We Need Revival — Scott Camp

The Burden of Revival and the Call to Repentance

The sense in which I wish that the Lord had placed on my heart a very light-hearted message to bring to you, but that is not the need of the hour. And so, it is with a tremendous sense of burden that I open up God's Word tonight, and I invite you to open up with me to the book of 2 Chronicles.

It's a very familiar passage of Scripture tucked away in the 7th chapter, beginning in the 13th verse. And when you found 2 Chronicles 7 and verse 13, I want us to stand together out of reverence for the reading of the Word of God.

And I'm going to read out loud, and I want you to read along silently with me as I read aloud. 2 Chronicles 7 and verse number 13. Where God says, When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land, or send a plague among my people.

We might read that like this. When the towers fall, and the oil spills, and the hurricanes devastate, and when you're mired in what seems like an endless war, and the economy fails, and the church grows cold, and the family unravels, and the young people are ravished, and the nation is divided, and there's violence in the streets, when children are hungry, and the most prosperous nation in the world, when all that begins to happen, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then, not until then, but then, I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Now my eyes will be open, and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. I have chosen and consecrated this temple, so that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.

Father, we pray tonight. Come on, church, help me pray tonight. God, we pray tonight, that in wrath, you would remember mercy. Father, I pray you'd sober us up. Father, I pray you'd break up the fallow ground of my heart.

And Father, I pray you'd give us ears to hear what the Spirit would say to the church tonight. And we pray it in Jesus' name, and the people called by his name said, and you may be seated. It was October of 1857, when Jeremiah Lamphere got a burden for his city.

The Fulton Street Prayer Meeting and the Great Prayer Awakening

Jeremiah Lamphere was not a preacher, he was a businessman. Living in New York City, and Jeremiah Lamphere began to be burdened by the moral and the spiritual decay that was going on in the life of the nation, exhibited in that great city.

So Jeremiah Lamphere didn't know what to do. He called a prayer meeting. And in October of 1857, Jeremiah Lamphere and a handful of business associates went into the sanctuary of the old Dutch chapel on Fulton Street in New York City, and they began to pray.

And Lamphere says that, as those men fell on their face before God, that the wind of the Spirit of God began to blow in that place. And there was such a mighty, powerful move of God that they determined that they would meet the next day, and they would pray.

And so the next day, ten men came, and they began to pray. They said, we're going to meet again and again and again. And the historians tell us that within six months, of that first meeting, every day in New York City, over 10 ,000 people were gathered.

They gathered in the restaurants, they gathered in the church buildings, and in the shops, and they began to fall on their face and cry out to God for revival. And within six months, listen to this, this is powerful.

The historians tell us that within six months of that initial prayer meeting, thousands of people began to pray. And within another six months, over a million people, that's one-third of the entire population of the eastern seaboard of our country at that time, over a million people were converted to Christ and added to the churches, and they called it the Great Prayer Awakening.

The Need for Revival in the American Church

Now my friend, what we need in America today is an old-fashioned, Holy Ghost, Bible-preaching, devil-chasing, sin-fighting, nail-pulling, shingle-rattling revival. We need revival in America. We need revival.

As a matter of fact, I want to tell you tonight that our only hope, listen, if we don't have revival, we're going to run headlong into the judgment of Almighty God. We've got to have revival. We need revival not only in the pews of America, in our churches.

Our churches are dead and cold. I'm talking about Pentecostal churches. You know, they used to call Methodists, shouting Methodists, and Baptists, shouting Baptists. I want to ask you a question. When's the last time anybody shouted in your Pentecostal church?

The average assembly of God church in America is so cold, you could ice skate up and down the aisles and hang meat in the auditorium, and there are icicles hanging from the chandeliers in the auditorium.

We've got more fire and more heat under the coffee pot in the Sunday school class than we have in the pool pit in the average church in America. Most of our churches, nobody's getting healed anymore. Nobody's getting baptized in the Holy Spirit anymore.

Nobody's getting saved anymore. We don't have enough power to blow the fuzz off a peanut in the average Pentecostal church. We need revival. We need revival not only in the pew, but we need revival in the pool pits.

Listen, my friend, we got a bunch of sissy fakes, little preacherettes preaching sermonettes to Christianettes who dress like majorettes and drive Corvettes and watch TV sets. We need some old-fashioned Holy Ghost men of God who are not afraid to raise up their voice like a trumpet and lay the ax to the root of the tree and say, repent the sin of the Lord.

National Sin, Injustice, and the Need for Moral Renewal

Listen, we need revival in this nation. Our nation that has become characterized by materialism. We know the price of everything and the value of absolutely nothing. As Neil Postman said in his powerful book, we are amusing ourselves to death.

Our nation that is so trapped up in materialism and in idolatry and in militarism. We're trapped in a war right now. Hundreds and thousands of our young men and women are coming home in body bags and others coming home, they'll never be the same.

