God Uses the Consecrated

Well, Gidey folks, welcome to the Awakened Network podcast. I'm John Tyson, Lead Pastor of Church of the City in New York, and I'm joined by Chad Bohai, who is the Lead Pastor of Radiant Central Coast, and Sam Gibson, who leads Prae and YC in New York City. Thanks for joining us in this podcast. We're going to be talking about prayer, revival, awakening, and what it looks like to seek God for another move of the Holy Spirit in our time. It's great to have you with us. We're back, episode four with the Awakened Network podcast. We are here. Let's do this. So this episode, we're going to look at tackling the question, why should we try out for revival? Why is this not just for like the overly zealous one in our church? Why does God want to put the cry for revival that leads to awakening in the hearts of His sons and daughters? I think this is a really important question. A lot of times people say, hey, there's so much injustice in the world. Revival feels like a luxury with so much brokenness. There's so many unreached people groups. Why are you talking about revival in the West where the gospel has been proclaimed for hundreds of years? Let's get the gospel to the ends of the earth. There's always reasons put forward why revival feels like a luxury and not a necessity. Monica's a junior wrote an amazing book on revival and in it, he gives four reasons, four frameworks for why we should seek God for revival. Care about revival. Have a half for revival. The first thing he says is this is we need to seek God for revival because it cultivates our imagination and our desire. We live with such limited imagination of what God can do. If you live in America, here's what your biggest dreams are in the American evangelical church. One, God will grow you a big church. Two, God will give you a big platform. What else is there? That really is what is viewed as success in American evangelicalism. So I think we need to get a vision of what we know what man can do. We know what the American evangelical church can do. With the God and what God can do. So we study revival to call about our imagination and our vision of what God can do. What do you think Sam and you hear? What can God do? Yes. We've seen the best version of church that man can build. Like that. We have seen human capacity is actually pretty amazing. It's pretty remarkable. We're not like you end downsizing what people are capable of. It's amazing the world we live in. But we have seen the best version it feels like of what man can build and yet how insufficient it is to meet the hour that we're in. I think we've yet to see outside of little glimpses in history, the best version of what God can do when he's invited to the situation. We talked about in that last episode, the age of Saul to the age of David. And it was remarkable that as David's rule, when the presence gets back in the midst of the people, it is just like God establishing the nation of Israel in a way that no one thought possible. Who being taunted by the Philistines for some of years also, God gives them rest on every side. One thing I love, I think about Finney when he went to Rochester and amazing story. He goes to third Presbyterian church because so many people have come to Christ under his revival in New York City that they make a call to New York state, come and pastor the New Convents in New York. Third Presbyterian church say to Finney, come up here, you owe us a pastor. He's getting on a boat on the Eury Canal and he's getting ready to go somewhere else. He talks to all of his trusted advisors and they tell him, it's not worth it. We don't think there's anything there. This isn't it. He senses right at the last minute the Holy Spirit tell him to go. So we go. Finney preaches 96 sermons in a period of six months and 100,000 people give their lives to Jesus from the poorest of the poor to the wealthy elites. It's a total citywide taking one theologian who witnessed it at the time said this is the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since Pentecost. Wow. In church history to that time. Six months. And they said in the criminal court system, you could still feel the effects of Finney's revival. 40 years later. Now I want you to think about your next sermon series or the sermon series you're past is working on. What are you believing God for in the next six months? You need to know that God can touch a city. You need to know that the same God can avoid human beings in hard places and it's possible that in New York where we live for a hundred thousand people to meet Jesus and for that to be revival effects felt in 2060. It's possible for God to do that. So if you don't study the history revival and we haven't even gotten to the biblical ones, we have an impoverished imagination. We need to study it to get our minds back. And just one like really sticky my one of my dear friends Rick just shared at our church and he threw out a one liner referencing how low our expectation is in the church and it was it wasn't a brow beating message. It was an honest indictment where we've been doing man centered, Saul centered, mathematics, which is we have five loaves and two fish and look we can feed seven people. The reason we need to have our imaginations and our desire centers and live and by the spirit by hearing stories, rehearsed and retold is because five plus two in the kingdom or present centered mentality isn't doesn't equal seven. That's what we can do. It equals five thousand men plus women and children. Yes. And so we have to tell the story of the God who has moved throughout history and response to the cries of his people. We have passed as in a time of decline building their visions on seven people being fed. Yes. This is what my church plant will be. This is all God can do. We're looking in the natural