I'd invite you tonight to turn in your
Bibles, if you want to read along the
Scripture, turn in your Bibles to 2 Kings,
2 Kings chapter 6, the
title of the message tonight, When Spiritual Famine
Invades the Church.
2 Kings chapter 6, beginning with verse 24,
And it happened after this, that Ben-Hadad,
the king of Syria, gathered all his army,
and went up and besieged Samaria.
And there was a great famine in Samaria,
and indeed they besieged it, until a donkey's
head sold for eighty shekels of silver, And
depending on the translation you have, one-fourth
of a cab, that's about one pint.
One pint of dove's dung was selling for
five shekels of silver.
Then as the king of Israel was passing
by on the wall, a woman cried out
to him saying, Help, help my lord, O
king.
And he said, If the lord does not
help you, where can I find help for
you?
From the threshing floor or from the wine
press?
Then the king said to her, What's troubling
you?
And she answered, Well, this woman said to
me, Give your son that we may eat
him today, and we will eat my son
tomorrow.
So we boiled my son and ate him.
I said to her on the next day,
Now give your son that we may eat
him, but she's hidden her son away.
Now it happened when the king heard the
words of the woman that he tore his
clothes, and as he passed by on the
wall, the people looked, and there underneath he
had sackcloth on his body.
Then he said, God do so to me
and more also if the head of Elisha
the son of Shaphat remains on him today.
But Elisha was sitting in his house and
the elders were sitting with him.
And the king sent a man ahead of
him, but before the messenger came to him,
he said to the elders, Do you see
how this son of a murderer has sent
someone to take away my head?
Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door
and hold him fast at the door.
Is not the sound of his master's feet
behind him?
And while he was still talking with them,
there was the messenger coming down to him.
And then the king said, Surely this calamity
is from the Lord.
Why should I wait for the Lord any
longer?
Then Elisha said, Hear the word of the
Lord.
Thus says the Lord, Tomorrow about this time
a measure of fine flour shall be sold
for a shekel, and two measures of barley
for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.
So an officer on whose hand the king
leaned answered the man of God and said,
Look, if the Lord would make windows in
heaven, could this thing be?
And Elisha said, In fact, you will see
it with your eyes, but you will not
eat any of it.
Across the nation of America tonight, famine has
invaded the churches of America.
It's everywhere.
Illustration.
As I've told you, and you know, that
I'm a Southern Baptist preacher, we have across
this nation, round figures, 50,000 Southern Baptist
churches.
Seventy percent of those churches have either plateaued
or they're declining.
Last year, those 50,000 Southern Baptist churches,
last year, 12,500 Southern Baptist churches reported
zero baptisms.
I told Life Church Sunday morning, I believe,
when I was preaching, I didn't know.
I'm just dumb.
I didn't know.
I thought any Baptist church anywhere in a
year's time could just trip one person and
push them into baptistry.
I didn't know.
12,500.
Zero baptisms.
The Methodist church in America is only a
shadow of what John Wesley had in mind.
The Presbyterian church in America would absolutely horrify
John Knox of Scotland.
The Episcopalian church in America, they're busy fighting
their own internal wars over homosexual priests.
The Roman Catholic church in America today, they're
busy with a severe war with renegade priests
who are sexually abusing little boys.
Famine has invaded the church.
It's everywhere.
It's happening everywhere.
In the text that I've read, the king
of Samaria, he was in his capital
city of Samaria.
I've walked around the ruins of Samaria located
there on that hilltop in the northern kingdom
of Israel, and suddenly the armies of Syria,
the neighbor, invaded Samaria.
They came against it.
It was a horrible time.
You've read, and you know, that in that
day and time, Samaria was like most cities.
It was surrounded by a high wall for
defensive purposes.
And here came the Syrian army.
They didn't try to scale the wall.
They didn't try to batter down the gates
to the city.
They didn't try to set the gates on
fire and burn them.
The Syrian army surrounded the city of Samaria,
set up camp.
They did not allow anybody to leave the
city.
They didn't allow anybody to come in.
They just sat there and waited.
Time went by.
Finally, inside the city, famine came.
No food.
The text, it doesn't sound right.
It doesn't sound right to we who are
in America.
We've got grocery stores on every corner.
We've got refrigerators full of food.
We're all fatter than a bunch of town
dogs.
We don't understand famine.
We don't understand it.
But in Samaria, a donkey's head was selling
for 80 bucks.
A pint, a little pint of dove's dung
was selling for $5.
They were eating that.
And if that's not bad enough, finally it
became so severe that the people began to
practice cannibalism.
