A Last Day Return to the Power — Carter Conlon

A Last Day Return to the Power of Unity

This morning, if you'd be kind enough to turn to Psalm 133, please, in the Old Testament, I'm going to speak on a last day return to the power of unity. A last day return to the power of unity. Let's pray together.

Father, I just thank you, Lord, with all my heart, God, I praise you for the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Thank you for sovereign and supernatural strength that you give to us as your people, not only for me to speak this word this morning, but for all of us to be able to hear it.

We ask you this morning, Lord, for hearing ears, for all the way through the book of Revelation, you said to the church, he who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit speaks unto the churches.

Now, God, I stand here this morning as a vessel, but if you don't animate these words, if you don't animate this physical body, our gathering is in vain. God Almighty, the hour is late. We need to hear your voice.

I'm asking you for an unction from heaven. I'm asking God for a strength that can't come from anywhere but from you. I'm asking for wisdom that so supersedes everything of the natural mind, the ability to express what's on your heart.

Give us the grace to hear. We ask this in Jesus' mighty name. Amen. I suppose Pastor Neal spoke with you. He told me he did this morning about beginning December 14th. He'll be on the radio 13 times a week, 1010 Winds, calling the city to prayer.

And so, I would really encourage you to encourage people in your neighborhood, in the workplace. Give them one of those business cards that's been printed. If you're visiting from another church, encourage your pastor.

If he or she doesn't already have one, to start a prayer meeting in your church. If you have a home gathering that's under some authority and recognized as a valid prayer meeting, you can contact nycprayer .org and register that prayer meeting.

It's really time to pray, folks. If ever we turn to prayer, it's now. It's time to pray. Psalm 133, let's begin there. Verse 1, Psalm of King David. Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.

It's like the precious ointment upon the head that ran down the beard, even Aaron's beard that went down to the skirts of his garments, as the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion.

For there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore. Now, in this particular Psalm, you see at the beginning, brethren dwelling together in unity. When that unity is God-based, when that unity is unity as the Word of God describes it, then the end result of that unity is a command of the blessing of God's life.

Now, God's life in the home, God's life in our personal lives, God's life everywhere we go. And as a church and as a church age, if we're dwelling together in unity, the Lord says that he commands a blessing, and that blessing is life.

And if ever there was a time in history where the church of Jesus Christ needs to be in a proper focus of unity, and the blessing of life must flow now from the house of God, if this city is going to be touched, folks, it's going to come from the house of God.

It's not just going to sovereignly... Now, God can do that, but not only judgment, but blessing starts in the house of the Lord. If God is going to bless his city, he's going to begin first doing something in his house.

I fully believe in my heart that he's doing it right now. Now, we're living in a generation where there is a lot of talk about unity and there will be an increasing talk about unity in the coming days.

People will, according to Jesus and Matthew, people will for fear begin to gravitate to familiar. They'll begin to bunch together in groups. It will all be about survival as men see survival. There'll be a focus on unity.

Nations will decide that they need to get together in unity. Governments will get together in unity. There'll be a talk of unity at every possible level in society. But I remind you today that there's only one unity when everything else is finally shaken and gone, that's still going to stand at the end, that which is unified in Jesus Christ.

There's no other unity that's going to get through as wonderful as it may be. Unity's true power is not found in just getting together for a common purpose. Unity that is outside of God can have a display of strength, but it will still fall short of what God has designed an intended unity to be.

Unity Must Be Grounded in God's Word

Take, for example, in Numbers chapter 13, we have 10 spies. Now, there are 12 were sent in to the promised land. They were to search out this land. The Lord had given a word about what the land was like, about the fruit in the land, about the milk and honey, about the pasture, about all of the provision, the wonderfulness of the land.

So, Moses sent 12 spies in to check this land out. Now, 10 of those spies returned not in unity with God, but rather in unity with each other. Every one of these, according to Numbers 13 .2, had leadership ability.

They weren't ordinary men. They were people with skill. They had been singled out in the ranks of the so many that had come out of captivity and were on this journey into the promised land. And yet, they went into this place even with the leadership qualities that set them apart from ordinary men.

