The Disruptive Theology of Revival — Sammy Tippit

I come to this conference a little bit nervous because I know what God did in my life in the last conference. Or perhaps I should say, I know what God has done in my life since the last conference. That was the beginning of a real transformation.

Preparing the Heart for Revival

I want to speak to you today on preparation for revival. And I believe we need to prepare our hearts for revival. Revival preparation is different from other kinds of preparation. We have prepared. We've been, as Byron has mentioned, we've been on the phone once a month for two years now.

Praying together, seeking God together, discussing what direction does God want us to go. And we're here today because of that. But that's not preparation for revival. That's preparation for a conference.

Preparation for revival is what takes place in here. Because revival is what God does in us. Revival is the work of God among His people. Revival is not evangelism. Revival is not proclaiming the gospel outside to those who do not know Christ.

Revival is a work of God among God's people. It's a work of God among us who know Him, those of us who love Him, those of us who follow Him. It's Him renewing our hearts. I think the best definition of revival that I have personally heard is that of Martin Lloyd-Jones who said, revival is simply when God is known as God.

Now the knowledge of God is an awesome thing. The knowledge of God is something that you cannot manipulate. The knowledge of God is not something that you can work up. The knowledge of God is not something you can plan for.

Knowing God is a deep work of the Spirit of God in our hearts and in our lives. Bringing us to repentance and a new walk of obedience. And it's out of that obedience that Jesus said, He who has my commandments and keeps them, He it is who loves me.

And He says, He who loves me, I will disclose myself unto Him. And so preparation for revival comes when we allow God to work in us, to bring us to the place of repentance and a new walk of obedience to the Lord.

So we can do all of the preparation for this conference, but preparation for revival, and I believe we've come here, those of us I know who are sponsors have been coming here for several years now, we come with a heart cry for revival.

And I say to you that I'm nervous because I know that God has been preparing me for something. In fact, I will tell you that I cleared my whole schedule for this spring. I don't have any, I had several speaking engagements.

God just laid it on my heart to clear my whole schedule. The only speaking I'll do will be at this conference this spring. And God has just been doing something in my life since the last conference. Things that I don't understand, I don't have all the answers to.

I felt sorry for Byron, he invited me to speak at their retreat last year at this time, and all I did was get up and weep and cry, I couldn't even hardly speak at the whole time. Because God began a work, two years ago in May, God began a work in my own heart where I came back from Cambodia preaching to an unreached people group in Cambodia, and I came back with total exhaustion and found myself on my couch for 30 hours and couldn't get up.

I called for a friend to come over and just pray for me. And Billy Hobbs, who was a former All-American pro football player, came over, he and his wife and they just prayed for me. I was scheduled to go to Haiti.

He said, Sammy, you're not going to Haiti without me. I'm going with you. We're going to take care of you. And he went there. I have a lot of people who say, I just want to carry your suitcases, but Billy, this All-American football player, that's all he did.

He came just to take care of me, carry my suitcases with a servant spirit. Two months later, we were in Brazil together, and he led most of one of Brazil's professional soccer teams to Christ, and professional soccer in Brazil is something, if you know anything about Brazil.

And then three weeks after that, he was supposed to go with me in two months to Pakistan. Three weeks after that, he was killed in an automobile accident. And I preached his funeral, and at the close of his funeral, I collapsed again, had to be brought to the emergency room in the hospital.

I went to Pakistan a few weeks later, and on my way home in Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, collapsed again, had to be brought to the hospital. I found myself in a position that I've never been in before, helpless, completely helpless, crying out to God, God, what are you up to?

What's going on? Just a few months after that, I received a phone call. I was having lunch with a friend of mine from Louisiana, and we were having lunch together. I received a phone call while we were there at the restaurant, and a colleague of mine said, Sammy, the guy who's interpreting for you in a Mideastern country has just been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are demanding $60 ,000.

Before I could even respond to their demands, I received another phone call that he had been killed and mutilated terribly. God was doing something in my heart, bringing me to a place I'd never been before, a walk that I've never been through before.

