revival in spite of. Listen folks, most of the time God sends revival to a congregation in spite of their pastor. Doesn't matter whether you got a beard and no hair at all son, he can do it. And he just sent revival and it shook our city. Was it good? Was it easy? Was it smooth? Heavens no. I had deacons who thought I'd gone crazy. Some of them called me charismatics. They didn't even know how to pronounce charismatic. I'm serious. Brother Douglas, you talked about the charismatic renewal movement. That's what was going on at that point. I'd never heard of people like Edwin Owe. I didn't know who Leonard Ravenhill was. I didn't have the slightest idea about any of these. And Vance Hamner, I'd never read one of his books. I didn't have the slightest idea about any of that. I didn't know who Stephen Oldford was. I'd never read the great histories. A.W. Tozer was nobody I'd ever studied. E.M. Bounds, who was that? All of a sudden God started pouring into me. When you're hungry and thirst, let me tell you what. If the thirst carries you toward the throne room, the throne room will pour into you everything that heaven intends to put in you. And when he begins to do it in you, he will change you and you will never, ever be the same. That's my experience of revival. That's where the beginning stages were. Now, I moved from there to a pastorate in Atlanta, Georgia, a suburban church. It was my contact with Leonard Ravenhill for the first time. I'd heard him, I'd met him. I'd gone to a prayer retreat down in South Florida where he had preached one night for an hour and 45 minutes on revival praying. And then he prayed longer than he preached. And none of us wanted to go home. God came and the glory of the spirit fluttered in and we never got over it. I invited him after he had spent a week with old Dr. Charles Stanley at First Baptist Church, a month with Dr. Stanley at First Baptist to come out to our little church. He taught me more theology in the two weeks he was with us than I got in my four years of seminary. God quit saying that. And I'll never forget, I had, by this time God was giving me young men like Malachi and they were coming out of the woodwork. And one Tuesday morning he was speaking and I had 11 young preacher boys, high school and college kids. I could name them today. One of them's a medical doctor in Honduras. Another one's a pastor of a big vineyard church in Atlanta. Another one's a pastor of a First Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. One of them is right now in the House of Representatives, Dr. Jody Heiss in the US Senate and the US Congress in Washington, DC. These were all young men. And I remember, I remember Raven Hill saying to that bunch of young men, he looked down at him and he said to that bunch of young men, he said, young men, with all you're getting, get unctioned or for God's sake, get out of this pulpit. And I began to understand there was a difference between theology and neology. Theology is what you understand about God. Neology is when he comes to reveal himself to you and define who you are in him. And he changes everything. Oh, I had to go through all the arguments. You remember then, Douglas, how the Pentecostals and the Evangelicals were struggling and battling and having wars over the gifts of the spirit? I went and people tickled my throat and I tried to speak in tongues. It just wouldn't come. I gagged and coughed and hacked. One night, a little church in Southwest Georgia, a Baptist church, I was praying by myself. And all of a sudden, God gave me something I'd never, I didn't tell anybody about this for years. I was serving Baptist, they'd have fired me. God, I'm on God's payroll. And God just changed everything. During the course of those days, we began to see revival. I went to the North American Mission Board and pioneered the Office of Prayer and Awakening. Henry Blackaby followed me there after I spent eight years pioneering there. 30 years ago, I began itinerating. And I'm telling you all of that because I want to tell you what I'm going to tell you tonight. And this is the introduction. The message is not long, I promise. Don't get nervous. I'm telling you all of that because basically everything that we've been dealing with up to this point, almost every speaker has dealt with the general theme of the price of revival. The price of getting something. I've got a little, you know, what's that, whatever you call one of those things, put it up there, PowerPoint, that's what it is. I want to define a couple of things and I want to teach you some stuff that, because listen, I believe what Malachi said, it's coming. We're not far from it. It's going to be messy, it's going to be difficult. The devil hates revival more than he hates anything on the face of this earth because he loses more in a matter of months and he loses in decades when denominational programs are emphasizing evangelism. God does supernatural things. The price is what you pay to obtain something, to get it. And we've been talking about that. Desperate praying, all of these kinds of things. Go to the next slide for a minute and I'll show you. God wants to talk to us, go to the next one. We were created to commune with God, go to the next one. I want to give you three definitions here. Revival is, it's not immediate, begins on Sunday and so on Wednesday