 Bottom |
Burning Coal |
Jurasic ParkDelivered at New Wine Christian Fellowship on Sunday, February 18,2018.
I think we all recognize that Christianity is struggling in a lot of places. It is especially here in the United States. We tend to lose a lot of our young, and the reason is because we are seen as dinosaurs, not the cute cartoon dinosaurs which you see on TV, but fossils old dry bones, real old dry bones.
When the women's movement perked up, Christians were the first to say, I'm not sure about that. That's not looking too good. Even though women have always been a leading factor in the church, we still could not embrace some of the things of the women's movement. Think about the sexual revolution of the 60's. We were definitely trying to throw cold water on that, as much as we could. We just couldn't stop it. Sex was a hot hot thing and it still is with all sorts of formerly unimaginable books and movies. By now you have just crazy stuff that at the time no one could have predicted. Recently the movie Fifty Shades of Gray come out, about people practicing sadomasochism. Of course, the homosexual movement has become a dominant force. In larger society, they think that's progressive. If you're against those things, then there something wrong you. You're an old dead fossil. Drug use is another place were we, as Christians, have always been out of step with culture, even to the point where some churches forbid alcohol, much less any kind recreational drugs. We are seen as dinosaurs.
Connected to both the sexual revolution and women's issues is the right to choice as opposed to the right to life. The whole abortion debate is really stuck in both of those two issues and someone who is progressive is going to say will a woman has the right to choose what she does with her body and that she doesn't have to bear a child. So as Christians we look at our Bibles and we say this not looking good. This is not a good revolution. This is a revolution that is against what we are meant to be, and whom we are meant to be, and what God purposed for humankind. And so we are seen by a large portion of society as dinosaurs, fossils, something of the past that needs to be buried, forgot about, put in the museum.
They don't even teach Christian history in public school or university. Despite the fact that Christian history is so integral to the development of Western society. If you think about it would there be orphanages without Christianity; would there be hospitals, would there be universities? So the people that are teaching against us, are, in fact, the very people that have been blessed by Christianity. I even think that psychology, that way of thinking to try to improve people that are struggling mentally, that is something that really comes out of Christian thought. Right now I am reading Augustine's Confessions; and so much of that book has that kind of psychological thinking. He is thinking about what was wrong with his thinking and how he could straighten out his thinking. There are so many blessings that come out of Christianity and yet Christians are seen as dinosaurs, dead dry bones.
Our school system starts from an early age. Teaching a lot of things that we have to disapprove of. As far as I understand, homosexuality is embraced in the public schools, uncertainly on university campuses. Obviously public schools don't embrace open sexuality with young people, but they certainly are doing much to discourage it. In fact, they're basically trying to tell people how to have safe sex. They teach evolution without God. All sorts of things are being taught that Christians are not terribly happy with. They are certainly not teaching Christianity in public schools. They are not teaching Christian history, they seem to avoid that like the plague. Even universities that teach it push religious history to the side. We are in a nation that is ostensibly Christian. But we have lost and our PR campaign is failed miserably.
In the 60s. I remember a lot of songs on the radio that were Christian themed: This is the Age of Destruction, Drop Kicked Me Jesus, Through the Goalpost of Life, One Toke Over the Line, Sweet Jesus. Some of it a little bit edgy. In the midst of all those crazy revolutions, there were a lot of Christian songs out there. Unfortunately a lot more of them were this sort of Slip Inside My Sleeping Bag or Hello Little Schoolgirl, songs that were teaching something else. That is still very much the direction of pop culture. Pop culture is taking people away from Christian values. In essence, we were living in the midst of a lot of sirens singing us away from where we belong.
And the worst part is that they are claiming to have the moral high ground. The are claiming to be progressive. The are claiming to be the ones who have a word and a vision that gives the strength that we need to create the future: free love, homosexuality, perfect acceptance. Progressives are just waiting for the day when we can have gay president or a transsexual president. You know it's coming. That is what they see as progressive.