Month after that, I received a phone call from my sister saying that she had received a letter from a man who said that he had evidence that he was our brother, and he lived in Portugal. So I contacted that man, and he said he had evidence that we were from the same family background, that my father and his mother had a relationship, and that his mother committed suicide as a result of that relationship in 1963.

My father's been dead since 1968, and of course, this was shocking news for me. We submitted to DNA testing, found out he was not my brother, but in the midst of that, he said that he had also evidence, DNA testing, that we were from the same Indian tribe.

I said, really? What tribe is that? And discovered that my whole background was not what I thought it was. This is past two years after the HeartCry conference. You can understand why I'm a little nervous at this HeartCry conference.

I don't know what God's up to, but I know this. I've come with a heart that is crying out, oh God, I want to know you. Though the world around me fall, though everything shake, I want to know you. Revival is the knowledge of God.

It is getting to know Him intimately. When God comes and visits His people and meets with His people, and out of that meeting, we come out different people because we've met Him. We are different. We have been changed because of the knowledge of God and that encounter with Him.

So I believe that there is preparation of the heart, and God is doing something. I hope that you have come to this meeting, to this conference, not just to be at another conference, but I hope that you have come with a heart cry for genuine revival in your own life.

Psalm 24 and the Sovereignty of God

Now historically, biblically, first of all, there's a great passage of Scripture that I want us to look at, Psalms chapter 24. And I want us to look at that passage of Scripture in light of preparation for revival.

I know there have been instances in history where people had prayed, and they had prayed and sought God for revival, but when they went to Psalms chapter 24 and they began to read through the Psalms and they began to apply the Psalms to their heart, God began to do a work in their lives that prepared them for a mighty move of God's Spirit in their own lives.

So I want us to read together the Psalms. Psalms chapter 24, and I'm just going to go through it and comment on some things as we walk through this. Psalms chapter 24, beginning with verse 1. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world, and they that dwell therein.

For He founded it upon the seas and established it upon the floods. The first thing that I want us to note about revival, and it's an assumption, and that is if we're going to get to know God, we must know Him in His sovereignty.

That He is Almighty God. Now that may seem like a simple thing. That may seem like a very basic thing. But we must know Him, not know about Him in His sovereignty. We must know Him as the sovereign God.

The one who put these mountains in place. The one who hung the stars in space. I was talking to my son who has a ministry with this new generation and we were just talking and in passing he made a statement.

He said, I believe this generation, the greatest need for this generation is a new sense of the awe of God. To know God, to reverence God, to have an awe of who God is. To know Him as the Almighty, the sovereign God.

Now what does that mean? According to the Scripture here, first of all, we need to know that He is the Creator of all things. We must recapture a sense that He is the God who has placed everything into existence.

There is nothing that exists without Him. There will be no revival until deep within our soul, deep within our heart, we know Him in this kind of way. A number of years ago I went to South Africa. The guy who was my mentor, he's gone on to be with the Lord, an evangelist by the name of Mike Gilchrist.

Some of you may know Manly Beasley. He was Manly Beasley's brother-in-law and Mike had a heart for revival and I first met Mike when I became a Christian and Mike was holding a conference in South Africa with pastors on revival and he asked me to go with him and to speak at this conference in South Africa.

And I remember going there. It was my first time on the continent of Africa and I preached in Cape Town each night before we went to the pastor's conference. And while we were in Cape Town, each night I would go out and pray.

And where we were staying was right on the ocean. It was where the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean come together and it's just an awesome thing to see the handiwork of God in that place. One of the most beautiful places in the whole world, I believe, is Cape Town.

And I remember we were down there and every night I would go out and I would spend a couple of hours in prayer. And when I said I'd spend a couple of hours in prayer, I wasn't really talking to God. I was just listening, just taking in, just absorbing His handiwork, His majesty, His power, who He is.

And I can remember thinking that, you know, this is amazing. My first time in Africa, I was at that time probably as far away from my home as I could get and still be on this planet. And I remember thinking, just sitting there, thinking as I looked up into the heavens and meditating on who God is, I remember thinking, you know, God is here.

There's nowhere that I can go on this planet except that God is there. And then I had a second thought. You know, God was there long before I ever arrived. And He was going to be there long after I left.

