I have to tell you that I am doing what my mother told me to do. I'm serious. I was homeschooled by a godly Christian mother out on the mission field in Japan in the 1970s. I can Remember in 1976, my mother would turn to me and say, Kevin, there's something wrong with the way that people are teaching Christian home schools and Christian schools in the area of the classics and literature, and she could see that there were so many of the young people that were walking away from the faith at that time. And that was way back in 1976.

And then in 2006, 30 years later, my mother came to me and handed me a book called The Undercover Revolution by Ian Murray. Again, it's my mother that keeps coming back to me again and again. She says, Kevin, there's something going on in the area of the classics, and these British classics have had such a negative effect upon British civilization, and they've contributed to the decline of the Christian faith in England. And so then that's when I began to work on apostate. And then I was convicted that we needed to present something better for our children.

So that's what inspired me from the beginning. I think what we're doing is we're calling, we're calling homeschoolers to repentance. We're calling Christian schoolers to repentance. We're calling Christian classic schools to repentance, we're calling public schoolers to repentance. This is the time to really engage a call to basic repentance across this country.

And repentance is fundamentally a shift of mind, a change of mind in a very fundamental sense. It effectively is that worldview change that we want to see to, in fact, impact every area of life. And so, if it's not radically changing, not just the externals of how we educate our children, but to the very core of it, if we're not bringing Christ to the center of it if we're not radically changing the worldview taught in how we do history and how we do literature if we don't see a 180 degree difference between the secular schools and what we're doing in the Christian schools and the home schools brothers and sisters we have a radical reformation that still needs to happen. I think the fundamental problem in the Christian mind today is the dualism that separates out the piety on a Sunday from what you do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It came with Aquinas and separating out the sacred doctrine from the other form of knowledge, distinct and kind, which was the philosophy built up on human reason.

He said We have two forms of thinking, two forms of philosophy, and he enabled a secular form of education some 700, 800 years ago. And that seeps into the way that we live. That seeps into the way we educate, the way we think, the way we entertain. And so Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, is not a constant presence in our lives because of this radical dualism in modern Christianity. So may the Lord help us to engage a regular walking and talking with Christ and a worship on a daily basis in our homes.

The daily aspect of the Christian faith is so crucial, brothers and sisters. The idea that The Word of God should be a frontlet between our children's eyes, that there's always something on the posts, on the gates, that we're always confronting, always facing the truth of God, the presence of God, the relevance of God, the significance of God, the worthiness of God for our worship. That's a daily thing that's shot through every aspect of our children's lives, of our lives as well. May God return these things to us. Well, there is a crying need today for Reformation, for repentance, for revival.

And so I want to draw from Joel chapter two this morning. If you have your Bibles, please turn to Joel chapter two. What this nation needs, brothers and sisters, is not a Republican president. What this nation needs is not a Republican. What this nation needs is a revival and a reformation.

The foundations are destroyed. What do the righteous do? We cry out to God as the prophet does in Joel 2. We come together, we gather the people, we cry out for God's intervention, for the work of God to do something amazing. The foundations are destroyed in this nation.

And there's the idea that we can solve the problem with superficiality. This is the problem. We have two superficial movements. We don't need more movements. We don't need more labels.

We need God to do a work. We need the Holy Spirit to descend and break through the heavens and rend the hearts and make significant fundamental change in our entire lives, both individual and corporate. The foundations are destroyed. What do the righteous do? I think the perception of so many is that we just need some minor thing that We can be healed in some minor way, as if an earthquake comes and hits some area, like San Francisco, and we have 9.0 earthquake, and it's creating seven-foot fissures in the basement, And somebody comes to the house and says, I'm here to clean your carpets.

And the householder says, I don't need carpet cleaning, I need concrete. I need new foundations. This is where we are today, brothers and sisters. If God would just give us the eyes to see the crying need today for a full-orbed Reformation of life, a repentance, a restoration of a right view of God of sin of Righteousness and of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the cry of every pastor Every God-fearing God-loving Jesus serving pastor in America turn us again.

Oh Lord make your face shine upon us and we shall be saved. We cry out that God would bring repentance to America, that there would be a rebuilding of the family, a reformation of the church, both corporate and individual. Before I move on, I'm here at a repentance conference in which we're trying to identify the need of the day, and God's Spirit works with us and points out the things that are lacking and our wrongheaded way of looking at things. And so we asked the question at a repentance conference, repent of what? What is there to repent of?