Now, I'm sure that they considered themselves cautious and reasoned men. They correctly assessed the land and evaluated the strength of their enemies. They looked and said, yes, the land is everything that God said it is, but in that land, there are forces that will oppose us that are stronger than we are.

And the land is so vast that it seems to swallow up its inhabitants. And so, here they are, reasoned men, cautious men, all of them leaders, going into this land, but they end up coming out in unity with one another, but not in unity with God.

They correctly assessed the land. They evaluate the enemies. And most likely on the way home, they got together to discuss alternate strategies and the severity of the problems that were ahead. And folks, by the time they got back to the camp, they were united in one thing only, unbelief.

United in, we choose to embrace what we see with our natural eye and what we reason with our natural mind. We choose to embrace it above what God has spoken. And folks, even in the church, we can get together in this generation or any other, and we can begin to employ strategies.

We can begin to communicate with one another. We can have conferences. We can talk about how we're going to bless the city or bless the nation. We can get together with strategies. But the moment we've left the word of God and the power of the supernatural, we are united in unbelief.

Now they didn't consider, I know they didn't consider themselves men of unbelief. I know they came back and they said, no, we're just reasoned. We're just calculating. We have an alternate plan. They would have considered it suicide just to go in, a ragtag army as it was, with probably a little more than just makeshift weaponry going in against what they saw to be the giants of the land.

They said, well, we can't do this this way. There's got to be an alternate strategy to do these things. We've got to find a way. You see, in our generation, we don't believe the Holy Spirit's strong enough to bring people into the house of God anymore.

We don't believe the conviction of sin still will do what conviction of sin has always done. We don't fully believe that men and women need an encounter with a Holy God where they confess their sin, confess their need of God, put away an old way of living and call out to God for not only redemption, but the power to live a life in this generation.

Now we don't believe these things anymore. So we've become so smart, so full of strategies and we've become united in our generation and unbelief, just like the 10 spies did, although they would be very loath to call it that themselves.

The end result of this kind of unity is death in the wilderness. When hard times come, when difficult times come, there's no power to survive there, folks. You got to have a supernatural walk with God to get through this generation.

You've got to be in right relationship with Jesus Christ. You've got to be walking in unity with God and subsequently with those who are gods in this generation to be able to make it through. The scripture tells us that all of the world one day is going to be united in a downward course, united in its desire to cast away everything that represents God.

The World's Rebellion Against God

Verse 1 of Psalm 2, I believe it is, says, Why did the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, saying, Against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder and cast their cords away from us.

In other words, without their influence, we'll be free to do what we want to do. Now don't even try to tell me that's not happening in our generation, where society as a whole is becoming. If you notice what's happening in America lately, society is fragmented at many levels, but the one thing that everybody seems to be united around is let's get the name of Jesus Christ out of our society.

Let's get rid of the word of God and these boundaries that tell us that men can't marry men and women can't marry women and we shouldn't be killing our children in the womb for convenience sake and all the rest of these things.

Let's get their bands away from us. Let's call them extreme. Let's call them radical. Let's call these people unloving. Let's invent names for them. Let's be unified in this one thing that we're going to get rid of the name of Christ in our generation.

Verse four says, He that sits in the heaven shall laugh and the Lord shall have them in derision. Their end result will be defeat and perplexing confusion. Folks, it's tragic when you see a nation turn from God, that knew God, that became what it became because of God.

Then you watch these same people turning away from the very Christ that made the nation a premier nation of all nations, perhaps all throughout history. It's a tragedy in our day, folks. It's not just a variance of opinion.

It's a tragedy, a spiritual and a physical tragedy that you and I are living through at this moment. Isaiah warns about the day when people are united in self-seeking. In chapter five and verse eight, he says, Woe to them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.

Isaiah warned about this kind of unity, a unity based on my gain and your loss. My advancement at your expense. And he says in verse nine of a truth, many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair and without inhabitant.

