(Revival) Religious Stumbling Blocks - Part 2 — Michael L. Brown

Supernatural Manifestations in Revival

They're trans, just judged, and they had to carry the person, pick them up and carry them to the meeting for them to repent and get delivered. You'd be amazed, you would be amazed at some of the things in the history of revival, what God's done.

I mentioned the Southern Presbyterian Church, people on their knees barking like dogs. Picture some of the most sophisticated, intellectual people. I mean, there's one... I can't even begin to describe one story I heard.

It's just mind-boggling when this guy who was just a... I mean, I can't even describe how together and how socially fine-tuned he was and everything, when he finally gets filled with the Spirit and chases his pastor down into a hiding place in the back of a kitchen, you know, and bouncing like a frog, you know, speaks in tongues in front of...

I mean, how can you even describe a scene like that? You say, it's crazy. Listen, I'm just telling you these things happen. If you experience real revival, you'll see a little of all of that. No one conjures it up, no one makes it happen.

Discernment Amid Spiritual Counterfeits

In fact, with every revival, you get a lot of stumbling because the flesh counterfeits and the devil counterfeits. And you got to know what's going on. The Spirit's moving, all of a sudden someone shrieks and you rebuke them.

That's the devil. You be quiet. Someone else shrieks, it's the flesh. Someone else shrieks, you say, let it go, it's the Spirit, they're getting delivered. You have to have discernment, you have to know what's going on.

Sometimes it gets a little intense, overwhelming. And I haven't experienced true revival. We certainly experienced the beginning of what could have been a great revival for Long Island and the New York area, but it was certainly an outpouring of the Spirit.

Even in the midst of that, I remember just as things began to happen, somehow in the back of my mind, I'd heard about these things and read. Just as things began to happen, at a Sunday night prayer meeting, I remember just saying, oh my, this is getting heavy.

As this one woman lets out a shriek as she gets delivered, and another tall brother who's actually here tonight, collapses like a yun tree, boom, on the ground. I said, oh my, this is getting heavy. Well, why does God do that?

The First Purpose: Displaying God's Supernatural Power

I believe He does these things. Again, there's flesh just imitating, there's satanic counterfeits, but I believe God does these things. Why? Well, I'll give you four reasons. One reason, it's a display of His supernatural power.

It's an awesome thing. You're at a meeting and 5 ,000 people crumble to the ground like one. That's an awesome thing. I remember one Korean fellow who was very, very, very skeptical about the things of the Spirit, and fairly cold in his overall relationship with the Lord.

And he came to a meeting and I laid hands on him and he was like a dead man. I mean, they just laid him out between a couple of chairs. He was like a dead man under the power of God. I remember afterwards, he said to me, that changed his life.

He experienced the reality of God. God shook him, something happened. There's a display of God's supernatural power. Even if some of the stuff is strange or odd, it puts you in a different realm, puts you in a holy realm, puts you in a realm where you just kind of tread softly.

I mean, something's happening, something's going on. When the Spirit's really moving, there should be an atmosphere of the Spirit. I can never understand meetings where you're ministering to people, or people up at the altar praying, or laying hands on people and the power of God is supposedly falling.

And people are looking at their watches, or this one's singing a secular song in their mind, and just waiting to get out, and this one's tying their shoelaces and reading a comic book. Wait a second, are we in the presence of God or what?

I mean, are we focusing on God? Are we worshiping him? Or is this just some kind of sideshow performance? I've seen people minister, and they start, everyone who wants to go home, go ahead and go home, and they just start praying for people, and everyone's talking and buzzing around, and they're up front praying.

It's like, wait a second. I mean, if the Spirit's really at work, let's have a little reverence, let's join together as one man, one body. But when these signs start occurring, when these supernatural things, man, you know, wait a second.

God, I mean, you're on your way out, and all of a sudden you start, wait, something's going on here. So one purpose is to display God's supernatural power and to make a lasting impression. Lasting impression.