There needs to be a radical paradigm shift on so many levels. There's so much satisfaction with superficial rallies, conferences, and movements. There's too much satisfaction with previous reformations. As if somehow if we just called ourselves reformed, that would be sufficient. And I see there are there are different ways of looking at the Reformation the previous Reformation I appreciate that because all previous revivals and reformations are important to the life of the church in the present day so we're thankful for the breathing out of the Holy Spirit of God and this amazing Pentecostal outpouring in the 16th century so all of that is wonderful but but there are those who say they are reformed and they say it in the past tense as if that's it and then there are those who the reform mean we call them the does and the Ings so this morning I drive the point home to each of you here this morning are you the reformed or are you either reform means Has the Holy Spirit of God really impacted your life in that you are seeing your need for Christ, you're bowing the knee to the lordship of Jesus Christ in the present and repenting and repenting of your sins in this ongoing life of repentance.

Well, very, very quickly before I hit the text this morning, I would encourage you to think of these on these things. A repentance agenda must, as we call the church to repentance today, we must repent of this quiet detente with the world, its philosophies, its ungodly educational systems. We must repent of the church's capitulation to statism, the welfare cartel, the redistribution of wealth in which the poor are terribly corrupted, a wholesale violation of the eighth commandment, and the church diaconate and the poor in our churches must repent of it. This is no small thing, brothers and sisters, but we need to challenge our diaconates and our poor to rid themselves of all of the systemic violations of God's laws and submit themselves once again to Christ and come to Him and confess and then submit to His Lordship in these areas. The church's failure to speak out loudly against the use of abortifacient birth control.

We must repent of this, brothers and sisters, the gross self-centeredness of the day. Again, each one of these sins, as we look at the corporate sins, we see it impacts the individual as well. We can hardly say these things without saying the self-centeredness of the day has affected my relationships with my own children. And we see how selfishness is such a horrible, horrible, horrific sin. And these are the sins to which Jesus calls us to repentance this morning.

The pornography scourge, the hiding of sin, the lack of confession of sin in the Protestant churches, and the refusal to walk in the light as He is in the light. This is such a basic definition or description of the Christian church. We back up and see that what it is to be a church is to be with those who are transparent, who open up, who receive the surgical tools that Jesus by his Holy Spirit brings to the heart as the Word of God is preached in the churches. We we see our need again, we run to the cross and receive the cleansing of Jesus and the warm sense of 1 John 1.9 sweeps over our being one more time as we receive this great promise of forgiveness and the promise of cleansing. Friends, this is what the churches need.

This is what we're crying out for today. Oh, that God would bring the confession of sin, the weeping and the mourning, the sackcloth and the ashes. I know these things are foreign concepts to the modern church in America, but blessed are those that mourn. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Ah, that there would be beggars for mercy as we've already heard this weekend.

That there would be true beggars. Beggars who know they are beggars because they are starving for God's righteousness and God's mercy upon them. Oh, that we would repent of the denominational splitting over endless inconsequential minor issues while congregations are filled with sexual sins, divorce, lovelessness, materialist idolatry, and parents sending their children to ungodly schools. There's the weak gospel that is incapable of cleansing a man or woman from sin and incompetent to change a sexual identity or orientation. This flimsy, flabby gospel that evidently has no power to transform God, deliver us from this gospel.

The Word of God comes sharply to us and calls us to a change of mind and perspective towards what Jesus did on that cross. Oh, that we would see these things. Amen, brothers, sisters. May God deliver us from the man worship and self-worship that has produced a deadening and souring of worship of the true and living God within our churches. And may we repent of a refusal to face sin and run to Christ and appreciate Christ and the beauty and the glory of His salvation.

May we repent of a lack of love for God as manifested by the fact that so few fathers love God. So few Christian fathers love God because if they would love God, we wouldn't have to argue over programs, we wouldn't have to argue over Sunday schools. If fathers would love God, there would be no Sunday schools needed why because because they are teaching the Word of God to the children seven days a week it says a front lip between their eyes it's integrated in the getting up the lying down and then the walking, by the way, it's 147 Sunday schools in a given week. All right, you can add one on Sunday. But The lack of love for God is manifest that a man is not putting God first He's not sharing the God he loves with the children he loves May God help us to repent of academic hubris Has been far too concerned with the skepticism of evolutionary scientism and higher criticism such that so many of our churches are kowtowing to the scientism of the day.

