My name is Brent Williamson, and I'm 36
years old.
I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio.
I was saved in my early 20s, but
then I had a false salvation when I
was 19 years old.
And what happened when I was in that
church, and I wanted to share this because
this is something of a passion and a
burn upon my heart, that when I was
going to a church and the pastor called
me to the front and prayed over me
and had all the elders and everybody there
praying over me.
They said, after the prayer, Brent, do you
accept Jesus?
Well, I said yes, because I was embarrassed
and I had nothing else to say, but
yes, everybody else wanted me to say yes.
So I wasn't born and raised in church,
so I thought that was appropriate thing to
say, yes, and so I believe I was
saved from that point.
And then from there on, I did go
back to my old ways.
I never experienced a genuine salvation.
And so finally, long story short, I ended
up back in the old ways.
I got genuinely saved, as I said, in
my early 20s.
But then from there, I met a godly
woman who was born and raised in church
herself.
Her dad was a pastor.
And then I was called to preach, and
I had that burden to preach.
And from that point on, I began seeking
out God with all my heart and finding
out what direction He had for me.
And I began preaching, and some opportunities came
open to preach in nursing homes.
And so I did.
And then from that point, I got privileged
and honored to meet a godly man.
I was roughly about 24 years old, and
I wasn't pastoring yet, just beginning my ministry.
And I walked up to him, and I
can vividly remember asking him after he preached
a camp meeting.
And I said, Brother, I'm a new preacher.
What books would you recommend, besides the Bible,
to read?
And immediately, he wrote down on a piece
of paper, and he said on that paper,
E.
M.
Bounds, R.
A.
Torrey, and A.
W.
Tozer.
And I can still remember seeing that piece
of paper.
And I looked at that piece of paper,
and I said, What books?
And he said, Every one of them.
And from that point on, I read every
book I could possibly get my hands on.
And then from that point on, I got
introduced to a man named Leonard Ravenhill.
And Leonard Ravenhill was someone that really changed
my life, even though at the point, Leonard
was passed on and went with the Lord
by that time.
And I had a friend of mine who
said, I have found a book that's 200
,000 books.
I can remember him saying it today.
And I said, Really?
He said, Oh, yeah.
He said, If you see this book, you've
got to get it, Brent.
And he said, It's Why Revival Terry's by
a man named Leonard Ravenhill.
I said, I've never heard of him.
He said, If you see it, get it.
And one day I was in a bookstore,
and I bought it, and I saw it.
I wasn't looking for it.
And I remember vividly that I got to
the third page of that book, and I
was on my face before God.
And it changed my life from that point
on.
And from that point, I began seeking the
deeper life and what God would have me
to do.
One of my burdens I have, and I
guess a frustration, is the fact that the
youth of today, and a lot of people
today in church, do not know what revival
is.
They have no idea what revival could produce,
or has produced in the past, or what
God is capable of doing, if we call
out unto him, if we cry to him,
if we humble ourselves.
And in one instance, or many instances, in
the historical accounts of revival, just not in
the book of Acts, or we get into
the Old Testament, we see Ahab, and we
see all these other kings humbling themselves before
God, and God begins to move, and God
begins to pour out his spirit.
And even after the book of Acts, we
find instances of historical accounts of revival, when
the church humbles herself.
And yeah, we talk about 2 Chronicles 7
-14 so many times in revival, but this
exactly is the antidote, I believe, is humility,
brokenness before God.
God longs and loves to see his people
broken and humble before him, not pride and
arrogant, but humble.
And that's what I want to see so
bad in the church.
The church is so prideful, so arrogant today
in America.
She's so far above what God...she's wise.
She's too wise.
And she needs to humble herself before God
and say, you are the great and mighty
God.
You are the chief.
The apostle Paul says, Christ shall have preeminence
over all things in the church, all things.
And we need to get back to that,
where Christ is the head, the genuine head
of the church.
Man is not.
The pastor is not.
No man is.
Jesus Christ is the head of the church.
And we're in a dark period right now
in the United States.
And I know right now there is real
revivals going on in different parts of the
world.
China is one of them.
China is having great news of God in
the underground church.
I've got some brothers out there right now
I've been talking with.
There is great power over there right now.
They're seeing persecution, but they're growing.
They have no Bibles.
The pastors have hardly any Bibles at all,
but they have the power of God.
And they're growing.
Some of these Christians are being shipped out.
They don't know where they're taking them to.
They're meeting in undisclosed locations at midnight, four
o'clock in the morning, just to have
church.
There it is.
There is where God is at right now.
We can talk about Mexico.
My father-in-law was in Mexico a
number of years ago with this church.
And he remembered vividly.
And he said, Brent, when I went to
a tent meeting they had there in Mexico,
these poor Mexicans, it was a tent.
There was no carpet.
There was no pavement of concrete.
When they came in the church on a
Sunday, they all knelt down in their seats
on the dirt floor.
And he said, literally, it wasn't grass.
It was pure dirt.
And every one of them knelt down and
prayed.
