The Anatomy of a Christ Awakening — David Bryant

Hello, this is David Bryant. In the summer of 2005, I had the privilege of addressing thousands of representatives from all across the United States at an annual National Denominational Conference. I spoke to the theme, A Call for a National Christ Awakening.

I brought three messages. The first was titled, The Anatomy of a Christ Awakening. The second, The Crisis that Demands a Christ Awakening. And the third, How to Prepare the Way for a Christ Awakening.

The response to the messages was tremendous. For example, after the first message, within one hour, 1 ,500 copies of my book, Christ is All, a joyful manifesto on the supremacy of God's Son, had sold out.

Not because of the speaker, but because of the theme. Because there is such a hunger in the hearts of God's people to have a fresh encounter with God's Son for all that He is. After other messages, people would line up for almost an hour at a time to share with me, one by one, how the message I was bringing was speaking to the greatest hunger of their hearts.

Awakening to the Supremacy of Christ

But this is not a message for just one conference. This is the message I am sharing with the body of Christ across this nation, everywhere I go. This is what I would like to share with you if I was sitting in your living room or riding in your car.

I might not preach or proclaim it the way I do here because I'm addressing thousands of people, but I would still share with you the very same themes. In fact, there is a way I can do that if you go to the book site ChristIsAllBook .com.

There you can order a copy of this 475 page book, which really follows through on every one of the themes you're about to hear. And if you go to the website, you can get it at a discount. Before each message, a passage of scripture was read and you might want to read that passage before you listen.

The first message, again, was entitled, The Anatomy of a Christ Awakening. And the passage that was read was from Colossians 1, 18 to the end of the chapter. Father, I pray now that you will use each of these messages to have an impact in every one of the listeners to this CD that you had this past summer when you brought thousands into a fresh encounter with your son for all that he is.

In his name I ask it. Amen. Mark Twain said a fanatic is a person who will not change their mind and they won't change the subject. And I think I'm in a room full of people that made up their minds quite some time ago what this gospel is all about and who it is all about.

And we're not only intending never to change our minds, but we don't want to change that subject either. Maybe I should tell you just a little bit about myself because it relates to this whole issue of fanaticism.

I became a Christian as a freshman in college one late November afternoon sitting on the edge of a tombstone in a cemetery. I often like to say I came alive among the dead and so I did. But it wasn't just any ordinary cemetery that day when it all came together for me and I opened up my heart and invited the Lord Jesus Christ into my life.

The Father had put me in a very unusual cemetery because it was a cemetery in which over a hundred Moravian missionaries had been buried about two hundred years earlier. As I began to realize that and do some studies on the Moravians I found out that that was quite an exciting movement in the early 1700s.

It began in a place in Germany called Moravia. It was a movement that had missions at the forefront. They sent missionary teams around the world to what we would call today unreached people groups. They sent revival teams all through different parts of Europe.

They even sent one to the Pope in Rome. They sent one that ended up on Aldersgate Street in London and one night into that prayer meeting, that Moravian missionary prayer meeting, came a man by the name of John Wesley and he wrote in his diary that it was that night when his heart was strangely warmed and he actually went back to Germany and was discipled for a season of time by the Moravians.

The Moravians did all of this out of prayer. In fact they set up a prayer watch as I know most of you know that lasted not just for a day or a week or a month or a year but for twenty four hours a day.

It went on for over one hundred years. I guess you could say that the Moravians were somewhat fanatical. But the Moravians aren't the only fanatics of the early 1700s. In fact they are representative of a movement in the early 1700s that we now call the First Great Awakening.

And there were many fanatical movements that came out of that. Just as there has been out of the great awakenings that have taken place in this country in the late 1700s, in the mid 1800s, in the early 1900s.

When God gives a spiritual awakening to His people He turns them into fanatics because He brings them to a new conviction about who His Son really is. And once they are convinced and see Him for all that He is they will not change the subject.

Biblical Images of Spiritual Awakening

Now I'm sure most of us in this room have heard that phrase awakening before. What does it really mean? Well just think about what happened to you this morning when you woke up. Everything you needed to get started with the day was already there in your room.

