A Revival of the Word — Douglas Small

Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Historical Setting of Revival

Your time, a couple days here of considering what God might be saying to us and might be calling us to do. Yesterday, I spent my time in the book of Amos. Today, I want to spend most of my time in the book of Ezra.

And of course, Doug Stringer was just in the book of Nehemiah, talking about Nehemiah. Let me give you a little bit of perspective that you may not have been aware of. In 605, and I know all of us, we start, our eyes start glossing over when somebody starts giving us a history lesson, but it's worth the perspective that in 605 BC, Babylon made its first incursion into Judah and into Jerusalem.

It took Daniel and the three Hebrew children, the brightest of the bright, deposed the king, put a vassal king. And then in 597 or thereabouts, it made a second incursion. This is what Ezekiel and others are taken into what is modern day Iraq, ancient Babylon.

And then in 586, they came back and completely destroyed the city and the temple. From 605 to 535, when Babylon moves off the international stage and Persia moves onto that stage, you have Cyrus. And there's been a lot of talk about Cyrus, about Donald Trump being a modern day Cyrus.

Somebody said he is more of a firewall than he is a president. That is, God has raised him up as a firewall to stop what was happening in the nation, to stop a slide, to stop a definitive direction. It is not what Donald Trump will do.

It's not what Mike Pence will do. It's not what Washington will do. It's what the church must do. We've been given a window of time and frankly, we've wasted it. We've not cried out to God. We've not had a mighty revival.

There hasn't been unity. There hasn't been prayer. And it's as if God says, all right, just before this term, this window closes, I'm gonna give you one more chance in the coronavirus. So the first exiles leave in 605, 50 ,000 come back in 535, Cyrus allows them to come back.

That's 70 years. That's the 70 years of captivity. And by the way, by the way, Israel never celebrated a Sabbath. Remember, every seventh year the land was to rest and they were to give themselves to the kind of recalibration of social values so that the rich didn't get rich and the poor didn't get poor.

And people got a second chance to begin every seven years. It's kind of what our seven years of bankruptcy stays on your record kind of thing. It's a biblical idea. Every seven Sabbaths, every 50 years, they were to have a year of Jubilee, never had one.

And so God counted. And he said, my goodness, you've been in the land 490 years. You should have given me 70 Sabbaths. You haven't given me any. I'm going to give the land a Sabbath. I'm going to impose a Sabbath on the land.

So you get a Sabbath from 605 to 535. Ah, when the people come back, they have appropriations to rebuild the temple, but they confiscate much of the lumber. And this is what Haggai would say, you dwell in paneled houses.

They've taken the lumber that would have been used for the temple and they've used it to build their own houses. And so they sit going to the temple site, but there's only a pile of rubble where Solomon's temple, it's the remains of Solomon's temple.

And for almost 20 years from 535 to 515 or 516, there is no temple. And then Haggai prophesies, isn't it enough that you have money and you put it into a bag with holes? You don't have enough food to eat.

It's because God is blowing away your profits. It's because of his house that lies waste. And finally, they're motivated to rebuild the temple. So you get the destruction of the temple 586 and you get the rebuilding of the temple 516, another 70 years, 70 years of the people being out of the land, 70 years of no temple, no place, no footstool for God's glory.

Now, here's the sad thing. They've got a temple in 516, but they're still scattered. Most of them are scattered now in modern day Iran and ancient Persia. And they are about to execute all Jewish people in Persia.

And God raises up Esther. Mordecai says, God has brought you to the kingdom for such a time as this. And the date of that is about 474 BC. So you're counting down 605, 586, 516, and now you go into the next century and you're at 574.

About what, 40 years or so. And you get the possible annihilation of Jewish people. Esther represents the intercessory element. She is the one who goes before the king. And so the first thing Matthew Henry said was that when you want to see what God is doing is you look at the level of prayer.

He raises up intercessors. We saw in the 70s, Intercessors for America raised up, probably the largest, most formidable group. We saw in the same period, the National Day of Prayer take on new notoriety and the National Prayer Committee formed out of that.

We've seen a rising tide of prayer. It was in 1989 that Peter Wagner and others said, have you noticed what's happening around the world with these prayer gatherings, these extraordinary prayer gatherings?

It was in 1992 that you had the first pray through the window. You looked at 62 nations in the 1040 window, as it was called, 10 degrees latitude to 40 degrees latitude north, from Western Africa and South Western Europe all the way around through the Middle East, through India, through Southern China.

