I want to take you back for a
moment to one of the most important days
in the history of the world.
More important than when they discovered the wheel,
invented the wheel.
More important than when they discovered fire.
More important than atomic energy and all that
has meant to our society.
It's a day that has everlasting effect on
our planet and in the world to come.
You don't need to turn to it because
you could almost memorize it, it's so short.
In the fourth chapter of Genesis we read
in the twenty-fifth verse, And Adam knew
his wife again, and she bore a son,
and named him Seth.
For God had appointed another seed for me
instead of Abel, whom Cain killed.
And as for Seth, to him also a
son was born, and he named him Enosh.
Here's the verse.
And then, somewhere in there, on some day,
at some hour, at some point, men and
women began to call on the name of
the Lord.
That has had a profounder effect on our
world than any other thing you could imagine.
Men, at some given moment, began to call
out to God.
Now, the Bible tells us, as you know,
that Cain slew Abel, and now Cain and
his seed, independent of God, self-sufficient, we
can do it, build a name for ourselves,
we can maneuver through life without God.
That ungodly seed was about to dominate.
So God raised up a godly seed through
the line of Seth, and Seth gave birth
to Enosh, and then some revelation came.
There were no Bibles, no churches, no choirs,
no media, no verses to stand on, no
Hebrew and Greek to study, nothing.
Except there was a God who was the
Creator, and somehow adorned by revelation on people,
that when you're in trouble, there's a God
that if you call out to Him, He'll
answer you.
He'll intervene in your situation.
That it either happened maybe when a child
got sick, because you know how that affects
a parent, or it happened maybe when the
rains weren't coming down and weren't planting us
and the crops were threatened, that men began
to get this instinct that they only knew
there was a Creator God.
There was a Creator God, but now they
learned that this Creator God was also a
God who heard and who responded when, and
only when, you cried out to Him.
So somehow at that moment, men began to
call on the name of the Lord, and
it's affected the rest of history, and it's
a theme that starts there and runs through
the whole Bible and ends up in Revelation.
The word there for call is a word
that means to cry out, to treat in
treat, to call out to, to beseech, to
beg, to plead, to call out with all
of your heart.
And then the word developed another meaning, which
means in the same tone, in the same
thread, to praise, to worship, to extol with
your lips, to exalt, to honor, to celebrate,
to commemorate.
And then it began to have a meaning
also to tell abroad and to call out,
to communicate with another person, to tell somebody
else.
So the first people who were ever God's
people in the Bible were not called Christians
or Jews.
The first people that ever belonged to God
were called those who call on the name
of God.
The whole seed of everything that we're doing
here today began with people calling on God.
And then as God responded, they would begin
to praise God.
The same mouth and heart that cried out
to Him and called on Him for help,
when God answered that cry, they would begin
then to extol and to honor and to
praise God with all of their heart.
And then they began to go to other
people and said, Have you heard about the
God who answers when you call on Him?
What are you talking about?
We just know there's probably a Creator.
No, no.
The Creator is a God that when you
call out to Him, He doesn't turn a
deaf ear.
In fact, His ear is always open to
our cry.
And it doesn't matter what your problem is
or what you're facing in your church or
in your family.
God is a God who's always saying throughout
the Bible, Call upon Me.
He's entreating us to entreat Him.
Call upon Me and I will answer you.
And I'll show you great and mighty things
which you've never even imagined.
You've never even got into your head what
God can do.
Now that was the mark.
Forget now your American system of Christianity.
Forget what you were born and raised.
Because a lot of that has meat, but
there's some bones in it.
And if we just follow and keep punching
in what we learn and what people tell
us is in the cutting edge, which is
not always so.
It's not in the cutting edge.
Some of it is just silliness.
But if we go back to the Bible,
we find out that the first thing that
God ever had with people, the first relationship
was, Call on Me and I'll help you.
And when you don't know what to do,
I'll tell you what to do.
And when you're ready to throw up your
hands, don't throw them up to Me and
put your voice behind it too.
And I'll come and I'll help you.
That's how religion began.
And God's never changed.
You change.