They started eating their little children.
How horrible could it get?
As I studied this passage of Scripture, I
got to taking this famine in Samaria, the
physical famine, and trying to draw some correlations
with the spiritual famine that has invaded America.
I want to just share about five or
six things with you.
First of all, when spiritual famine invades the
church, the young are the first to go.
Every time.
You march me into any church in America,
and I can tell you almost immediately if
spiritual famine is living in that church.
Where there is spiritual famine, there are no
youth, no children.
They've vanished someplace.
Youth will flee the atmosphere of death every
time.
Where spiritual famine lives, you go into that
church building, and what you find is a
group of silver-headed, just a little huddled
up group, like a huddle on the 50
-yard line, silver-headed senior adults, sitting there
in a little huddle singing, Revive us again.
Fill each heart.
No youth.
But where life abounds, there is a vibrancy,
a thrill, a joy, and children and youth
will flock to that.
The people of Samaria begin to eat their
children.
That's what a dead church does.
It eats its children.
It's young.
It swallows them up in a dead orthodoxy,
dead worship, dead singing, and dead preaching.
Another thing.
When spiritual famine invades the church, stubbornness becomes
the dominant characteristic of the people in that
church.
In Samaria, they were eating donkeys' heads.
You answer me back.
What's the chief characteristic of a donkey or
a mule?
Stubborn.
You ever heard that term?
Stubborn as a mule.
And that's how people get where spiritual famine
is living.
The people become stubborn about everything.
First, they become stubborn with God.
Time after time across the years, I've heard
people say, Well, you know, Brad, I know
the Bible says that, but this is how
I feel about it.
I was pastor for 17 years at the
First Baptist Church of Duncan, Oklahoma.
Never will forget it.
We were sitting in a deacons' meeting.
We had 75 ordained deacons in our church.
We were sitting in a deacons' meeting, and
I don't remember what prompted this.
I just remember that the senior adult deacon
who was sitting next to me right here
on my left, all of a sudden, he
said, and I quote, He said, Well, I
tell you what, I think we ought to
get it back like it used to be
where the deacons run everything.
Now why I did what I did next,
I don't know unless it was low IQ.
I just turned to him.
I had my Bible on my lap.
I just turned to him, and I said,
Would you show that to me in the
Bible?
And he said, I don't care what the
Bible says.
That's just how I feel.
Well, it's hard to argue with logic like
that.
People become stubborn with God.
Stubborn, stubborn.
This is how I believe.
But not only that, they become stubborn with
each other in church where spiritual famine lives.
Stubborn with each other.
I don't know how it is down here
where I travel, especially I know in Southern
Baptist churches, the biggest battle going on right
now, Nathan, in Southern Baptist churches is church
music.
Church music.
You heard that?
Senior adult said, I don't want no words
up on the screen.
I want to sing out of a Baptist
hymnal.
Paul carried a Baptist hymnal under his arm.
Young people, young adults, they say, We want
to sing praise music.
We want to sing some new music.
No, we want to sing that old music.
The hymns, that's all we want to sing.
And there's a battle going on.
I cannot understand why in the world, why
in the world believers in Jesus Christ, why
senior adults cannot sit in a pew and
look down the pew at the young people
and say, You know, your type of music
isn't my type of music, but I thank
God you're here worshiping Jesus Christ.
And I don't understand why young people can't
look down the pew at old silver-haired
senior adults and say, You know, those hymns,
that's not my kind of music, but I
thank God that you've set the standard for
all these years.
Stubborn with God?
Stubborn with each other?
Stubborn with their leaders?
Stubborn.
You see, where spiritual famine is living in
a church, there's no fellowship.
There's no idea about being a servant of
Jesus Christ, of being a slave to Jesus
Christ.
You walk into any church where spiritual famine
lives, and the Holy Trinity is no longer
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Holy Trinity is me, my, and mine.
What's good for me?
What are you going to do for my
family?
How are you going to address me in
America tonight?
There are thousands upon thousands, multitudes of church
members who are feasting on donkey's heads.
Stubborn.
Another thing.
When spiritual famine invades the church, the Holy
Spirit becomes a thing of the past.
In Samaria, a pint, a little pint of
dove's dung was selling for $5.
A few years ago, I preached a spiritual
awakening conference at a church in Wyoming.
I preached this message early in the conference.
On the last night of the conference, a
lady, when service was over, and I walked
out into the vestibule to greet some people,
a lady said, she said, I don't know
if you'll be able to use this in
the future in conferences, but I got it,
and I want to give it to you,
and she handed me a Ziploc bag filled
with dove's dung.