And then the 470, the 470 window. This is where 60 of the population lived, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. And the idea was you can't get in there. Well, if we're gonna finish the Great Commission, you can't even get in there to evangelize.

And somebody said, well, couldn't we pray? Couldn't we pray? Well, what good is, and here's our pragmatic problem in America. What good is prayer gonna do? What good is prayer gonna do if we can't, if we can't actually do something?

We are so pragmatic in America, we don't understand the real movement happens not when we work, but when God works. And we don't understand, and you'll never understand the mystery between our prayer and God's works.

It's not that our prayer moves God, it's that our prayer is a signal that we discern his moving. And we are prepared in that process to move with him. And this dialectic of bridegroom and bride, this dialectic of heaven and earth, thy will be done in earth as in heaven.

This conversation back and forth where God moves and we move and he moves us and we began to move it with him. This is what God has been trying to get us to do, to move into all these years. You will have another, you'll have another 15 years before you come to Ezra.

And Ezra will be about 558, 557 BC. So you are now way into the next century. And you've had now 60 years in which the temple has been rebuilt, but the city is in ruins. The gates are down, burned with fire.

The walls of the city are not definitive. There's no in and out, no right and wrong, no clear them and us. All of that's gone, all of that is erased. And so you get an intercessor movement and then you get a priestly movement.

In 1989, the first pastor's prayer summit took place. And over the next decade and a half, almost 50 ,000 pastors in America got on a bus, went out of town for three days, sometimes four, to do nothing but sit in a circle around a communion table with Bibles on their laps and pray.

Pray for their city, pray for their own lives, pray for their own spiritual renewal in their own lives, in their own hearts, 50 ,000 people. And God started to work with pastors. And if you go then another 13 years to 445, you come to Nehemiah.

Nehemiah is not a priest. He has the authority of the governor. He comes in the place of the king, of Persia himself. He's got the documentation, the authority, everything that is needed, as did Ezra when he came.

And in every one of these cases, there is the moment in which Esther goes before the king. There's the moment in which Ezra gets permission of the king and letters to go back and begin the process of renewal.

And Nehemiah gets letters, authority, to do what he's doing in the city. We're not a group of rebels trying to do what is defiant. But watch this again. A movement of intercessors symbolized by Esther.

A pastoral movement of prayer and spiritual renewal. Pastors symbolized by Ezra. And then the marketplace movement. Nehemiah will do in the city what Ezra did not have authority to do. And I think what's happening today is a Nehemiah movement.

It's a movement in the city. But the movement in the church, the spiritual renewal in the church has not yet, it's not yet come to fruition. I just want to give you a perspective. All of this happens over almost a 30-year period.

Well, if you look at it, it's a century and a half. It's a century and a half in building. But from the time of Esther, Esther and the decree, 474 to the time of Nehemiah, 445. You get that feeling. Almost 30 years here.

This doesn't take place quickly. It doesn't take place automatically until God begins to move in a definitive way. There is a season of suddenlies in which we enter in. Shall God not avenge his lack? They cry out day and night, night and day and day and night.

I tell you, he will avenge them speedily. Oh, wait a minute. Do we cry day and night, night and day and night and day and night or does he do it speedily? Both, both. There is a persistence in prayer.

There is a dogged determination in prayer. There is a relentlessness in prayer. And then we enter into a season of suddenlies. I think we're about to enter into a season of suddenlies. If Doug String had been able to come back on, I was gonna ask him because everybody's been seeing the news, I'm sure, that the leader of North Korea, not only a coma after the stint, failure of the stint, but now almost definitively reports are coming out that he is, that he's dead.

And there's rumbles already in China about appropriating North Korea as their own. But there is a prophecy by Kim Clement who also prophesied the election of Donald Trump. He's dead now. But he prophesied the reunification of, of Korea and that that would be the place from which the global revival emerged.

We're seeing a season of suddenlies. We're seeing this perseverance that's been taking place from the intercession and from the time of Reagan and the new emphasis upon a national day of prayer for the nation, a law, actually, a call to prayer.

And then they said, Washington doesn't pay much attention to it. I've been there many times on the national day of prayer. And I thought, boy, this will be a wonderful time to go when Washington is praying.

You'd never know. You'd never know except for what did take place in the days before the Obama administration, there was a White House ceremony. And then there was always a ceremony in Congress and a ceremony somewhere else in Washington of prayer.

And then the Tent of David has been there for a good while until it moved out to 50 states. And that was the plan this year is that it would move out and go to 70 cities across the nation. I pray that that still happens in some way.