Maybe I change, but denominations might change.
God has never changed.
And we can create and stir and redefine
all we want.
God will never change.
He's not a man that He should change
like that.
So the relationship He had, there was this
calling out to God.
And you follow through the patriarchs.
They built altars and Abraham called on God.
Isaac built an altar.
He called out to God.
Jacob, long before Moses got the worship system
of the tabernacle and received the law, men
were calling out to God.
When Abraham went down to Egypt unwisely, he
runs back to that altar at Bethel where
he first called upon the Lord.
That's the way it is when we backslide
and we get away from the ministry that
God wants us.
You always have to get back to that
altar where you started calling out to God.
How many know what I'm talking about?
Say amen.
That's where we all go back to.
And this became, by the way, the earmark
and the sign of God's people.
Moses, in his great sermon in the book
of Deuteronomy, says this about the people of
Israel.
He's getting ready for Joshua to take over
as a leader.
And he's enjoining the people to remember how
special they are.
And listen to what he says.
He says, And who else of all the
people in the world have a God that
draws near to them when they call upon
Him?
He says, Who of all the other people?
They might have better chariots, if it wasn't
allowed to have chariots.
They might have better weaponry, but he says
to all the people, Forget the Amorites.
You don't have to worry about the Jebusites.
Because who has a God like unto our
God that draws near to us when we
call upon Him?
When we call upon Him.
How many have found that?
God draws near to you whenever you call
upon Him.
You might be a mess and you'll walk
with God, but there's something about God here.
When He hears that cry, boom, He goes.
So Satan's whole device with us.
Don't call.
Don't cry.
Be clever.
Organize.
Plan a lot.
Depend on talent.
Get that computer on.
But how many know, how many know, if
we're going to do spiritual warfare, the devil
doesn't care about computers.
What he gets afraid of is when we
lift up our hearts and begin to call
out to God.
God, You're going to help me.
God, You absolutely are going to help me.
And that was the sign of Israel.
That was the absolute sign of Israel.
Who has a God like unto our God
who draws near to us only when, notice,
when we call upon Him.
All bets are off if we don't call
on Him.
There's not a promise in the Bible for
if you don't call on God, if I
forget God.
You can't stand on those promises without calling
on God.
It's not a mental exercise.
It's about this.
So put a song in your heart going
out to God.
And remember, this was the way the prophets
operated.
Remember when Elijah said with his big thing
with King Ahab?
He said, Look, get all your prophets of
Baal.
You think Baal is bad?
Bring all the prophets of Baal.
Get them all over here, and I'll stand
over here.
I'm all alone.
There's nobody left.
Get all 450 prophets, right?
And here's what.
Lay out the sacrifices, and in the end,
he poured water on the sacrifices of his.
And he said, Listen, you call out to
Baal as long as you want.
And whatever God answers, when we call, that'll
be God.
He said, Call.
Go ahead and call.
And they started early in the morning calling,
and they cried, O Baal, which tells us
what calling is about.
It's not some mental exercise.
It's about your whole being.
You will call upon me, and I will
answer you when you call upon me with
all of your heart, when you seek for
me with all of your heart.
And so they're calling, O Baal, O Baal.
Nothing's happening.
And around noontime, he even gets a little
humorous, and he says, Call louder.
He must be out of town, or he's
busy.
He's working on work, you know.
And they call, and they call, and they
call.
And what was the proof that God was
God?
What was the proof?
Because Elijah said, Now, God, you've been calling
your prophet to Baal.
Watch.
You call.
Nothing.
Because he's dead.
There's no ear to Baal.
He can't answer.
But now watch what happens when I call
to my God.
O God, hear my prayer.
And the fire came from heaven.
That was the sign.
That was always the sign.
That God hears when you call.
He has to.
Otherwise, throw away the book.
Nothing's true if that's not true.
Now, nobody developed this, of course, greater than
David, who was a man way ahead of
his time.
David lived in the New Testament with his
heart.
His body was in the Old Testament.
And we read Psalm 4.3. Listen to
this.
Psalm 4.3, But know this, the Lord
has set apart for himself him who is
godly.
