Are You Prepared (Compilation) — Compilations

The Church’s Decline and the Need for Revival

Now I submit to you that for fifty years in America, or longer, pastors as earnest and as sincere as the one who would seek to be sincere standing before you have sought to see revival in America. During these fifty years, the church has become more cold, less powerful, more meaningless in society until today the world says the church is so weak and powerless that it is utterly irrelevant and abscurantist and has no place in such a generation as ours.

This I categorically deny. I submit to you that we can't longer go on waiting for the recalcitrant and the indifferent and the stubborn. The time has come when those who are of one mind and one heart must begin to meet on the grounds of the Lord's meeting.

Revival Through Fellowship and Class Meetings

How will it be? I believe that the answer is going to come when we reestablish again that grounds of fellowship as was done under John Wesley in the class meeting. Hearts that were committed to Christ and they spent hours in the Word, hours in prayer, hours in seeking and discussing and thinking together until the glory of God came down and men and women were so marvelously transformed that whole communities were shaken for Christ.

Sacrificial Commitment to Seeking God

The answer? The answer is going to be under God that a call will go out. Are you prepared to give a night of your life above all the other responsibilities you have? If you can't give a night, are you prepared to meet at five in the morning for two hours or more?

Are you prepared to expend effort and energy and sacrifice of your time because of the hunger of your heart to glorify God? Will you submit to discipline? Will you submit to teaching? Are you prepared to follow in the way of the Word and of the Lord?

Public Commitment and Brokenness Before Christ

Will you stand on the grounds of brokenness? I believe the time will come from this pulpit such an invitation will be given and whether it be an elder or a deacon or a Sunday school teacher, they'll be asked to come and stand publicly declaring before all that this is the level of their commitment.

Their names will be taken and they will be expected to meet at the time that they can with a group of those that have made similar commitments to the Lord. Then it will be that those who have chosen not to come will have made their own choice.

Unity Under the Sovereignty of Christ

But when the invitation has been given and people come and stand there and say, I want to go on with Bob. I'm desperately concerned for the fullness of Christ. I'm going to meet him at any cost. I'm willing to adjust my schedule, adjust my plans.

I'm willing to take a night of my life in as many hours as God requires. But I am going to find out how to live wholly for Christ. Then I believe we have found the grounds. It isn't the grounds of a place.

It isn't the grounds of a day. It's the grounds of unity in submission to the sovereignty of the Son of God. And I believe that when this happens, the glory of God will come down upon hungry hearts. And there will be such revelation of his power for it was when you had people of one accord, one faith, one mind, seven days that the Spirit of God poured upon them.

Absolute Commitment and the Church’s Mission

When you had another group of people bound together by their common needs and common commitment and common passion to see Christ glorified at the place of Satan. There are those who stubbornly through years of entreaty and exhortation have refused to bow and break before Christ.

Then we shall commit them to the Lord. We have nothing to say except that the grounds of the church is on the grounds of absolute commitment and absolute brokenness and absolute submission. And such people have every privilege of meeting together, seeking to God's glory and blessing to understand the word and to move on with it.

Small Groups as the Instrument of Revival

I believe that the, that which will save America is not going to be the great crusade, as important as that has been, the great church, as significant as that is. But it's going to be the cell of groups of people that have been drawn by a commitment to Christ and spread spontaneously and move on.

Worship and Perseverance in Isolation

Beloved, we'd better learn how to worship alone in quiet because it may come before you're many years older that you have to, if you worship at all. But it will be a unit of place where hearts of similar commitment can be encouraged and encouraged.