where we put notches on our gun because we got somebody saved. Revival is God's work in and among his people, bringing them from cold, carnal complacency to biblical Christianity. It's Christ in you, the hope of glory. It's an atmospheric change. We've got a whole generation that's never seen that. We've got young men like you that knows something's there but you've never seen it in the full-fledged, unveiled glory of what it is. And I see your heart. God gave me a view into your heart and you hunger for that, son. You hunger for it, Shane. Don't give up, don't give up. And don't get afraid when it comes. I'm gonna give you some insight on what to do as it begins to unfold. Now, I've been married 54 years. We soon celebrate our 55th anniversary. And I paid an awesome price to get that gal. I chased her until I tripped her and she fell and I sat on her. And I said, will you marry me? And she said, ah, and I said, okay. I slipped a ring on her finger and we made it this far. I paid a price, but I've had her 54 years. And I usually, you know, I tell this and she's present sometimes. I said, I paid a price to get her, but I've had her 45, 50, 54 years now. It cost a million that you can't believe. I said that about 10 years ago and she stood up in the middle of where I was speaking and said, big boy, the cost just went up. Now, listen to me. Price is what you pay to obtain. Cost is what you pay to maintain, okay? Now, revival is God's work in us. Awakening is God's work supernaturally manifest through the bride that changes the atmosphere that brings conviction to the atmosphere of secular society. And there's a world of difference between conviction and condemnation. Condemnation is what I do when I... That's a stupid looking beard. Man, you need a beard like mine. That's a puny little thing, you know? You'll never grow one like that. It pushes you away. Conviction is a work of the Holy Spirit that draws you. And so often we, listen, the greatest evidence of the fullness of the Spirit, yes, the gifts are operational. I believe in all of them, but the greatest evidence is fruit. Love, joy, peace, patience, tenderness, kindness, mercy. And you see, when that's in you, it comes out. Jackie and I had been married, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes when I discovered she was really weird. She discovered about me the same. And I said to her a couple of weeks into this journey of 54 years now, I said, you really make me mad sometimes. And she looked at me. She's the greatest theologian I've ever seen. She said, honey, I don't make you mad. I squeeze you and what's inside leaks out. And the world is not interested in the height of our steeples or the creed of our theology. They wanna know what we leak when we get squeezed. And I began to understand what it was to be in the Spirit, to live with the overflow of the glory of God. And so I saw a revival. And here, I'm gonna go quickly through two or three things and then I wanna get to some meat. Go to the next one there. Desperate praying by desperate people. That's obviously one of the things. I've got a four hour teaching on this, but we'll just go real quick through the next three or four slides. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Praying over the condition of the people of God. Isaiah said, woe is me, he didn't say woe is them. Washington's a mess, yes, but the church is in a bigger mess. Our solution is not with President Trump. Our solution is with broken hearted pastors, weeping and travailing, deacons, laymen, elders, Sunday school teachers who spend nights weeping over their class. So keep going. Then there's the condition of the people of God. Go to the next one there, next. And then we come to humility, price of humility. Humility has to operate in order for revival to come. And then humility is what operates in the midst of revival and sustains it. And then humility is what keeps the move of God. And so often what happens when revival comes in great outpouring of the spirit is an individual, a man or a woman or a people or an organization begin to be raised up by the hand of God. And they begin to come and say, look at what we do instead of look at what Jesus does. And the hand of God is lifted. The candlestick that you were talking about earlier tonight, it's removed out of their midst. Now, let's go to our third thing. These are all prices. See, when you have humility, God, He deals with you. Pride always operates in rebellion, deception and perversion. Humility always operates in submission, revelation and Christian maturity. Now, these are things that I could teach much about. Go to the next one. So you're gonna have revival. There has to be instant joyful obedience to what God says. Can you imagine what would happen in this little valley down through this what, right on the San Andreas Fault? I've been praying about that. That's where you are, folks. Can you imagine what would happen if Sunday morning when every man of God, every person that stands up to teach the word, spoke the truth of God, if every truth that was spoken was instantly obeyed, be spontaneous revival. It'd change everything. And invariably, I teach a lot with young people, YWAMers. I'm leaving tomorrow, headed to Orlando to teach for a week with a group of DTSers. And they say, Mr. Shepherd, do you ever make a mistake