When Will Revival Come?

Now if you have your Bibles, I'd be glad if you'd turn to the book of Deuteronomy, the book of Deuteronomy, that's the 32nd chapter. This is terrible to ask a man to preach to such a divided audience. Do you folks hate each other around here? Huh? That's all right.

What's the matter with you? Will you folks speak to those folks over there? I didn't know. Lord, if there isn't a pleasant sight, all the ugly folks sitting right here, just a handful of them, all the good looking, I wish the ushers would tie off all the benches except the two front ones here. Tomorrow night, when we fill them up, untie the third one.

I would, that's what I'd do. No man on earth can preach to this. I wish the ushers would cooperate.

Do you preach to a divided, to sit divided this way with you? I'd knock them in the head, I wouldn't put up with it. I might, would add 10,000 whole to your services if you didn't have 15 people present, if you'd sit together. That's right.

I hope you'll do that. That'd make it a lot better. I wouldn't want to have to crowd to get there early to get a front seat.

I'm not cranky, I just know there is a tremendous work of the spirit when people sit together, but they do not when they're scattered. And I hope I won't have to fuss at you again about this. Sit together, the ushers.

If you don't have any, get some, seat the people and seat them together. Amen? I saw some of you birds standing back there, but I think he is asleep. All right, the 32nd chapter of Deuteronomy.

I'm speaking tonight on when revival will come. And I speak tonight on that subject because the scriptures tell about the time when we'll have revival, and it tells exactly when it'll take place. And it'll take place the same way at the same time that we'll have a breath of the spirit in our day.

And it is of interest to me that God brings revival to the world exactly like he saves a sinner. And it's that last part that I want to talk some about tonight. I've got an outline from a sermon, and I'm going to give it to you, but I don't think I'll get to the outline.

In the 35th verse of the 32nd chapter of Deuteronomy, the Holy Ghost, through a man by the name of Moses, gives us the threefold description of the time when revival is going to come to this part's world and when God is going to deliver his people and when he's going to give the Jewish nation a heart to believe in Christ, which has never happened yet. And we're not interested in revival in the Jewish nation, but because revival will come to us if it ever comes in our day exactly this way. And because if men are saved, it'll be saved in this way that I speak tonight.

This text in verse 35 and 36 comes in the last message that Moses brings to the children of Israel, and it's in the book of Deuteronomy. Deuter means two or double, and Deuteronomy has the meaning of law, the second giving of the law. And in this final message, Moses, speaking for God, promises deliverance and revival to the people of God.

And he's going to bring this revival at a certain time. And these two verses tell us three things about the time when this old ungodly world that's about to crack up is going to experience the work of the God of all the earth and give men a heart to believe in Christ and fulfill this earth with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Here's the text.

God says, "...to me the longest vengeance and recompense. Their foot shall slide in due time, for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste, for the Lord will judge his people." And the word judge here means deliver. "...for the Lord will judge his people." The judges, the book of judges.

God raised up judges and they delivered the people. That's what he means here. He'll give revival.

He'll deliver his people and repent himself for his servants when he sees that their power is gone and there is none shut up or left. God promises through Moses here that he's going to deliver his people at a certain time. He's going to do it by making manifest, making real his terrible judgments on the Gentile nations.

He's going to do it in the second place, coming at the same truth from a different standpoint, when it pleases him, when he repents himself for his servants. He's going to do it in the third place when their strength is gone and there is none shut up or left. Revival is coming when men begin to feel the hand of God in the judgments of God.

Revival is coming when it pleases God. Revival is coming when God's people are completely at wit's end corner, completely shut up, all our strength gone, all our pride gone. When we're completely shut up, then God will work.

The people are going to be delivered, says Moses, when God brings judgment on the Gentile nations and when men are aware that there is a living God manifesting his aliveness, not only by his goodness but by his terror. For law and gospel always must go together and judgment and grace always come together. If I'd continued reading in this chapter, I should have read where God says, I kill and I make alive.

That's the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is not the God who made a mistake by pronouncing a holy law, and he's been trying to remedy that mistake ever since. But the God of the Bible has always been a God who, in order to save a person, brings his judgment on that person in such a severe fashion that that person recognizes that God's on the scene.

Now, we can't have revival in our day because this generation has accepted Jesus and told him to go to hell, as far as his law is concerned. Is that too strong for you? We've accepted Jesus as our Savior, thrown his holy wrath away, and we've been having a nice, soothing, serene message, trying to whip Jesus off on people who haven't the slightest desire for it. And if we want revival, we've got to quit being so damn religious, if you'll let me cuss a little bit, and come back and go to preaching the God of the Bible.