It had been there all night long. But you didn't know about it because you were unconscious until you finally had enough things invade your consciousness that you couldn't roll over and go back to sleep any longer.

You had to get up, get on your clothes, get on with the day. Well that's exactly what God does in every great awakening. All the ones that are recorded in scripture including in the book of Acts as well as the great awakenings all through the history of the church including the one in the day of the Moravians.

What He does is He comes to a generation of His people and He awakens them. He alerts them to something that had been there all along. To the glory, to the fullness, to the presence, to the majesty, to the power, to the supremacy of His Son.

His Son was there in the midst of them all along but in some way or another they had somewhat gone to sleep on Him. And so the Spirit of God visits that generation. He shakes them and He wakes them and they see Jesus for who He is.

And you know the Moravians had a motto. In fact I have it on a plaque that hangs in my living room to this very day. Out of that great revival the Moravians came up with a motto for their movement that said simply this.

The Lamb has conquered. Let us follow Him. And when I first read that I thought you know that's exactly what has happened in every great awakening. That's what it means to be a fanatic. When God awakens His people to see how fully Jesus has already conquered as the Lamb that was slain.

So much so that we rise up and say we cannot go to sleep on Him any longer. Let us follow Him. The Bible is full of references to awakenings. Isaiah 60 says, Arise and shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

Paul writes to Christians in the book of Ephesians chapter 5 when he says, Awake you who are asleep and get out of the dead. Sort of sounds like get out of bed. And Christ will shine on you. Jesus spoke to the church at Sardis.

He said you have a reputation that you are alive and so it is of the evangelical movement even in this nation today. We have a reputation that we are alive but He says to the church at Sardis, Behold you are really dead.

So these are His next words. Wake up. A spiritual awakening is all about being reintroduced to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is about coming back to the verse that says, This is the riches of the mystery that Christ is in you.

Christ in Us, the Hope of Glory

The hope of glory. Now listen to me brothers and sisters. He is here tonight in this room. And what He will be Lord of ultimately. He is Lord of right here in this room tonight. And all of the promises that He will inherit ultimately.

He inherits them and holds to them right here tonight. And all of the fullness that we will see in Him one day when we behold Him in all of His glory is the fullness of glory that He has in Himself as He is here among us tonight.

And the greatest favor God could ever do for any one of us as believers. Whether we have known Jesus for 24 hours or 24 years. And the greatest favor the Spirit of God could ever do for any of our churches is to reintroduce us to this One who is in our midst as the hope of glory.

A. B. Simpson wrote in his six volume commentary on the Bible, The Christ and All the Bible, when he was writing on Colossians chapter 1, he wrote these words. He said, If I could stand on this platform.

And I think he would say tonight. If I could stand on this platform and say, I have received from heaven a secret of wealth and success which God will give freely through my hand to everybody who will take it.

I am sure, Simpson writes, that you would need a larger hall for all the people who would want to come. But dear friends, he writes, I show you in God's Word a truth which is more precious. A great secret which is now being disclosed to the saints.

Paul went through the whole world just to tell those that were able to receive it about this secret. And that simple secret is this. Christ is in you. The hope of glory. And then Simpson ends with this sentence.

And I would have to say the same for my own life when he writes. But I feel that I have only begun to learn how well this secret works. As Paul goes on to say in verse 28, having said this is the secret, Christ in you, the hope of glory, he then goes on in verse 28 and says, Him we proclaim, teaching everyone and admonishing everyone that we may present everyone complete in Christ.

And I don't think he means by that that we might fine tune their discipleship until they're walking more perfectly in obedience to Christ. But in the context rather, what he means is, I'm going to talk about him morning, noon and night.

I'm going to talk about him in all of his supremacy as he writes throughout that first chapter. I'm going to talk about him not only as supreme, but also as intimate as among us. And I'm going to talk about him as the one who gives us hope of every promise God has ever made that it shall be done.

I'm going to talk about him until I can bring every believer, whether it's by teaching them or even by warning them if I have to. I'm going to do what it takes to bring every believer to a completeness of understanding all that God's Son wants to be to them and in them and through them.

Because Paul understood that once he had accomplished that task, he could move on. Because once they really grasped this secret about the supremacy of Christ in them, then everything else would follow out of that and they would be fanatics too.