trying to obey God? And I say, well, of course. Fall flat on my face. Well, what do you do about that? I said, I asked God what to do about it because I was falling so often. God said, it's okay if you fall. If you just fall toward me, I'm not running from you. If you just run away from me, you're easier to pick up. God doesn't expect perfection out of us. He asks us to strive, to press, to run from, to get away from evil as far as we can. So these are some of the prices. Now, here's where I wanna go for a minute. Can you just hang with me about 20 minutes? I wanna talk to you about the cost. Cost is what you have to invest to keep something. Now, you've been talking, we've been talking about revival. The outpouring of the spirit of God. Go to the next one. We've been talking about revival, the outpouring of the spirit of God. And we've been talking about what it would look like. I'm not sure what it's going to look like. I can tell you a couple of things I'm positive on. There will be tremendous brokenness. The altar will be filled first and foremost by broken believers running to the Father to say, search me, try me. It's not my brother, not my sister, but it's me, oh Lord. Not the preacher, not the elder, not the deacon, but it's me, oh Lord. And when we bend low, you never stand taller than when you kneel before God, never. And when you kneel before, the devil doesn't mind how much we pontificate. He is not impressed with our eschatology. He is desperately terrified of our prayer meetings. He hates prayer. The effectual fervent prayer in James. I said, God, I don't know what that means, effectual fervent. I can look it up. I can study the Hebrew and the Greek. But what does it mean? This is what God said. It's a prayer that's originated in heaven. And you begin to reach into heaven and pray earth down. I pray heaven down to earth. It's the obtaining of the will of God in heaven and beginning to believe it and bring it down to earth. And so as we begin to do that, we begin to be delivered from the fear of man. And we begin to have a reverence for holy God. Go to the next one, if you will. Here's some of the cost of maintaining this thing. If God sent revival to this valley, up and down this area, you know, y'all are crying out for it. I've got a friend in Shelbyville, Tennessee, pastor of the United Pentecostal Holiness Church. We are brothers in Christ and we have a ball together. We work Nepal day in and day out. He's leaving on Friday of next week with our team going to Nepal where we've been working for 30 years. We are as opposite from our backgrounds as you can imagine. We're as bound as you can believe in the blood of Jesus Christ. And he began praying when he came to Shelbyville, Tennessee. Oh God, send holy ghost revival to this city. And they prayed for 10 years and God sent it to the First Baptist Church. Made him so mad until the first three weeks, he wouldn't even go to a meeting. God doesn't always deposit it where you want it. He deposits it where he wants it. So you must be willing to be identified with all of God's children, no matter who they are or how they act when they're really God's children. Now I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about what my brother was talking about, the cults and the weirdos and those that go out on the extremities. I'm talking about those, you say, what is your plumb line? This, this is the plumb line, the word of God. You measure an experience not by what you feel but by what God's word says. And so if you want to maintain what God's doing, you begin to say, God, I want to, I want to be a part of the people of God. Let's look at the next little thing and I'll help you to understand it. You say, well, what about all these unusual and unexpected things? When you go to a ball game, do you anticipate some unusual and unexpected things? You're just kind of watching for them, don't you? When God sends revival, there's going to be unusual and unexpected things. In our church in Atlanta, my last pastor to where Ravenhill was with us, that was where Larry Flint, you remember Larry Flint, the guy who was the editor of Hustler Magazine was shot down on the street, just door down, I mean, just a half a block down was the hospital. I went and visited him and the girl that he called his girlfriend and shared together. And one night in a prayer meeting, this big hawk of humanity was standing in the doorway. And he said, I got Flint, I'm gonna get you now. I was preaching one night, we had five worship services, three in the morning and two at night. I was preaching in the final worship service one night and I just pontificated about Jesus and how great he would be. And in the back door, this guy came walking in, long flowing hair, looked kind of like the traditional picture of Jesus with a white robe on. And he said in a deep, rich voice, I am the one of whom he speaks. I knew he was. I didn't have any question, but I had a bunch of hippies that had just been saved, drug addicts off the streets, some prostitutes who had just gotten right with God. I'd been talking to them about signs and wonders and so they would have run to him. But thank God, there were men and women in the congregation who had already grown enough to realize this guy, actually he was from the middle section of the hospital, the block, half a block away. And