On Eagles' Wings Pt 12 — Don Courville

God's Strength for Those Who Wait

Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increases strength.

Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, and they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.

We welcome you again to the program on Eagle's Wings, a church revival ministry designed to encourage you to experience the power of the cross, to experience revival in your life. I believe that God intended us to be an exciting, spirit-filled, enthusiastic body of believers, always full of life and love and joy and laughter, even amidst our trials to have great joy as the early church did.

The Need for Personal and Corporate Revival

Well somehow or another we've missed it, we've slipped back, we've backslidden, and we're in need of revival, and that's what this program is for, to encourage us to experience revival. We trust that God will use us to encourage you today as we listen a little bit again to a story from China, a story on this is how great her love is.

Gets you a little bit different view of what's going on maybe in China in regards to being a Christian over there. I'll share that with you and then a little bit more on Moses, and I'm going to share a few things on the philosophy of revival.

But first, get your Bible, call up a friend or your pastor, and pray for revival, pray for God to use this program to encourage believers for revival. Maybe God can even use this today in someone's life, your life maybe as you're listening to receive Christ as your Savior.

Personal revival is revive me, that's one believer, walking in the Spirit. But interpersonal revival is revive us, a group of believers, walking in the Spirit. The corporate revival is revive thy work, where a church collectively is walking in the Spirit.

Revival specifically is a ministry of cleansing and spiritual adjustment to the inner life of the local church and to the body of Christ in general, bringing back into consciousness and health those who already have life.

Vive has to do with life, re is again. So revival means life again, life again. Spiritual awakening specifically has to do with the unconverted. When they become consciously aware of the presence of God at a given point in time, God sovereignly and supernaturally compels people in a city or an area to respond to Him.

When the unsaved see the saved responding to God, they are drawn to Him in supernatural ways and sometimes in revival movements, thousands upon thousands are saved. Well we haven't seen this in our country, not for quite a while have we seen it.

And this is what we're praying for, a revival and awakening really, where God sweeps our land and turns this land to Him. My friend, are you praying for revival? I want to share with you again a testimony from a young lady over in China about how great her love was for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Revival in a Chinese Women's Prison

She wrote, I came to the Lord at age 34 and six months later my husband died. For the next four years I worked and raised our children and then I was arrested on March 30, 1980. I was held for 15 days and during that time the Lord revealed to me that I must bear testimony to Him.

After my release I returned home to care for the children but on August 15, 1980 two other sisters and I were sentenced to a woman's prison for terms of six to eight years. At that time the prison was a spiritually dark place.

There was not a single person praising the Lord. The Lord revealed to us that we must freely give what we had been freely given. He had sent us there to do His work. Some other Christian women were sent to the prison until there were about 20 of us.

We began having fellowship together and eventually the prison became a fertile vine which bore much fruit. In 1984 the sisters were severely persecuted and many were put into maximum security cells. Some were handcuffed and others were tied up.

Under these circumstances the sisters remained very strong. The Lord meant to show His glory in that prison. This punishment was followed by a self-criticism meeting where the sisters were lined up and asked, Do you still believe in the Lord?

Of course we do. We must believe in the Lord, they answered. There was nothing the officials could do. Christ was victorious. God glorified His own name. Praise the Lord! After this persecution a revival began in the prison.

We continued to pray fervently and whether we were eating, working or sleeping, we sisters would talk about the work of the Lord. Although it was difficult, we used every opportunity to preach Christ.

During meals we would stuff little notes into people's pockets to be read later in secret. Many unbelievers willingly accepted the Lord. Meetings began to be held everywhere with people praying and singing.

Out of the 3 ,000 people in prison, 2 ,000 repented and the prison became a glorious church. We had only one Bible, an old Union version, which we tore apart so that we could take turns sharing the pages.

We were all very anxious to know the Word so that we could love and serve the Lord. Once some guards found portions of the Bible and they read them. From this they became Christians themselves and also began to preach Christ.

God was really glorifying Himself in that prison. The more we were persecuted, the more joy we experienced. One sister who had been sentenced to life was asked by the Communist officials to reconsider her faith in the Lord.

There is no reason to ever reconsider my work for Jesus Christ, she answered. Many sisters no longer thought about returning to their homes. They were faithfully serving the Lord there in prison. They had committed everything to Him.

