When is the time to rock the boat and when is the time to be quiet and blend in with everyone else?  When are you a patriot and when are you a rebel?  When are you part of the problem and when are you part of the solution? When, how, and why do we submit to authority and when must we buck the system?  When are we all things to all people that we might win them, and when must we be separate and stand out as belonging to Christ?  When is it best to say something and when is it best to keep your mouth shut?  Interesting questions, you must admit.  I find myself wrestling these days, as never before, with some of these questions.  When you are young and full of zeal, you think you know all of the answers to these and many more questions.  However, the older I get, and the closer we come to the mid-night hour, the more questions I have.   My guess is that there must be more of you out there with the same questions.  I hope to begin to address these pressing issues.  It may take several blogs as we dig into these issues Biblically.

     As a person who has grown up in the church, attended three Bible schools, served on boards, pastored, evangelized, and taught submission and authority, I thought I understood all of these principles.  I am by nature and personality, a very submissive person.  I have always looked up to those over me as people to never be questioned.  Even as a child, I was taught to never question doctors, dentists, teachers, or grown-ups.  I was taught that the word no was not even available to me.  Therefore, that extreme teaching put me in danger and subjected me to abuse, more than once in my life.  I never questioned a minister, or anyone else until the last few years.  

     When revival touched and changed my life forever, I had easy answers.  If you were not in an on-fire church, get out.  If your pastor doesn’t want to go farther, find a new one.  I always said that I would move if I didn’t live in an area with a good revival church.       

     When I say revival church, I’m talking about the Book of Acts kind of revival.  This is a church where the gifts of The Spirit are not only allowed or tolerated, but encouraged. This is a church where it is a frequent and normal thing to have His gifts and His Spirit in manifestation on a regular basis.   This is a kind of church where The Holy Spirit has free reign to move any way, any time, that He desires.  It is a place where the leadership not only allows God to move but creates an atmosphere that God loves to dwell and move in.  This is a church on fire that goes out and wins the lost.  It is a church of holiness and power.  It is a church where people are quick to repent, with sorrowful repentance.  These people come out from the world and live differently.  

    This is not a church where people use grace loosely for their own lasciviousness and desires.  It is not a church where people gather for one hour to do their duty and come out no different than they went in.  It is not a nice, social club where people just have doughnuts in the foyer, visit for awhile, and are told they are nice people and that God loves them just like they are.  He does love them, but does not want them to stay as they are.     

     This is a church where the entire Gospel message is proclaimed.  The Bible says in Rom. 11:28, ”Behold the goodness and the severity of God”.  As ministers of The Gospel we are told to not only exhort but to admonish, reprove, and rebuke.  We will stand before a Holy God and give an account for how we handled The Word of God.  Gal. 1:10 says, “For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” In this hour, like no other, everything is standing in the balance.  We are in the last days and Jesus is coming for a holy, sanctified, set-apart, church without spot or wrinkle.  We are about to witness the demise of our great nation, our families, and society as we have known them, unless their is a Great Awakening!  This will not come about in a nominal, seeker-sensitive church.  We must have a church that understands the blood of Jesus Christ and His Holy Covenant.  

     There is a demonic strategy for this hour that seems to be working well.  It is to water down the church in the spirit of winning more people to Jesus.  It is to water down the blood in the name of acceptance.  It is to water down fire and fervency in the name of unity and just getting along.  It is aimed to water down holiness in the name of grace.  It has a plan to do away with honor in the name of making everyone feel comfortable. It is a plan to stop the gifts of The Spirit from operating in the name of protecting the unbelievers and the babies of the church.  However, my Bible tells me that the gifts of The Spirit are a sign for the unbeliever. 1 Corinthians 14:22 - “ Therefore tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe but to unbelievers;....”.  This satanic plan tells us that we must find out what is attractive to the world and do it to win them.  That would be like asking a small child what they want in school.  They would tell you, lots of candy, more recesses, and no work.  If we accommodated them just to have the largest school in the country, what would that school be like?  Would it produce real students?  Or would it produce ignorant, spoiled children that call themselves students?

     The Bible tells us that in this hour there will be great, rampant, deception in the church. 2 Tim. 3:13, “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived”.  Eph. 5:6 - “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”   Matt. 24:11 - “ Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many”. He warns us in I Tim. 4:1-2 - “ Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, (2) speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.”    It tells us in 2 Tim. 4:3 - “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers”;

 It also tells us that people who practice sin are none of His and that there must be fruit of repentance. 1 Cor. 6:9-11 - “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,[a] nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God”.  1 John 3:9-10 - “ Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God. (10)  In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.  1John 5:2 - “ By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments”.  It tells us that this is a narrow road and not many choose it.  Instead, they will gravitate to the easy, wide, acceptable road.  (Matt. 7:3-4)

     Even as I write this, I am weeping at the state of the church and the deception that I see coming to good people.  It seems to be much like the old proverbial story of the frog being boiled in water slowly.  I look at people and want to scream “wake up, before it’s too late”, while shaking them.  They seem asleep and don’t even realize they are being lulled to sleep.  I have contemplated how this can happen and have begun to see very clearly some of the tactics the enemy is using.  We will continue to discuss them in further blogs but I will give one here.  It’s called unity and getting along, not making waves.  Let’s look at true unity and when it’s time to speak up.

     I have witnessed some unique situations that I do not feel free to speak openly about for the same reason that most don’t.  There are good people involved.  These are nice people.  Besides, since the church of Jesus Christ is one church and we will never build anything unless we unify over the blood, we feel we must not speak of another church, denomination, doctrine, service, or sermon, negatively.    .