he had gotten out that night. I'm glad he didn't get too far down the aisle because his skirt tail was a flap tail and he wasn't decent. Unusual, unexpected thing. Don't be afraid of that. Do know the ways and the character of God. How do you know the ways of God? You read his word. If you want to put something together that you've gotten, you take the instruction manual, you open it up and you read it until you wear it out. If you can't figure it out the first time, you go back another time. And if you say, I can't help, you know, in the Google or is it Apple, they have a line you can call in on. We've got the best Google connection you can imagine. You can call into heaven anytime and say, Lord, don't understand this. And God said, well, I sent you the Holy Spirit. And he came, I told you he was coming. He came in order to teach you, to instruct you, to correct you and to direct you. And he'll give you instructions. So do know the character and the ways of God. Do know the ways of uncrucified flesh. You say, Glenn, what's uncrucified flesh? I don't know who it was. One of the speakers, maybe it was you, my brother, talked about the Galatians 2.20. I'm crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. And I love the way you quoted it because it was the right way. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live, I live by the faith of the Son of God. Not my faith in him, his work in me. And so you say, well, what's an uncrucified flesh? Well, they're those who rebel. You know, I'll just show you how it operates most of the time in the main line. Our, you know, my branch, the Baptists, Methodists, you know, us high church folks. I'll tell you how it operates here. Look a minute, I'll show you what it looks like. We ain't never done it that way before here. Have you ever heard that? I mean, that's the way it usually is. And then on the other end, then on the other end, and by the way, you say, Glenn, what are you? I don't know, I'm a follower of Christ. Baptists call me a Bapticostal. My Pentecostal friends call me a Pentebaptist. Jesus calls me his kid, his little brother. And the Father says, that's my boy. And I'll walk with him and look after him if you'll obey me. And you see, those who go to excesses are the ones, and I don't change, I don't make any apologies. I preach this same message, whether it's to Charismatics, Pentecostals, high church, low church, Baptists, Presbyterians, it does not matter because so often what we do is we are afraid to walk on with God. You say, what do you mean by excesses? Well, you know, some folks, and I love to go to these meetings where people get knocked out by God. My Pentecostal friends call it slain in the spirit. And they lay on the floor and they're transformed. I don't care how much you jerk around on the floor. I wanna see how you walk when you get up. And many of us say, oh, I wanna have another, I want some more carpet time. Have you ever heard that term? I want some more time on my face with God. Time on your face with God gives you the ability to walk in the anointing of the Holy Ghost. And when you walk that way, the glory of God begins to flow through you. So you have to be willing to be identified with all of God's children, no matter who they are, how they act when they're God's children. You say, well, that's uncomfortable. Folks, if you want revival, don't expect it if you're not willing to be uncomfortable. He'll move you out of your comfort zones. He will not allow you to stay in your tradition. He will invite you to act New Testament Christianity. Let me go to the next one real quickly. I'm staying on it. Choose the place of no reputation. That's one of the costs of revival, and just keeping it. Reputation is a guarded thing. We've just seen it. You know, all of this shameful thing in the Senate with the struggles and the battles, and I don't care whose side you're on. It was an embarrassment to the nation for us to see our leaders act like we acted, you know? And it tarnished our reputation. Reputation is what others say about you. Character is what God knows you're like when nobody's looking. And he will let your reputation be assassinated in order for his character to be expressed. And I say this many times to pastors. How many pastors do I have here tonight? Are you the only one that's a pastor that's here tonight? How many spiritual leaders have I got here tonight? All of you that are here. You know how hard it is. We guard our reputations. But more than anything, we need to be sure that we're walking in the character of Jesus Christ. See, when revival breaks out, we have to walk with such humility, such brokenness, such desperation for the glory of God that we're not afraid of the unusual and the unexpected, and we don't care what others say. I'm not talking about being an arrogant, buffoon, baboon who hurts everybody. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about being a gentle giant touched by the glory of God who willingly dies if it means someone else can get closer to Jesus. Choose a place of no reputation. This is a long one. You can jot it down. I'll give them the key. They can have it. There've gotta be people in the congregation. Every congregation is gonna have to have somebody that takes the time, pays the price, and willingly obtains what God is doing, discerns whether this is of God and whether it's not. And if it is of God, even though it doesn't fit our little traditional denominational slot, if it's of God, how to release it. And if it's not of God, doesn't fit into your denominational slot, but it's not of God and it's not of the Bible, how do you contain it without breaking the container? That's the tough thing. See, how many of you have relatives that are hurt? They got hurt in the church somewhere back years ago, and they ain't never gonna set foot in. I see you shaking your head over here. You got somebody like that, an aunt or a child or somebody, you know? Years ago, when our National Prayer Committee was in its formative stage, I had the honor and the joy and the pleasure in 1978, nine, along with Vaughnette Bright and Jim and Joy Dawson and Evelyn Christensen and Dick East and myself and Norval Hadley. We came from such divergent backgrounds. We met the first time in Kansas City kind of as an ad hoc committee, praying for the, I think it was called the Crusade of the Americas. We fell in love with one another and we decided we'd meet again. The end result of that was what is today's America's National Prayer Committee. You know, the National Day of Prayer that you've just celebrated, or just celebrated in May and will celebrate again in May. I had the joy of being with that group in the early stages. One of the things we did in the early stages to try to build bridges between that wonderful, exploding, unbelievable, charismatic renewal group. And us rather stuffy, scared to death, mainline evangelicals. Because you see Jim and Joy come out of that background. Norval's a Quaker. Vaughnette comes out of a Presbyterian. I'm a Southern Baptist. Dick Eastman's a Four Square. We came from all different branches of the body. And we decided if we could walk together, if we could go into cities and minister to people, that what it would do is it would paint a picture that would help to set the pattern. Now, do you invite heresy? No, I'm not talking about that. But I'm talking about those who just simply do things a little different. They may be baptized a little different. They call, I call it the Lord's Supper. They may call it communion, you know. You know what I'm talking about. Went to Portland, Oregon just many years ago. We'd been invited by the United Ministerial Association of the area. And we went up to do a conference. We usually go in on a Friday night, have a conference. And as we shared together on Friday night, we usually just did a concert of prayer like we did here the other night for the opening. And God blessed and it was precious and powerful. And we purposefully, purposefully. Now keep in mind, this was in the 70s. We purposefully asked people that were from one background to get with somebody else. Don't get with your little crowd. Get with somebody you don't know. If you got a different color skin, find somebody with different color skin. If their eyes slant different than yours, you're in good grace. Go get with them, you know. If they pray out loud in tongues and you're not accustomed to that, we would advise them to say, hey, now, you know, hold it down. Don't get mad if somebody does something you're not comfortable with. And those of you who are like me, I'm pretty verbose. Don't pray so loud until you disturb people 30 feet away from you. We just give them practical things and we let them pray together. We did that on Friday night. We didn't do it in a church house. We did it in a high school auditorium because we wanted neutral ground. And on Saturday morning, we came back to have a morning of teaching on the unity of the body. My old friend, Joy Dawson. Joy's still alive, up in her 90s. Now, if you've never studied any of her stuff, you'd need to study it. She's poured so much of this into my life. My old friend, Joy Dawson called it trinity unity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We pray in John 17 that they will be one even as we are one. And so we were teaching on that area. And Dick Eastman. How many of you know who Dick Eastman is? The hour that changes the world. Heads up every home for Christ in Colorado Springs. One of the greatest evangelism outreaches in the world today, probably. Dick was going to teach that morning. And Dick's like me, he's old. But he was young then. And so we'd asked Dick to speak that morning and he had gotten up and was speaking. And there were probably seven or 800 people in the auditorium. And we were around tables, eight or 10 at the table. And we were going to have teaching and then application. Teaching and then application. Proclamation without application leads to stagnation. And I had a while when we were to say to, no, Mr. Shepherd, it leads to frustration. And I thought that's a better definition than I've ever heard. You know, and so we were trying to make applicable what we would teach them with the word. And so Dick was teaching that morning and it happened. I don't know how to define it. If you've ever experienced it, you know what I'm talking about. There was a breeze of the Holy Ghost. The breath of God smiled upon that united body. And it was over for one quarter of the site, or one quarter of that big high school cafeteria. You could just feel it sweep across. And Dick sensed it and he stopped and very quietly said, I really believe that we