These empty seats are empty of people who've made a profession of faith in Jesus and living like hell and think they're going to go to heaven when they die. And the reason for that is that this generation has never faced up to the fact that God Almighty, in order to deliver a nation or a church or a people or a civilization, always brings that nation, people, church, or civilization to judgment, and to such terrible judgment that they know that God's on the scene. Look at this language.

How's God going to deliver the people? He says, Vengeance belongs to me, and recompense belongs to me, and thy foot shall slide in due time. And brother, it's sliding now. All hell's erupted in the last five years.

Just all hell. This world's coming apart at the seams. Our churches are just about flickered out, and I don't know whether we can gasp through tomorrow or not.

Oh, we are dying on our feet, and nobody knows. We've tried every trick, and I'm suggesting, I'm suggesting that if we'd be true to the day in which we live, we must begin to bring God back on the scene, and see God's judgment in every calamity that comes on this nation. I'm here in the town that is best known of any city on topside of God's earth right now.

You've received more publicity. I don't know enough about it to talk about it, but there isn't a black man in Africa. There isn't a yellow man in China.

There isn't anybody alive on the face of this earth now that hasn't heard about how all hell's erupted in the city of Birmingham. Wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody in Birmingham would begin to say, well, maybe God's in this thing. It's just a picture of a cancerous sore that has descended on our generation, and you patch it up here, and it breaks out there, and you seam it up here, and it tears there, and you put a mustard plaster here, and it breaks out over there, and all hell's parted all back.

And the reason for it is that foot shall slide in due time, and the calamity that's coming upon this whole wicked world that takes the name of Jesus, and it lifts and tramples this holy truth and his holy demands under a dirty religious seat, is finding out that God Almighty is a holy God. It would begin to translate what's happening all about us in terms of a holy God who will never let this world get out of his sovereign hands, and has a purpose in it all, and for whom the glory of whom everything that rives and wriggles was created, and whose purpose is that he'll turn the wrath of men into praise of him. That's the conception we must get back to, or we're just well to turn the keys of our churches and our homes and our schools over to the devil, and hide our faith in the sand and go on to hell together.

God's judgment is on our churches, God's judgment is on our homes, God's judgment is on our bodies, where every last one of us thinks there's something wrong with every last one of us, and we're facing the fact that all of us are going to wind up in insane asylum in the hospitals unless something from God comes to give us rest. And I'm suggesting that there never was such a day to begin to tell people about the fact that every calamity, and every outbreak of lawlessness, and every evidence of rebellion that's so rampant in the world today, is just the judging hand of almighty God, and that all of his prayers judgments are just types and figures of the awful judgment of God that's coming on this earth. When's revival coming? When his judgments are made real to men and to women.

When we quit outlawing God from his universe, when we quit talking about accidents and the laws of nature, and when we quit ruling God out of the affairs of men, and when we bring him back in our homes and our churches and our homes, sitting on a throne ruling things and bringing everything to the dotting of an i and the crossing of a t right into line with his holy purposes. If we see that, we'd capitalize on this day and begin an aggression instead of being sublimate orthodox. We'd have a little heart about us, and some tears about us, and some barbed wire in our message, and some barbed wire in our witness, and something to stick into the crawls of people where they live, and begin to preach that this world is right now under the sovereign hand of our mighty God, and that he's bringing his judgment on men and institutions and the foundations of being destroyed, and it couldn't happen if God didn't allow it.

And he's doing it for the purpose of bringing us to the end of our strength, to the time when we'll look up to him, to his sovereign good pleasure. What I'm talking about is this. When is a man saved? A man is saved when the judgments of God become real to him.

God never saves anybody without judging them, without bringing them to judgment. God never saves anybody without putting that anybody down to the place where he trembles under the judgment of a holy God. What is the doctrine of eternal hell in the Bible? It's nothing more or less, ladies and gentlemen, than the fact of the judgment of God on men and women who have violated his eternal character as expressed in his holy law.

And no man yet has ever been saved. No man has ever yet been saved to whom the horrors of God Almighty's judgment against men who sin against his law are made real and brought home to their inward hearts. That's right.

That's right. That's right. What are you talking about, preacher? I'm talking about it's downright silly to try to get anybody interested in the Lord Jesus Christ now inside our churches or out without first camping right here.

Brother, we don't need to try to get men to take Jesus now. This generation say they already have, but they haven't been transformed. And when the day comes that God saves a sinner and don't change him, will the change that keeps on changing and makes them hunger and thirst and panic to God till the day he dies? That just can't be any salvation at all.