The Lord will hear when I call.
That was David's whole posture to battle everything.
That was an instinct in Israel.
It doesn't matter what the opposing armies have.
If we call out to God, God gives
us the victory.
If we backslide and don't call, then we
can be knocked out by 200 soldiers.
That was the whole life of the nation
of Israel.
And David said, The Lord has set apart
the godly for himself.
Who are the godly?
The Lord will hear when I call.
David said, You can chase me.
You can persecute me.
You can do anything you want.
But when I call to God, you're in
trouble.
Because the Lord will hear when I call
to Him.
The Lord will hear when I call to
Him.
He developed that even further.
It's like the Bible tells us that the
definition of evildoers, Psalm 14.4, workers of
iniquity, evildoers, who do not call upon the
Lord.
They will not call upon the Lord.
That's the definition of the ungodly.
They'll do a lot of things, but they
will not humble themselves, recognize God's omnipotence, and
they won't call upon God.
And David says, They're the evildoers in the
land.
They won't call upon God.
And then further, as you know, we could
pick them so many places.
Psalm 50, verse 15, repeated over and over
in the Bible, call upon me in the
day of trouble.
And I will deliver you.
And you will honor me.
God says, I want praise from your life.
But the only way fresh praise will come
is if you keep calling upon me in
days of trouble.
And when you forget to call upon me,
I'll just send some trouble to remind you
how smart you really are.
How many honestly have had that happen in
your own life?
You start to backslide a little bit.
You get a little cocky.
We think we can handle everything.
And God says, Trouble.
Please send some trouble.
Trouble.
And how many know in the same day
you can go from thinking you're as bad
as can be to, oh God, help me,
Lord.
Oh God, have mercy on me.
Help me, Lord.
Come on, how many know what I'm talking
about?
Say amen.
Because notice what the intimation is that until
the day of trouble came, David didn't call
upon me.
In the day of trouble, I called upon
the Lord and he heard me and he
delivered me.
In the day of trouble, I called upon
him.
Trouble is one of God's greatest servants, isn't
it?
Because it reminds us how much we need
the Lord.
If there's something about us that gets away
from this calling thing, you know, we just
want to carry on without this childlike helplessness.
But God won't have it any other way.
In fact, revival has everything to do about
this.
And you don't go by any definition of
revival that anybody tells you in the revisionists
of the modern church era.
Listen to Psalm 80, verse 18.
Revive us, O Lord, and we will call
upon your name.
That's the sign of revival.
When people aren't calling on God's name, I
wouldn't care what else was going on.
It's not revival.
The thing about revival, whether you study the
Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the Welsh
Revival, what happened at Azusa Street, is men
got sick and tired of the status quo,
men and women and leaders, and they began
to call on God and they were insistent.
And that prayer begot revival, which begot more
prayer.
Because revival, the Holy Spirit, is the spirit
of prayer.
When we're full of the Holy Spirit, truly,
how many know, that's the spirit of prayer.
You feel the need of God everywhere you
turn.
You're driving in a car and your spirit
starts going up to God with needs and
petitions and intercessions.
And when our heart gets cold, prayer becomes
strange and we try to teach it, symposium,
seven ways to a better prayer life, but
none of that's going to happen until God
comes.
How many know what I'm talking about?
When God comes, God births the spirit of
prayer, for we know not how we ought
to pray, but the Holy Spirit helps us.
And the sign of revival always is that.
If we're prayerless, we're not revived.
If our churches don't pray and if people
don't have an appetite for God, what does
it matter how many are running?
How would that impress God?
Or your carpet, or your lights, or anything
else?
God's only had one kind of people who
called upon the Lord.
He's rich in mercy to everyone who what?
Calls upon Him.
That's Old Testament, New Testament, nothing's changed.
You can't update it.
God's not adapting it to our culture.
We adapt ourselves to God.
He's abounding in mercy and grace to everyone
who calls upon Him.
And that's why the church was born.
Obviously, we thought, all right, guess where the
church was born?
In a prayer meeting.
It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
The church was born not in a teaching
session.
The church was born in a prayer meeting.