instead of saying God is what you can do if I submit and multiply. I love that. I'm going to preach on that. That's great. So cultivate desire and imagination number one. What's number two methodology for how we go about seeking God for revival. Yes. Are there keys to revival? Are there ways that God responds? Are there certain conditions or methodologies in which God responds to what we want to see? So I think this is important. You will, you will always see. Kaiser goes on and says that there's nine marks in every biblical revival. Meaning there's nine things that are present that normally mark out what it is that God does. We know there things like the radical pursuit of God in prayer. Even the ones who say, well, we don't know Jonathan Edwards talks about the surprising move of God. We did nothing different. But when you look at his baseline level of devotion, we did nothing different. I spent another 11 hours with Jesus this year every day. You know, like they had a really, really high level of seeking God. So it's your prayers, one of those things. We can't sense. Reconfaction. The fear of God, sowing righteousness for yourself, tearing down idols. Yes. The commitment to reconcile. Yep. That's with those that have been offended or wronged. Lots. Yeah. So again, a lot of times, this is how the evangelical church tends to work. Ready? Successful trend gains attention. The evangelical industrial economic complex attaches to it and says we can monetize this. They sell the trend to exhausted pastors as a panacea for their decline. So that's a, that's a whole, that's conferences, that's books, that's industries. Then swinging back the other way, you get reactionaries, you get people who present the opposite. So if one movement is like big like the book of Acts, the next guys are going to do microchurch like the book of Acts. If you get one guy's, it's like, we need empowerment. We need faith. The other people are going to say we need faithfulness. We need to just, you know, so it's just a whole series of, you know, we need faithfulness. Successful trends often imitating the world followed by reactionary people trying to be faithful and not get sucked into the trends. And what you miss, the miss of that is God's methodology for the kingdom. So we need to go back to the ancient ways. Look for the ancient paths. Go back, that's why it's important to study it. What do we see? What are the conditions? What are the factors? What are the, the things that God seeks to get a hold of? So yeah, you need to get a methodology, not trend chasing, or theological pet peeves, or mission methodologies, or whatever it is. It's what has God said are the principles that lead to the power of the spirit being poured out. Yeah, the amount, I think something like even just to spend time, if you want to go deeper, here's like the amount of conditional statements that God makes. If, if my people, follow later on, then this will happen. Yeah, it's then, it's then, over the Bible. And we've just like done such a like, you know, all about the sovereignty of God. God's going to do what he wants, what he wants to, and it's just like, man, just go get haunted a little bit by the if statements in the Bible. Yeah, that's so good. And it's all these different conditions. God's like, this is the atmosphere in which attracts my presence. Yes. That we're often inviting God into like, and habit of space he's not familiar with. Yeah. You know, it's like, man, come in, come in this gathering. It's like, I'm unfamiliar with the space you're asking me to be in. Yes, you know, there are miles of, people, people don't connect these dots. Henry Blackaby, he wrote, uh, Bob's his book, experiencing God. He's experiencing God. Amazing. Paul was what? Do you remember the big idea of experiencing God? Find out where God is working and join him. Don't ask God to bless you. bless your thing, find out what he's blessing enjoying. That's right. That's his big principle. You know what people don't know about that? He was a part of a church in Canada. And there was a man who came from Scotland and preached at his church and his name was Duncan Campbell. And Duncan Campbell prophesied that a move of God was going to happen in that church. A move of God happened in that church. Black Abbey was in leadership in that church. And as a result of watching what happened because of the Hebrides Revival that was prophesied in his church wrote that book that went on and sold millions of copies. So again, that wasn't a random insight. That was a revelation from a man of God who met the conditions of Revival and experience in the Hebrides. As leaders in local churches, like how do we see God for it? We are under an insane amount of pressure culturally to constantly reinvent ourselves, to keep up. So when we hear passages, is that Jeremiah 6? I don't want to misquote it. So ask for the ancient pathways. 16. Yes. A new generation, young people right now, youth pastors, people who have a passion for God in high school college need to hear it's okay to go and ask for the ancient ways. So well worn paths that God has historically traveled down because they check what matters in his boxes, his heart, if you will, like repentance, consecration and the like humility and seeking in with heart, soul, mind and strength. And so the methodology, how we seek for it, it's actually a gift to leaders that are here and emerging and being raised up to go, gosh, the crippling pressure to have to be so fresh. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't contextualize the new thing is the old thing. Yes. And so it's important to study those ways how God has historically moved. And really it's a gift if you're a leader like, oh, I can do that. Like they did nothing more exhausting than chasing evangelical trends. And there's nothing more terrifying if you've built on trends on realizing that trend has moved on. That's a terrifying thing. I remember this so clearly when I moved to the US, it was the Seeker Church and then it was the Purpose Driven Church, then it was the emerging church, then it was the Missional Church, then it was church online. It's just and the multi-site church. I mean, it's just it's all these treasuries. You know what's underneath and I'm not saying that that stuff doesn't matter. If you know me, I mean, I believe in contextual methodology, but that is so surface compared to the kinds of, and this is the third point, starting revival tells us about the kinds of lives God uses. We have the same gospel, John Wesley, George Whitfield. These people had the same gospel and the same Bible you had, but what they had is a different response. What happened at a Zuzer Street? William Seymour. We have the same Bible that you have, but they just had a different response than we do. So I think we need to learn not just to get mentored by celebrity pastors or effective leaders. And you can't, this stuff is good there. Absolutely. But I'm telling you, man, what you learn from is like who in history has lived a certain way and we will have an a huge conversation the other night. So I think it's so important. We were talking about creating content, prepping for this podcast and you were like, they didn't have Instagram or TikTok to be distracted by. And that is such an insight because if you want the fruit they saw, you've got to live the life they live. But then you have to understand how they use their time and focused. And so if you want the fruit, you've got to adopt the lifestyle. And I often think if John Wesley was sitting at this table today, what would he say about our use of media, our use of technology? He probably wouldn't say it's sinful. He probably said it's stupid. Like he's given too much time to it. And he wouldn't do it out of legalism. He'd do it out of love. He'd do it out of devotion. But what else when we talk about kinds of people that God uses, this is also a window into a reality in the kingdom that's liberating because you go, now clearly God has used some brilliant bright people. I'm not saying that. But the amount of really that that guy really that guy really those two saints and the Hebrides who are trying out for revival, it's also it just it's like a fresh release of like the wind of God spirit of hope and confidence. Like if he can do that through them, then why can't I believe that he could use? Why could I be one of those vessels set apart for for noble good purposes? And so that's exactly it, man. It's God uses consecrated people. It's like right. It's the good people who consecrate themselves to the things of God who God uses. It's not quite an if then. It's actually maybe even clearer than that. It's an invitation. That's second Timothy to passage, which says in a house, there's two kinds of instruments. We've got ones for common use and then you've got some that set themselves apart for special purposes. They're useful to the master. And I think then you go back, you will find all of them going through a season of profound surrender, wrestling deeply to get rid of this in sacrificing themselves, living that sort of Nazarite call. It's a voluntary sacrifice for the pursuit of more. And I think that's one of the things we're seeing in our ministries right now. Yes. Favour on the idea of consecration. Yes. So the invitation is not, does God love you? He loves you. Yes. It's the gospel. He's not going to love you anymore. The more you consecrate. Yes. Your love is revealed at the cross. The question is, do you love him more? Will he use you because your life is available? So it's not about legalism. It's about devotion. I want to give myself to be the kind of person you can use. And you will always find people who use their time differently. Yes. They'll use their money differently. They'll monitor their energy. They will see their lives as a sacred stewardship given to the things of God, not just participating in the things that are allowed. All things are lawful, not all things are profitable. And you find people who say, I want profit. Wesley had this little quote, I value all things now only by the value they contain in eternity. His whole vision was trying to do an start in eternity, work backwards. That's exactly right. It's like by Bitcoin at a dollar. He knew, get in early on eternity. Jonathan Edwards put a mark eternity on my eyes, right on my eyeballs. He wanted to see, you know, he would walk around with these crystals and stones and look through them and say, Lord, put this. Let me see who it lands like this. Or tells us the kinds of men and women because it's been some extraordinary women who've been used by God in revival. And then the last thing is how to prepare for revival. When you study revival, you start to notice that there are some themes, not formulas, but themes, conditions, which is what Arthur Wallace talks about, meaning the conditions of revival. That's a huge if then. And the ways that we can begin to prepare our hearts, one of the verses we've talked about a lot is in the book of Hosea, because it's a time of decline. We're about to disappear off the pages of history. And in the middle of it when God says, break up your fellow ground. It's time to seek the Lord. He gives them something to do in a time of decline. And man, I took that, break up your fellow ground talk, the super bloom. I took that thing on the road because we felt so powerless. You've got all of this political drama. What can we do? You've got racial injustice. You've felt overwhelmed and didn't know how to respond. You've got culture to climb. You've got COVID. What do we do in a time of decline? And here's what God says. Seek me. Break up your fellow