And it seems like we're bogged down in a quagmire that only God and only revival can get us out of in an honorable way. Hedonism. We don't know what's right and wrong morally anymore in our country. We've marginalized the poor.

You read the prophets in the Old Testament. I want to tell you, they didn't primarily preach against homosexuality, although homosexuality is a sin. They didn't primarily preach against abortion, although abortion is the murder of the unborn.

They primarily preached against a society that had marginalized the poor and had left behind the needy. And they preached against societies that were characterized by classism and racism and sexism. And God says, I'm going to judge you because of your sin.

And God, let me tell you something, my friend. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And that doesn't just mean that He is good all the time. That means that the same God who judged His people in the Old Testament is getting ready to judge His people today.

I'm coming, amen, just get ready. Buckle your pew belt. We need revival. It's affected our young people. We've got 3 .3 million teenage alcoholics in our nation today. Every year, over a million teenagers run away from home, spend the night in the streets of the major cities of our country, cover themselves up with a newspaper.

Every 38 seconds, a young lady becomes pregnant out of wedlock. 1 .2 million last year. All out of the 2 million abortions that were performed in our country last year, one-third of them were performed on teenagers under 16 years of age.

Listen, you've got to have a note from your mom and dad to take an aspirin at school, but you can have an abortion, and nobody ever finds out about it. We're sick, do you understand that? Our homes are falling apart.

It's not just in the church or outside the church, it's in the church. I read a statistic not long ago that shocked me. By Josh McDowell, who surveys young people and the state of morality among young people, and he said there's no, listen to this, he said there's no qualifiable, quantitative difference between the moral, sexual morals of young people outside of the church and those inside of the church.

It's because mom and dad have fallen asleep at the wheel. We've got a society where we're just so passive with our kids, and we let them do whatever they want to do. We've got a bunch of daddies. My friend, we need some daddies with backbone, amen, who will stand up and be with me.

If we could have revival in our homes, revival would sweep our nation. We need revival. We need revival. And I got good news for you. We can have it. Let me tell you something about God, friend. God's hand is not too short that He cannot save, and His ear is not deaf that He cannot hear.

Biblical Revivals and the Power of Repentant Prayer

We're not waiting on God to send revival, friend. God's been waiting on us. God wants to pour His Spirit out. There's never been a day too dark or a society too hard or the hearts of people too far away from God where God couldn't break through by His Spirit and send revival.

You remember in the Old Testament, the nation of Israel was in declension and despondency, and they had turned their back on God. And Elijah climbed up Mount Carmel and faced down those hundred plus prophets of Baal.

And he built an altar and laid the wood. And he dug a trench and filled it with water. And he cried out to the God of heaven. Listen, my friend, the question today is not where's the God of Elijah. It's where are the Elijahs of God?

Where are the men and women of God? Elijah fell on his face and cried out to God. And the fire from heaven fell and consumed the sacrifice. And Israel turned in one day back to God. Remember the nation of Israel, the walls were broken down.

The temple was in dishevels and dishambles. And God sent a man named Nehemiah and then Ezra. And he stood up and preached the word of God all day long until the people wept and they repented. Listen, when's the last time you've wept before God?

The last time you fell on your face and you said, oh God, I'm so broken because of my sin. God, I'm so broken because of my carelessness. And I'm so broken. God, I don't read your word anymore. I don't pray anymore.

I don't seek your face anymore. Oh God, forgive me. God, forgive me. The people of God repented before the Lord and a great revival came and reform started that changed the entire course of the nation of Israel.

There had never been a city more wicked or more desperately in need of a touch from God than the city of Jerusalem. A city that just 50 days before had nailed the Son of God to the cross. And yet the Bible says in Acts chapter 2 that in one accord they were meeting in an upper room and they prayed and they got a hold of God until the fire fell and the wind blew and Pentecost came and the Spirit of God fell upon them and 3 ,000 souls were saved.

God, do it again. God, do it again. Throughout the medieval period, the Catholic Church with all of its superstition and all of its darkness consumed the lives of the people of God until God began to move and raised up a Savonarola who preached the gospel and a Whitcliffe who preached the gospel.

And finally the Protestant Reformation with Luther who preached sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura, by faith alone, by the grace of God alone, in the Word of God alone. And God raised up a Calvin and a Zwingli and the radical reformers and the Protestant Reformation saved the entire civilization of Western Europe.

Revival Movements from the Wesleys to Azusa Street

And 200 years later God raised up some brothers called the Wesley brothers. Charles Wesley who wrote the great gospel hymns. And John Wesley, that little 5 foot 8 inch, less than 100 pound preacher who had the power of God on his life.

And George Whitfield who went out of the fields, they kicked him out of the church. I want to tell you the enemy of revival is never the lost world, it's always religious people in the church. You just let God start moving among the young people in a community and the power of God hit them.