need to stop. I don't need to teach anything. Why don't we just break into small groups and begin to pray? We did people quickly without any coercing or anything. Just they got out on their knees. Some people have never prayed publicly out loud. And I'd often tell them, if you can talk, you can pray. But if you're too scared to pray, then pray under your voice. And when you get through, if you're holding somebody's hand, you get through praying. And you just prayed for them. Just squeeze their hand. That'll be a signal. Let them know you've just been prayed for. It's your turn. Let them sweat a little bit. And it would break down barriers. We saw people who had never prayed with someone else begin to pray out loud with someone else. And as that began to happen, it was a sweet murmur. Oh, it was powerful. There were Asians, there were Africans, there were Anglo-whites, there were Latinos. There was, I don't know, probably 20 or 30 different organizational denominational backgrounds there. Somewhere after about 15 or 20 minutes, you could hear the weeping that began. A couple of tables away from where I was kneeling with Joy and with Vonette, we heard a little lady and she was crying. And it, you know, oh God. Oh God. And my thought was, bless her, Lord. I just went on praying. Before long, it went up about an octave. Oh God. Oh God. And I looked up to be sure she was okay. And we went back to prayer. And she went up another octave. And it got to the point where she literally was wailing and screaming. Now don't let me scare you. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! I had a very deep thought. I thought, Lord, somebody needs to stuff a sock in that woman's mouth. We gotta drag her out of here. She's learning everything. My dear saint, dear godly little old Joy Dawson, like a soldier in a foot, you know, whatever you call it, one of those trenches, she headed toward her. She had her Bible. She crawled up under the table, got right beside her and said to her, I followed Joy. I wanted to watch her. I'd been around her long enough that I'd, I'd gotten on my Baptist negativism to women doing things. And I thought, boy, I've watched her teach me things. I wanna see what she does. So I got up close. Now I heard her lean over to the lady. And she said, honey, you're drawing attention to yourself. People are looking at you. And people had began to stand up all over that big building and look. And you could feel it. Spirit was lifting. And Joy leaned over to her and said, honey, you're drawing attention to yourself. And the lady screamed up, one of these wailing screams again. And Joy leaned over to her and hugged her and said, darling, darling, you can control this. This is not of God. Hold on now, just back down a little bit. And she tried to quieten her down. Lady let out a humongous squall. And I remember Joy. She backed off and looked at the lady and just, she said, Satan, in the name of Jesus, I demand you to shut up by the blood of the cross of Calvary. You have no authority here, spirit of distraction. Now you shut up. Just like that. Lady began to whimper and cry. Joy cuddled her in the arms and held on to her. I stayed until everything settled down and you could feel the settling of God. That morning for about three hours, we prayed for the glory of God and filled that high school cafeteria. I forgot about it. I went on back to my group and went to pray. I got up after we dismissed about lunch to have a bit of a bite of lunch. I wondered where the woman was. I found Joy and the woman. They were sitting out in the vestibule. Joy was teaching the lady. The lady was shining with the glory of God in the presence of the Holy Spirit was in her life. It was quite evident, and I'm not being judgmental. I'm reporting what was there. It was quite evident that the devil hated what was going on and he wanted to draw attention to a person or to the flesh. And this strong woman of God understood and bound and cursed it and cast it out and told it to hush. But she didn't drag the woman out like I would have done with the sock. I mean, really. I mean, here I am a Baptist preacher. I got sense enough to run a church, you know? Soccer. That lady was sitting out there sparkling with the glory of God. Now listen, pastors, spiritual leaders, those of you who, you say you want revival? If revival comes, you're gonna have that kind of thing. The devil hates it. He will counterfeit with everything that he can. The gifts will be manifest. Some will be real and some will be counterfeit. But you have a hard time counterfeiting fruit. And you can sense when there's a spirit of correction that comes, if it's real or not, by the fruit that begins to manifest. And so if you want to maintain what God begins to do, and you're getting ready for that. Your hearts are getting ready. Gene, you are standing on the brink of something bigger than you've ever thought of. He's gonna do exceedingly abundantly above and beyond all that you've ever dreamed or asked or thought of. And there are gonna be people who are scared to death. And there are gonna be some who will say, you're crazy and you're taking us crazy. Listen to God, don't be afraid, and don't act like me and stuff a sock in their mouth. Have sense enough to raise up godly men and women who know what to do and help you to walk through it. And one