Revival is Like Judgment Day - Part 2

I have to say, not quite. In Kentucky and Tennessee, and over here in Spartanburg, South Carolina, people were slain in the spirit. Those who were slain were scoffers, wicked people, under conviction of sin, who fell on their faces before God. Sometimes they lay helpless for hours. It turned out that this woman and her husband had never been married. Oh, it was quite a story, and I think back over my own experience. You know that about 1949, there was a wave of revival in colleges throughout the United States. It began in Bethel College, the Swedish Baptist, the general conference, as they're called. What happened in Bethel College? I remember one night in Minneapolis, four of us, Billy Grain, that time president of Northwestern Schools, Bill Dunlap of Presbyterian, Jack Frank of Forest Home, and I, four of us, young men, praying that God would send a moving of revival to the students of the Twin Cities. Billy went off for a campaign somewhere. But in Bethel College on the Thursday in Chapel, at the end of the message, a student got up and, ignoring me, spoke directly to the president, Dr. Wing-Blake, said, Dr. Wing-Blake, can I have a week off to go back to Iowa? He said, I stole a thousand dollars and I can't live with it anymore. That is judgment. And every great revival is marked by judgment. Have you ever thought of the verse that says, if we were to judge ourselves, we should not be judged? If we will engage in self-judgment, we're escaping judgment, either if God should deal with us in this life, or at the judgment seat of Christ. We don't hear enough about the judgment seat of Christ these days. Now, you have heard the verse, judgment must first begin in the house of the Lord. I wonder if you've ever heard of a Sunday school teacher called Henrietta Mears. She and I started a group, a sort of Bible study prayer group for movie stars in Hollywood. I was their first chaplain, the second chaplain was Richard Halverson, who is now chaplain of the United States Senate. And I remember one occasion, those new converts raised this question, they said, the Bible says, judge not. We should never judge anybody. I said, you must read the scripture. It says, judge not that you be not judged, for the measure you give will be the measure you'll get. It's not a prohibition of judgment. It's a denunciation of hypocrisy, two-facedness. Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye and don't look to the beam in your own? In other words, there's no prohibition of judgment there. It means, don't you judge unless you're prepared to be judged. That's the full sense of that word. I think I can give you another passage of scripture that would help illuminate this. 1 Corinthians 5, 9-13. I'm going to read it to you. You can read it in any version. You'll get the same message. By the way, we call this the first epistle to the Corinthians. Actually, it's the second. And the second is the third. Because he says in verse 9, I wrote to you in my letter, that's his previous letter. We don't have a copy of it. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men. Not at all meeting the immoral of this world. Or the greedy and robbers and idolaters. Since then you need to go out of this world. In other words, before you buy a personal computer from somebody at a store, you don't ask him if he's living right with his wife. You can patronize Christians, sometimes it's wise so to do. But the Apostle Paul makes it quite clear. We're not to separate ourselves from the world. We don't identify with them, we're Christians, they're not. He said, but rather I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of a brother if he's guilty of immorality or greed or is an idolater, reviler or drunkard or robber. Don't even eat with him. In other words, you have to judge those who are defiant of God but call themselves Christians. Don't associate with them. And he ends up by saying, drive from among you. Now we'll come back to the detail of that particular man. But you see the difference between an association with the world and an association with a brother. Now you don't make hasty judgments. You have to listen to all the evidence. But if someone refuses to put things right, you have every right to challenge him and then you simply withdraw association. Now in the old Mennonites, among the Anabaptists, you've heard of the Anabaptists, George Peters, a Mennonite professor in Germany, spoke at our Oxford conference and he said, the Southern Baptists trace their descent to John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan, but we Mennonites are better than that. We trace our descent to Saint Anna, the mother of Mary. That's why we're called Anabaptists. I've got to say that the Mennonites practice shunning. In other words, you won't behave really well. I think the Amish still do this. We won't have anything to do with you. They don't just shun the world. They shun a divine believer. Now I was once having a conversation with Oswald Smith. I was his associate pastor in Toronto. But long time after, he came to see me in Los Angeles. I said to Oswald, I have a theory that if the children of God tolerate open sin in the life of a servant of God, the Lord commonly allows that person to be overtaken by some other fault that drives them out of the ministry. Oswald said, how would you illustrate? Now I'll give you an illustration from the 1950s. I want to avoid any discussion of issues today in charity. But I said there was a very popular young evangelist, as good looking as Billy Graham, as good a preacher as Billy Graham, popular all over the states, but so greedy for money that my friend Armand Guesswine, a very mild-mannered man, rebuked him. He said, everywhere I follow you, I find there's a bad smell about your financial practices. And the man laughed in his face. He said, Armand, there are enough big cities in America for me to visit only once. He was prepared to loot the churches and never to go back again.