Not no grandma prayer, but they prayed through
before they ever sat down in their seat.
And he said, Brent, God came into that
tent.
He said he remembered praying and worshiping God.
And his hands were lifted in the air.
And next thing you know, he looked at
his clock or his watch, and it was
three o'clock in the afternoon.
They just had church for four hours in
a blink of an eye.
In every instance of revival, when God shows
up, we lose track of time.
When people begin watching their clocks and looking
at their watches, we know that God's not
there.
Because when God shows up, we have eternity
involved.
When eternity is involved, heaven has come down,
and all we're caught up is in God
himself.
And that's what church should be about, being
caught up in Jesus Christ and his glory
to glorify him.
And Jesus Christ will show up to a
people who are humble and broken and long
for him.
And that's what revival is all about.
And we have, in remembering back in between
the 5th century and the 13th century of
revival, there was a great darkness back then.
There was a dark period where there was
very little writings of revival, very little moves
of God.
There was a little trickle here and there,
but very little.
And what I see in my personal belief
is that we're in that dark period right
now.
We haven't seen a real revival.
I'm talking a nationwide revival where the bars
shut down, the taverns shut down, where people
are longing to go to church, the lights
are not shutting off in the sanctuary.
People are just mesmerized by the power of
God.
All they want to do is be together,
praying and seeking the face of God, repenting.
We're not seeing that today.
We're seeing the American church coming up with
every fancy thing it can find under the
sun to draw people to a church.
When the most powerful, attractive thing we can
find is God himself.
When John the Baptist was in the middle
of the desert, he didn't have no highway
intersection he located his church by.
He was out there in the middle of
the desert.
And the Bible says regions from all around
came to hear him preach.
Why?
Because he was baptized with the Holy Spirit.
He had the power of God upon him.
And that's where we need to get back
to is the power of God.
Again, going back with all the historical accounts
of revival, we can get past this dark
period if we just humble ourselves and cry
out to God and ask God for mercy.
He's a merciful God.
If we just will do that.
One thing we're doing is we're inviting people
to come into a building rather than inviting
people to come to Christ.
If you study history, when God begins to
move in a genuine revival anytime in history,
they're not pushing people to get into four
walls.
They're not pushing people to get into a
building of what we call the church building.
When revival comes and God comes down in
all his glory and power, people are inviting
them to the kingdom of God, Jesus Christ
himself.
If you study the history of Christ, he
never tried to get people into the temple.
He never tried to get people into a
physical building.
He tried and preached the kingdom of God
to them.
And that's where we're so off today.
We're trying to invite people.
And now we call it witnessing the evangelical
way today.
The American evangelical witnessing opportunity is to say,
hey, come to church on Sunday.
Well, that's not what Jesus told us to
do.
He told us to get them to come
into the kingdom of God.
We can't save them, but we were told
to lead them to the kingdom.
Jesus, again, preached the kingdom of God.
And that's our job as Christians to preach
his kingdom and lead them in that direction.
That is where it all boils down to,
is we have to get people seeing God
and God himself, not into a fancy building,
not into anything else, but God himself.
We have to get back to the preaching
of the cross of Jesus Christ.
The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 1.19,
for the preaching of the cross is foolishness
unto them that are perishing, but unto the
wise is the power of God.
We've got to get back to the genuine
preaching of the cross of Jesus Christ.
We have to get back to the wrath
of God.
We hear love, love, love, but there's a
balance there.
There is the wrath of God.
You mentioned the wrath of God today in
the church and you'd be kicked out.
And here just recently in my own personal
devotional reading time, I've been rereading some of
the sermons of Jonathan Edwards back in the
1700s.
And that's some of the historical council revival.
And it also sparks my mind about Jonathan
Edwards when he preached that awesome message, sinners
in the hands of an angry God.
One thing we never hear about, the man
spent three days and three nights in prayer
and fasting before he ever preached that message.
He didn't preach.
He preached it from his notes.
I know a lot of us already know
this, but the man was anointed by God
because he spent time with God.
He humbled himself before he even preached that
message.
And you study history of those old sermons
and you never would ever think a sermon
like that could ever be preached in the
American church.
Because my personal belief is you preach a
sermon like that today, Jonathan Edwards or Wesley
or Finney or Whitfield, you'd be kicked out
of the church.
They say you're too hard and you're legalistic.
Well, that's what they blamed those guys back
then for, being legalistic and too hard.
But we've come to the place where we
say the cross is love.
The cross also means the wrath of God
too.
It means love.
Yeah, Jesus died, blood gave his life for
us, but he was forsaken of God.
He had to drink that cup and that
cup was the wrath of God.
He drank that cup and he was forsaken.
And we have to get back to genuine
preaching of the cross of Jesus Christ and
show people what it really means and what
happens when we get nailed to that cross,
that old rugged cross.
Prayer is a key to revival.
I mentioned humility, but prayer has and always
will be a key to genuine revival.
Anytime you ever read about revival in all
history, you see people praying earnestly.
You see people spending time earnestly seeking God
for revival.