I mean, there are enough times where I've seen God move on people intensely, powerfully, in a shaking way, and they've never forgotten. They can't forget it. It's like God came down, put his hook in their jaw, and picked them up out of the water and said, remember me?

The Second Purpose: Destroying Human Religiosity and Pride

Yeah, I remember you. All right, now go back down in the water. You don't forget that. What's another purpose of religious stumbling blocks? Well, to destroy every last remnant of human religiosity and the flesh.

To destroy every last remnant of human religiosity and the flesh. These things are just not pleasant. These things are just not acceptable. They just don't build you up in the natural. You know, when I was in my cold period, from about 72 to, excuse me, from 82 to 87, I knew the numbers weren't computing there properly.

No, not from 82 to 87, from 77 to 82. Glory to God. From 19 and 77, as they say, to 1982. I was much more at home in the flesh with my religious beliefs. I felt much more relaxed in the presence of learned professors than when I was at Pentecostal praying in tongues at least an hour a day.

That stuff is just unacceptable to the fleshly mind and to human pride. When you get down on your knees and you groan and shake and tremble and travail, lay there prostrate on your face for two hours, that doesn't exactly build up the intellectually proud esteem that you could hold for yourself.

You know, it's not the type of situation where you get up from that and you see some professor and you want to talk to him about some high and lofty religious or theological subject. I mean, you've been down in the pit.

You've been down in the trenches. It was much easier for me to go pursue my studies and do all these other things and leave out some of these, you know, put these other things back in the closet, this old Pentecostal, anti-intellectual stuff.

Just put that back in the closet. When God grabbed hold of me and seized me, though, I just had to say, Lord, whatever. I remember the night when this guy couldn't even drive his car that I referred to, that night in November of 82.

Here he can't even drive his car and at this point he's laying on his face prostrate. This is before we were going to go home. He's laying on his face prostrate. I'm kind of wondering how he's going to manage to drive or do anything, looking at him.

This one guy had fallen, laying on his back. I'm like, oh no, not falling again when we pray for people. I thought that wasn't God. I proved to my satisfaction it couldn't be God. I gave all the intellectual reasons for it.

Now he's falling. The wife's speaking in tongues, sounds like a chicken. I mean, just going on. I mean, just, I don't know what a chicken sounds like, but you know what I mean. Just, I mean, just speaking in tongues, chattering and chattering.

The husband laying on his back, speaking in tongues and the other guy laying on his face, shaking. And then the other guy who was the old-time Pentecostal who was there in the group, kind of doing like an Indian war dance.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I said, oh my God. I said, I thought I was dead to all this. I thought I'd, this was all behind me. I thought I didn't have to worry about any of this stuff. It's so humiliating.

And I said, Lord, if that's real, if it's you, all right, whatever, I don't care. I don't care. And I don't care. I didn't and I don't. But I mean, man, there was some religiosity in me. And there was some fleshly pride.

There ain't no fleshly pride left after you get through weeping and wailing on your face for two hours for a dying world. I mean, where's the fleshly pride? You go to talk to somebody and say, I just want to share my faith and you fall apart.

I mean, where's the pride? It's demolished. So these religious stumbling blocks, they really go a long way in doing that. I mean, here you've prepared your whole sermon and you want to impress the people and the spirit just kind of gets hold of your feet and you start boogieing.

You know, I don't mean dancing gracefully, but just kind of boogieing and jumping. It's like, oh, no, I don't believe this. Unless you quench the spirit, you're going to have to dance around that whole building.

Hey, in one moment of time, God can humble more pride and destroy more human religious edifices. Just with that one little religious stumbling block there, then years and years and years of trying to work it out and wean yourself of it and all this other stuff.

And I remember one time, a guy was going door to door selling his family encyclopedias. He was in from California. They send you to another part of the country, so you just work day and night. You're away from your friends and everything.

And he was going to make all this money, he thought. It was harder than he expected. Got over to my house. I had just come back from teaching. My wife was on her way out and started talking to the guy.