A self-seeking society is going to end up empty. That's what Isaiah said. And he said, the finest homes in that country. Of course, that was Israel at that time. He said, I see the finest homes in the country empty and without inhabitant.

Nobody can afford to live in them anymore. Nobody has the income to maintain them. I see fine, fine homes that have been built by a society that turned inward and began to focus on itself. And Isaiah said, I see them empty in the days ahead.

Self-Seeking in the Church

In the church of Jesus Christ, Paul also warns, he warned the Corinthians. He warned them about self-seeking. He warned this church age of that generation about getting together in unity, but the unity was short of the glory of God.

It was short of Psalm 133. They were coming together in church and they were grouping around the familiar. I can just see it now in that temple that the rich are in one corner and the politically active are in another corner and certain cultures are in this corner.

Other cultures are in that corner. They're all feasting. They're bringing together their food. They're having a wonderful time, but the poor, the homeless, the single mothers, the disaffected in society have no fellowship.

They're being pushed to the sides of the temple as it is. And Paul said, because of this, because you failed to discern what it means to be part of the body of Jesus Christ. Paul was saying there's a unity that is found in the body.

That's not found anywhere else in the world. Do you realize that today that we are in a place where God says, I want to unleash a power. That's not known anywhere in the world. It cannot be found in the world.

It is only found in my church. It's the power of the life and the virtue and the anointing of almighty God through the Holy Spirit and the people who are walking together in unity as the scripture says, unity is to be.

And Paul says, no, you've fragmented even in the house of God and you have preferences and you are marginalizing certain people in the church. And because of this, he said, many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep.

Remember Isaiah said he's self-seeking nation ends up with empty houses as self-seeking church ends up with empty houses, folks. That's what's happening in our generation. Churches on every second corner throughout America and most are half empty in our generation.

There's a reason for this. Think of rail bone in first Kings chapter 12, the son of Solomon who inherited the kingdom of God, as it was in that generation. And instead of embracing history, he had men and women who walked with Solomon, his father before him, trying to give him advice and trying to give him counsel, but he was not willing to listen.

And folks were living in a generation of young ministry that have just cast off history, taken the book of Acts and literally thrown it out the window. No, we know better. We know how to get people in the house of God.

We know how to do this. And they, they branched together as it is. They banded together in a unity that was impulsive. They thought they knew better in their time than what history was willing to teach.

And they counseled this young man rail bone to speak a certain way to the people, a way that history was telling him, you shouldn't speak. This is not where God's focus and power is. They told rail bone to become firm with the people, but the older were counseling him.

Listen, the power of God is found in servanthood. If you will serve these people, if you will speak kind words to these people, the older people told this rail bone that these people will come and they'll be in the house of God and they will serve this kingdom forever.

But he rejected that testimony. And folks, when we reject the testimony of history and think we're smarter than God, we're in trouble. When we reject the way that church has always known the glory of God and the power of God, I'd say with all my heart today, it's time to turn away from the boardrooms and go back to the prayer room again.

It's time to just eradicate the ideas of men and go back to what God had to say about things. I'd rather die on this side of faith and sit around the table of human reasoning, trying to figure out how to advance the kingdom.

We can't even see with our natural eye, let alone understand with our natural mind. Real bone with all of the reasoning and those around him with their human reasonings ended up dividing the kingdom of God.

He brought a weak testimony into the nation and among the nations in fighting came into the family of God. And they began to worship the works of men's hands. You remember Jeroboam, who took 10 of the tribes of Israel, set up calves in the Northern kingdom at both ends in Bethel and Dan.

And the people began to worship cows instead of the living God. We can be united in an ungoverned religious zeal. Think of David, the king, when he decided again to bring the ark, which is prayer. It's a whole, it's a complete type of prayer.

The ark represented the history of God, the faithfulness of God, the word of God, the life of God, the commandments of God were in that ark. Mina, which is supernatural bread from heaven, had been in that ark.

Aaron's rod that buttered, which was an evidence that God says, I'll take what is dead and bring it back to life, was in that ark. The whole testimony of God was in that ark. And in the days of Saul, they had, it had been a kingdom that was governed by the natural mind of man and the fear of men's hearts.