And any man of God that you've ever
read about in history, no matter who he
was or where his background is from, every
great man of God had a great prayer
life.
You can study it.
I have studied it and you see their
intense prayer life.
They spent hours with God.
Well, I got the privilege of speaking with
Martha Ravenhill.
She said, Leonard Ravenhill spent anywhere from eight
to 10 hours a day in prayer.
We never hear about that kind of stuff.
And I remember what Paul Ravenhill told me.
Paul Ravenhill said, he said, Brent, prayer is
not measured by time.
Prayer is measured by the intensity.
For the Bible says the fervent effectual prayer
of a righteous man avails much.
It's the intense prayer.
And I, one time in my life, I
got caught up in making a time in
idle.
How much time can I spend with God?
It's not about that.
It's about seeking God with all of our
heart.
God is a rewarder of them who seek
him diligently, not half-hearted, but fervently and
intensely.
Prayer is measured by, again, not by time,
but by the intensity.
We see men of Leonard Ravenhill spending eight
to 10 hours a day in prayer.
We see all kinds of men.
I could talk about hours of prayer lives
of men that I've studied.
We see them spending many, many hours in
prayer.
But we have to remember also not to
get caught up in their time of prayer.
But going back, we have to see it
was the passion of their heart for revival
or whatever they were praying for.
I remember one time when Martha Ravenhill, again,
on one occasion told me about Leonard.
She said, no one hardly knows what I'm
about to tell you about Leonard.
And she said, every person that Leonard prayed
for that had cancer was healed, was healed.
We all know Leonard Ravenhill was not a
prosperity preacher by any means.
He's a very humble man of God.
But prayer can do many things because it's
through God.
And if we seek God with all of
our heart, and we find where God is,
and that's through prayer.
I thought about the parable of Jesus when
he said, the man that traveled off to
a far-off country, and he's speaking about
heaven.
In a sense, in the same way, that's
what we're doing with prayer.
We're traveling to that far-off country.
We're traveling to get to God.
And sometimes we have to pray to pray.
We have to pray through.
And that's something that we haven't heard about
a lot.
They used to do in old times past.
But we have to get back to the
genuine seeking God for revival through prayer, through
fasting.
And that's where God is.
God is looking for a man that's after
his own heart.
And that's a man of brokenness, a man
of humility.
Ever learning and never able to come to
the knowledge of the truth was written by
the apostle Paul, according to the last days.
We are in that.
We've been in that point for many years
now.
We have so much teaching on revival.
We have so much teaching on faith and
holiness and healing.
We have so much knowledge, and we're not
doing what we've learned.
Ever learning, but never able to come to
the knowledge of the truth.
We have everything at this very moment as
Christians.
We have everything God has designed us to
have.
We have the power of God.
We have the word of God.
We have the prayer of faith.
We have everything there if we just go
what we've learned and do what God has
told us to do.
We don't need any, we don't need one
more conference.
We don't need one more seminar.
That's the last thing we need.
We just need to do what God has
told us to do.
As Mary said herself, whatever he sayeth, do
it.
We will never fulfill the great commission until
we fulfill the great commandments.
And I hope you take that to heart
because that's something that's burning upon my heart.
We have to get back to loving the
Lord our God.
Once a person genuinely loves the Lord supremely
with everything in them, then it's going to
drive them to go out into the highways
and the byways and to witness.
And no longer are we going to be
meeting preachers and trying to kick our people
out the door to tell them, hey, you
need to be witnessing and sharing your faith.
There's going to be something natural within them
wanting to speak about the first love, and
that's Jesus Christ.
And that's another revival we need, a revival
of witnessing, but it's a revival of loving
the Lord our God with all your heart,
strength, mind, and soul.
One thing also I wanted to share with
a burden of mine is I hear so
many people call revival, or we had a
revival last Sunday, or we're going to have
a revival, or we just experienced a revival
in our church, and they have this trickle
effect.
And because we haven't had a genuine revival
in so many years, almost anything, any wind
blows through, we call revival.
And I remember what A.W. Tozer said
years ago.
He said, one hot day doesn't make a
summer, and one hot day doesn't make a
revival.
We need something that's genuine.
And again, we've heard it before, but I'll
say it again.
It's when the lights don't shut off in
the sanctuary is a good sign that God
has showed up.
And my whole point to everything that I've
said today is God showing up is our
greatest need.
We just need God to show up.
We need genuine preaching of regeneration again.
We need to see people genuinely born of
his spirit.
We need to see people truly praying again.
We need to have that true church, a
house of prayer again.
We need to see genuine holiness preached again.
We still need the love of God more
than ever, yes.
But again, we need also the fine balance
that God is angry with the wicked every
day.
And one thing I heard years ago, and
I read that blessed my heart, was what
Madam Guion said.
It was a prayer by Madam Guion.
It's very short.
It's very quick, but I hope you can
write this down and put it into the
tablets of your own heart like I have
mine.
And she said this, and it was a
prayer.
Lord, not some of me and some of
thee, but all of thee and none of
me is my plea.