Well, I welcome you back again to On
Eagle's Wings.
I haven't said anything yet about the war
in the Mideast.
I've been watching it like you.
I've even given some serious thought to taking
some time on this program to talk to
you about revival and prophecy.
I've been doing a lot of studying, or
maybe not a lot, but some studying on
past revivals.
The thing that I am most intrigued about
is how those revivals of the past, the
ones where God worked deeply to affect lands,
were carried on for months and years after,
to where people were revived and stayed revived,
stayed alive, stayed hot for Jesus.
We're going into the spring season.
When we have our revival times, we set
up, we say we're going to have revival
from April 4th to the 10th, or whatever.
And actually what we mean most of the
time is we're going to have evangelistic meetings.
A revival is of the nature where God
does the work.
God sets the schedule.
God sets the agenda.
The main thing we can do is pray
for revival.
Now, we can set up some meetings, and
God can bless, and God does bless, and
God is blessed in this area.
Just recently I talked with a couple pastors
that had made a trip hundreds of miles
to come to this town where I'm at,
where God worked for almost two months, over
two months, in revival.
And they never talked with the main pastor
that was involved in the revival.
They did talk to another man that had
used his building, and he had had some
part in it.
And they went away deeply affected.
I even understood that there were some tears
that they shed.
And I happened to meet these pastors.
I was at a pastor's meeting here a
few days ago, actually a week ago, from
when this is being recorded.
And I asked them about their trip up
to Alliance, Nebraska.
And they said, God did visit that town.
And what God has done here is already
gone out into three publications.
Last week we had Pastor Jules Ostrander share
with you in the week before.
And I hope that you will contact him
if you'd like to know more about what
God is doing.
You can call him.
His phone number is area code 308-762
-5236.
He has invitations now to go to the
east coast, the west coast, and one up
in Kansas.
And he's planning on a trip already in
March going across Canada sharing.
People want to know what is happening, and
they want to know how to have it
themselves.
I have a deep burden for the church,
and I have a deep burden for pastors,
and I have a deep burden for you.
My struggle on this program is to know
what the heart of God is from me
to you.
In other words, I want to give you
what God wants you to receive.
I have a burden to teach you the
cross.
And I have a desert survival series that
I call it on the life of Moses
that I've been praying and asking if God
would want me to share this with you.
Because you see, one of the things that
happens so many times is that we get
the what we need to do, but we
never get the how-to.
And this series that God gave to me
after we experienced revival up in our part
of the country in 1985, was what God
gave me to share with my people on
the how-to of the cross.
And I entitled it the Desert Survival Series,
and I took it from the life of
Moses.
Moses, the man of God.
But yet on the other hand, I have
a burden about the church, not just to
share with you personally and the pastors, but
the church.
Our church, churches today, are what someone has
called sub-normal.
We are low.
And someone said the church must herself be
saved or she cannot save the world.
The pastor here that I am now currently
working with and under and trying to help
out, and I'm learning some things too, we
often say that revival could break out in
this land through one of two means.
One, if the coffins start rolling in from
the Mideast, five or ten thousand a week,
there won't be a county in this country
that won't be affected.
And already people are going to the churches
and praying, but what will it do to
us if we see five or ten thousand
coffins a week begin to roll into our
towns?
Our water fire economy finally does it close
down, and there's no food to be had,
no money for jobs.
Will it take that to turn us back
to God?
Is the church ready for revival?
Are you ready?
Is your church ready for this land?
We are praying for an awakening.
Someone has said her prayer, which is her
faith, expressing itself in words, instead of being
the cry of a spiritual giant, is but
the wail of an infant in the night.
Her visible life is far more a profession
and outward respectability than a holy, attractive, world
-conquering, Christ-producing reality.
Before the world can be made a better
world, the church must be made a better
church.
How can she be terrible as an army
with banners, when many of her soldiers are
either in sickbeds, or sitting by the campfires,
or holding parlays with the enemy?
We're at war.
We're at war right now with another nation.
But the church is at war, too.
Satan is at war with God, and if
you're on God's side, then you're at war.
How can we, when we're at war, be
off on furlough?
Rest and recreation is the order of the
day for the church.
What we need is revival to wake us
up.
Life again.
Someone said that we must enter a crusade
against the growing worldliness of the church.
This is robbing the church of its purity
and power, and placing it in an embarrassing
position, so that she cannot proclaim the whole
counsel of God.
Worldliness only requires one condition for its success,
and that is that we do not fear
it.
The church never had so much power over
the world as when she had nothing to
do with it.