They were united, but their unity produced nothing but failure. And so in the day of David, David said, we've got to bring the ark back into Jerusalem again. In other words, we've got to seek God again.

We've, we've got to bring God back in to the center of everything. That was what was in David's heart. And so he got the people together and he counseled with those around him. And they said, good idea.

Let's make a new cart and let's, let's, let's do it this way. Let's, let's bring the ark, even though the word of God clearly described how God comes back into the midst of his people, they were still stuck in unity in the reasonings of men's minds.

And so they got this parade together and the scripture says they, they played with all their might. I mean, they, they were hitting those instruments. They were clanging those cymbals. They were playing their harps.

They were dancing before God. They were doing it with all their might. They were singing. They had psalteries and timbrels and cymbals and trumpets. And in the midst of it all, God kills a young man who has the audacity to reach out his hand and try to stabilize what represented the presence of God.

God help us in our generation. If we think we have to stabilize the presence of God or somehow make excuses for God or somehow present him to society as so weak that we have to figure out how to prop him up and make him more palatable to people in this generation.

God help us. God in his mercy has to kill this whole parade. He has to put an end to it. And let me tell you, he is going to put an end to it in this generation. By grace, we experienced the death of all that has no possibility of producing life.

It's by grace he stopped the parade. He was, it's not by anger, it's by grace. God knew that it was a, an honest thought in the hearts of David and those around him, but they were not doing it. David later said, according to the order of God, God had given instruction.

This is how I am to be honored as I come in among my people. And you've got to get back, David, to the word of God. That's what he was telling him. You've got to do this the way it's been prescribed in scripture.

Thank God that by grace, again, we're going to discover the power of walking in unity with God. God wants to walk among us. Did you know that? He wants to display his power. There's a longing in the heart of God in this generation to come back into his church, your life and mine, into the assemblies that gather in his name in this city and in other places.

There's a longing in the heart of God to come back into his house with power. He longs for it more than you and I can understand. If I feel one yearning in his heart in this generation, it's that he might come and walk among the candlesticks again, that he might walk together with us as we make the choice to walk with him in unity.

Unity's a gathering together in agreement with the word and the will of God. Believers walking in unity with the purposes of Christ find Jesus himself and all that this represents drawing close to them.

Matthew 18, 20 says, where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them. I remember my wife, Teresa and I, in the early years of ministry, we had no training. We had no budget.

We had nothing. We're living in an area that was roughly 40 square miles without a visible testimony of Christ that we were aware of. And perhaps there hadn't been a testimony for as many as a hundred years in that area.

And we began to get together with another man who's a bus driver. And the three of us got together on Tuesday night. Each of us took a quarter of our living room and we began to pray. That's all we knew how to do.

No money, no budget, no training, no nothing, but a great, great, great big God. And every Tuesday night we gathered together and we prayed. And folks, we prayed because we couldn't do anything else but prayed.

We read the scriptures. We knew that God's kingdom moves by the power of prayer. And we began to say, Oh God, make a way in the darkness. Oh God, push back the religious darkness. Oh God, don't let these people go to hell without a testimony of Christ in this area.

Oh God, for the glory of your name and for the souls of man, God, begin to do what only you can do. And I remember one night God came into that room. I don't know how to explain it other than to say that the three of us, a joy overtook us.

I don't know how to explain the joy that overtook us. You wanted to dance. You wanted to cry. You wanted to laugh. You wanted to shout. And it was all three of us at the same time from different areas of the room, the Lord had come.

And in our hearts, we knew he had said, done. I'm going to do what you've asked me to do. I'm going to do the thing you've spoken to me about. To make a long story short, within seven years, there were two churches established, a Christian school, a food bank feeding 237 families, a missions program whose budget outstripped our operating budgets of our church.

When you're sending motorcycles and bicycles and instruments for pastors and books into South America, this little church put the gospel of Mark in the entire Russian school system, grade six and seven, took up an offering.