Their hearts no longer belonged to the world. Two months before I was released, many of the sisters were weeping because they thought we would never meet again. This was because they were young. The Lord was in the process of teaching them to totally rely on Him, to know that He is with them in every circumstance.

On March 29, 1987, I walked out the prison doors. Now at this point, another preacher joined in the conversation, and this is shared in the testimony paper also. What she is saying is true, he said. We saw the revival in that prison.

The fire in the church outside burned into the prison. There were many women criminals there who had committed serious crimes. They had been sentenced to life. They had no hope. But when our sister was put into prison, new life and new joy came with her.

Many people who were waiting only to die had new songs to sing. In that prison, you could hear the sound of hallelujahs and people praising the Lord. When this sister's sentence ended, her father came to pick her up.

As they walked out the front gate of the prison, she began crying and wanted to go back. I don't want to leave this place, she said. There are so many new babes in Christ who would take care of them. This is how great her love is.

This was taken from a little paper on reports put out by Underground Evangelism. Oh, my friend, what revival will do for you and me is a wonderful thing. What it will do for our church is a wonderful thing.

Revival, the Church, and the Nation

But what it will do for our land is what we desperately need. We need a turning back to the Lord. I believe in our day that the answer is in the church. I personally believe that if God judges America in a serious way, he will judge it for the sin of the church.

Not for the sin of the country, but for the sin of the church. We are a wicked land. There's no doubt about it. But there is hope. I am one for believing that there is hope. And I have that hope because of the scriptures.

And I have that hope also because of the record of past revivals and how bad the times were in some of those places. We need to turn to God in prayer. It starts in prayer. As you and I pray, get somebody else to pray.

I was reading in Isaiah 57 verse 15 where it says, For thus saith the high and holy one that inhabited eternity, whose name is holy, I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

Are you willing to let God break you down, to humble you? We want to encourage you for revival. And if you're experiencing it, you know what I'm talking about, to have a fellowship that you're going to where God is honored and glorified and hypocrisy is put aside.

And there is true spiritual life, not a pseudo-spiritual life, which expresses itself in several different forms in our day. The emotionalism, the super piety put out in a professional program or whatever.

But the true spiritual life where sacrifice is there and love and gentleness and kindness and basically the fruit of the spirit is demonstrated in the body of Christ. We're looking for that. But it starts with a brokenness of our pride and our own selfishness.

Moses' Fears and the Lessons of the Wilderness

We've been going through in the life of Moses and I want to share a little bit with you about his excuses or actually his five fears to show you how this can come out in your life, how this can affect your life.

This is just one area. There's just so many different areas. Fear is just one area. There's stubbornness and self-will. There's anger and the bitterness, the basic ingredients of pride. But you know, when God came to Moses and said, I want you to go.

He said, who am I? Moses was saying to God, I'm a failure. And he didn't need to tell God that he was a failure because God knew that he was a failure. He had failed in the flesh. We always fail in the flesh.

There's no other way in the flesh but to fail. Jesus says, without me, you can do nothing. In other words, without me, you will fail. And so God took Moses out into that desert. And you know what deserts are good for?

Those trials that you're going through, that suffering that you go through, that hard experience, that hard circumstance that you're going through right now, my friend. That is good for revealing your flaws and your fears.

And you need to see it because before you see it, you'll have confidence in yourself. So those trials, those deserts are good for making you face yourself. When you come to yourself, what do you see? A nothing, a nobody.

And when you recognize that, you're getting to the point of humility. And God can use a humble person. He says to us to humble ourselves. We're to humble ourselves. And then he says, I will lift you up.

And this program is designed to teach you to walk by grace, to walk in the spirit, to let God lift you up and to use you. So many times we're like the little girl who had her shoelaces in knots and dad walked by and saw what was going along and going on and said, can I help?

And she says, no, I'll get it myself. A few moments later, here she comes back up to dad with a little sheepish grin on her face. And she says, dad, I can't get it. Can you? So many of us, we've got our life all tied up in knots.

There's one that specializes in untying knots. And that's the Lord Jesus Christ. Will you come to him? Without Christ, we can't help but get our life tied up in the knots. And the Bible says not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God.

My friend, all progress starts with God. Past failures produce fear. That's where Moses got it. His past failure had produced that fear. And fear is a lack of faith or trust in God. The Bible says, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.