I was talking with somebody the other day
on how hard it is to find a
pure church.
Matter of fact, it's just about impossible.
We have engrafted the standards of the world,
the music of the world, and by the
way, that booklet that I'm offering on rock
music is still available.
I've even been thinking about just offering it
to you pastors that will write for me,
to me for it.
You have a burden about it in your
church, and you really want to know, and
you're sincere, you just write to me, and
as the funds are available, I'll just give
you that booklet free.
This isn't a great radio ministry like some
of them that are around.
We don't have lots of funds rolling in
and stuff like that.
We're not asking for it, but if you're
a pastor and you write to me, I'll
see that you get that booklet as God
supplies.
Otherwise, I've been offering it for five dollars.
It's about rock music in our churches.
In our youth's lives, we have done something,
I believe, that is grieving the Holy Spirit
in this area, and it is called worldliness
in our music.
You know, someone said, what hurts me most
is that the world does not oppose us.
I've also heard somebody say recently that the
next attack on the church is going to
be the illegal attack from our government, and
that it will be effective and thorough in
hitting the churches.
Are we ready for revival in America?
Someone also said the demons do not fear
us.
Of course, we remember the incident in the
19th chapter of Acts where the man who
was demon-possessed overcame the seven sons of
Sceva, so that they fled out of the
house naked and wounded, and the demons still
say to us, Jesus I know, Paul I
know, but who are you?
Someone said also that the church has flung
a smokescreen around her true spiritual condition by
building enormous church edifices and by spending vast
sums of money in promoting and popularizing her
conventions and campaigns.
Her leaders bask in the spotlight of Hollywood
glare.
The noise of the machinery of propaganda is
louder than the still small voice of the
Spirit.
The fame of men and movements is greater
than the fame of the Redeemer.
We'll have so-and-so come to our
church if he has a great name or
a big title or a lot of degrees
or a fancy degree, but we won't have
some little small prophet that has the voice
of God speaking through him to our church
for meetings.
No, we like to have our ears tickled.
We like to be soothed.
We like to have the big signs up.
We like the glory and the praise of
man.
God is grieved with the church.
The glory of Pentecost was a spontaneity.
The revival at Pentecost was a spontaneous evangelistic
effort.
There is no advertising of Peter and the
Apostles as special speakers, and we're getting ready
for our spring fling with revival, play our
game, get a couple souls saved, or if
we have a real big church maybe we'll
get a dozen saved.
There's no advertising.
God the Holy Spirit told them to wait
and pray, and when he hit everybody knew
it.
There is no planned method of evangelism.
The supreme fact of that first and purest
revival was the reception of the Holy Spirit
by a waiting church.
Are you waiting for God to come?
The unavoidable consequence was expressed in one line,
and in the same day there were added
unto them three thousand souls.
And by the way, those three thousand converts
were willing to go to the cross and
die, which is a missing element in the
gospel today.
We're leaving out the cross, the crucified life,
that when you come and take up your
cross and follow me as Jesus said, you're
leaving all.
You're willing to leave it all and follow
Jesus no matter what the cost.
Count the cost.
But we say today, you come to Jesus,
you just believe in Jesus and you can
be saved, and there's no cross.
Nothing is said about taking up your cross
and following Jesus, that it might cost you
your job, that it might cost you some
strained family relationships.
It may cost you with your time.
God may say, I want you to go
as a missionary to another country, but we
say, no, you come to Jesus.
There's not much of a cost.
Christ has paid it all.
It's just a cushion.
It's going to be great to be a
Christian.
Well, it is great to be a Christian,
and I wouldn't go back to being an
unsaved person for anything.
All the misery and the struggle and the
heartache and the emptiness, and there was no
hope, no hope for me without Christ.
And I was religious.
I was in church every Sunday and Wednesday
nights, youth meetings all the way up.
I was there, but Jesus wasn't there.
He wasn't in my heart.
And the day that He came in, I
remember I felt so cleansed.
You know, some of you need to be
cleansed.
You don't know what it's like to be
clean.
All you know is dirt and filth, and
you continually sit before the screen and fill
your mind with more filth and dirt.
And if you're a Christian and you're doing
that, and you're wondering what's wrong in your
life and your church, you just stop and
look at the stuff that's going in.
And so we fill ourselves with all this
dirt and stuff, and then we come up
to the board meeting, and we're going to
say, well, we need to get a speaker
in and have some revival meetings.
And God is saying, no, you need to
look at your own heart and start right
there.
If my people which are called by my
name shall humble themselves and pray and seek
my face and turn from their wicked ways,
then I will heal their land.