     Several years ago, in the 90’s, it seemed people were so hungry for revival.  I used to go into a church for one scheduled week and stay for six or seven weeks.  In one church, eighteen denominations and sixteen states attended that revival.  In another church where I stayed for seven weeks, the pastor asked me to stay for another seven but I didn’t.  In that revival, young people were hitch-hiking from all over the state to attend.  Hundreds were saved.  I thought that by the year 2000 revival would have taken the nation by storm.  It used to be easy to tell people to go to a good Holy Ghost church.  There were many of them in most cities. 

     I remember that the man who was my pastor at the time and whom I was the associate evangelist of, Dr. Rodney Howard-Browne, would be very blunt with people along these lines.  People would come to him and myself at times and say, “thank you for coming to this church.  I go to a church that doesn’t allow The Holy Spirit to move like this and I feel like I’m dying.  The only thing that keeps me going is to sneak over to this church once a year when they have someone in who believes in these things.”  Pastor Rodney said he refused to say the politically correct thing anymore. So he would ask, “why are you going there?”  There were always many pat answers.  “Momma bought the organ there, Grandma founded the church, my kids were baptized there, they are nice people and have great pot-lucks, and the usual answer of “I feel I’m called to be the fire there and catch the rest on fire.”  I loved his response to that.  “That’s like going to a restaurant that serves poisonous food and saying that if you go and sit there long enough, the food will get good.  Only the head-chef is allowed to change the food, not the people sitting there.”  Besides that, you are in rebellion to sit in a place and believe something different and pray that God changes the pastor.  You need to be where you believe like they believe.

     That was fine as long as people were in an area where there was a Holy Ghost church to go to.  Recently we met with some people from our denomination that talked about how they feel the same way but that there is a time to go somewhere and just do what you can do, keep your mouth shut, turn it over to the new generation, and unify where we can.  That sounds good and even right on some points.  I can even understand it, instead of bringing division, we plug in, and be nice.  I know how it hurt when we were pastoring and people criticized and stirred up trouble.  The old me, who likes to make peace, love people,  and be loved understands this entirely.    However, I know that you become what you are a part of, after awhile.  If you sit under luke-warm teaching, you become luke-warm.  If you are a part of something that doesn’t encourage the gifts and manifestations of The Holy Spirit, you no longer operate in them yourself.  If others around you don’t win the lost, you stop.  If you hear enough teaching on anything, it eventually gets in and we are responsible for what we let in our ear-gates.  It doesn’t have to be a total lie, just a half truth.  

     Most television preachers are saying the same thing.  “God loves you and has a great plan for you.  Be blessed and come back next week”.  There is no mention of sin, the blood, true conversion, living an over-coming life, or being like the early church, full of power and miracles.  People love it.   You can build a big church quickly by giving them what they want and never challenging them with change.  However, according to 2 Tim. 4:2, 2/3 of preaching should be rebuking and reproving.  The old revivalists did not water down the word.  People were weeping, screaming, and feeling like they were sliding into hell, (another unpopular subject), and would come running to the alter to repent.  

     I think of our great nation, how it was founded, and the price that was paid.  We call them patriots and heroes today but the established government of England called them traitors.  If they would not have spoken up and called out, “Give me liberty or give me death”, we would have no United States of America.  That’s why so many of us are speaking out again for our nation.  It’s not that we do not respect the office of the president but are trying to wake people up to the fact that he and so many are trying to take this nation as we have known it, away from us.  When we email, speak up, demonstrate, or sign petitions, we are fighting to not have this great republic become a Godless, socialist nation.  Yet, the current leadership would claim that they, too, are Americans who only want what is best for this country.  Maybe they are so deceived that they truly believe that.  However,there are some who know the truth.  Do we just call ourselves fellow Americans, unify, and watch it disintegrate before our eyes?  Or do we say it’s too and one person can’t make a difference, so we dare not rock the boat?  Or do we declare, at our own risk that we are going the wrong way?  Anymore, I feel like an alien in my own country.  You are looked at as some small-minded, ignorant, radical if you feel marriage is for one man and one woman.  You are looked at in the same way if you declare that we were founded as  a Christian nation under God, and that He should be put back in the schools.  Yet, as Christians, we have a duty to continue to proclaim these things.  It’s not that we want to stir up trouble, be negative, or don’t love our country.  It’s just the opposite.  We want the true America back!     

     This brings me back to our original question.  I have tasted God’s glory and will never be the same.  I can never go back to anything less.  Yes, I can unify over the blood of Jesus, but there is more.  The true church of Jesus Christ was the early church.  That was our pattern for continued church.  Signs and wonders, the baptism of The Holy Spirit, healings and miracles, buildings being shaken, and dead people being raised.  This is the church.  If I have to be anywhere where the gifts are squelched, The Holy Spirit grieved, no manifestations, worship rushed, giving never mentioned, healing not taught or practiced, I would rather be home letting God be God.  Let the true church of Jesus Christ rise up in this hour.  Let’s not settle for anything else.  I’m not talking about bickering about styles of preaching,  what color we want the carpet to be, or how loud the music should be.  Those are examples of petty people being difficult.  I’m talking about contending for true revival at the expense of being labeled a rebellious radical.  I’m afraid I have to say, give me His glory, give me revival, give me His holiness, give me His presence, or give me death!