Revival Requires a Return to the Word of God

We're seeing a season of suddenlies. And we're likely to see more jolts, more seismic shifts. What's the foundation for a marketplace revival? Well, first, you've got to get something else settled that we've not gotten settled.

I hinted at it yesterday, but I want to come back to it today. If you'll open your Bible to the book of Ezra, I just want to go through this and just do a basic plain vanilla, no fancy stuff, look at this, and we'll stop and pray.

We'll stop and pray. The first thing you see in chapter seven, verse 10 is this, Ezra. And let me just point out his granddaddy or perhaps his great granddaddy was the last high priest who was killed in 587, 586, somewhere in that era, the year of or the year before the temple was destroyed.

And so when the people were carried away into captivity, the sons and the family of that high priest was carried away. And from that lineage came Ezra. So he would be third or fourth from that last living high priest of Solomon's temple.

So he has charge of these sacred scrolls and he's pouring over these scrolls. He's a scribe who writes and copies and studies. He's a priest. He's in the lineage of the high priest. And the Bible says that he prepared his heart, that's prayer, to seek the law of the Lord.

And so let me just say to you, the revival that we have to have in America is a revival of the word. It cannot be an emotional revival. It cannot be a signs and wonders revival. It cannot be a... It doesn't mean that it won't be without emotion or passion.

It doesn't mean that it won't be decorated by the supernatural evidence of God around it, but it has to be a fundamental return to the word of God. Because we've gotten to the place that we don't even know the Bible.

And we pick and choose our favorite portions. And our understanding and commitment to scripture lacks integrity. So there is prayer. There is prayer over the scrolls, over an open Bible. This is the best kind of praying you can do.

It's the only real praying that you can do. You see, prayer request or asking is the privilege of prayer. It's not the heart of prayer. Intercession, prayer for others, is the duty of prayer. It's the noblest use of prayer, but it's not the heart of prayer.

No, no, no. Thanksgiving is the envelope in which prayer takes place. Because its celebration points out the goodness of God and praise points out the greatness of God. And worship points out the wonder, the speechless reverence that we need before God.

But the heart of prayer is not Thanksgiving. It isn't petition or prayer request. It isn't intercession. It's prosuche. It is standing before God in the seeking of his face. It's the desire for a relationship with God.

It's the depth of communion with God. At times, it is wordless communion with God. It's not a dance with his power and ability. It's not even a celebration of his love. It is an acquaintance with his holiness.

And that's where transformation takes place. The holiness of God always has three aspects about it. Number one, whatever is holy belongs to God. So it is the signature of God. God declares something holy in order that he might make it holy.

And this is what justification is in my life, in your life. God declares me holy in order that he might make me holy. And that's the second part of holiness. It's the imputation of righteousness followed by the impartation of righteousness.

He imputes righteousness. He calls me righteous. He gives me the record of Christ and Christ takes my record. He dies for me that I might live for him. This is the exchange life. This is the principle of consecration.

I consecrate. God only makes holy what I consecrate. He claims me and I enter into a relationship with him where I learned to yield and yield more and yield more and die and die more and die more until Christ comes to live in me and through me.

What's the third aspect of holiness? It's holiness, it's health. Our churches are not healthy. Our churches are divided. Our churches are carnal. Our churches are preoccupied by worldliness. Our prayers are worldly because they're about the problems of this world.

Intercessors prayers are all about the evil one. We're more preoccupied by the darkness than we are with the light. The first movement of prayer is to crucify the flesh in order that Christ might rise up in me and touch through my touching and love through my loving and care through my caring and speak through my speaking until he, the invisible God is made visible in me and people see my good works and say, you could not have done that.

And they recognize the presence and the glory of God upon my life. See, the glory of God always is associated with the holiness of God. The beauty of holiness and the glory of God dance together. God claims you.

He marks you with his blood. It's his signature. You belong to me. And then he begins the process of both imputing to your righteousness that is putting it on your record, but imparting that to you. It begins a process of sanctification.

I consecrate and he sanctifies. The more I consecrate, the more he sanctifies. The more I yield, the more he takes possession of my life until I began to come to a place of wholeness, of beauty, of holiness.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. This is where he wants us. This is where he wants to bring the church. This only happens when you began to pray over the Bible and you pray the principles of the Bible and you seal them in your heart until you began to experience personal transformation.

You cannot have a praying church unless you have a praying people. And you will never have a prayerless church if you have a praying people. Does God use our prayer in an intercessory way? Well, absolutely.