Why?
Because God's never going to change.
Go back and tarry in Jerusalem and keep
calling on me and waiting between the calling
and throw in some Thanksgiving and praise in
there.
And then I'm going to fill you and
equip you and you'll find out that the
church was born in a prayer meeting.
What does that say about our churches when
God had the church born in a prayer
meeting and we don't even have prayer meetings?
And doesn't anybody beside myself get embarrassed when
you hear religious leaders talk about no prayer
in schools?
What a joke.
Isn't anybody embarrassed when you don't even have
a prayer meeting in the church?
Why should they have it in the schools?
I don't even understand that.
You would think somebody would say just out
of humility, time out.
They didn't have prayer in the Roman schools.
They didn't care what Nero was doing.
Who cares what Caligula was doing and Emperor
Claudius?
Let them do whatever they're going to do
and who cares about secular humanism or New
Age?
How could the demons stop God?
How can anybody stop God when God's people
pray and call out upon His name?
Impossible.
I'll tell you what, that embarrasses me.
I'm telling you, I'm a Christian, but I'm
embarrassed when I hear these so-called leaders
lambast President Clinton and the liberals and all.
Who cares what they do?
What's that got to do with me?
Let the church be the church and I
don't care what they do.
You don't see Paul bringing his hands and
saying in the New Testament, what are we
going to do?
Caligula's a transvestite.
He's dressing up as a woman and I
don't know what are we going to do?
How are we going to do this?
You know what it is?
Listen, we're playing games with ourselves.
No, I'm serious.
We're playing games with ourselves.
We're trying to divert attention away from this
weak area of our own church life.
We're trying to put the spotlight over there
on the world.
I don't see any of that in the
New Testament.
I read the New Testament constantly.
I try to never be six feet away
from the New Testament in my life.
And I read it every moment I can
to get the breath of the New Testament
in me.
You don't find any hand-wringing about what's
going on in Rome and they passed this
bad law.
Who cares?
They'll do what they want.
How could that stop God if God was
let loose in the church?
How could that possibly stop God?
I hear New Age and demons and all
this fiction about their demons.
Who cares what the demons are doing?
But I'm embarrassed when you hear people say
there's no prayer in schools.
That embarrasses me.
When I talk to pastor after pastor and
they tell me privately, Oh, Pastor Simba, don't
tell anybody about it.
I couldn't have prayer meeting in my church.
It would be embarrassing.
One twentieth the crowd would come.
There's somebody teaching or singing or carrying on
or entertaining.
It's preaching that becomes just a form of
entertainment.
Just a stick.
It's just more mental truth and nobody's acting
on it.
I want to raise a couple of questions
to all of us because when we stand
at the judgment seat of Christ, God's not
going to ask you what your peers thought
of you or if you were on the
cutting edge of what some magazine said was
what God was doing.
I don't go by any of that.
I try to stick with this book.
And this book says this.
Listen, listen.
I'm not trying to be humorous.
When I stand before Jesus, He's not going
to ask me these questions.
He's going to ask me did I continue
on in the line of men and women
who called upon God.
God showed me on a boat in Florida,
maybe I'll talk about that in this afternoon
session, that if my wife and I would
lead the people to call on God, and
we had less than 100 men, that number
one, every sermon that I would need to
preach, which I was insecure about, I've never
been trained.
I'm not an orator.
He would take care of.
Number two, we would have enough money to
live and pay the bills in the church,
which was touch and go with us for
years.
I made $3,800 the first year in
the ministry.
$5,500 the second year.
We took second jobs.
Went to ghetto.
First offering I ever collected as the pastor,
$85 morning tithes and offerings.
But if we would lead them to call
on God, He would take care of the
sermons and the money and we'd never be
in a building large enough to contain all
the people that God would send in just
in answer to people calling on His name.
So when I stand before God and you
stand before God, I want to ask you,
why is that?
Why can't we have prayer meetings?
They've canceled the Sunday night service, now they're
prayer meeting.
Prayer meeting, that went out with high button
shoes.
No one's going to come to pray.
Why?
Because they're glued to television.