Centrality and Supremacy of Christ

Now listen very carefully. I'm talking tonight about the supremacy of Christ. I am not talking about the centrality of Christ. Both are very important. Both are very biblical. Part of the reason why there is a spiritual crisis in most of the churches represented in this room and in the evangelical movement at large is because we have stopped at the centrality of Christ.

We have not taken our people on to the supremacy of Christ. What do I mean? Well let me define the centrality of Christ like this. The centrality of Christ is his right to be at the center of who I am, where I'm headed, what I'm doing, and who I am and how I'm blessed.

And that's absolutely true. He has a right to be at the center of all of that. But the supremacy of Christ takes us a step beyond. Because the supremacy of Christ says that Jesus has a right to put us at the center of who he is, where he is headed, what he is doing, and how he is blessed.

And there's a world of difference. I imagine most of us in this room have seen that little booklet, The Four Spiritual Laws. If you have, and probably many of us have even used it at one time or another to share Christ with a friend.

It's a great tool. It's very helpful. You remember the first law says God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And that's true. And that's about centrality. But maybe a better way to write that first law would be to say it this way.

God loves his son and has a wonderful plan for him to sum up everything in heaven and earth under him as Lord. And he loves you enough to give you a place in it. That is a paradigm shift that can transform how you read the Bible, can transform your prayer life for the rest of your life.

That is a paradigm shift for those of you who are pastors as I was for many years. It can transform the way you preach God's Word, whatever your text or your topic might be. It can transform marriages.

It can transform the work of evangelism. It can transform the movement of missions. It is a paradigm shift that takes place every time God gives a great awakening. It is the paradigm shift alone that can transform any of us into true fanatics.

We are dealing with a crisis in the lives of many of our people and in our churches. And in the evangelical movement, not because of anything wicked that we have done, it's come about almost unconsciously.

We have stopped at centrality. We have not taken God's people on to supremacy. And yet, when I read the New Testament, supremacy is the major emphasis on the Son of God. How do I know? Well, I could give you so many passages tonight, but let me ask you this question.

Of all of the Old Testament texts that the New Testament writers could have drawn on as they were writing to New Testament Christians to help New Testament Christians understand what God was doing with them right then and there as we read about it through the book of Acts, the only Bible they had was the Old Testament in the New Testament Acts period of time.

So out of those 39 books, thousands of verses, of all of the Old Testament texts, which one do you think the New Testament writers quoted or referenced more often than any other, found referenced or quoted in almost every book of the New Testament, even found on the lips of the Lord Jesus Himself?

If you had to guess, and you've never heard this question before, what passage do you think it would be? The passage that when they read it said, this is what's happening with us. Well, friends, it's all on supremacy.

Psalm 110 and the Reign of the Exalted Christ

No surprise there. It's Psalm 110 that begins with these words. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. That's the third circle. The Lord will extend your scepter from Zion and you will rule in the midst of your enemies.

And your troops will be willing in your day of battle, arrayed in holy majesty. From the womb of the dawn, your youth will come to you like the dew. For the Lord has sworn, and He will not change His mind, you are forever a priest after the order of the king priest, Melchizedek.

And the New Testament writers, they kept coming back to that. They said, that's what's happened. When He ascended into heaven, everything that happens from this point to the end of history is Jesus conquering His enemies.

And what we see unfolding, whether it be in Ephesus or Colossae or Thessalonica or Jerusalem or Antioch, what we see unfolding before us is people who, first of all, are being conquered by Him, second of all, have a grand vision of who He is, and third of all, are saying, here we are, Lamb of God, you have conquered.

We are willing in your day of battle and we will follow you. And it was that passage, more than any other of those 39 books, that described how God was transforming His people in that hour into fanatics.

But that's what He's done in every great awakening. And I'm here to bring you great news that it is the conviction of millions who are praying for this around the world that God is bringing us to the threshold of another awakening to His Son, not because we deserve it, but because He does.

I want to suggest that our first step is to reconvert God's people back to God's Son for all that He is, so that they might be re-energized, not by anything we do or say, but by the Spirit of God bearing witness to the Word of God, re-energizing and reawakening them to such a vision of Christ that you will not be able to contain them.