And the first folks that raise up their head against the revival are the people in the church. I've seen it all in my ministry. I want to tell you something my friend, religion is the enemy of revival.

Whether it's Baptist religion or Methodist religion or Pentecostal religion. Some of us don't love Jesus, we just love being Pentecostal. We just got all of our little religious traditions. We love our religious traditions.

Some of you got a face so long you could stand straight legged and lick buttermilk out of a gopher hole and never move an inch. That's a long face, amen? I mean in church. Listen, some of the meanest people I've ever met in my life go to church every single solitary Sunday.

Controlling spirit. That's who killed Jesus. Prostitutes didn't kill, they loved Jesus. Drunkards loved Jesus. We have the privilege almost 70 years ago now of starting a church in a living room. Just a handful of people and God has blessed and we've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people come to Jesus Christ and have their lives changed.

Listen, listen friend. I'm talking about every kind of tatted up kind of person. People who don't know how to dress right in church. I'm talking about every color of person, every type of person and they don't have any religion.

They're just in love with Jesus Christ. I'm talking about, listen church, we need revival. I'm talking about I pray the spirit of God in a break us beginning with me and so fill us with the Holy Ghost and so empower us that if a mosquito bit you he'd fly away singing there's power in the blood.

Amen. I'm talking about the power of God on the lives of the people of God. They kicked the Wesleys out of the church. Whitville out of the church. They said if you want to preach you just go preach outside and so they said okay.

You read the diary of John Wesley and you'll find out how he preached the tens of thousands of old coal miners whose face were black. They weren't welcomed in the church. They weren't wanted in the church.

They were the working men of their day and time and they stood there and heard the Wesley brothers preach and sing about Jesus and the reporters said, listen to this, that the tears washed those blackened coal miners faces clean and they came to Christ.

The winds of revival blew across the Atlantic Ocean into New England and North Hampton where Jonathan Edwards stood with a piece of paper. He was almost blind. He held a manuscript and he preached that great message.

Sinners in the hands of an angry God and people in the congregation began to tremble and fear and they fell out before a holy God. Revival came. The second great awakening Charles Finney. He wasn't a preacher.

He was trained as a lawyer. God used him mightily and he would walk into factories and people would begin, he had such a sense of the presence of God. Oh God, you know I long for the day when you walk into work and you're so full of Jesus and there's such a shine on your face and the glory of God is on you and people around you begin to say, man, what is it about your life that's so different?

So different. We need revival. Azusa Street, an old black preacher with one eye, William Seymour. He was so shy that Frank Barnum in his book about Azusa Street said that William Seymour would sit behind an apple crate on a chair and he would stick when he wasn't preaching, he would stick his head in that apple crate and he would just pray, oh God come, oh God come and with a handful of people and now a hundred years later out of that one little group of people who met in an old barn outside of the city of San Francisco there are over a half a billion people who are Pentecostal and charismatic because of the revival that started at Azusa, God do it again.

Amen, God do it again. The charismatic renewal in the Jesus movement where over a million teenagers were swept into the kingdom of God and my prayer today is God do it again. God do it again. God do it in this place.

Revival in Pentecostal Churches and Denominations

God touch the preachers in this place. I want to tell you something my friend Mike, my wife's from Oklahoma we lived here for many years, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit right here in Oklahoma in the midst of a crusade of the Southern Baptist Church.

Matter of fact the last time I was in Oklahoma City I was preaching at the Oklahoma Baptist Pastors Conference. You say Scott did they kick you out? No they kicked me up. I mean listen I'm excited about assemblies of God and being Pentecostal but I'm going to tell you something our churches need the fire of God again.

We need the fire of God. How can we have this great revival? Listen to me and I'm almost done. I want to tell you how we're not going to have it. We're not going to have it by marketing methods. Some of you young I'm going to get down here where I can preach now.

Amen. I want to talk to some of you young preachers out there. I've been preaching almost 30 years now. I got saved when I was a senior in high school in a jail cell in Fort Worth, Texas. I was a drug addict an alcoholic I was a thug, a criminal and God changed my life.

My life was so messed up. My life was so messed up it was like a soap opera. I mean as the world turned I was one of the young and the restless who was in a constant search for tomorrow. And then one day the guiding light took me by the hand led me through the secret storm promised me I could live with him in another world and be part of all my children.

Amen. I mean God changed my life. See I was born in revival. You know how I got saved? Three teenage girls got a burden for my soul. They started weeping over me. You know what I found out? I found out that their youth group little Baptist church out in the country got a burden for my soul and I found out later that they made a top ten list of the worst kids in the high school.

Guess who made number one? You're looking at him. Amen. Number one. And they began to fast. When's the last time you fasted? See I'm talking about revival that doesn't come through slick marketing. I'm talking about revival that doesn't come through seeker sensitive services.