God is the eternal God. God is the omnipresent God. He is the eternal God. And then I had a third thought. He not only was there and He's there eternally, but I had a third thought and that was that He knows everything.

You see, I was in South Africa. My family was back in America. But God, the God that I was, I was having communion with that same God, He was there all the time, everywhere, knew everything. And then I had a fourth thought and that was that He had all power.

Now, as I begin to think about this, I don't know if you understand what that did to my prayer life. Because I was in touch with a God who was everywhere, all the time, had all power and knew everything.

And I would just go out at night for two hours every night and just meditate on the awesomeness of who God is. He is the Creator. He is the Lord God. And thinking and meditating on that, there was something deep that was taking place within my soul.

Well, by the time the pastor's conference came, we were putting together the schedule as we have done here for this conference and who's going to be speaking when. And I said, guys, just forget about me.

Don't worry about me. I just want to be here and meet with God. And they said, no, Sammy, we want you to speak. So they gave me the sleep session. It was the afternoon session, you know, and after everything.

And I got up and I spoke. And I don't even remember what all I spoke about, but I spoke about who God is and what God wants to do. And I went and sat down. And when I went and sat down, something happened in that moment.

God came and met with us. We were supposed to be dismissed and no one could leave. Someone stood up and began to sing. Others began to fall on their face and weep. People sat there. People stood. People were crying.

Brothers began to go to brothers and sisters in Christ. People from different racial backgrounds and there was reconciliation and asking for forgiveness. And there was a deep sense of brokenness and repentance that took place in that moment.

This went on for about an hour and a half of nothing but the presence of God among those pastors and leaders, God moving among them. And finally, the one who was in charge, you know, the person who had been in charge before this and he came and said, OK, guys, we've got to be dismissed because it's time for dinner.

And so we've got to go. They're waiting for us in the restaurant. We must go in there. We must have dinner. And he walked away and no one followed because no one could leave. It went on another hour. Finally, he came back and he says, the food is getting cold.

We must break for dinner. No one could leave. There was just a sense of the awesome presence of God. And when God comes and when God visits, we know him as the creator, the sovereign God. He is the one in control.

He is the one in charge. I just met with a pastor from South Africa just a couple of weeks ago who was in that meeting. He said it was the turning point of his ministry, the turning point of his life when God came.

Revival is not necessarily the top blowing off. Revival is often the bottom falling out. We have nowhere to look but up and we see him and we behold him for who he is. And when we see him for who he is, he comes, he meets with us.

Our hearts must be prepared because we must see that he is the owner of all things. And by the way, the group that had been meeting here and discussing, praying and working towards this conference, we are not the owners of this conference.

This is God's. And one of the great things that you will learn if you are going to see revival and know revival, you are going to have to understand that you are not the owner. You are not the owner. Not only is God the creator, he is the owner of all things.

If he created these mountains, he owns it. If he called you into the ministry, he owns it. And this ministry and what we talk about revival, we are talking about what God owns. He is the sovereign God which means he can do what he so desires to do.

And we must take hands off. We are not called to be owners. We are called to be stewards. You know, I sometimes I hear and we talk about this and so much has been talked about leadership and we talk about leadership and we talk about, you know, we've got to give people ownership.

The great problem in the church today is we've got a lot of owners of the church. And the truth is he is the owner of the church. We are stewards. You look at the biblical concept and the biblical concept is we are stewards.

A steward is a manager, one who stands under the authority of the owner. The owner is God and we are simply stewards. And the only test for us is whether we have been faithful stewards. And when things go wrong, it may be that God is wanting to meet with us when those things are going wrong.

And it may be that God is preparing our heart for a deeper work that he might reveal himself to us, that we might know him in the midst of the bottom falling out, that we might really get to know him.

And so we need to see him. When things go wrong, I ask my staff only one question and that is, have you been faithful? Now if things go wrong because we have not been faithful servants, then we need to repent.

But if we have been faithful and things go wrong, then we must say that God or what we deemed as being wrong, then we must say that God is in control, that God is the owner. I think one of the things that blessed me so much about Dr. Bill Bright, when I knew him right a couple of years before he died, I had the opportunity to interview him.