He moves us from the center of communion where we're anchored to the edge to reach over the cliff and make a difference. I didn't finish what I started to say a moment ago. In 1992, there came this desire for an experiment to pray for the 62 nations of the world where the great amount of darkness was concentrated.

And after that, there was a quantification done by, I can't remember the group. It may have been Ralph Winter's group mission. And they said, it appears that 95 ,000 people are coming to Christ every day.

It was just an unbelievable thing. In 1995, there was another pray through the window, this time not for the nations, but for 100 gateway cities. And people made trips. I think it was something like 35 million people signed up to pray.

And people made trips spontaneously to those cities where there were no churches, no Christian witness at all. They walked the streets and sat on benches and they couldn't take tracks. They couldn't witness openly.

They simply prayed. So here's the incense of God rising from 100 cities where there's no witness, virtually no Christian witness at all. And the quantification was done again. And it said, it looks like 145, 146, 47 ,000 people are coming to Christ every day.

In 1997 or 1998, they did the pray through the window again. This time they focused on unreached people groups within that 62 nation. Where are the people group, the ethno-linguistic groups that do not have a church planting movement, a sustaining gospel engagement movement?

Let's pray for them. This time they stopped counting when 50 million people signed up to pray. How many people took treks and walked the streets and just prayed? See, we think we've got to do something.

We think it's up to us. No, no, no, no. It's God working. God from the Genesis on is the laborer who has dirt under his fingernails. He is the great evangelist. Through the Holy Spirit, through the work of Christ, we get the privilege of coming along with him, sowing the seed and picking up the sheaves and reaping the harvest.

You know, as Blackaby used to say, you find out what God is doing and you join him on mission. In a pragmatic culture, we design our own plans and then ask God to bless them, sprinkling them with prayer.

We pray and then we go and do it ourselves and ask God to join us. The real deal is praying, finding what God is doing, mission, and releasing that through the power of our collaborative effort. And that's called church.

Prayer, Bible Engagement, and Transformed Behavior

I gotta stay on my track here. Let me just show you this again. This is so important. This is foundational. Here's Ezra praying. He's praying over the scrolls, praying over an open Bible. And then I want just two little words to do it.

It begins to change the practices of his own life. It begins to change what he's doing. His ideas, his thinking has changed and then his behavior has changed. You really haven't begun to experience transformation until it begins to change not only your beliefs, but your behaviors.

Values are not what you believe, they are what you do. They're what drives your life. And values are the essence of worship. Worship, it's the essence of worship. Worship is not going to church and lifting our hands and swaying back and forth.

Worship is recalibrating our values and reorganizing our life around biblical ideas and biblical principles. And if there's anything that's happening to us in this coronavirus episode, it's that God is calling us to recalibrate our values.

Here's prayer. Here's prayer and Bible engagement. Here is prayer that's transformed into behavior and action. And then the Bible says, he begins to teach it. And as he talks about what's happening out of his own encounters with God over the scrolls, he engages a whole group of people in Babylon.

And evidently at some point they say to him, we can't stay here any longer. We can't be happy here any longer. We've got to sell everything we have and we've got to move back to Jerusalem. It's where their fathers came from, but they'd never been there.

No, no, no, they'd never been there. And so what happens with one man spreads and infects a small group until that group decides to re-center their lives, to move back to what they believe to be the center of God's will, where God wants them to be, where God wants them to live.

They're gonna return to mission and to purpose. This is extraordinary. The Bible says, it tells us about the heads of the families right here in Ezra that decide to go up. These are the heads, chapter eight, verse one, of the father's houses that went with me from Babylon.

And in verse 21, they stop and they pray and they fast together at the river Ahava. They humble themselves. They will not do this out of their own energy. They will not do this out of enthusiasm, nor can we.

They pray every step of the way. They're praying and asking God that may your hand be upon us. The hand of God is upon all those for good who seek him and his power and wrath are against those who forsake him.

So we fasted and we entreated God. And they began in the first month and in the fifth month, takes them four months to make the journey. And they get to Jerusalem. They take three days and then they go to the temple.

Chapter eight, verse 33. They take their gold, they take their silver, and they offer burnt offerings and they offer a sin offerings before God. They offer 100 bulls. They are, I'm sorry, 12 bulls and 96 rams and 77 lambs and 12 mill goats.

Not since the rededication or the dedication of this rebuilt temple have they had such a moment. Not since then have they had such a service as this. I mean, this is one of those, this is one of those everybody goes home and says, mama, you should have been at church this morning.