I'm saying that no man will ever trust Jesus Christ. No man will ever receive Jesus Christ. No man will ever accept, if you want to use that word, Jesus Christ, until that boy, girl, man, or woman feels the judgment of Almighty God against sin deep down in his heart.

That's right. That's right. That's right.

What you're talking about, I think I can illustrate it. I wish that the saved people in this congregation would go to telling people about a living God who's active right now and bringing God on the scene in every disturbance and every walk of life and say that's the judgment of God. You mean tell me that our civilization has got as rotten as it is now without that being the purpose and the express act of an all-holy God.

It just isn't accidental. And I'm saying that the time's come now for us to look men and women in the face and say not all who see and feel the manifest judgment of a holy God are saved, but every man who's ever saved sees and feels the manifest judgment of Almighty God. And there isn't anything on God's earth that'll answer this hour's need except some churches that know how to pray until God Almighty will be felt by this generation of infer-hell sinners and his keen judgment strokes shall pierce men and men seeing the horrors of hell-faced disobedient men will begin to scream out for mercy to the holy God.

I've seen it happen and I've never seen a breath of revival apart from God acting in judgment in such a severe manner that people began to sit up and take notice and say that's God, he's alive, he's alive. Let me give you an illustration of what I'm talking about. I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the oil capital of the world.

I lived there for years as an evangelist and later I moved away and then I went back to one of the big rich fashionable Baptist churches in that city and I began to preach on the judgment of God, on S-I-N-C, and things got pretty hot and didn't know what was going to happen. And the Sunday school superintendent, and I apologize to whoever superintendent here, no personal reference, the Sunday school superintendent heard me three times and he took out and he let everybody know that he wasn't coming back to hear that truth, that he was too rough and he was too plain and he'd run people away. Well, bless God, you don't have much trouble running folks away now, you never do get them in the first place, so I lost all fear of that.

And he just talked about something terrible and he let everybody know it and it's amazing how news like that can get in a big fit and everybody hears it in 15 minutes when it takes two weeks to get something good out, you know. And he just talked up a, he just talked, he had him a big time, he wasn't coming back to the meeting until that crazy evangelist was gone. Well, God Almighty struck him blind.

God struck him blind. He thought God did, I can't prove it, but the people of Tulsa thought God did it. And he stayed blind for five days and everybody's talking, it spread all over that city.

Everybody knew about the big suit and pants. And then he lost his eyesight just like that. And Sunday morning came and the crowd started coming to see what was happening.

And I interpreted, I said publicly from the pulpit, if God shall be pleased, I can't speak for God, I can't tell you exactly what God will do in any given situation, but I said if God should be pleased, God should be pleased, I can't promise you, I haven't got one of these propositions, if you'll do something, I guarantee what God will do. But I said, if it please God, he'll make this city know that he's still on the throne and that a man can't get by booking God. There's no way on God's earth a man can succeed trampling God's law and rebelling against God's son.

Give God a little time and he'll bring his judgment on that nation, that home, that individual, that church, that plays loose with the holiness of God. And I just about ready to stand up and preach. Sunday morning, the commotion out there in the vestibule, whatever you call it, in came this flying superintendent, man holding this arm, man holding that arm, walked down the center aisle, he got down there and they were singing, they stopped singing.

He looked up, he couldn't see, he said, Brother Pastor, are you there? Pastor said, yes. He said, Pastor, I stand against God, I stand against his preacher, I stand against his church, I stand against the gospel. And he said, God struck me blind.

He said, I know he did. I'll have my neighbor's feet. Pastor said, yes, we know.

We believe God did it. The man said, I know God did it. He said, I've come back this morning to the place where I went out saying I wouldn't be back, and I went out making fun of the preacher, and I went out just making fun of God.

And then he just fell down on his knees, began to sob. He said, I've been asking God to forgive me, but I sin publicly, and now I'm confessing publicly, I'm confessing to the church. I've already confessed to God.

And then he began to cry out in agony, oh God, is there any mercy for me? And then I'll never forget it. He said, Pastor, would this church forgive me? And would this church get down on its knees and ask God for forgiveness? And I saw that fashionable Sunday morning crowd, as one man, get down on their knees. And you thought he was in a Holy Roller meeting.

All of them began to pray together. While they were praying, that Sunday school superintendent got up off his knees, and he could see. And the people of Tulsa said, God did that, God did that.

My God, if we could get the living God out of our creeds and our orthodox statements of doctrine and our icicle hearts, and give him some invitation, and welcome him again in our lives and in our churches, and begin to recognize that he is a living God and that he does kill and make alive, might be we could get the attention of this religious but lost generation. Oh God, we need to go to praying and witnessing that God will begin to work in our midst with this holy and righteous judgment to strike fear in the hearts of this generation. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't like these empty seats.