last thing, I got two minutes on this and we'll wrap up. Strong mail, that's just a passage that goes with it. Strong meat belongs to those who, by reason of service, know how to use it. Finally, be prepared for the thousands of new converts that must be discipled. Jeremiah 12, five says, if you've run with the footmen and they have wearied you, how can you contend with the horses? And if in the land of peace wherein you trust it, that wearies you, what are you gonna do when the river floods? In other words, if this is tiring, now I'm tired physically, but when the glory of God comes, there's a supernatural strength that comes. But the great danger that I saw in the Jesus movement, we stood on the break of national revival, 1971, two, three, and four. God gave a great outpouring of his spirit. Every one of you, if I took time tonight, and gave you a minute, how you were touched or your parents were touched or grandparents were touched during that time, you'd tell a story of what God did. I never tell these stories without somebody saying, oh, that's when I got saved. That's when God did that work in me. Now, I think it was, who was the young man that spoke first on the opening session? David. Yeah, David was talking about Dr. Orr. I spent the last eight years of his life with him. He mentored me. I was with him the night that he had the heart attack and when he died with Carol. And he was in a conference with us in Nashville, North Carolina, actually at Ridgecrest. And Dr. Orr told me, he said, and I listened to David and I talked to him afterwards. He said, Glenn, during that great 1857, 1858 prayer revival there were two million people. He said, there was a million of first time converts. They'd never been born again. See, you get on a plane, on a train in New York and by the time you got off in Chicago in the Midwest, you were saved, you know. There were prayer meetings in every place. Ships sailing into the harbor in New York. Atmospherically, this atmosphere is so charged with the presence of God that sailors who had been out sailing on these ships, there was no chaplain. They were coming in to find a brothel and a bar. And the atmosphere so deeply impacted them until entire ships were saved. And so the church began to line up at the gangplanks when they came down and led them to the church instead of to the bar. It was just amazing, you know. And Dr. Orr said, he said, there were a million non-church people, but he said, Glenn, there were a million vaccinated church members. He said, Glenn, what do you mean by vaccinated? I've got a smallpox vaccination up here. You probably got one, Douglas. Most of us older folks have smallpox vaccination. You know what it does? You get just enough of the real thing so you can't get the real thing. And religion is a counterfeit for relationship. And we often have people who joined the church and never joined Jesus. And they're never made new creatures. And Dr. Orr said to me, he said, Glenn, not only did we have a million that came to Christ during that great move of God, 1857, 58, just prior to the great outpouring of the great war between the states. He said there was another million lost church members that got saved. Now take those stats. That would have been 20 million people, 20 million people. If we had proportion of that kind of move of God today, there is no, I mean, excuse me, that's what we would have today. There'd be 20 million people basically that would be saved over a period of 18 months or so. And so we've got to get ready. We got to say, Lord, don't know how we're gonna do it. Not sure. And there's not many denominations who are planning for that kind of move of God. In fact, there's not a one that I'm aware of. And so you, pastors, local churches, lay people, you begin to say, God, what happens if all of a sudden over a period of the next six, eight, 10 months, this church begins to need to have, not a new building. Let's just use this sanctuary five times. And don't let him preach every time. God will raise up preachers and don't tell them who's gonna be in the pulpit. They'll come to the pulpit. Let them come to Jesus. If the atmosphere is saturated with the presence of God, then God will take whatever he puts in that pulpit, fire it with the glory of God, release it with the power of the Spirit, and it won't matter who's preaching. It'll only matter that Jesus is exalted and people will not come to, I call them religious show-offs. They will be coming to listen to Shane. They'll be coming to hear what Jesus says. So you get ready. Now, if that kind of thing happened, say during the Welch revival, 80,000 people were saved in just a matter of months during the 1857-58 prayer revival. They were baptizing 10,000 a week in New York City. 10,000 a week. Baptists who baptized by immersion, they cut holes in the ice, baptized them into freezing water. Now, when Baptists do that, God's on his throne. I promise you, it was unexplainable. It moved across this land. And instead of us embracing that, we fought over it, grieved, quenched, and resisted the Spirit, and God moved his lampstand, and he moved it to Korea. And in that time, the largest Pentecostal church in the world, Yungicho, a million members, a million members, seven, eight church services a day on Sunday. They'd fill up a 25,000-seat auditorium, overflow annex