It's rife. I talked to Ken Ham, our brother, that holds to the sixth 24-hour day perspective and he says, so few denominations will take the stand on it. Why? Academic pride, academic hubris is taking down our best and brightest of those in our seminaries today. May God help us to repent of the reliance on psychological methods, counseling, humanistic terminologies, instead of preaching the word, rebuking, admonishing, praying, and relying on the Holy Spirit of God and his powerful working in a man or a woman.

Jesus didn't bring psychology to the man at the Gadarenes. Jesus didn't bring pills. He didn't bring the psychotropic drugs. Jesus cast out the demons. May we rely as as preachers of the Word of God upon the power of God.

Oh may God bring a great reformation and repentance to the day. Well, let's move on to Joel chapter 2, and I'd like to read from verse 12. I'm going to review the book with you in just a moment, but here, Joel 2 and verse 12. Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart and with fasting and with weeping and with mourning rend your heart and not your garments turn unto the Lord your God for he is gracious and merciful slow to anger and of great kindness and Repenteth him of the evil who knoweth if he will return and repent and leave a blessing behind him even a meat offering and a drink offering unto the Lord your God. Well, the book of Joel speaks of the state of affairs of the children of Judah at that time.

And it speaks to us as well, the prophets, they bring the bad news in sharp clarity, as well as the good news. The prophetic teaching brings out the best analogies and the best illustrations, defining and describing the bad news with a very sharp clarity. And so Joel describes this in the first chapter. He talks of the spiritual barrenness of the day in which it's just a desert and a wilderness. It's a scorched earth destruction brought about by sin's effects upon the land.

The field is wasted, the land mourns, the grain is ruined, the new wine is dried up, there isn't even enough seed to plant for the next year. And Revelation 2 and 3 adds to it because again friends sometimes the macro descriptions in the minor prophets and the major prophets can be applied to the local churches in Revelation 2 and 3 of the New Testament era And we see similar descriptions. It's the dead and dying church. It's the lukewarm churches, the loveless churches, the defiled churches. They are naked, they are wretched, they are miserable, they are poor, and they are blind.

And at times, brothers and sisters, we step out into the ecclesiastical environment in which we find ourselves and as pastors or elders or sometimes lay people in the churches we look around us and we can sense the dryness and the coldness and the deadness. It just feels dead. There's no spiritual life, there isn't that spiritual discernment and that vivification that comes with the Holy Spirit's presence and present working. And this is the state of the church. This is the state of so many churches.

Churches are like gardens in which sometimes yes we have a time of greenery for a year or two or five or ten or fifteen years and then we sink into the Laodicea or the Sardis or the Ephesus in which we've lost our first love and and this is the state of affairs that entire macro churches face in the Western world. All the descriptions are descriptions we can relate to. Amen. Every pastor knows this. Every pastor in which the Spirit of God works, he knows, he can see at times in which people are not getting converted.

Remember Martin Lloyd-Jones, in a sermon I heard recently said, a sign of a dead church is that it doesn't reproduce. The church is a mother, and a mother reproduces. She has babies. And if the church isn't having babies, if there's no conversions, there hasn't been a conversion in your church for five years. The ungodly, the unbelievers in the communities aren't coming in to receive the grace of Christ and the life of Christ and the resurrections are not happening.

Friends, You've got deadness, coldness that you're dealing with in those environments. People aren't getting saved. Churches are dealing with sheep shuffling. From church to church, it's all vain. It's empty.

There's no progress in the faith. They're just new labels. There's just new church movements, there's pretend revivals, just sheep shuffling and sheep shuffling, but nobody's really getting saved. Their church divisions, church disunity are going on and so forth, this is the scenario described here. And if you were to bring all the good preachers into a conference in Washington, D.C., if we were to draw in George Whitefield and the Apostle Peter and Charles Spurgeon and Martin Luther and Bucer and all the great preachers that have brought about great revivals by the working of the Holy Spirit.

These men all converged on Washington, D.C. Today and opened up on the National Mall with 100, 000 people surrounding. We wonder if it would do any good. We wonder if it would have any effect. What is described here are the preconditions for Acts chapter 2.

Joel 2, Acts 2. That's the comparison here, friends. Joel 2 is fulfilled. Peter says in his sermon, it has been fulfilled today in your eyes. Joel 2 Acts 2.