Every one of them is full of a little imp out of hell, some in his nose at my Lord and the gospel I preach. You don't like it either, you're filling one. But you better listen to me now, we just will close the meeting tonight.

If you think anything ordinary is going to get the attention of this generation, you better start praying and witnessing to a living God to make his judgments real in somebody's heart. A pastor came to see me in the world's richest small town. He was a pastor.

The world's more well protected in that small town, any small town in the world, oil money. I never shall forget, he said, Brother Barney, I think maybe the Lord answers prayer in other places, but he don't pay attention to us in my town. He said, well you come preach for me.

We set a date. I started on Sunday morning, had the usual Catholic called Baptist Sunday morning prayer. See the difference? And between Sunday school and preaching service, seven deacons came to the pastor in a very nice, quiet way.

They were gentlemen, scarce, where most of our church members don't come to the pastor and say, when you get through the meeting we'll be back. They just don't show up. I've been going all over America in the last ten years, it's amazing how many churches have turned their auditorium over to me, to you, and they never come around.

We're in desperate need. And what I'm saying now, I'm trying to whet your appetite and change your prayer and put some barbed wire in it. We've got to go to waiting on God for something out of the ordinary.

Nobody believes that God's alive now and that he's holy and that he'll punish them. You didn't invite them to come to the meeting, you blew in their face. And they'll give you excuses to get rid of them, but they're not interested.

And we'll shut up now, we can fold our hands and quit, or we can get ahold of a living God and begin to pray, Oh God, quit asking to bless America, asking to curse it, asking to bring some calamity on men, but they'll recognize that God's still alive and that men cannot thumb their noses at God like they're doing now and get by with it. These seven deacons came very pious to the pastor, said we don't believe in what's called revival, all that excitement, said we're not going to bother them a thing, said we just won't be back till the meeting's over. And of course, all he could do, the pastor said, all right, brother, you do as you please.

But he did give them this parting mark. He said, don't talk about it, don't talk against the meeting. Oh, they said, no, we're not going to say anything, but they didn't keep the word.

He started out on Sunday night, had the house full Sunday morning, all that gang of unsaved church members, gave God an hour at a time, told them to go to hell next Sunday morning. They were busy, like this generation of church people, tired up in everything from an organization that gets the sick cats out of the devil's alley to anything you can think of. And innocent nothing, except panting and thirsting after Almighty God and his presence.

They got out on the street, and we couldn't get a corporate guard. Monday night, that usual Monday night crowd, Tuesday night, about three or four more, just preaching to a handful of God's choice people, weren't getting the first base. And as those seven deacons pounded out, it tickled them.

Couldn't have them eating up there without that presence, you know. And they began to talk, and pretty soon there was a town just full of the deacons. Ah, they're not getting anywhere up there, I told you so, and all that sort of foolishness.

And the broken-hearted pastor came to me, and he said, Brother Barnard, I'm desperate, said those deacons are talking, everybody's listening to them, and they're glad we're not getting a crowd, not getting anywhere. I've been that way hundreds of times where I couldn't get a corporate guard, and we ain't never going to get more than a corporate guard again, until men begin to feel God in his awful wrath and judgment. That's the only thing that gets the attention of this generation.

And he said, What can we do? Well, I said, I'll make you a proposition. Let's turn them over to God. Let's get down on our knees.

You give? He said, I'll do anything. I said, Well, kneel down here by me. And he knelt.

And I said, I just asked God to kill them for Satan, and we did. And he said, I said, Now, don't tell anybody. And he said, I won't tell anybody.

And I said, I won't. Well, I was lied, because those deacons heard about it, but they didn't hear it right. Oh, it just tickled them to death.

They said, Oh, the preacher's up there praying for God to kill him. No. We weren't praying for God to kill him.

We were praying for God to kill him of Satan. Anybody that does not love the gospel of my Lord Jesus Christ, does anything in this world has missed Christ. You can put that down.

It'll not be the stuff and the other thing you're after that'll keep youngsters from misleading. It'll be the fact that they've made a protection and joined the church and told Jesus goodbye and they don't love him. Because if you loved him, you'd love every thread of the story about him.

That's an acid test. We're just well-faced. That's the God's truth.

You don't love the gospel. It's the children's bread. That means you don't love him at the bout.

And you don't like to hear him bragged on. And that's the reason church members do not love the house of God. Is that right? That's the God's truth.

We were praying for God to save those men or kill them. They were blocking the meeting, making fun of the church, that the Lord died for the church, and making fun of the gospel. But that's the story of the Lord, making fun of the preacher.