Revelation 1 and Encountering Christ in Silence

I want to end with one last illustration that probably relates to a number of you sitting here, because you were there. It was October 4th, 1997. It was the mall in Washington, D .C. A million and a half men gathered on that mall that day to do nothing else but to spend six hours to pray for revival.

And I still have to ask you, even though here we are eight years later, where did that come from and where was that going? We have still not seen the full impact of that prayer meeting yet, but it's coming.

I was on the program team for that event and asked to speak toward the end of the second hour of the six hours. There was a prayer tent, like they have a green room over here, well there's a prayer tent back behind the platform where the speaker was supposed to go about 20 minutes before they were up to speak to be prayed over.

And there were about 40 or 50 intercessors from around the United States who were in that tent. So they had me sit down on a chair and they all gathered around and began to pray over me. And as they did, something happened to me that in public probably has not happened more than three or four times in my entire life.

And that is I began to weep uncontrollably as they prayed. At first I wasn't clear as to why this was happening to me. It caught me by such surprise. But then I sensed that God was saying a couple of things to me as they continued praying and I better obey.

The first was this, that He did not want me to bring the message I had planned to bring. But instead He wanted me to go up on the platform and to do exactly what I did do 20 minutes later when I walked up and I saw that sea of men back way beyond even the Washington Monument.

And I opened up my Bible and I read to them that vision of the supremacy of Jesus in Revelation chapter 1 where His face shines like the sun and His eyes are like a flame of fire and there's a sharp two-edged sword coming out of His mouth and so on.

And then I went on and read the part where it says, when John saw Him. Now this is John. This is John who laid his head on the master's breast. This is John who walked with Jesus for three years. This is John who wrote the Gospel of John at the end of which he said, if I was to write for you everything I could write about Jesus, there aren't enough books in the world or libraries in the world to hold all the books I'd like to write.

It's this John who certainly thought he knew Jesus. Who when he saw Him in the full revelation of His supremacy had an awakening. And suddenly he realized the one who's with me, the one who's walked with me, the one who dwells in me, the one whose name I have proclaimed throughout the Greek world, this one is far more than I ever knew He was.

And it says that when John saw Him, he fell at His feet like a dead man in total absolute silence. Unable to move because now he knows the next move belongs to Jesus because he sees what it means to call Him Lord.

So I read that passage to the men on the mall that afternoon and then I said, I'd like to invite you to do something which I know most of you have probably never done before. But like John was prostrate before the Lord Jesus in silence, I'm going to invite all of us at this moment in time not to say anything, not to pray anything.

I want us to get flat on our faces, totally prostrate on the ground and I want us to simply be silent before this one who in His supremacy is the answer to every single prayer we're praying on this mall for our nation.

And so they did. If you were there, you remember. I've had pastors who've come to me and say, I was sent back. I had given up the ministry. I was, God called me back in the ministry. Just the other day I had someone come up to me and say it was in those moments of silence that God called me to missionary work.

It was in those moments I've heard testified over and over again when we did absolutely nothing, none of us, but humbled ourselves in total silence before Christ in all of His supremacy and just wait before Him.

One of the reasons I wept that night was because back in that prayer tent was because I knew what I was about to do and I knew this was going to be a mighty, powerful work of the Lord. But the other reason I wept, and you can weigh this for yourself after tonight is over, is for me I felt also the Spirit was saying in my own heart, David, this is what I want you to do and I want you to know that what you're about to witness, if you have the courage to do this, what you're about to witness is simply a sign of things to come.

Maybe the greatest evidence of a fanatic, of a person who's really been awakened to Christ for all that He is, is silence. I don't mean we all become Quakers here tomorrow morning and not say anything whenever we meet together.

I mean it's a Spirit in us, a Spirit of waiting, of listening, a Spirit of awe, of worship, it becomes a way of life that what those men did flat on their faces physically for three minutes becomes a way of life.

Brothers and sisters, I would stake my life on the words I'm about to say to you, that every dream and vision God has ever given to the Alliance or ever will is easily fulfilled if He will have a body of men and women of God who will make it as a lifestyle to live in silence before the supremacy of His Son.