And I did an interview with him on personal revival. I was asking him about his own walk with God, his personal relationship and fellowship with God. And I asked him what he thought the secret to ongoing revival, personal revival was.

And he said something to me that just blessed my heart. He said, every night before I go to bed, my wife and I lay in the bed and we say, Lord, here we are. We're your servants. Just simple servants. We wake up in the morning, we pray together, we say, Lord, we're your servants, we're reporting for duty.

And I believe that what's happened is we've developed a lot of CEOs. We've developed a lot of owners of ministries instead of servants. And when you see that God is the owner, when you see that God is the one who is in charge, that God is in control, only he and only he alone has the authority to say, go to the left or go to the right or do this or do only God.

You place yourself in a position simply as a steward. And the biblical position for revival, I believe, is that of saying, God, I am simply a steward. Whatever you want me to do, I'm here. I am one saluting you.

I am one saying, yes, sir, I'll do whatever you want me to do. So the psalmist says, first of all, he says, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it in the floods.

There is an assumption here about revival, and the assumption is that we know God is the sovereign God. There is a sense of awe in our hearts because of who he is. The next thing is, not only is he the sovereign God, but he is the holy God.

Holiness, Truth, and Clean Hands

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, verse 3, or who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul into vanity nor sworn deceitfully, he shall receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

There are three things said here. If we're going to know God, see God, welcome God in revival as the king of glory and his glory is going to be manifest. And I believe that revival is simply a small manifestation of the glory of God, the king of glory among his people.

And if we're going to see that, then there are three things stated here. First of all, I'm going to go in the opposite order. First of all, there has got to be a sense of a commitment to truth. He says, not only is he one who has a pure heart and clean hands, but he says also that he has not lifted up his soul to vanity or sworn deceitfully, or I believe another translation says sworn by that which is false or by idols.

You know, idol worship, the one thing about idol worship that, and I've been in countries where there's much idol worship. And I think what sets Christianity apart from other religions, one of the great things is truth.

Jesus is the truth. You go to a place like India and I was there, I went into a temple where they had this little God of stones and everyone brought their bananas and their fruit to offer to this God of stone and the next day the bananas and all the fruit was gone.

Well, let me ask you a question. How many of you think that little God of stone ate those bananas? Of course you don't. I don't either. You know what, they didn't either. They understood that. You know, they understand this is a fable.

But I want you to know that we are not dealing with fables. We're dealing in truth. Jesus is the truth. And so when we minister and when we come to revival, it's important that what we say, what we do be rooted in integrity of life and ministry.

What we preach must be with integrity. It must be the Word of God. Revival has always come as the Word of God has been proclaimed in power and as the Word of God has been proclaimed in truth. And there must be a rooting in the truth of the Word of God.

If real revival is going to come, it's going to be rooted in the truth of God's Word, the first thing. And I believe that also in relationship to that, I think that it's very important that when we minister, and I see this happen all the time, I'm an evangelist.

And one of the great heartaches that I have is I hear people speak all the time and say, well, you know, evangelistically speaking. And what's meant by that is we evangelists have a reputation of exaggerating the truth.

And I want to tell you something. When Jesus comes and visits His people, there's no need for exaggeration. In fact, most people won't believe when revival comes because they're so used to hearing exaggerations that it's hard for them to really come to grips with what's really true.

I'm talking about the average person out there. Because we've dealt with things that are so untrue and we try to, you know, we try to build it up more than it is and say things about our ministry more than really has happened and we need to come to the place.

There needs to be a fresh honesty. When revival comes, there is a sense of honesty about who we are, about what we've done. We don't have to impress people. We deal in truth, truth from God's Word, truth about who we are and what God is doing in our own lives.

So there's this sense of genuineness and truthfulness in revival. Also, I think I have a, one of the great problems that we have in our culture today is with marketing. And don't misunderstand me. I believe that it's okay, not only okay, I think it's good and something the Lord wants us to do to let people know about, for instance, this conference.