I didn't keep it.
Can you imagine eating that?
That's what the people of Samaria were eating.
Now, a question, you answer me.
In the Bible, the dove is a symbol
of what?
I hear words, peace, a lot of people.
The dove in the Bible is a symbol
of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit of God.
Now, you can forget everything I say tonight,
but you remember the next sentence.
The dove's dung does not represent where the
dove is.
It represents where the dove used to be.
The dove is gone.
And in a church where spiritual famine is
living, the dove is gone.
The Holy Spirit is gone.
He flies away.
We grieve him.
You see it all over this nation, church
members who are feasting on past glories.
Oh, we had a great revival in our
church.
When?
1948.
Maybe nothing's happened since then.
Church members feasting on past glories, eating the
leftover of blessings, acting like everything is all
right, but the blessed dove is gone.
I got to thinking about this, so I
got to studying through the Bible to find
out what the Bible had to say about
the dove.
First thing I found, the dove informs the
church of conditions out there in the world,
what it's like out there in the world.
You remember Noah?
He got on the ark, 40 days, 40
nights of rain.
Stopped raining.
The water began to recede.
What did he send out of the ark
to find out if there's dry land out
there?
A dove.
The dove showed Noah the conditions out there.
And the blessed dove, the Holy Spirit, does
that for the church today.
But what if the dove is gone?
What if the Holy Spirit is gone from
the church?
The church has no idea of what's happening
out there in the world today.
That's why the church in America today is
so confused about so many things.
Lottery, alcohol, drugs, homosexuality, abortion.
You got church members all over this nation
who see nothing wrong with those things.
In Oklahoma, we have the lottery.
You know how we got it?
Baptists voted it in.
You know how I know that?
You don't have anything in Oklahoma if Baptists
don't vote it in because we're a majority
in Oklahoma.
So Baptists, nothing wrong with the lottery.
Go ahead.
There's nothing wrong with alcohol.
Church members got it in their cabinet.
They drink it all the time.
There's nothing wrong with drugs.
There's nothing wrong with homosexuality.
It's just an alternate way of life.
That's all it is.
No, it's sin.
I've had church members say, Oh, there's nothing
wrong with abortion.
It's a woman's right to choose.
There's only one thing wrong with abortion.
It's murder.
That's it.
It's murdering a living human being.
Another thing I found out the dove does,
the dove guards the church against deception.
Hosea chapter 7.
Ephraim, now Ephraim was one of the 12
tribes of Israel.
Ephraim is like a silly dove without any
sense.
Now this phrase, without any sense, it can
also be translated from the Hebrew no heart,
no heart.
When the Holy Spirit leaves a church, when
the blessed dove leaves a church, that church
has no sense about spiritual matters.
Jeff, I've sat in finance committee meetings in
church and some guy will say, Well, I'll
tell you what I think.
I think we ought to run this church
like a business.
Well, God help us if we ever run
it like a business.
It's not a business.
It's an organization established by Jesus Christ.
It's a spiritual entity.
Everything in a church where spiritual famine lives,
everything becomes cold, hard facts.
Everything becomes ritual and tradition.
I can't remember exactly.
I had been pastor at First Baptist Church,
Duncan, six, eight months.
I can't remember exactly.
I preached one Sunday morning.
The invitation was finished.
Closing prayer was said.
I stepped down off of the platform.
My foot just hit the main floor and
right there in front of me, right in
my face, was one of our senior adult
deacons and his wife.
I got the best chewing out they ever
got in the ministry.
They chewed my hind leg off.
You want to know what my sin was,
what I had done?
I had changed the order of service in
the bulletin.
I had dared trample on Holy Writ, the
bulletin.
I'm living for the day.
When I go to a church somewhere that
has a bulletin and the order of service
all printed out, and we never get around
to it because God comes.
The Holy Spirit comes and does His work
and what He wants done.
Another thing.
You see, deception in the church, it's so
easy.
Maybe you're here tonight and you've been feeding
on droppings of the Holy Spirit, something you've
heard from the past, maybe something your grandparents
told you.
You've never seen revival yourself.
You're just living on someone else's reputation, someone
else's memory because the dove is gone.
Something else I think is important.
The dove reveals Jesus Christ to the church
and then in turn out there to the
world.
That's the blessed dove's responsibility.
You remember when John the Baptist was baptizing
in the Jordan River?
He looked down the dusty road and he
saw a man coming and he said, Behold
the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world.
Jesus was coming.
And then John said it not once.
He said it twice.
He said, I did not know him.
I did not know him.
What?
They were cousins.