We had this visiting group that came from Babylon. And I mean, the offering plate was overflowing. You should have seen the altar. You, I mean, mama, you should have been at church this morning. And so what happens with one man moves to a small group and that small group, let's modify the understanding here.

Let's make it contemporary. It overflows into the church. It overflows into the Sunday morning. I know this is a Sabbath experience here. It overflows into the temple. This is the metric, the growing metric of revival.

One person on their knees over an open Bible, weeping, asking God, give me understanding, change me, transform me until something happens in their life. And they're so moved. They're so moved that other people notice it and they infect a small group.

And that small group consecrates, rededicates, moves, re-centers their life, sacrifice to get where they need to be, where they think they need to be with God. And then one Sabbath, one Sunday morning, I know there's a difference between Saturday and Sunday, but you get the point.

It overflows into the Sunday morning crowd. You know, pastor, you don't need the church to vote on revival. You don't need the whole crowd. You don't even need 50 of your congregation. All you need is 17%.

That's actually 17, 18%, round it off to 20. That's the tipping point. Sociologically, if you get 20 of your congregation that has a fervent heart for God, an on fire heart that wants to see revival and renewal, it will change your whole, it will change your whole church.

You see a tepid majority is always, is always less influential than a fervent minority. It's this remnant that you need to be working on. Most pastors, they're working with the Sunday morning crowd when they ought to be working with a remnant.

Jesus, his great concern was not the 5 ,000 that he fed, the 4 ,000 that he's, not the hundreds, not the villages that crowded in around him. It was consistently the 12. It was the 120. It was the 70 that he sent out.

It's that remnant because if that remnant can reach the point where it gets it, where it understands, I say to every pastor, this is really the message of Jude, but you beloved, when apostasy is everywhere, the book of Jude, when Christiology is lost and missiology is lost and holiness is lost and we don't even understand the transforming aspect of justification and eschatology is a matter of confusion, look at the book of Jude.

It is the greatest catalog, the simplest, most concise catalog on apostasy in all of scripture. And here's what Jude, the brother of Jesus said, but you beloved, it's plural. But you, I'm looking for a remnant inside the church.

You, you build yourself up on your most holy faith. You pray in the spirit. You center yourself in the love of God. You look for, you look for the mercy of God. And then he begins to talk about how you deal with the lost.

You pull them out of the fire, heating the garment, spotting the flesh. Revival begins with a remnant. It always begins. And there's one person at the center, two, three people at the center and their fervency affects a small group.

And that small group spreads to the church until there's an overflow in the Sunday morning crowd. And by the way, this is where I want to go in just a minute. That goes deep into homes. It has to transform our homes.

Revival Must Reach the Home Before the City

And this is where we're stuck right now. It has to transform our homes before in Nehemiah's day, it overflows in the city. One man, small group. Sunday morning, that's not enough to have an exciting service.

Not enough, not enough, not enough. It's got to move beyond that until we're willing to change our lives in the macro and drive the stake of faith deep into personal habits at home. And then it will overflow into the city.

And this is what we want. It's not an overnight process from Esther through Ezra to Nehemiah, from intercessors to pastors, to business leaders, to the marketplace is almost a 30 year biblical period.

And that comes after 60, 70 years of spiritual drought. And that's where we are now. Since the 1962 Supreme Court ruling, we've had 60 years of spiritual drought in this nation. And now there's an intercessors movement.

And now there's a stirring among pastors. And now there's a stirring in the marketplace and a recognition that God didn't give me this business just to make money. There's a divine purpose and I've got to make a difference.

And I can do some things in my business and through my business that my pastor and the church can't do because I can go places where they can't go. Oh my goodness, if you can see what I'm seeing in this principle, this is what God is up to here.

The solemn assembly is not an event. I mentioned yesterday that in some cases in the early 90s, we released this and everybody said, well, we checked out, we had our solemn assembly. It didn't bring revival, it's a process.

It's a process. You do solemn assembly and then you do another one and then you do it because sin is layered. It's layered in our homes, it's layered in our lives. This is why repentance is a process and redirection is a process.

I can't take that kind of change all at once. God reveals this to me and I say, oh, I didn't see that, I didn't see that. God help me, give me grace. And I struggle with that until the sanctifying grace of God comes and releases me and I go to another and then I backslide and you do too.

And then God reveals something else and something else. It's salvation, I was saved, I'm being saved, I will be saved, this is a process. This is a process. After, at the beginning of chapter nine, after the moment in the temple, here's what happens.

