When God Breaks Through — E.A. Johnston

Encounters With God and Transformed Lives

I believe one of the most remarkable events in a person's life is when they have an encounter with God. As a student of revival, I have spent decades studying various movements of God in revival, and one common denominator between them is the transformed life from an experience with God.

We don't know much of this today because God has withdrawn himself from our midst in remedial judgment upon his church. I was taking chapel service for a Christian high school, and the elderly minister who invited me came up to me when I was done, and he said, I thank you for coming and addressing these kids, but I feel sorry for them.

I asked him why he felt sorry for them, and he replied, these church kids today don't know what it's like to see the power of God in a meeting. Then he got a faraway look in his eye and said, when I was a young pastor about 50 years ago, God was afoot in the land, and here and there across this country, you could still have an experience of God in a meeting that would forever change your life.

I knew what the old boy was talking about, for I had been in a couple of churches back yonder that were in revival, and God's presence was so thick you were melted down under a holy solemnity. But nowadays, we have to bring entertainment and loud music into our sanctuaries to drum up some kind of feeling in the flesh and call that religion, because God has returned to his holy hill.

Historical Revival and Extraordinary Encounters With God

In 1949, on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, God came down in a powerful revival that altered the spiritual life of the island. The minister who was the human instrument of that revival was Duncan Campbell, and I knew a pastor on that island who knew Duncan Campbell, and I asked him one time to describe to me his reflection of Duncan, and this is what he told me.

He said, Duncan Campbell was an ordinary man who had had an extraordinary experience of God. And as I thought about that, it made me think of others God had used in revival, men like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Asahel Nettleton, and they each were men who had had an extraordinary experience of God, and it altered their life.

The Cost of Surrender and Divine Pruning

For when God breaks through, you cannot help but be forever changed. When Jesus was here in his earthly ministry, as he passed through towns and villages, those individuals who encountered him experienced change.

Listen, friends, God cannot be explained, but he can be experienced. But there is a cost involved. If you want more of Jesus, then be prepared to have more of his cross. Revival is not only possible, it is probable, so long as we are expendable.

The question is, how bad do we want to experience him? Are we willing to be reduced to nothing so he can be everything through us? If we want more of God, are we willing to be brought to nothing? Are we truly willing to gamble our lives away for him and the sake of the gospel?

Are we willing to surrender to the divine process of how God builds a servant of his? For God builds his servants through his divine process of reducing and decreasing, emptying and stripping. Gold must be reduced to its purity in the furnace of affliction, and a branch must be trimmed back and decreased before it can grow more fruit.

If we truly desire further usefulness to God and a deeper experience of him, then we must submit to both the refiner's fire and the divine pruning knife. I remember years ago, I was preaching to a group of pastors on a Monday evening at the Stephen Offord Institute in Memphis, Tennessee.

And that particular night, my text was John chapter 15, which I told those pastors I called the pruning chapter. And as I spoke, the faces of those men suddenly became quite altered and serious, as a touch of heaven permeated the room, and we were getting serious with God.

And when the session was over, a few men stood in line to speak with me, and one man was an elderly black man, who approached me and threw his arms around me, and as he hugged me, he said, I have been a pastor now for sixty years, but tonight I'm going home, and when I get there I'm going to kneel by my bed and ask God to get out his pruning knife on me and my ministry.

That man knew the cost involved in getting serious with God. Listen, friends, when God breaks through, it comes on the heels of an earnest seeking of him in desperate and serious prayer. It's not the amount of prayer, but the agony in prayer that gains his ear.

Daniel's Repentant Intercession

Listen to this prayer of the prophet Daniel, and how his earnest petition of desperation reaches the throne room of heaven. In Daniel chapter 9, beginning in verse 3, we read,. And I set my face unto the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.

Let me pause here, friends, to take note of how Daniel prepared his heart in sincere humility and repentance before he sought his God. Now let us continue. And I prayed unto the Lord my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keep in the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments.

We have sinned and committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments. I will stop there. Daniel's prayer takes up the next 20 verses of this chapter as he pours out his heart to the Almighty in intercessory corporate prayer.

Answered Prayer and a Deeper Knowledge of God

But notice, friends, the result of his labor in prayer as he sought a deeper knowledge of God. In verse 12 of the next chapter, we see an angel come stand before Daniel, and he reveals to him the following, Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words.

In other words, friends, when we seek to know God and experience him in a deeper way, and we set our faces to heaven in an earnest seeking of God in prayer, then we will get a breakthrough with God in answer to prayer.

I believe that if we truly desire a deeper walk with God, that there must be such an utter and complete surrender to his will that we become willing to be made willing to enter through any type of suffering for him so long as God receives glory.

The hindrance to our progress in going deeper with God is our unwillingness to be made nothing for him. Self-preservation blocks all attempts at a deeper walk. Jim Elliott, the missionary martyr who was speared to death by Alka Indians, in his Bible were found the following words after his death, He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

When God breaks through in answer to prayer in an earnest seeking of him, then we will see how futile the things that this world are hanging in the balance of eternity. In Africa, monkeys are caught by dropping a nut they are fond of into a narrow neck jug.

The monkey will slip his furry paw into that jug and grab that nut, then his fist can't fit through the top of the jug, and lest he opens his paw, but he won't do it, the animal traders come by and catch that monkey because he won't let go of that nut.

God wants to use us in greater ways of usefulness, but we won't let go of the things that keep us from a deeper experience of God. True repentance is a painful process because through it our darling idols are ripped from us permanently.

We say with our lips we want to get serious with God, but our selfishness and self-preservation gets in the way. We just refuse to let go of our favorite nut. When God breaks through, the things we once held as important become meaningless and are seen for what they are, obstacles that merely stood between us and him.

Trusting God Through the Valley of Loss

Some stay back from mountaintop experiences with God because they fear the valley. They ask themselves, what if God takes a loved one away? What if God takes my money and my security away? It is the what-ifs of unbelief that keep many sincere believers back from getting a breakthrough with God.

But God can be trusted, friends, and he really does have our best interests at heart. What is keeping us back from making progress with him? We must ask the Holy Spirit to search our hearts and to shine his holy spotlight on the areas in our lives that must be given to God entirely.

Souls hang in the balance, and hell fills every minute while we stand in our own way while God waits to be gracious to us. If you are serious in seeking a deeper walk with God and you desire a breakthrough with God, then you must be willing to break off from the things that grieve the heart of God.

Laying Down Our Lives for Christ

We can't move God, but he can move us into a deeper experience of him. If we possess the faith to totally trust him with our lives, we have to be willing to lay down our very lives for him, if necessary, holding nothing back.

For he was willing to hold nothing back by being nailed to a cross in death so we could live. Let us pray.