We've got to market this conference in that sense. We need to do that. But when I talk about marketing, I think there is a temptation, and I think the evangelical community has stepped way over the line on this, a temptation to try to paint something to be something that it's really not.

To impress people so that we can get people. We have lost, we feel like in order to get our thing to work, we've got to show people something that is so dynamic and so exciting that we've created thoughts and ideas that are not rooted in reality and in truth.

And when revival comes, I want you to know it's all about truth. Jesus, He's the truth. And so there must be that sense of integrity of life. Not only we won't swear by that which is false, we won't speak about that which is false.

We'll have integrity in our speech, integrity in what we say, but we'll have clean hands in our relationships. When God comes, it's not just to have us have some real neat experience. Revival is much more than an experience.

Revival is the knowledge of God. And to know God means to love your brother. And we have so many broken relationships. We live in a culture of broken relationships. And one of the great hindrances to revival is that we do not have clean hands.

Jesus said before you bring your gift to the altar, go and make it right with your brother. And then bring your gift to the altar. There has got to be a writing of wrong relationships. No matter who it is.

And so many times in the ministry, I know in my own ministry, there are times you're going to be hurt. There's times that you're going to do things that are wrong. And we have got to have a spirit of humility where we go to brothers, we humble ourselves before them, and we ask forgiveness.

If we're going to see revival, now we can have a revival conference and not have clean hands. See, the hands are that which touches other people first. It's the hands. And if our hands are not clean, we're carrying disease on those hands in those relationships.

I mean, we can produce a lot of things. We can have some great conferences, but we'll not have revival until we have clean hands. So whatever it is, whoever it is, there's a broken relationship with. Whatever's been done, there's only one thing important.

That is that we have clean hands. I can remember when I first became a Christian and I was a new believer. God had called me to preach. God called me to preach the night that I was saved, or at least I understood God's call to preach the gospel that night.

I surrendered to preach two nights later. And my pastor told me I knew nothing about the Bible. He said, son, you need to go to a Bible college. So I went to a Christian college to learn the Bible. And I was there.

And of course, they had very strict rules and regulations. And before I became a Christian, I had cheated in a lot of my exams and did pretty well. And then when I became a Christian, of course, you know, that was different and I wouldn't cheat on my exams.

I studied. And I remember I was in a particular biology class and, you know, the dissecting of the frog and all that. And you had to identify all the parts. And I had studied. I knew all the parts of the frog.

And went there, frog in the middle of the table, and we're all, you know, writing down our stuff. And I'd studied every part of that frog. I knew every part of it. I came to one part. I knew it, but I just couldn't remember it.

And I was, you know, I thought that would help me, but it wasn't. And so finally, a friend of mine saw my dilemma and he just sort of turned his paper. And when he turned his paper, I saw the answer. And when I saw the answer, I said, I knew it.

I studied it. I remember. And I wrote it down. And turned it in. I got an A on the exam. And I went back to my dorm room and closed the door, got on my knees to see God. And God was so far away. His presence.

I said, God, before I went into that exam, I met with you. You were here. Where are you? And the Lord said, son, you cheated on that exam. And I said, God, forgive me. I'm sorry. And the Lord spoke to me and said, but you've got a lie on your record.

There's a lie on your record. You don't have clean hands. You've got to go to that professor. And you've got to tell him what you've done. You've got to ask forgiveness of that professor. And I began to argue with the Lord and I said, but Lord, you don't understand.

This is a Christian college. And I'll be put out of this school if I do that. And the Lord said, no problem. And the windows of heaven were closed. And I wrestled in my heart with the Lord that day until finally I couldn't stand it any longer.

And more than anything else, I wanted clean hands. And I went to that professor and I said, sir, I said, there's something I've got to confess to you. And that is that I cheated on that exam. And I told him what I did.

I'll never forget what he said. And he said, I knew that. I said, you did? He said, yeah, I saw you. He said, but you know what? You're the only one who's confessed and there were others who did it too.

He said, so I'm going to give you another chance. Man, I want to tell you what, I ran back to my dorm room. I closed the door and do you know what? The windows of heaven were open. And I realized something.