Matthew 27 is the state of affairs described in Joel 1. So as we move on to Joel chapter 2, verses 1 through 12, we read of God's judgment that's hovering over the people at that time a day of darkness of gloominess a day of clouds of thick darkness as the mount morning spread upon the mountains of great people and as strong There has not been ever like that. Neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations. A fire devours before them, behind them. A flame burns.

This is the hovering judgment of God over the people of God. Perhaps AD 70 is configured here, but there is that sense of imminent doom, imminent judgment, the judging hand of God hanging over a people, hanging over a nation. And our nation certainly is subject to these judgments as well as you know brothers and sisters I don't have to go over all of where a nation is today there has never been a time in this nation's history I mean never in which this nation is in so much need of a Holy Spirit revival of a national repentance because the judgment of God is hanging over this nation. We all know it. It would almost go without saying it.

We are this close. God would have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. That is if His judgment wouldn't come upon a nation that is in the state that it is in today and doesn't repent. Gallup identifies 19 moral indices for the nation, and just this last year, we are at the very lowest of every single indices that they have ever looked at over a period of 30 to 40 years. Moreover, the church is in deep need of revival and repentance as well with all the scandals that have fallen upon the great leaders across this country.

So here is the state of affairs described in Joel chapter 1, Joel chapter 2, first 12 verses. And then we come to verse 12 of Joel 1, and here it is. Now what do we do in this state of affairs? What do we do as things look desperate, whether it be on the macro scale of America, the entire Western world, Canada included. Here we are in this terrible condition.

What do God's people do? How do we face this? How do we react to these conditions? And Joel 2 verse 12 picks it up. We prepare for God's blessing.

We prepare for God's blessing. That's what it says here. Now read verses 12 and 13. Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart and with fasting, with weeping and with mourning, and rend your heart and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil." That is, here we are on the cusp of God's judgment. And God says, turn to me, first with weeping and mourning and fasting.

This is the first step to preparation for the blessing of God, which will come towards the end of chapter 2. What we do is we weep and fast and mourn. This is the first indication of revival. In my study of the great revivals and Pentecost that have occurred over centuries what we find is without exception there are days of weeping and mourning. And George Whitfield wrote to his wife from Scotland when he was up in the fields of Scotland preaching till 10 o'clock at night.

They would go for four to five hours at a time with 20, 30, 40, 000 people gathered. He says the weeping in the morning went on all night long. People wailing and moaning and crying out to God all night long. The Korean Pentecost, same thing. When it all came down, the Holy Spirit visited that group in January of 1907 to launch one of the greatest missionary outreaches in the history of modern missions.

When the Holy Spirit came down and those 2, 000 men gathered in that room, there was weeping and crying and it was chaos. The Presbyterian missionaries said, we didn't know what to do. We thought maybe we should stop this. And then they realized it was the Holy Spirit of God convicting these men and they wept and mourned and cried out to God for days. So the indication that God is bringing a revival to your family or to your church will be that there is a heaviness.

There must be a palpable heaviness upon ourselves, upon our churches, upon our families. And may I say for days and perhaps even weeks, weeping, mourning, and fasting. Then he says in verse 13, and rend your hearts and not your garments. The rending is a rending of desperation, a rending of an agonizing, heart-deep cry to God in our severe need for God's intervention. This is it.

This is it. It is a loud demonstration of a need, of a desperate condition in which we find ourselves, it is a way in which we grab the attention of God, so to speak, because we have come face to face with the horror of the condition. Again, it just won't happen. The revival doesn't happen unless there is this deep and penetrating sense of the desperation of our condition. Unless we can taste the deadness of it, unless we understand the coldness, the weakness, the brokenness, then we don't cry out to God.

We don't rend our hearts with his heart deep agonizing cry for for God's intervention for God's deliverance for God's redemption then verses 16 and 17 moves on to blowing the trumpet sanctifying the fast calling the solemn assembly gather the people sanctify the congregation assemble the elders gather the children those that suck the breast let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber and the bride out of her closet, Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord weep before the porch and the altar and let them say, Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to the reproach of the heathen, that the heathen should rule over them. Wherefore should they say among the people, where is their God? What is this? Again, it's the weeping and the mourning, the rending of the hearts, and now we're prepared for prayer. And somebody already mentioned that the lack of the prayer meeting in the modern church is an indication that there is a lack of reviving in amongst God's people and this became something I was I became aware of a couple of years ago and I called for a prayer meeting in our church in which for the first week or two or three or four weeks, it was myself and my wife and my daughter that would have come on a Wednesday night and there we were and then we moved it over to our house because there wasn't any sense in going to the church building with it.