I think the thing that you need to
do in your church this spring, instead of
setting up meetings, is set aside that time
and just pray.
Use every one of those nights and get
there and just pray and pour out your
hearts to God and confess your sin.
That'd be unusual.
The things that we've seen in the revival
meetings is we set aside times for God
to visit us and to work in our
churches.
We've set aside times for revival for us
that the unsaved have come to get saved,
and they have got saved naturally, and it
hasn't been an artificial means.
You know what?
Fire can always be relied upon to bring
a crowd.
Sensational methods and startling advertisements are unnecessary to
announce a fire.
It announces itself.
You just get it to burning and a
crowd will come.
You're trying to get people into your church,
doing all kinds of things, spending all kinds
of money on advertising and promotion.
Maybe the deacons are upset with the preacher
because you're not growing, and the preacher's upset
with the people because they're not growing.
And what you need is a fire in
your hearts.
Well, we're in a fire-starting business, spiritually
speaking, and I am excited to see what
God is doing right here.
The last two weeks we had this pastor
sharing and he called me up yesterday and
he said, revival is still happening.
A man had just went around making a
thousand dollars worth of restitution, and I don't
know how many thousands of dollars of satanic
stuff that he had in his house.
Tapes, materials that he didn't recognize were from
the devil.
And God finally got a hold of him,
and I asked him, is this man in
our church?
And he said, he is.
He's a member.
How many in our churches today are filled
with stuff like that?
Well, they just come in as members just
a couple, three months ago.
They just come in, and as they've sat
under the preaching of the Word and being
in a revival atmosphere, they have to do
one of two things in this church.
They have to get out and go somewhere
else and find another church, and there's a
couple churches here that are really growing because
of what God's done in this church.
Or either they get right with God.
And my friend, I can't help but wonder
if that wasn't the way it was in
the early church.
And I think it was, and that's what
we want in America, to be like the
early church.
Someone said, it's not the special spurts of
the church that count, but the steady, vital
ministry of the church in our everyday life.
As Holy Jehovah has so beautifully said, it
is not the new birth which initially arrests
the world, but the new and glorified life.
It is not, therefore, by spasmodic revivals, however
grace-blessed they may be, that we shall
excite the wonder of the multitudes, but by
the abiding miracle of a God-filled and
glorious church.
What we need above all things is the
continuous marvel of an elevated church, set on
high by the King, having her home in
the heavenly places in Christ, approaching all things
from above, and triumphantly resisting the subtle gravitation
of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
End of quote.
The clarion call comes to us from Isaiah's
prophecy.
Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.
Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the
holy city.
Shake thyself from the dust.
Arise, sit down, O Jerusalem.
Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck,
O captive daughter of Zion.
The church is like a great giant sleeping.
She is like Jonah asleep in the storm.
She is like the disciples asleep in Gethsemane.
The great need is for the trumpeteers to
arise.
Many dear saints love the exquisite sermons and
jazzy quartets, but hate the trumpeter of the
resurrection.
One of the realities of revival in the
cross that I've had the experience is that
people don't like a trumpeter.
They don't like the voice of one that
speaks truth.
They like to have their ears tickled.
Especially we that have leadership positions do not
like to face the fact that we are
in sin.
That there's something wrong.
And pastors are the worst of us in
pretending that everything is just fine.
And we're the most resistant to fall upon
our face before God and say, oh God,
there's something wrong in my life.
What is it?
Show it to me that I can deal
with it.
We like to play games.
And we are crying out to try to
wake up God, and God is awake and
he's telling us to wake up.
Believers, do you want to be aroused?
We must awake to our high calling of
God in Christ Jesus.
We must awake to our responsibility of Christian
stewardship.
We must awake and possess our blood bought
possessions in our risen Lord.
The Prophet cried out, O Jerusalem, the holy
city, O captive daughter of Zion, rouse thyself,
clothe thyself, cleanse thyself, shake thyself, loose thyself.
You know it's a terrible condition to be
a captive.
You've seen those pictures on TV of our
captives over there in Iran and how they
beat them.
Their faces are puffed up and you can
see the blood bruises.
That's what Satan does to his captives.
He beats you and he beats you and
beats you and he beats you down.
Jesus is not in the beating business.
He's in the building business, lifting you up.
And I'm for you, my friend, I pray
for you.
Every Sunday as this broadcast goes out into
the four states, I pray for you.
I pray that God will speak to your
heart, that God will lift you up on
eagle's wings.
This program is designed to be a ministry,
a help to the local church, to the
pastor.