So we are in a situation where a lot of young people don't see value in who we are and what we are. Here's where it gets difficult. A lot of Christians take their value from the Bible. Or we take our values from what we hear on TBN or other places like that. We say okay that's my value, but in the end, the problem is that if it doesn't come alive in you, then you still are dry bones, you still are what you were being accused of being. Just because you could quote the Bible doesn't mean you have the ability to flow in what the Bible is trying to make us flow in.
What is the Bible. What is the word of God. What is Scripture. Paul in Galatians 3, verse 24, He said he tells us what it is, the law which in Hebrew is the word, the word of God, is our schoolmaster. It is meant to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But his point there is that if you're still in school 20 years later, after hearing the word. Something has failed. If you're 50 years old and you still haven't graduated high school. Your education system has failed, hasn't it? If you're still running to the Bible to know what you think.
So I want to turn because the Bible has so many wonderful things in it. Let's turn to Ezekiel 37. Everybody will remember this exactly what I'm talking about. It is the most beautiful description of how this process works, because you've be at been given the skeleton, the foundation structure to build your Christian life on. What good is a foundation without a house on it. It is useless. A skeleton without flesh is the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel says:
(Ezekiel 37:1-3) The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
Now, you and I would say absolutely not. But, Ezekiel knowing that he's in the vision. And knowing that God is asking for a reason, knowing that God is capable of doing all kinds of things, wisely says, “Oh Lord, you know.” He basically evades the question.
(Ezekiel 37:3-14) And I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the LORD.”
What you see here is a transformation from fossil bones to Jurassic Park. Suddenly, these dinosaurs are very real, very alive, very vibrant, very much meant to be taken seriously. An exceeding great army. What does it take to make those dry bones into something alive. When the prophets of the Lord, hear the word of the Lord and speak the word of the Lord, then the dead logos, the word, the written word suddenly became comes Rhema, a living word. At some point you come to the place where you understand why is God saying that, for instance, a man should not lie with another man. This is now not just a rule. But there is an understanding of what the purpose is; what God is trying to call forth. Our nature is off kilter and he's wanting something more beautiful for us, something more alive. He's not trying to kill your pleasure. God is trying to make life alive and more vibrant and make who you are something greater, something stronger. He truly wants, wants so badly he's willing to sacrifice His son, so that the Holy Spirit could be released everywhere, not just in a handful prophets, but there are millions of churches throughout this planet and they all have access to the Holy Spirit.
There are churches now where no missionary came to them, the Holy Spirit came. There are Imam's that have had visions of Jesus and suddenly decided okay my mosque is now temple of the Lord Jesus Christ, because I saw him and spoke to him. I never saw Mohamed. He never spoke to me. Jesus did. Whole villages of Muslims have turned to the Lord, because someone who wasn't even a Christian became a prophet of the Lord Jesus Christ, a prophet of God. Not a self-proclaimed prophet, but a true prophet, one that saw and heard Jesus, and spoke to the Holy Spirit.
What happens: miraculous things. It's easy to put a Bible quote on your fridge and say do not fear or live in the joy of the Lord, or whatever it is. It is another thing to have that switch turned inside, where the fear dissolves a hurt and or an injury. That is really what this church was based on. We started as a group of deliverance healers. We wanting to help people heal from those things that no one else could. And the only way you're going to heal some of those things, is to change what is happening inside. Whether we are talking about rapes, violence against a person, or other kinds of things that cause things to get set in your heart that are against you. These are things that the Lord sees. These are things that the word of the Lord can touch. The rhema word Lord sees those things. I love that story of the person stood up in the front of the church and said, “God saw you and the yellow duck,” which of course is the silliest thing the prophecy, but it turned out that somebody fell down weeping at that point, realizing that 70 or 80 years ago, she sat there on the dock thinking that God didn't see her. And she was staring at a yellow duck and wanting it so much. And suddenly when she heard that prophetic word, she fell down realizing God was there all along. It was a word that broke a long-standing hard place inside her heart.