ground. So righteous. It's all to yourself. It's even now. Yet even now there's a window of time. And I think the thing I love about this, John, we referenced this earlier. But when you have like the paradigm of what are the conditions, you actually get way more hopeful in our day and age, right? Because you walk around, hope deferred makes the heart sick. And I feel like there's such a lack of hope in the Westertures. The church has heart sickness right now because we've put hope into politics. It's fair. We put hope into celebrity pastures. We put hope into systems of man. And it's like, it's still not there. But when we start putting our hope back into the right thing, we get marked with a vision for eternity. Like without prophetic vision, people cast off restraint. And it's like, maybe that's not about your platform or your ministry. Maybe that's about a prophetic vision of eternity. And we're just revealed in Revelation four and five. But you start looking around and it's like, man, things are trending the wrong way. It does not look good in culture. But you look back in the Bible and you look back in history and you go, you know what? The atmosphere is ripe. For God to step down and to make Himself known. And so it's kind of get the twinkle in your alibi. Not you're not unaware of what's happening with society. This is not an ignorance. Not spiritual bypassing. If not spiritual bypassing is you're looking at culture going, God, we need this to produce a desperate cry. But the atmosphere is ripe for an outpouring of like a move of God. And it begins to awaken expectancy for you. You actually begin to like, oh, this is these are the times and spaces in history where God has made Himself known. And so you actually like cast off the like heaviness and the discouragement and you begin to get invited into press in for more like press in the midst of uncertainty, press into the midst of this because you have a lot of precedence here that this is meant that conditions are ripe. That's what James that passage in James five. Yes. Elijah was a human being just like us. We are buddy prayed. But he prayed. Yes. And that's the invitation. It's buddy prayed and what happens? He opened he shots in opens heaven. Yes. And that's an encouragement. The difference between Elijah and us, he said, well, he was a prophet. He was in a different dispensate. He's like, that's the opposite of the Bible's point. What the Bible is saying. He was just like you, but he prayed. And so it gives us. Let's hope. Look at the leadership he was under. Look at the horror of what was happening amongst the people of God. I mean, is there anyone worse than a habbinge Jezebel? These were godless leaders. And yet he was a man who knew God wasn't controlled by the conditions, believed for breakthrough, sought the Lord repeatedly. Yes. And something happened. And James says, think of him, right, in your city, in your time frame, when it looks like all hope is lost and godless leadership is in place. Yes. And pray. Rain is coming. No, absolutely. One of the things that woke me up usually goes, we talked earlier about David in his like, hey, I had failures later in life. I remember vividly reading in the book of Acts. It says, David fulfilled all the will of God in his generation. Yeah. And I'm telling you, I think my heart's with such intensity going, I can fulfill the will of God in my generation. David, Martin, most of us write us off after his failure. But yet the book of Acts says, he fulfilled all the will of God in his generation. And man, having people that lived the hidden life that's man, what are you doing? I'm just fulfilling God's will for my generation. I think we've just lost so site that that's even possible. That's even a method in which God wants to use like a normal person who's full of brokenness who feels like they've absolutely messed up and was like, man, yet even now, declare the Lord, return to me with all your heart with the week human fasting with the morning. Ringe your hearts, not your garments. Full of disgrace and compassion. It's slow to anger about me. It's too fast. I want to close with this quote. I love this. This was our someone sent this to me. It was a quote from Evan Roberts in the Welsh revival. It says, this many who are now silent Christians, negative Christians, Christians whose belief means little to them and nothing to anyone else will lead in this movement. And that's the thing that we forget is that God can use anybody. If you turn to God, he will turn to you, draw near to God and he will draw near to you. And so if you, I just want to say to you, if you feel like you're a candidate who God, God could never use you, you don't know what I've done. You don't know how I've screwed up. Get that out of your head. Do you know who God is? Yes. And do you know what God can do? And so we study revival to be, to be inspired by what is possible to understand the ways that God tends to move, to become the kinds of people that he can use. And also to be the kinds of four runners. Yes. To create the conditions, to seek the Lord, to create the kind of place where that's happening. So we just want to stir your faith and call you to press in and to study what God has done in history. We have a generation that's forgotten who God is and what he can do. And when, and this is the one thing I'll say, when you share about revival, it carries the seeds of revival. What you honor, God increases. Yes. Hearing about it, it's just faith for you to want to see it yourself. This power and biblical precedent to remind yourself to be encouraged, to strengthen, to call other people to contend for revival in that time. Well, that was an incredible episode. My heart is so stirred. Thank you so much. Everyone for joining us. We're excited to see you again for our next episode. [Music]