As far as I know, I don't know
of any others in the land that are
focusing on revival in this aspect.
There are others that have a revival ministry
in the teaching and developing of the word,
and I have a great burden to teach
the word.
That's my gift, not really in doing this
stuff.
I just have a burden to get you
interested enough to cry out and call on
God to help.
Matter of fact, if I go into this
series, this desert survival series with you, it'll
be a teaching ministry for you.
Is God speaking to you?
I have an invitation to speak up in
northern Missouri and possibly will be coming back
down into your area, and if you'd like
to meet with me, then you get a
hold of me.
Tomorrow I'll be making a phone call to
establish a date to see when we'll do
this, and if I can help you, you
write, and it'll be forwarded on to me
to this address, and we'll talk.
If you want me to come to your
church, if the scheduling can work out, I'll
come.
Are you desperate?
The sin of the church is that it
is earth-bound.
Shake thyself from the dust.
We're living in lower-level spirituality.
God wants us in an upper-level spirituality.
Shake thyself.
Many are longing for a tidal movement of
the Spirit to sweep through our churches, but
we do not need to wait for that.
The remnant of old cried to Jehovah, Awake,
awake, put on strength, O arm of the
Lord, as in the ancient days in the
generations of old, Isaiah 51.9. And God
answered them with this pathetic rebuke.
Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.
It is not the Lord who is asleep.
It's not Him.
It's us.
And He wants us to repent and get
right with Him, and it starts by humbling
ourselves.
What God has done to me in the
last five, six years has been nothing but
humbling, and He continues to do it.
He did it last week, even deeper.
And the more I let Him humble me,
the more power there is of Christ.
The garment of power is hanging on the
door of Pentecost.
Will you put it on?
We read the menu, but we fell to
order.
He that believeth on me, out of him
shall flow rivers of living water, Jesus said.
We must appropriate our resources.
They're not dried up.
They're there.
All that the Apostles had, we can have
too.
The church's potential is the same as it
was in the apostolic days.
How about it?
Where are you at?
Are you living in the power of Christ?
Are you seeing your prayers answered?
Last week we were at, the pastor here
and I were at a pastor's conference, and
we prayed specifically that God would do some
certain things, and He did those things to
the T.
And one of the things that we asked
was quality time.
Would one of the pastors there, quality time,
not when we were just in speaking services,
but when we could sit down and minister
to Him the cross.
And God gave us that opportunity, and that
man was broke.
God did a work in his heart.
He was a new man when we left
that city.
A new man.
He was so excited he was like a
kid with a new toy.
He was excited.
He knew the crucified life too, but there
was an area in his life that he
not, had not yielded up to the cross.
And when he gave that to Christ, when
he saw how Satan was using that as
a handle to beat him, and he gave
it to Christ, he was set free.
And if I was to mention him, many
of you would know him.
He was an assistant pastor at a large
church in this country, and he's now in
his own church.
Many of you would know his pastor in
the other church that he was in.
And unless he wants to, I won't say
anything.
I'd like to get his testimony on tape.
It was the most powerful thing.
The things he went through, the rejection he
went through, all of the trash that he
went through, it brought him to the point
to where he was not real.
But when God got a hold of him
and shook him, he was real.
You know, in taking a break here and
switching over to Moses, Moses was known as
the man of God.
He was a man of God.
He loved God, and he had a testimony
that was powerful.
You know, in Deuteronomy 33, it says, and
this is the blessing, where with Moses, the
man of God, blessed the children of Israel
before his death.
And he said, the Lord came from Sinai.
I'd never noticed that before, but he says,
the Lord came from Sinai and rose up
from Seir unto them.
He shined forth from Mount Paran, and he
came with ten thousands of saints from his
right hand, when a fiery law for them.
Yea, he loved the people.
All his saints are in thy hand, and
they sat down at thy feet.
Every one shall receive of thy words.
Did you know that God loves you?
God loves you enough to orchestrate circumstances to
such a way to where he can get
your full attention.
God loves you.
God went to a lot of trouble to
come down and live in this world with
us for thirty-three years, and then die
on the cross for our sins.
He went to a lot of trouble, self
-expense, pain, and sorrow, and suffering, just because
he loves us.
No one loves me like Jesus.
No one cares for me like Jesus.
And once I found out that Jesus was
all I needed for life, it has changed
my life.
And once I found out that all I
needed to do to be set free was
to let him be my Savior and Lord,
it has set me free.
The Scripture says, he that is entered into
his rest has ceased from his own works.
This is why I'd like to take you
through the life of Moses and show you
what the crucified life is like, so you
can get some handle on it, how to
put it into practice.