It is easy to just say “thou shall not fear.” It isn't easy to give people the reassurance just from the Bible. They need something stronger. It isn't easy to change someone that is set into a pattern, a social pattern that is self-destructive without the rhema word. All around us, we are seeing people set in self-destructive patterns, or a life that keeps them way below their potential. They need a rhema word.
There is only one way you're going to get the rhema word. If you want to help people to choose. If you want to help yourself get to the next level. There is only one way to get it. It is the same way that prophets of the Old Testament got it. They spent quality time with God. Some of them were priests. A lot of them where not even people that we would expect that they should be prophets. Think of Jonah. He was a farmer. There were several others who were farmers or herders. David was a prophet. He had prophetic visions all the time. He spoke to God. He saw angels. As a sheepherder, he sat out there in that field and spoke to God a lot. It is quite clear from the Psalms. He had a very active vibrant life of talking to God, until he started hearing from God, and then he had rhema word that could change the nation of Israel. He could take a hold of Israel and lead it. It was Israel's greatest period of prosperity and strength, of vibrancy of the temple, the word of the Lord just exploded at that time. Because God was there. God was with him because he spent time talking to God.
For ten years I ran the prayer on Sunday mornings. We used to have an intercession time before service upstairs. Our former pastor Chris trained me to do that. And he had strict rules for prayer time. He wouldn't let me lead that thing until he watched me do it a lot of times. He wouldn't let me lead by myself until he watched me do it and was satisfied. He went over with me exactly what he expected. He wanted nobody preaching to God, now one of my favorite pet peeves. You have you heard those prayers, “Oh God, I know it says in your word this and this and this, and we know that people should be doing that, and that and that.” It's not prayer. You're not talking to God. Who thinks they are talking to a sovereign God when they pray like that. Who were they talking to? To the other people in the prayer meeting. They are preaching. Other pet peeves are getting bogged down in the flowery language, “Lord, in your magnificent glory...” and so on and so on. It's putting on airs. God isn't interested. I remember the testimony of the Bob Phillips who was pastor across town. He had been a pastor for some time and he had gotten pretty burned out. So we went down to the Brownsville revival. He just wanted to recharge. He didn't want to do anything. But one of the leaders up on the stage knew he was a pastor. At the time start praying for people, he called pastor Bob to pray for people. Bob was a trained preacher who knew how to do all those flowery oratory things. So there are people all around them praying, “Fire!” And, in the Spirit, people are dropping like flies. But pastor Bob wants to do it his way, because he's a trained preacher. So he's going into his long oratory about what God should do. The whole time he's arguing in back of his head. “How come I'm doing it the right way. I've been trained and so on and so forth. But it isn't working. And they are just saying fire and it is working.” Maybe you don't need to put so much of your own blabber into. Maybe you don't need to show all of your old training. Glad you trained, but they just need the touch of God. Finally he acquiesces in and prays, “Fire!” The person drops in the Spirit. He goes next person, “Lord in all your mercy...” and he starts going into his spiel. Nothing. The next person, “Fire!” The person drops.
The point is that sometimes we're so busy doing everything else but talking to God. We are doing everything but listening. We are doing everything but getting our Holy Ghost batteries charged. If you want you're batteries charged, sing to God like God is listening. That means if you're all alone in your own house, you can sing at the top of your lungs. You want God in your house. Don't you want God there when your kids come in and they're sneaking around behind you're back, doing things they shouldn't be doing. You want them to feel the guiding hand of a loving God right there. When you talk to God talk to God like you really are talking to God. You are. And then take time to listen.