Hey, they're glued to the television and they're
watching Chuck.
And don't give me any other story.
I've traveled all over and I know this
world just like you do.
They're watching television or sports.
They're wedded to it.
In fact, you can't even get them for
a long Sunday service.
I go places.
You've got 18 minutes, you've got to get
them out of here.
We've got to get them out by 5
after 12 or else they'll walk out.
The football game's on.
Well, what is that?
It's not Christianity.
I don't care what doctrine you're teaching, that's
not Christianity.
That cannot be the religion of the Bible.
And why would God send people like that
to heaven?
Listen, I'm being very serious.
I think Brother Hayford, no, he's not a
legalist.
I'm not a legalist either, but I want
to ask you a question.
If the people in my church don't want
to be around God's presence and they don't
love God's presence, why would they go to
heaven?
It would ruin everything for them.
There's nothing, listen, in heaven, there's nothing but
God.
If you don't enjoy His presence and you
don't love to call upon Him and worship
Him, I don't care what doctrine you have
in your head.
You're not the believers that they have in
the New Testament.
Listen, the revisionists, let me close, the revisionists
are not in Washington.
They're in the church cult movement.
They've revised what a church is.
The Bible tells me they continued steadfastly in
the apostles' doctrine and in the fellowship and
in the breaking of bread and in prayers.
They did that by instinct.
The church is a spiritual organism with spiritual
instincts.
And if in your church and mine they
don't have those instincts, you don't have a
church just because you can get them for
an hour on Sunday morning by doing market
research.
That doesn't make it a church.
It's not a church.
I challenge anybody to show me from the
Bible that's a church.
It's not a church.
It's a bunch of people in a building
on a Sunday morning.
But the church of Jesus Christ is a
spiritual organism full of the Holy Ghost and
joy and loving God's presence and waiting for
His Son to return.
And this is serious because this American system,
you can get by being just, you can
retire as a minister and get by in
the American system.
You can build a huge church without the
Holy Spirit a thousand miles from your place.
We fine-tune church growth down to a,
almost a terrible edge.
But people who call on God.
We have a prayer band in our church.
They started all-night prayer meetings on Friday
night years ago.
Then this godly pastor who Brother Hayford, I
would love for him to meet him.
This associate of mine, he started every night
from 11 until 6 in the morning.
Now it's 7 days a week, 24 hours
a day.
There's a band of people in the church
praying.
I'm not talking about something at home where
they pledge to pray.
I'm talking about in the building, no matter
what the emergency is.
If you have a problem and you handed
me a little note today, I'll take it
home.
They'll pray for 30 days, morning, noon, and
night for that request.
Well, Brother Ware said to me one day,
Pastor Symbolist, you know, we're not getting through.
You're doing good on Sundays, but we need
more conviction.
We need more conviction of sin.
I said, I know, I feel it, Brother.
No, I'm talking serious.
We're in New York City now.
We're going to have a dozen people HIV
positive every meeting.
Crack addicts, we got 150 homeless people brought
in every single Sunday night.
We just baptized a woman who's raising nine
children in a shelter by herself.
You've got to do this with mirrors.
It's gone up a bust.
It's gone or it's not going to happen.
But that's the way it ought to be.
Amen?
So he started a prayer.
He said he has, to this day, he
has 40 people locked in a room.
They pray from 10.45 to 1.30.
Morning service is over.
They start at 3.15 through 6-something
afternoon service.
Then we have a night service.
They start praying at 7.15. Sometimes I
leave at 10 o'clock, 10.30 in
the building.
I hear them still pray.
God help them, protect them, help them.
God send the glory, send the presence of
God in the meetings.
So you might visit our church and the
Lord might really be there and you might
really be blessed and you might think he
has something to do with me or Carol.
No.
Maybe it's just his people praying.
And on Tuesday night, of course, which is
our main service, we have standing room only,
using the lobby and every folding chair we
can get just for the prayer meeting.
No choir, no guest speaker, nothing, just Jesus.
But if they don't come for that, what
kind of church am I pastor?
If they don't come just for Jesus, what
am I into?