And Moses said, who am I that I should go? That I should deliver Israel? And God comes back. Now, wait a minute, Moses. I'm going to be the one doing the delivering. You're just going to be the instrument.

The problem of Moses at that point is that he's still living in the past. If God can get you out of the past, my friend, you'll experience the power of the present. The power of the present is the Spirit of God Jesus.

Living his life through you. When you get up in the morning and you say, Lord, praise your name. Thank you that I'm alive. Now I die. And I just want you to live your life through me. This is what Romans 6 says.

Dying to Sin and Living in Christ

Reckon yourself to be dead. Die to self. Die to sin. And then you experience the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus Christ. Memorize Romans 6, 7, and 8. Memorize those chapters. Fear lives in the past.

Faith lives in the present and the future. Faith commands the present and the future. Don't live in the past. Live in the present and the future and the power of the Spirit of God. Now what's God's answer to Moses?

He says, I've got a promise for you, Moses. Verse 12 of Exodus 3. He said, Certainly I will be with thee. You know, when the Lord Jesus Christ left, he gave that promise again to the disciples and to us.

He says, Lo, I am with you always. The words of David Livingston. He wrote this. He said the words of a gentleman. He says, I will be with thee. I will be with thee. I'll go with you through the darkness.

I'll go with you in your trials. And it's not that Moses is going to go, but it's who is going to go with him that makes all the difference. And we got that song, I Can Face Tomorrow. I can face tomorrow with Jesus.

I can face anything with Jesus. God said to Moses and to us two things. He said, Moses, you try it in your strength. Now try it in my strength. Actually, he said, just relax and let me work through you.

Philippians 4 .13. We can claim the promise. But if we fail to realize that the promise was born out of Paul's desert experience, we'll miss it. You know, Paul said in Philippians, if I can get back over there, and if you have your Bibles, you can turn to Philippians with me.

But he said in Philippians 4 .13, I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me. Before that, he said that in verse 12, I both know how to be abased and I know how to abound everywhere and in all things.

I'm instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I think in the past, we shared something about how we can all stand affluence, but not many of us can stand to be humbled.

Do you know how to live with great wealth and then turn around and live with great poverty and be the same person or do things affect you? Maybe the reason God won't let you in or win that five million dollars readers sweepstakes contest is because He knows that it'll just devastate your life.

You'll just saturate yourself with so much carnal worldliness and things. It'll just snuff out what life's there. Why do you want it? Paul knew how to abound and how to be abased. He just knew that Jesus was all he needed and he could make it through anything.

Facing Failure Through God's Presence

And so God says, my presence will take care of your fear, Moses. So that was no good. What was Moses afraid of anyway? You ever thought about it? Why is it that you and I sometimes we won't go back and try something again after we failed?

Well, Moses was afraid of failure. You know, when I was growing up back when I was a young fella, I used to do a lot of swimming. I was raised down in Louisiana and go up into Arkansas and spend time with relatives.

But I do a lot of swimming, did a lot of diving. Just one summer I counted, I think I counted up, I did around a thousand flip and a halves. That's where you do a flip and then you come on around and you dive into the water.

A full flip as you go in on your feet. Well, I got to doing a lot of the diving. We do some of the fancy divings and things. And one time I was up on the high dive and I decided I'm going to do a two and a half flip.

Well, that two and a half flip went pretty good. I was flying through the air, I went one, two, and then about two and a quarter, something happened. And what happened was I ran out of airspace and if you don't know what position you're in at two and a quarter, I'll tell you what position you're in at two and a quarter.

You are horizontal with the water and I ran out of airspace about that point and I went plop right on the surface of the water. It wasn't very graceful. It was a little bit loud and it was very painful.

Well, I floated around there in the water for a while, just sort of hurting. And you know what? From that point on, my diving ceased to be so dramatic. Matter of fact, the years slipped on by and I just quit doing it altogether and I don't think I could get up and do a single flip now.

I think I'd get so dizzy I couldn't stand it. But that failure cooled me down and that's what happens to us. We have a failure in a certain area and it slows us down from making progress to the Lord. Well, what does his presence mean to Moses anyway?

Moses, he said, my presence is going to go with you. His presence meant that Moses would have no fear. Do you have fear? You know, I wonder if you're trying to cover something up from God. The Bible says in Proverbs 28, 13, he that covereth his sins shall not prosper but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.