Folks, God did so far beyond what we could even think or ask. We left seven years later for New York City, leaving behind over $700 ,000. And that's a lot of money in a little country community in real estate, all paid for, no debt.

We had no budget. We had no money when we were praying. We're sitting people outside of the church on mild days to be able to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. People were driving from a hundred miles to hear the gospel of Christ.

And it all came because of prayer. There was no boardroom. There was no strategy. There was no, how are we going to do this? We simply prayed. And when God said, do this, we did it. We walked in the way that God said to walk in.

Prayer, Compassion, and Reaching the Lost

I remember we prayed and said, Lord, how do we reach this community? How do we, how do we break into this, these years of religious stronghold? And we prayed and you know, God sends answers that you don't anticipate.

Remember a pastor who had come to help with the French, French speaking people began to sit in an English church and cry. We're 17 people that were sitting in the congregation. They didn't speak English and I wasn't being translated into French, but they were, the presence of God was so powerful.

They would sit and just cry. And one man told me, he said, I don't know how it happened, but we knew what you were saying. We just knew what you were speaking. A pastor came to help with this work and we were praying, God help us to reach the, how do we reach the community?

And one day we had bought a school bus for our kids. And one day he came back to the house with a school bus and it was full of grapefruit, the whole bus from beginning to end. And I remember looking and saying, what are we going to do with this?

First of all, why did you come home with a busload of grapefruit? And he said, well, I was at a food bank in a major city and they had, they had this huge ship and a grapefruit come in and they didn't know what to do with it.

They had so much, it was going to spoil. So they said, do you need something? And he said, sure. So they filled the bus. So we got a short bus, but it's full of grapefruit. And I said, well, we got to do something with this grapefruit.

We, I guess let's, let's find people who need it. And so we, we found a poor family and not, you know, one thing, the poor know the poor. And so we went to the first door. We knocked, he said, look, we got a busload of grapefruit.

Do you need some? And they said, sure. So we'd bring a box in and do you know anybody else? And they would send us to another house and another house. We had no idea that this is how God was answering our prayer.

We're just getting rid of the grapefruit, but it was actually the road in to the community. It finally dawned on us. Oh, feed the poor, help, help families that, that don't have, we, we all of a sudden were in contact with all these poor families in the area that, that needed help.

And that was God answering our prayer. I thank God for it. His ways are not our ways. Like you tell me what committee is going to come up with that. I'm just so thankful. I wasn't sitting at a table of our strategists.

Well, if we go to a, what would it take for you to come to church? A box of grapefruit where two or three are gathered in my name. There I am. And when Christ comes into a situation, the supernatural comes with him.

I want to challenge you with everything in my heart. Just break out of the box in this generation. Begin to pray, Lord, help me, guide me, lead me, let my life make a difference. Walk with me. And if you can find somebody to pray with where two or more, now I know Christ and me is two.

So that's good enough. It's a majority. But if you can find somebody to pray with you that has a heart of faith and you begin to walk together, Jesus said, when you pray, I'm going to come. I'm going to be right there with you.

I'm going to speak to your heart and you just begin to obey me. And the supernatural begins to happen in your life. Joshua and Caleb, just think for a moment, the other two spies that came back and said, no, let's go.

We can take this land. Their defenses departed from them. Joshua and Caleb said, they're bread for us. But you see, these were spiritual men and they were seen with spiritual eyes. Natural men couldn't see this.

As a matter of fact, they were so angered. They wanted to kill these two men for wanting to walk in faith. But Joshua and Caleb, although they suffered because of this decision, the people made, God came and walked with them through the wilderness, through 40 years of wilderness, through defeat, despair, death, and brought them to victory.

Hallelujah. Praise be to God. Think of those in the upper room taken from fear and inadequacy and brought into a place by God's presence alone of love and empowerment. A place where they could not do what God was calling them to do.

So they just went and did what they were told to do. They went into an upper room. Now that upper room could be anywhere in your house, but they went into that upper room and said, Oh God, you promised to give us power.