And maybe in our closing minutes, I could
give you a little word of introduction.
You know the testimony of Moses in the
Scriptures in Deuteronomy 34, verse 5, it says,
so Moses, the servant of the Lord, died
there in the land of Moab according to
the word of the Lord.
Right there was his testimony.
He was the servant of the Lord.
Some of you are the servant of men.
Men.
You serve men, rather than God first.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God.
You're not putting God's kingdom first.
God took Moses and put him through the
ringer, so that he could lead the children
of Israel to rest.
And the lessons there are powerful.
And the Desert Survival Series is designed to
teach you how to walk by faith.
Actually, how to mount up on eagles' wings.
Teaches you how to develop discernment, as Hebrews
5 says, and to discern doctrine, as Ephesians
4.14 says.
It teaches us how to be desert dwellers.
Isaiah 48.21 is a tremendous passage, which
says, and they thirsted not when he led
them through the desert.
You know, it makes a big difference if
you go off on a trip into a
place that you don't know of who your
leader is.
There was one place I wanted to go
when I was over in Israel many years
ago, and so I hired me a cab
driver, of all things.
And he took me over to a certain
area, and I went there, and we went
over to another area, and then I wanted
to go over to the Jordan River.
And he says, no, Abbie, I won't take
you over there.
And I said, why?
I want to go over there.
He says, no, because this was 1968, one
year after the war.
He says, no, we go over there, and
they'll shoot at us from both sides.
It's good to have a guide, so you
don't get into zones where you're shot at
from both sides.
Moses was a desert dweller.
He learned some things there.
God said, and they, the scripture says, and
they thirsted not when He led them through
the deserts.
Some of you are leading a dry life.
There's no joy.
There's no peace.
There's no power.
There's no purpose.
It's because He's not leading you.
When He leads you through the wilderness, He
makes a way.
He provides for all your needs.
You know what?
God said in Isaiah 43, 19, I will
even make a way in the wilderness and
rivers in the desert.
If you're going through a trial right now,
and a hardship, whatever it is, God can
bring it to your mind right now.
If you say, I don't have any trials.
Well, that's great if you don't.
I'd like to meet you.
But if you're going through trials and temptations
and struggles, God can make a way through
that wilderness.
But let me tell you something.
One of the most powerful tools of the
devil is in the mind.
And he's going to come along and continually
bombard you and tell you that you cannot
make it.
I just heard this morning about a lady
in our church that's homeschooling her children.
And her mother come up and said, you
won't be able to homeschool your daughter because
she's in a lower grade and you just
can't handle it.
And that was a handle for Satan to
work on her.
And he's beat her with it.
And hopefully she's beginning to see that that
was a lie from the devil.
Because she can do it.
And her husband can do it.
You know what the devil says when you
go into the desert?
He says you will die in the desert.
You're going to die in that trial.
You can't make it.
You're not adequate.
By the way, this pastor we talked with,
this was a handle that Satan had on
his life that he was not adequate for
the ministry.
And that is true.
I'm not adequate.
You're not adequate.
None of us are adequate for the ministry.
But you know what Jesus says?
Jesus says, come ye yourselves apart into a
desert place and rest a while.
Well that seems like the most unlikely place
in all the world to rest is in
a desert.
In the middle of your trials to be
at peace and to be calm and to
be at rest is the strangest thing in
the world.
And here's the secret.
It's not where you're at, but whose you
are and in whose hand you're resting.
You can have the greatest storm going on
around you.
And I like storms.
I like to see the lightning and the
thunder.
I like to see the blizzards and all
that.
We just had one last night.
I like to be out in it.
If I can get back in and get
warmed after a little bit in those blizzards.
But there's a great calm in knowing God
and the storm.
And let me leave you with this.
If you will learn to bloom in the
desert, then you can bloom anywhere.
If you'll learn to fly on eagle's wings
through your trials, through your temptations, through your
hardships, through that thing that you think is
going to crush you, you can make it
through anything.
And then once you learn the crucified life
and how to fly on eagle's wings and
let God bear you up, you can lead
others to the cross also.
But you can't lead someone to a place
you've never been there yet.
You can't do that.
So if you'll learn to bloom in the
desert, then you can learn to bloom anywhere.
Let him lift you up, my friend.
Let him bear you on eagle's wings.
Let him be your life.
Let him be your strength.
They that weigh upon the Lord shall renew
their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles.
They shall run and not be weary.
And they shall walk and not faint.
Until next time, may God richly bless you,
my friend.