You wouldn't be trying to walk with God, would you? With some kind of hidden sin? No, you wouldn't be trying that. Or would you? Well, I did. I tried it. But you know, it doesn't work too good because the Bible says you're not going to prosper.

Oh, outwardly, you may be looking pretty good. But inwardly, how are you? How's things going? He that covereth his sins shall not prosper but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. I'm reminded of a story I heard several years ago about a man up in Montana, a very prosperous man, a very successful man, a very prominent man.

In that community, everybody knew him. Everybody liked him. But that man had a problem. He was literally eaten up inside with fear. And what he had done is he had killed someone years before and he had got away with it.

But he couldn't stand it anymore and he turned himself in to the authorities and they just couldn't believe it. The local authorities couldn't believe it. But they looked it up and went back in the newspapers.

He told them what happened. And sure enough, he had killed that person. And he told them how he never did have any peace. He always afraid somebody was following him. He couldn't sleep at night. He had constant fear.

And I think it was something like 20 years or something like that. Constant fear. And he said he felt so relieved just to confess it. And of course, they took him in. He had to pay the price for his crime.

Freedom to Serve God

You wouldn't have something that you're trying to hide, would you? I hope not. Well, Moses has the presence of God to go with him. In verse 12 of Exodus 3, he said, Certainly I will be with thee. God said this will be the token.

The evidence was, you'll serve me. Thus, this shall be the token unto thee that I have sent thee. When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. We don't walk with God just to have the privilege of God walking with us.

But it's so that we might serve Him. Their life in Egypt was service to Pharaoh. Their life in freedom will be service to God. Maybe the reason that we have so few workers in our churches is that we have so many around that aren't really free.

They've got some kind of bondage in their life. And they're not really free to serve God. That's why we're on the air. To encourage you to be free, Jesus came to set you free. Came to the Jews and said, I'll set you free.

And they said, we're not in bondage. We've never been in bondage to any man. Ah, but if you're not free, it'll show up in your life somewhere. Well, they served Pharaoh in fear. And now they're going to serve God in freedom.

You remember Peter when he denied the Lord and the Lord came back to him and he said, Peter, I want you to follow me. And he said, by the way, don't worry about John. You just follow me. Keep your eyes on me.

You follow me. Christ restored his fellowship. Christ restored his faith. And then by a command, he said, follow me. I believe one of the reasons that we have so much trouble following Jesus is because we have a fear in our life.

We have something we're trying to hide. Those that have trouble following Jesus also have trouble obeying him. He gave him restoration of fellowship, restored his faith, gave him a command to follow him, gave him a promise, and lo, I am with you always.

I hope you're not trying to hide something from God. He's got pretty good insight. Did you know that? There wouldn't be someone would there in your life that you hold a grudge against. Is there anyone you've not forgiven?

How about, is there anyone you hate? Is there anyone you do not love? Are there any misunderstandings that you're not willing to forget? Is there any person against whom you are harboring bitterness, resentment?

Or jealousy? Anyone you dislike to hear praised or well spoken of? Do you allow anything to justify a wrong attitude toward a brother? Are you free? Are you really free? I hope that you are. You see, the Lord Jesus came to set you free.

Would you confess it, deal with it? If you need to make restitution, go make it right. And you know what will happen? You'll experience the lifting up of the Lord. He'll lift you up on eagle's wings. He'll lift you up by his strength and by his grace.

Receiving Christ by Grace Through Faith

Are you a captive of sin? Have you ever been set free by Jesus Christ? Have you received him as your savior? If not, would you just do it right now? Just confess that you're a sinner. The Bible says the wages of sin is death.

The Bible says we've all sinned. We've all sinned and come short of the grace of God. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Would you let him save you? You've been maybe going through all kinds of spiritual gyrations, spiritual exercises, tormenting yourself, trying to work your way into heaven.

And you'll never get there if you're going to try to work your way into heaven. Because the Bible says you can't do it. The Bible says for by grace you save through faith and that not of yourselves is a gift of God and not of works so that no man can boast.

How do you receive a gift? You just reach out and receive it. Ask Jesus to come in and save you. If you've been struggling, friend, in the Christian life, let him take it. Let him lift you up. Let him be the one that will set you free, that'll lift you up on eagle's wings.

He's all you need. Is he all you want?