You said that when your power came upon us, you would make us living witnesses in our generation in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, unto the uttermost parts of the earth. And the scripture says, as they were praying, the Holy Spirit came, God began to walk with these people and out of inadequacy and out of fear and out of failure came people into the marketplace.

Folks that changed the whole known world that we live in today. 120 people. Just think what could happen with 8 ,000 people in this church began to seek God in New York City. Acts chapter four, Peter and John taken in and threatened for walking in the power of God.

They prayed and they said, why do the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things? Why do they feel they can cast off the restraining hand of God? As long as there are people who are willing to walk in unity with Christ.

I really don't care what the newspapers say. I don't care what anti-God radicals say in this generation. As long as there are people walking in unity with Christ, the presence of God cannot be pushed out of any society or out of any borders.

When they prayed, the scripture says the place was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit again, and they spoke the word of God with boldness. And I want to suggest that we need to pray like that again.

I want to suggest that we come into the prayer closet and say, oh God, consider the threatenings Lord of this generation against the testimony of Christ. And for the sake of the children, for the sake of our families, for the sake of those who in their ignorance are fighting against their own salvation, God almighty, for the sake of your Holy name, for the sake of the cross, for the sake of the heart of God, shake this place where I am Lord.

Shake me God. If I'm complacent, shake me. If I'm embracing something that's eroding your strength, shake me my God. And give me the power to speak your word with boldness in this and every other generation.

Acts chapter 16, Paul and Silas in prison for the testimony of Christ. And the scripture says they prayed and they sang praises. Thanks be to God. They walked in unity with God. They were in agreement with God and with each other that fighting for the souls of men may not be easy, but it is always worth it.

Hallelujah. Blessed be God. It may not be easy, but it's always worth it to fight for the souls of men. Because when you're fighting for the souls of men, you and I are walking on the side of God. When we're about the Lord's business, the Lord is with us in that business.

Praise be to God. God praise be to God. Paul, the apostle is living proof that unity with God is mightier than the most powerful army on earth. Paul was seemingly captivated, chained to Roman soldiers in the midst of a system that was bent on conquering the known world with all of its strategies of world conquest and control and all of its armies and all of its methodology and all of its supposed learning and all of its weaponry.

And I want to remind you that it's gone today. And what was more powerful is one man walking in unity with God. One man with a pen in his hand in a prison was more powerful than the whole Roman empire.

There's power in walking with you in unity with God. The Roman army, the Roman system is gone. The Caesars who thought they were God, gone. The conquering sword of Rome, gone. The magnificent buildings, ruins today that people go to visit, nothing left.

The arenas where they supposedly thought they were making sport and conquering Christians, gone. Everything gone. But that was written from the hand of a man in unity with Christ still stands. If you can see this, if you can understand this, if you can get this, a man who's simply walking in unity with Christ, he's living for the purpose of Christ, for the honor of God and for the souls of men.

He's walking through this world and casting off its accolades, not afraid of its threatenings, not afraid to suffer, walking in the footsteps of his master. God puts a pen in that man's hand and what he wrote still stands.

We still read it today and it will still stand when every kingdom, every dictator, every potentate, everything is gone. It will still stand. It will have endured the test of time. There's such power in walking with unity in unity with God.

Malachi's Call to Fear the Lord

I want you to turn to the last book of the Old Testament, please. Now with me, we're going to conclude here in the book of Malachi chapter three. I want to talk about what it really means to be one in heart with Christ.

What does the Bible say about this? Malachi chapter three, beginning at verse 15. Now Malachi is writing about our day and he says, and now we call the proud happy. Yea, they that work wickedness are set up and they that tempt God are even delivered.

Then they that feared the Lord spoke often one to another and the Lord hearkened and heard it. And a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and thought upon his name.

They shall be mine saith the Lord of hosts in that day when I make up my jewels and I will spare them as a man spares his own son that serves him. And then you shall return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serves God and him that serves him not.

Now the scripture says, they that feared the Lord in verse 16 spoke often one to another. Now we're talking about unity and Malachi is talking about a last day regathering of unity again. And it was a people who feared the Lord and thought upon his name.