David didn't get all that understanding by not listening. If you want flesh on the bones of your Christian experience, and in the words that you say to people, you want the breath of life. The breath makes that pile of dead bones into a Jurassic Park. Something changes. Even to hardened people such as imams, you can speak the rhema word of God that changes them. The only way you're going to get that rhema word of God is if you are communicating with God. You must spend time with God. Seek God. I get up in the morning. A lot of times I just run out of energy or time. I can't say that I'm the world's best prayer warrior. But I do respect prayer very much, because the times I have had breakthroughs, have always been from hearing from God. His word comes through whatever is against me. His word changed things around.
Last Thursday I went to a concert. John Michael Talbot is a Christian artist. He became a Catholic monk in one of the less stringent orders. He is married. He is not in some cave or something. He does live a pretty austere life, and he has to get permission to go out to perform his music. You could feel the way he spoke and you can feel it in his music that this is a man that spends time with God. He has a very simple lifestyle. There's nothing fancy about his lifestyle. I suspect he doesn't have a television in his house. Things like that. There are fewer distractions for him, and instead there is a community that gets together and lives to pray and sing. As a result, you can see it he is different. He was also pushing Catholicism, which wasn't my cup of tea. He says things like, we are the first church. If we go to the Orthodox or the Coptic church, that are just as old, you can't say that. I like the guy because I could see that the Lord was on him.
The weekend before that I had the opportunity to go to a conference that had as one of the featured speakers Brian Simmons who is translating the Passion Bible. Now I've never been fond of vernacular translations. But this one I'm interested in just because I heard the man speak. He very much impressed me. Again it was somebody that you could tell he had a connection to God. He had been a missionary for several years. He had learned the language of this obscure tribe in New Guinea and then translated the Bible for them. When he returned, he and his wife started a successful church in the Northeast. He'd gotten the church rolling and was getting ready turn that over. He was sitting in his study, when suddenly the wall melted, and suddenly God walked in, or an angel of the Lord. He said he wanted Brian to translate the Bible. Brian is protesting, “I am not a Hebrew scholar, I am not a Greek scholar, I'm not guy to do this.” But God said, “I want to you do this, because you're the person has the rhema. You're the person that can do it with my heart.” That's why it's called the Passion Bible. And so he is doing what he was instructed to do and he says, “throughout the whole process, God is helping me.” He's a very well-educated man. He was capable doing it. But there are people that spend their lives studying this stuff. He had been spending time as a pastor and a missionary and things like that. But God could show him because he had that relationship. God could show him things that scholars couldn't see because they were looking at the technical aspects of the Greek and the Hebrew, but he was being shown the heart.
At some point our Christian life has to become a burning fire of rhema power, or we will continue to be seen as dry bones. Do we want to be this church to be seen as a Jurassic Park or a fossil park? It make it really does look like a fossil park right now. We know that the Holy Spirit shows up, but is it glowing in a way that it's so on fire. When the people are coming you know it's on fire. When people show up and they're standing there going I don't know why I'm here. It's rhema. Another one of my favorite stories from from Brownsville was about a couple of girls that were Playboy models. They were there in Brownsville to do photo shoot. But there was a hurricane coming in to the weather was not conducive. So they were stuck in their hotel and they just decided we weren't going to stay there, they were going to go out to find a hurricane party or something. They got in a cab and asked the cab driver, what was the most happening thing. He said “Brownsville,” meaning the revival. He took them there. They had no clue what they were walking into. They walked into this church and thought this is the strangest thing they ever saw. They both got hammered. I mean being flattened by the Lord. They lay for hours in front of the altar. All of the sudden, they are burning for something other than Playboy, and they are lighting fires other than fire down below. They are lighting fires in the heart and in the mind, they are now living for Jesus. >How did that happen? It happened in the presence of God. They wound up there. It was against anything that would have occurred to them, that they would be going to a church, and becoming followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was not the life they were living. That was not the direction their life was going. Their life was turned around by the Holy Spirit. Their life was turned around because there was a place that the Holy Spirit was so strong, that the power of everything else in their life was defeated. The world's vision will have no power over the people that come in to hear, if the power of the Lord is so powerful in this place that people are chanded