I'm talking about a revival that you can't have a revival of the spirit of God and show movie clips and tell jokes and sit on a stool like a pop psychologist and massage the egos of your people until they walk out saying well the preacher almost said something.

Man I was born, birthed in revival. That's the only thing I've ever known. When I'd preach in southern Baptist churches including the Southern Baptist Convention they'd always say well now what Pentecostal church do you pastor?

I mean man listen I never fit in because there was a fire inside of me. But I got to tell you that the same death that's taken over the major denominations in our country is creeping right into the fellowship of the assemblies of God.

I want to tell you it breaks my heart. This is a weak end to talk about our heritage. Our heritage. Listen our heritage is revival. That's our heritage. Our heritage is not evangelicalism. Our heritage is not slick.

You know when this denomination started in churches on the wrong side of the tracks by people who were poor and uneducated but they had the power of the Holy Spirit and people were healed and people's lives were changed and they traded in alcohol bottles for tambourines.

I mean God changed people's life through these. But we've gotten sophisticated now. Now we've got our beautiful buildings and our degrees and our people are no longer looked down on. Now we're just like all the rest of the denominations and that's the problem.

We're just like all the rest of the denominations. But I'm praying for revival. I'm praying for a touch a move of the Spirit of God that is so supernatural and so powerful that the church growth movement cannot explain it and the denominational press cannot market it and no man can take the glory.

Humility, Prayer, and Seeking God's Face

All we'll be able to say is I don't know how it happened but God did it. I'm going to tell you this and I'm finished. God says if you will I will. That's the good news. If you will I will. God says if you will humble yourself and pray I want to tell you the most prideful people I've ever met in my life beginning with myself are preachers so full of stinking pride so desirous to be known and some of you so cocky you could strut sitting down and I've always found by the way that the empty wagon rattles the loudest.

Amen. Oh listen, listen, listen, listen. You know where God says He lives? He says He lives with the contrite and the humble and the broken hearted. I want to tell you it breaks my heart that I don't love Jesus like I know I should.

God says if the people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek look at me, listen, and seek my face which is always an idiom in the Hebrew language for the presence of God. We can't have revival through marketing we sure can't have it through manipulation.

Rejecting Manipulation and the Prosperity Gospel

In the Old Testament when the people were so far away from God and the priests were so far away from God that the fire, the genuine fire of God would no longer fall, the priests figured out a way to rig the system up and kindle strange fire before the altar of God.

And the people were so spiritually out of it they didn't know the difference. We got a bunch of hucksters, let me tell you, we got a bunch of pimps in the pulpit of America today. Pimping out Jesus. The prosperity gospel, I want to tell you my friend, it's straight out of the pit of hell.

You go to a third world country, I'll be in Africa in two weeks you try to preach that garbage over in a third world country where people love Jesus Christ and they lay down their life for Jesus Christ but they live in a cardboard shack.

They put us to shame. We got a spoiled brat, spoiled rotten church in America that treats God like a genie in a bottle, that treats God like a slot machine and it's all about us and God's here to help us and make our life more positive.

The biggest preacher in America, all he ever preaches, all he ever preaches is what God can do for you. I want to tell you we're sick. We got preachers with $10 ,000 Rolex watches on living like celebrities.

Can you imagine the Apostle Paul? We got a bunch of junk being preached on Christian television. You better be careful not to get your theology from a woman with pink hair who raises chickens from the dead.

Amen? I mean, God help us. I want to tell you I love everybody but I love you enough to tell you the truth. That's why we're in the shape we're in. That's why we're in the shape we're in. God says humble yourself and pray and seek my face, look at me, and turn from, he's not talking about the world, he's talking about the church turn from your wicked ways wickedness adultery in the church in the pulpits, greed materialism using the people of God to build your own empire all the slander I'm telling you my friend I pastored the meanest woman in the world I'm convinced when the devil fell he fell into the choir loft, amen?

I mean that's where that woman she was full of the devil slander, got a tongue so long you could sit in the living room and lick gravy out of the skillet in the kitchen and never move an inch that's a long tongue, amen?

Wicked giving every preacher hell God sends you a man of God he might not know everything, maybe he didn't do it like brother so and so used to do it, but he loves God with all of his heart, his marriage is good, he's sacrificing he's a man of God, he preaches the word and all you can do is criticize and sometimes I want to say, why don't you stand up sister and lead us in a word of criticism amen, huh?

I want to tell you my friend, that's wicked before God and it's hindering it's hindering the revival racism I don't see many black faces in the crowd, listen our whole movement was so amazing to the secular world and the secular press because from the get go it was an integrated movement led by a black preacher now I gotta tell you, our churches are full of racism and all of this is like a dam, God says I will I want to, I will if you will.