And found out that he had known the Lord as a teenager or even a very young teenager and backslid now. He was maybe 18, 19, 20 years old. Someone had led him to the Lord, referred back to the Lord as he was knocking on doors.

And we began to talk. I said, man, you need the power of God in your life. I said, have you been filled with the Spirit? And he said, well, you know, no. We began to talk about it. So I opened up the Word.

We sat down, showed him the Scriptures. Here, just alone in the house. Showed him the Scriptures. I said, well, are you ready to receive? He said, well, I'm a little scared, but yeah, I'm ready. Here, laid hands on him.

I remember the power of God fell on him. He got laid out, collapsed on the couch, shaking, trembling, speaking in tongues. I still remember as he tried to get up and collapsed down again. He couldn't even move.

The power of God was there. It's like, well, whatever religious system he was involved in or whatever he thought was the right way, because I didn't know his background. He'd never seen anything like that.

Heard about it a little, but never experienced it. That whole thing just got demolished a whole lot more quickly than if you tried to teach him, instruct him, and have a religious argument. You know, when I was getting cold, I had met this guy.

This is when I was still kind of remnant hot, you know? The coals were still burning, but there wasn't fresh fire. And I was in college, and I was talking to this guy, and he was a militant Baptist. And we would argue points.

And I was on the Pentecostal side, and he was on the Baptist side. Wherever we differed, that's where we differed. And I really thought I could prove my point. I didn't see him for a couple years. I mean, he used to have super, super short hair and be super, super conservative.

I didn't see him for a couple years. All of a sudden, I ran into him. At this point, I was really cold, and I was in agreement with him. He looked a little different. His hair was a little longer. And he just looked a little bit more free.

And I couldn't wait to talk to him. Before I could talk to him, he said, you know, we had these people, and they were going to this church out on the island. And this church had a lot of good things, but a lot of problems also out on Long Island.

He said they were going to this church, and one after another was leaving the Baptist church. And I'm not pro-Pentecostal, anti-Baptist, or the reverse. I'm just saying this is the historic occasion here.

He says, and they were leaving the church, and I got really concerned. And I sat down with this one sister and told her this tongue stuff was wrong and all this other stuff. And she said, well, Ralph, have you ever prayed about it?

Now, at this point, I was ready to tell him that all his old positions were right, but he beat me to the punch. He was ready to tell me that I was right, all my old positions were right. And I said, you know, what happened?

He said, well, you know, I talked to her, and I'm like, right, and you rebuked her, and you set her straight. And what happened? He said, I just went home, and I just said, God, if it's real, I want it, and just started speaking in tongues, just like that.

And experience, God, tongues is probably the greatest contemporary religious stumbling block in the last two, three generations, probably times. But it destroys every last remnant of human religiosity in the flesh.

The Third Purpose: Returning to God's Order

And then a third thing these religious stumbling blocks do, they get us back to God's order. But first, we must be violently shaken out of our order. So religious stumbling blocks violently shake us out of our order and get us into God's order.

You say, well, God does everything decently and in order. Yeah, according to His order, according to His order. The description of decently and in order in 1 Corinthians 14 includes tongues, prophecy, interpretation, revelation, all different people speaking.

You call that order in 99 of services? No. That's because it's God's order, not our order. If I set you right, I want you to put all these chairs in order here. And what you did is you lined them up against the wall, you stacked them against the wall, and you had them in perfect order.

And then everyone came in to sit down. I said, what did you do? You've got to take them all down now so that people can sit. Well, I can't get it any other way from your order, which is totally wrong, to the right order without taking your order down first.

You've got to take the chairs down and then set them up in rows the right way. So basically, we've got this thing. I don't like when the Spirit moves like this. Who are we to dictate? I prefer if the Spirit would move more quietly or more subtly.

Well, whichever way you prefer, He'll move. He'll move the other way until you stop dictating to Him how you want Him to move. The Bible says test the spirits with a small s, not test the Spirit with a capital S.