The leaders, the people, the priests, the Levites, they come to Ezra with this confession. And I want you to see this now. The priests, the pastors, the Levites, the leaders, and they say, we have not separated ourselves from the peoples of the land, the Gentiles, the non-Jews, with respect to their abominations.

Ezra is astonished. Ezra is shocked. It is unbelievable to him. Here's what the priests say to him. Our sons who will be priests have married pagan wives and our daughters have married pagan sons, which means there cannot be a pure spiritual leadership in the future, which means the holy seed is mixed.

Ezra pulls out his hair. He tears his garments. He sits down in absolute shock. Everybody else might leave, but he can't. He's there all day, he's astonished. There is no appetite, there's no desire to go out and eat anywhere.

There's no desire to take care of himself. He is all day long, from the morning sacrifice to the evening, from nine o 'clock in the morning to three o 'clock in the afternoon. He's on his face prostrate, he's on all fours.

He's on his knees with his hands lifted. His posture changes from time to time, but he's stunned, he's shocked. So here's the first thing that has to happen. I wanna take you to a process. There has to be, beyond the man, beyond the small group, and beyond the Sunday morning moment or the moment in your congregation when God breaks in on the congregation and says to the congregation, I'm up to something.

When a revival spirit comes, when there's an obvious touch of God, there has to be, number one, a sense of awareness that what we have done, how we are living is wrong. We are living in compromise. We are living in sin.

And this is not right, this is conviction. This is conviction that comes by the awareness of God. See, up to this time, these people were fine with the way they were living. In fact, here's what happens.

The fathers take pagan wives and they say to their sons, oh, I did it, why don't you do it too? The encouragement to sin in the next generation. And so there has to come a widespread awareness that where we are now is not acceptable to God.

We are not here yet. We are not at this point yet. This is a work of the Holy Spirit. You cannot bring conviction, nor should you try, to other people. Your life can testify, you can share the principles of God's word.

You can preach, you can testify, but only the Holy Spirit can bring the kind of awareness that causes people to acknowledge, I am not where I need to be with God, and I'm a pastor, a priest. I'm a Levite, I'm supposed to be a holy man.

I'm supposed to be set aside. I'm a deacon in the church. I'm on the council. I'm not where I need to be with God. Only the Holy Spirit can bring us to this place of awareness. And then there is astonishment.

Astonishment is something that happened to Ezra. He said, I sat astonished. There's no astonishment anymore in our churches, even by leaders at the degree of sin in the church. We've come to accept it.

And if it's among a leader who is paying a lot of time, we kind of go, well, we can't say anything to him. No, no, no, listen. We have to, there's a point at which we have to ourself be astonished at the gap between God's holiness and the lack of righteousness in our life, the lack of biblical moral integrity in our life, and the fact that God wants to heal that gap.

It's not that we're going to be perfect people, but there has to be a hunger for holiness and a hunger for righteousness. There is astonishment by the leader because when you go into this, let me tell you something.

When you go into this process, pastor, when you go into this process, intercessor, when you go into this process, councilman or deacon or elder or whatever they call you in your church, here's what began to happen.

God will begin to reveal to you the depth of sin. The word of knowledge will begin to operate in your life. You'll seek things that you never knew. Pastor told me, he said, I was about to turn the church over a large church, huge church.

And he said, I walked up and sat down on the platform and I turned in and saw one of my staff members come in one door and one of my staff members come in the other door and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, you can't leave until you straighten this out.

That's a word of knowledge. And he said, that night, he called them both. And he said, I want you to know that I know. And in the morning we have to talk. And that's all he said to them. In the next morning, he called the man and he said, I just want you to know I'm on my way to your house.

He said, we have to talk this out. And by the time he got there, she was there. And at least one of their spouses, maybe two, and they confessed the illicit affair that they were having. Two departments of the church, it devastated the church.

When God begins to clean house, he will begin to reveal things. You will be astonished. You'll be, you can't handle it now. You'll be shocked. Ezra's astonished. He's shocked by the degree of sin that he is seeing in this place.

And then, and then number three, and then number three, the Bible says, the Bible says that he sat down astonished and everyone who trembled at the word of God, at the words of God of Israel assembled to me because of the transgression.

So the third thing, this is beyond awareness. This is the point at which people feel an anxious, the old anxious seat idea. People feel an anxious awareness of the convicting presence of God. Well, I don't know when I have been in a service since the time of my youth, 100 years ago, when people trembled at the word of God.