another 15, 17,000. They'd run 350, 400,000. I spoke with Dr. Cho personally, eyeball to eyeball, and I asked him, I said, Dr. Cho, what's the greatest problem you have being pastor of the largest church in the world? I anticipated what he would say, and so I had some follow-up questions. He didn't answer what I thought he would answer. I thought he'd talk about the difficulty of trying to handle a staff of 25,000. I thought he'd talk about the jealousy and envy that comes when you're the big cheese on the block. He said, well, Glenn, the biggest problem we have, I want to call him Brother Shepard, didn't call me Glenn. He said, the biggest problem I have, Brother Shepard, is I have people who come for the service at 5.30 in the morning, and they want to stay all the way through the 9.30 service at night. And I thought, why is that a problem? He said, well, you see, we're having so many people converted until we don't have room to seat the new converts. I said, tell me how many you're having. He says, we average now 12,000 a week coming to faith in Christ. Largest Presbyterian church, the largest Pentecostal church, the largest Methodist church, and now revival. Korea is in a post-revival era because they became enamored with intellectualism. Well, I could go on and on and tell you stuff. I've told you this stuff from an old man's perspective because I've watched it now for 48 years. And I didn't watch it as a student who had been primed and trimmed and pressed. I fell in the door. It's the grace of God. It's God's mercy. I'm here tonight because it's God's mercy. Jackie and I are still married because God healed our marriage. Broke my heart. Taught me that I never pray. Oh, I could pray pontificate and pray from the pulpit. She wanted to hear me pray over her every day. Husbands, let me tell you, your wife doesn't need financial security. Need nearly as much as she needs spiritual cover. You may not be able to pray a great big theological prayer, but if she cooks good biscuits, thank God for them. And let her hear you say, God, thank you, that she cooks good biscuits. She good does. She births good children. She's a good woman. God bless her. Then just kiss her. That's a good prayer. It's theological and solid. God broke my heart and I became a man of prayer, not because I was desperate for God, but because God was desperate to invade a young broken pastor's life. And so the cost, that's what I want you to go away with. The cost. I want you to get ready. I want you to be willing to say, God, I want to pray for it like it all depends on me and believe for it like it all depends on heaven. And if you send it over there, if you want to do it down there, if you want to do it up there, that's all right. I'll go where it is. I'm not looking after building a kingdom. I'm looking after building the kingdom. And then you begin to say, oh God, give me the wisdom to discern what's really of you and what's not. Because the devil will do every trick he can. He'll begin to send the witches, the warlocks. I've seen it. We've had them to come. And then begin to get ready because it will never be business as usual again. I'm through. God, would you make applicable the stuff that needs to be made for my brothers and sisters? May their hearts go away tonight understanding some biblical basis of how to maintain what I know you're getting ready to send. I'm watching it in thousands of young people and a generation of kids that are weird and freaky looking and they got more earrings and tattoos than I know what to do with. And I have to look past that and look at their heart and hear their voice and see you because you're the one that has to do the inside work before they can have the outside work done. You're getting them ready. You seldom have done it in a bunch of old codgers like me, but you always seem to find a young book like Malachi and set him on fire and the world comes to watch him burn. Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, help us to not do what we did in the 70s, to get afraid of and competitive with one another, but help us to sit close together, love one another, pray over one another, and in honor, prefer one another in such a way that whatever happens, all of the glory goes straight to the throne room of heaven. Jesus, tonight, I pray over the spiritual leaders in this congregation, the pastor of this young church, the elders, deacons, whatever status they stand in, those that have flown in, my brother who came all the way from the UK, God, I pray your blessings over these. I pray for those, Lord, who are watching us on a live stream tonight. I pray right now where they are, those that are listening, that have endured through this message, I pray that there will be a firing through the Holy Spirit that will go to where they are and that there will be a tender touch of heaven in Australia or the UK or in wherever, India, in the states that are there. In Jesus' name, Father, we know what we need. We need you. There's nothing else that will bring resolution to our cracked up, fought and destroyed nation, but you, God, you, you're looking for a people who will bend their knees, pay the price, and willingly say, it doesn't matter. If I have to die, I'll die in order to maintain that my children and my grandchildren may see your divine glory. Thank you, Father, thank you.