I could have substituted a good grade on an exam for the knowledge of God. And I could have gone through my whole ministry preaching without the power of God and manipulating situations and manipulating things until I was willing to humble myself and repent and go to that professor and say, whatever happens to me, I'm willing to accept.

If it means being put out of the school, then that's okay. But I need to be right with God. And I cannot be right with God if I don't have clean hands. And to have revival, a heart cry for revival, to have your heart prepared for revival, you've got to have a heart to know God, to have the knowledge of God and His holiness more than you want anything else in life.

And if there's any broken relationship, you've got to be willing to go back and say, would you forgive me? So, first of all, there must be truth. Revival is rooted in truth. The truth of God's Word, the truth of who we are.

Secondly, it must be rooted in clean hands. And thirdly, and I think most important, is we must have a pure heart. Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.

Seeking the King of Glory With a Pure Heart

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Now what does it mean to have purity of heart? The word purity means without mixture. In other words, there can't be a mixture of desiring revival and desiring something else.

There can't be a mixture of desiring revival, the glory of God. If revival is the glory of God among the people of God, then we can't desire the glory of God and the glory of our own selves. You see, the motivation of the heart, man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the inside.

He sees what's in our hearts, and He's looking for a heart that's pure. A heart that says, God, I want You. What I want is You. And even to come to the place and say, Lord, I don't want You, Lord. The truth is, I really, my heart is not pure.

My heart is not after You. Lord, there's a lot of self-glory in there. And to get honest with God and to go before the Lord and say, Lord, I want You more than I want anything. And that brings us right back to the place of the sovereignty of God where we see that it all belongs to Him.

It all comes from Him. It's all unto Him. It's all from Him. It's Him. It's Him. It's Him alone. Because the next thing that He says in verses 6 through 10, He says, such is the generation of those who seek Him, who seek Your face, O God of Jacob.

Salah, lift up your heads, O you gates. Be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty. The Lord, mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O you gates.

Lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is He, this King of glory? The Lord Almighty. He is the King of glory. Oh, the longing of our hearts must be for a visitation of the King of glory.

The sovereign God to whom all glory and all honor and all praise is due. Not to an organization, not to Sammy Tippett Ministries, not to Life Action Ministries, not to Navigators, not to Canadian Revival Fellowship, not to the Asbury Society, but to the glory of the King.

This is the generation that seeks Him. This is the generation. And one of the reasons this conference we're having is we believe that God wants a new generation that has a passion to seek God for who He is.

Not for what we can get out of Him, but for who He is. I began sharing, I think it was at the last conference, that I really believe that God is doing something in our land. I believe God's doing something in North America.

First of all, we know that the great revivals of history, at least in this land, many of them have taken place on university campuses. There have been student movements. And there's something that I believe that is taking place.

I believe God is stirring among students to seek God. This generation to seek the face of God. To seek Him for who He is. And we need a generation of young people. And I know that some of us who've been perhaps in leadership, we may not be comfortable with everything, but we must know that there must be a new generation who seeks God for who He is.

And the torch must be passed to a new generation who will seek God for God and for who He is as a sovereign God, as a holy God, that will humble themselves under the mighty hand of God and seek His face, not just His hand, but seek His face.

There must be a new generation. Another thing that I believe that has happened in the last number of years is that God has brought, and I'll be speaking about this some tonight, but God has brought, I believe, a new wave of immigrants to this country for the sake of revival.

Koreans. The closest, personally, I have come to revival in recent years in America was at a conference with Korean-Americans, young Korean-Americans. I believe Nancy DeMoss spoke there and I spoke there.

And after Nancy spoke and I spoke, both nights, it was, I mean, every evening we'd close the session down and there was people praying and repenting and going deep until 2, 3, 4 o 'clock in the morning.

These young Korean-Americans have not been in any Anglo services like that. I remember speaking at a Cambodian conference of Cambodian leaders who had, there had been a revival movement in some of the, some of the refugee camps from the Cambodians when they came out.

And I remember speaking every morning, I was speaking to this group of leaders, it was in Seattle, Washington. They'd come from all over North America, from Canada, the United States. I remember speaking to them and at the last day, every morning I would speak, I'd be the first speaker.