They grew up together.
They chummed around together when they were teenagers.
What do you mean he didn't know?
John meant, I didn't know he was the
Messiah.
I didn't know that.
And then John said, He who sent me
said to me, Upon whom you see the
Spirit descending and remaining on him, this is
he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
He said, When you see the dove coming
down on a certain man, that's the one.
Jesus Christ.
It's the dove who reveals Jesus Christ to
the church.
And then in turn, we're to reveal Jesus
Christ out in our community to other people.
Don't live in a world of droppings.
Don't try to live on past reputation, past
glories, past revivals, past church camps.
God's dove is for today, right now.
Another thing, when spiritual famine invades the church,
biblical roles get all messed up.
They get all reversed.
In Samaria, the king of Samaria, he's up
here in his palace.
The prophet Elisha is down here in his
house.
The king of Samaria, he gets all of
his entourage together to go down and talk
to Elisha.
He thinks Elisha can probably put a stop
to this famine.
And they're going down there.
There are soldiers with the king.
And one of them that the Bible mentions,
it's, some translators say a lord, an officer.
It says, on whose arm the king was
leaning.
We don't know if the king was old,
if he was crippled, but he was leaning
on this officer's arm.
And the word for officers here is a
word which means a general of the third
rank.
We would call him a three-star general.
This three-star general, he's kind of helping
the king down to Elisha's house.
And Elisha says, hear the word of the
Lord.
At this time tomorrow, 24 hours from now,
you'll be able to buy all the grain
you need cheap, right in the gate of
Samaria.
And this three-star general, he said, and
this is the Brad Allen translation straight out
of the Hebrew.
This general said, uh-uh, he corrected the
prophet of God.
He said, if God was to open the
windows of heaven and pour grain out, how
could such a thing be?
And Elisha said, you'll see it, but you
won't eat a bite of it.
When the dove is gone from the church,
when spiritual famine sets in, biblical roles get
all reversed.
Preacher doesn't get to tell anyone anything.
Deacons maybe tries to call the shots in
the church.
I've heard it a thousand times.
Well, have the deacons voted on this?
Have the deacons approved this?
In the Bible, the deacons never voted on
nothing.
They just served the church.
That's all they did.
Another thing that I'd mention to you, when
spiritual famine invades the church, the prophet always
gets blamed.
That's what happened with Elisha.
The king, either the king thought Elisha had
started the famine, or he could put a
stop to the famine, and he did.
He blamed the prophet of God.
That's what happened in the church today, where
spiritual famine lives, the church will always put
the blame on the pastor.
It's his fault.
Church isn't growing.
It's his fault.
He's supposed to get new members in, not
us.
Usually, usually the solution for any church where
spiritual famine lives is not to repent.
It's to fire the pastor and just go
on in their famine.
Just go on, go on.
The results of this has been staggering in
America.
Staggering.
They did a survey.
Here's what they found in the survey.
For pastors, 70% of pastors in this
survey said they constantly fight depression.
71% of pastors said they are in
financial trouble.
65% of the pastors say that they
have thought about quitting the ministry in the
last 30 days.
It's also staggering for the people.
Where spiritual famine lives in a church, what
does it do to the church people?
It's staggering.
Church members end up, they say, nothing's going
on here, and they drop out here and
they wander around from church to church trying
to find a church where they can kind
of be happy or else church members just
drop out and forget the whole deal just
as a bad deal.
They just quit.
I would be derelict in my duty if
I didn't preach the last point in this
sermon.
People are always glad to hear me say,
last point.
When spiritual famine invades the church, there's always
hope.
Bless God, there's always hope.
Let me tell you what happened in Samaria.
There was this big high wall around Samaria
right here outside the wall, at this spot
right here, at this spot.
Every day there sat four old dirty, nasty,
ragged lepers.
The reason they sat right here every day,
this was where the people of the city
came and threw their garbage over the wall,
and that's what the lepers ate, was the
garbage.
There's no garbage now.
The people in the city are eating everything
they can get their hands on.
The morning after Elisha talked to the king,
the morning after, these four old lepers were
sitting there.
One of them said, why sit we here
until we die?
Maybe we could go into the city.
There's no food in the city.
They won't allow us in the city.
We're lepers.
We can go out to the camp of
the Syrian army out here.
Maybe, perhaps, they might give us something to
eat.
They may kill us.
But there's one thing for sure.
If we stay here, we're going to die.
These four old lepers got up, dirty, filthy,
rags for clothes.
The leprosy had taken its toll.
One of the lepers, all of his fingers
were gone.
Another one, both ears were rotted off.