But only God can make a preacher. And they were thumbing their nose at God. Now, he'd rather see seven deacons go to hell than the whole town, hadn't you? And they had the thing bottled up.

And we prayed. And by Thursday night of the second week, the pastor preached the funeral of every one of those seven deacons. And every one of them died like that, in a peculiar manner.

That meeting went on 13 weeks in a town of 5,000 people. They even had to close up the picture show. The manager got saved.

The fella who turned the crank got saved. The girl who sold the tickets got saved. And nobody was going to come to the meeting.

The fear of God came on that city. They said, God's alive. You know what that city said? They said, God killed those men.

They're exactly right. They're exactly right. God did do it.

And he's doing things all over this country now. But we're laying it off on everybody except God. And he's doing it to make his judgments real and manifest to the hearts of men and women.

Oh, that's what I'm talking about. Brother, you are a traitor to the Lord. Jesus Christ, and so on.

If you can rest without bombarding God's prayer throne for him to open the windows of his awful wrath and make his holy hatred of sin and his certain judgment of sin manifest to people now, that's when revivals come in, when men feel the awful horror of a loving God's holy, holy law. A woman went out. The front steps sat to hear him preach.

You could hear her cursing. She kept cursing, big church worship. And, oh, man, she'd given me down the hill.

And she used bad words. People heard her. That night at 11 o'clock, the pastor's phone rang.

And the woman was in the hospital. A 17-year-old boy was stricken. They'd rushed him to the hospital.

They'd gotten a specialist in. And the specialist examined the boy and said, there's not a thing on God's earth wrong with the boy, but he's dying. And the mother got scared, and she called the pastor and said, get that preacher and bring him over to the hospital.

He got to where I was being entertained, a little before midnight. He got me up and, yeah, we took out to the hospital. Walked in the hospital room.

There's that 17-year-old boy lying on the bed, the specialist treating him. The specialist looked me in the face and said, preacher, there's not a thing on God's earth. I didn't find wrong with this boy, but he's dying.

And the woman began to cry, and she said, for God's sake, preacher, pray for my man. I said, no, let him die. I ain't going to pray a lick for him.

Oh, she said, you're cruel. I said, no, you're cruel. You cursed God's preacher, and God's sticking your son.

And if you want him to die, okay by me. But God cursed him. And you better talk to God.

And she got down on her knees, and she began to confess, and then to plead for mercy. And as I speak to you tonight, the 17-year-old boy got up out of bed, put his clothes on over his pajamas, and mother and the boy went home. What I'm talking about, folks, is this.

When men find out, if they ever do again, in your day and mine, that God Almighty is hoping that he's just, that he kills before he makes a life. And when men begin to feel the judgment of God against sin, then is when we'll have revival. Now, I'm going to let you go.

I'm going to let you go. I sat down and watched the traffic on Highway 11 for a little while this afternoon. And I said to your godly pastors who came over, when did this generation begin to just thumb their noses in the face of God? The Sabbath desecration.

It's developed in the last 15-20 years until it's the most terrible, terrible thing I think this generation's faced. Here's a book, and in it the character of God's faithfulness. Most of those people on pleasure bent, or business bent, on the day our fathers and mothers, your mama wouldn't even cook on Sunday.

She leaned over backwards to bake the bread on Sunday. Now, in a few years, we've turned this day. That's the biggest thing in this book, the biggest guard on the moral hearse of a nation.

We've turned it into a holy holiday. And I face you at God's feet, get some barbed wire in your witness, some salt in your prayers, fill these empty benches, give me a chance to uphold the hand of the pastor, as I face men, if you can get them here, for the fact that God Almighty is alive, and warning them of his holy wrath. Amen? Let us stand.

Let's sing our song, O gentle Savior, hear my humble cry. I still see a church ought to pray this prayer. I still see that what I'm talking about never has happened apart from real, agonizing, inaccessory prayer.

I cannot explain the sovereign power of my God and the prayer of God's people. They just go together. There's a connection.

As God is my judge, I'm not a novice. I know a little bit about what I'm talking about. If you love souls, you pray and witness that men will begin to feel the awful darkness.

God Almighty's holy hatred of sin. When will a man be saved? When he trusts my Lord, but he'll never die until he trembles. And I plead for some, and I plead for him, and I'll not preach the fact that I'm tired of Christ's justice being ignored, and the seeds being empty, and the prophets being dead, and I'll not rest until men are brought Christ to peace with the claims of God for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I beg you, I plead with you in an extraordinary manner that you never thought yourself capable of, go all out to get men under the hearing of the Word of God, will you? Pray as a church that the sovereign Spirit will not pass you by, and the benediction will be these last, these first two verses of Pass Me Not.