If it's Him, you back out of the way. So these religious stumbling blocks just so violently shake us out of our order of doing things. Look, let's say you're worshiping the Lord and singing a hymn. And someone so turned on says, oh, brother, I feel I have a testimony.

Well, not now. At the end of the service, we'll give you a moment. Well, that's not going to shake the order, OK? But when you get up to sing your hymn, and the moment you begin to sing the words, you break down weeping and get on your face and start trembling and weeping before the Lord, that will knock you out of your order pretty quickly, you see?

So these things are violent, shaking, intense, contrary. I don't mean contrary to God. I don't mean contrary in terms of just controversial. I mean contrary to the way people would do it. So the last purpose of religious stumbling blocks, I said it's contrary to the way people would do it.

The Fourth Purpose: Revival Belongs to God

Well, it's obviously this. Religious stumbling blocks remind us that revival belongs to God, not to man. Revival belongs to God, not man. When he moves in this way, you can't work it up. You can't orchestrate it.

You can't turn it on. You can't turn it off. You can't bring it up to fever pitch. You can't bring it down. You can't set up when. You can't set up how. Why? Because it's God who does it. Over and over and over and over in Bartleman's description of what happened at Azusa Street and the subsequent movings of God in that California area.

Over and over and over again, he shows how people try to control it, continually quench the Spirit. In fact, he says this. The New Testament church begun by Brother Smale seemed to be losing the spirit of prayer as they increased their organization.

They had become ambitious for church and organization. Again, it's not that organization is wrong. It's when you organize God out. It seemed hard to them to not be like the other nations. Quote, churches round about them.

And right here they began to fail. As church work increased, they lost sight of the real issue. Human organization and human program leave very little room for the free Spirit of God. It means much to be willing to be considered a failure while we seek to build up a purely spiritual kingdom.

God's kingdom does not come by observation. It is very easy to choose second best. Their prayer life is needed much more than buildings or organizations. These are often a substitute for the other. Souls are born into the kingdom only through prayer.

The New Testament church seemed to be drifting toward intellectualism. I became much burdened for it. During one meeting, it was so painful after what we had seen, I groaned aloud in prayer. One of the elders rebuked me severely for this.

How are the mighty fallen? Kept ringing in my ears. See, this church that was called the New Testament church was initially wide open to the things of the Spirit. But then, in order to get this better and get this better and get this, you had to turn this on, turn this off.

Start this, stop this. Control this, let this in, not let this in. For the people's sake, you see, for the people's sake. They can only handle this. They can't. You start to dictate. It's no longer God's.

It's no longer God's. And the moment it's taken out of God's hands, like we said, it ceases to be revival. So religious stumbling blocks display God's supernatural, overpowering, and awesome power. You know, it makes people realize God's pretty big.

How many times have you ever been flattened by the Spirit? I mean, flattened. One fellow who's a weightlifter told me that while he was laying on his face, the fellow I met in New York, he was laying on his face.

And he said, the Lord came. Just basically put his toe on his neck and said, try and get up, Larry. And he said, the guy tried with all his might and couldn't move. And he said, God was just giving him a glimpse.

He said, well, God made the universe. Yeah, but do we ever have just a little glimpse? Enough to keep us flat on our faces, maybe? Enough that we want to speak and our mouths are just silent? Enough of a glimpse of the power of God that we just feel the rush and push of the Spirit coming upon us.

Summation and Closing Prayer

Religious stumbling blocks display God's power. They destroy every last remnant of human religiosity in the flesh. They get us back to God's order by violently shaking us out of our order. And they remind us that revival belongs to God, not to man.

Father, we pray, each heart here, we pray that when You come, when You move, when You arrive in a new and significant and powerful way, be it corporately or individually, for each of us here, God, we pray that we will be waiting and willing and ready and ready, ready to receive, humbly, with open hearts and open minds.

In Jesus' name, amen.