Another one, his nose was rotted off.
Another one, his feet.
He just kind of walked along on stubs.
And they made their way out to the
camp of the Syrian army.
They got out there.
There were all the horses, camels, sheep and
goats.
There were all their tents.
They went into the tents.
The tents were lined with Persian rugs.
Went into another tent.
Here was all this barley and wheat, this
grain, and not a Syrian soldier in sight.
What had happened?
Well, during the night, God had caused the
sound of a great charging army, and the
Syrian soldiers just got up and ran into
the night.
These four old lepers, they started eating.
They ate and ate and ate and ate.
Do you all have golden corrals here?
Huh?
You know what a golden corral is?
It was golden corral time for these lepers.
When they filled up, one of them said,
we do not well if we don't go
in and tell them in the city.
They went in and they told them about
all this food.
They sent people out there to bring all
the grain and the sheep and the goat,
all this food right into the gate of
Samaria.
And word began to spread that there's food
down here at the gate of Samaria.
And the people began to run down the
narrow streetway of Samaria, running toward the gate.
This three-star general, he heard about it,
and he ran and ran, and he got
out in front of the crowd, and he
was in charge.
He was a general.
And he got out in front and said,
stop, and they just ran over him.
And he died.
He saw the food, just like Elisha said,
but he never ate a bite of it.
There is hope, my friends.
There's hope for spiritual awakening.
There is hope, and hope for the end
of famine.
First of all, it's always a miracle from
God.
It's always a miracle from God.
Another thing, hope for the end of famine
will always come from the most unlikely source.
Whoever thought it would come in Samaria with
four old lepers?
I have sneaking suspicion that if revival comes
to a church, usually it doesn't come through
weak preachers.
It'll come from some layman or laywoman back
here who knows God.
There's a church in Florida that experienced great
spiritual awakening, and it started with the church
janitor.
That's where it started.
Most unlikely sources.
In the 1930s, our Southern Baptist mission work
in China, it was pretty strong, going pretty
well in the 1930s.
We had several missionaries in China.
One of them was a lady missionary named
Mary Crawford.
Mary Crawford said, she said, I came to
China in 1923, and she said, for several
years, she said, I did the best I
could to learn the language and to witness
to the Chinese people.
But she said, the millions of lost people
that were just surrounding me just made me
feel hopeless.
I didn't know what to do.
And she said, in 1927, another missionary asked
me if I had ever been filled with
the Holy Spirit.
She said, nobody had ever asked me that
question before.
She said, I wasn't for sure I knew
what she was talking about.
She said, I started searching the scriptures.
And she said, a few weeks later, while
I was in prayer, I asked the blessed
Lord to give me the fullness of the
Holy Spirit.
In 1931, God did one of the most
miraculous works he's ever done in the Shantung
province of China.
If you've never read Dr. Culpepper's book, The
Shantung Revival, you need to read it.
Just a little paperback.
He was one of the missionaries, Dr. Charles
Culpepper.
32 of our Southern Baptist missionaries were filled
with the Spirit of God.
Then Chinese leaders began to experience the same
thing in one of the little old precious
stories.
On June the 15th, 1932, in one of
the Chinese villages, the Chinese preacher got up
to preach Sunday morning.
He got up to preach.
And as he stood to preach, the entire
congregation got up and filed out of the
church building and left.
That'd make a preacher feel good, wouldn't it?
You know why they left?
He went outside, looked.
What the congregation was doing, they had lined
both sides of the road and they were
watching as old Sister Keo, an old Chinese
lady, was walking home from church, and they
were watching her.
Well, the thing that was so remarkable about
that, old Sister Keo had not taken a
step in 20 years.
And God healed her.
And they just were out there watching her
walk home.
Walk home.
There's a miracle about to happen here tonight.
There's some people here tonight who have never
been saved.
You've never invited Jesus Christ to come into
your life and save you.
And he's ready to give you eternal life,
forgive all of your sin, reserve a home
in heaven for you.
You just can't beat a deal like that.
I'd invite you to come to Christ and
be saved tonight.
You come to Christ.
There are others of you here tonight that
you want to come and say, God, do
something for me.
Fill me with your blessed spirit.
There are others who might want to come
to the altar and say, Lord, send revival
to me, to my church, to my town.
Do it now.
Nathan's going to sing.
It's a great song.
It's true.
He is here, hallelujah.
He is here, amen.
He is here, holy, holy.
I will bless his name again.
He is here, listen closely.
Hear him calling out your name.
He is here, you can touch him.
You will never be the same.
Would you stand and come right now.