And so it wasn't the right time, there just wasn't the desire And I've come to the conclusion that we can't preach it, we can't urge it, we can't manipulate it out of people. If the Holy Spirit hasn't worked yet, friends, we're not even there yet. We're not even to the point of the reviving of the church. If there's going to be a prayer meeting, we call it, we don't tell people to come to it, we just say it's there. And if it's there and people have a burden that is the size of a Mack truck and they just have to unburden this before the Lord, they're coming.

They will come, I tell you they will come. If they have a burden, if they see the need, they will come. They will come to the fast. They will come to the prayer. And so the elders call for this.

They don't call for new programs. And I became tired of the endless discussions on how we can stimulate the men in our congregation to do family worship. Are we going to have to back up to the youth group? Are we going to have to hire the youth pastor in order to patch it up for the next five to 10 years? What kind of program do we bring into the church?

A church that just has no fire for God. What do we do? Another program? Is the church service require a little more of this and a little more of that? Then we realize the the program is to pray and to wait It's to pray and to wait It's to wait on God now again acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God We believe that is only God that can come and part these red seas of people's hearts.

It's not going to happen but for God to intervene. So the test of faith for the elders and the test of faith for those who are spiritually aware and spiritually sensitive to the deadness of the world around us is to stand and pray and wait and hope for the salvation of the Lord. Our program is simple. Pray and wait and hope expectantly for what God is going to do. That's the program.

That's what we do. It's the faith of Moses who said, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord today. Now it's difficult for us to do that. There we are at the Red Sea, we lift the rod for a moment, we wonder. Perhaps it's a test of faith, waiting itself is the test of faith.

You've sensed the deadness and the coldness. You lift the rod and you wait. And you wait for God to do his work and separate the waters and bring about his amazing redemptions. Oh brothers and sisters this is it. We gather together to pray and to wait upon God and to expect and anticipate God's mighty work.

Verse 21, fear not, O land, be glad and rejoice for the Lord will do great things. That's it. Oh, your church is tiny. Oh, there's hardly anybody who's on fire. Evangelism almost a lost cause.

What do you do? You Pray and wait and fear not, but be glad and rejoice because God is going to do great things. That's the strategy. And so yes, you've seen Psalm 137 in which we're hanging our harps on the willows, yes, but we always transition into 126 because God will do great things. That's the outlook all the time for men and women who have faith.

It's always an outlook of hope and expectation and anticipation for what God is going to do next. And I love Isaiah 64, Where the prophets have witnessed the 1600 years of the unfaithfulness of God's people. You think you have a problem in your local church. I'll tell you this much, it hasn't been for the last 1600 years. These prophets have dealt with 1600 years of constant rebellion against God's word to the period of the judges, the period of the kings, and then the exile, the return from the exile, again and again, all the way to Malachi, dealing with 1600 years of abject rebellion and apostasy, and it's come again and again and again but Isaiah and the prophets are still men of faith yes revealing the Word of God but standing in prayer in Isaiah chapter 64 and crying out oh Lord rend the heavens oh that you would come down, oh God, come down.

You will do the awesome thing which we did not expect. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God will do. Now listen to this, this is the key phrase, what God will do. Eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of man what God will do for those who wait. The key to revival is to pray and wait and wait for what?

For God to do his work. So there they are, 120, in the upper room, surrounded by 20 million angry Romans and Jews that had just put the Messiah to death, 120 in that room, praying and waiting. And then God did it. And He brought His Pentecostal Holy Spirit power upon that building, upon those people. And the world has not been the same since.

And here we are, 1200, sitting in an age of rank secularism, Obergefell, apostasy, unlike anything we have ever seen in the history of the world. We have seen hundreds of millions of Scottish, English, Germans, Canadians, Americans who have rushed off and away from the church. Here we are surrounded by this rank secularism today, but it is a good thing for a man to hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. The effects of this great revival and this great repentance that sweeps across, whether it be the individual, whether it be the individual case, and I'm so thankful that in our congregation God has over the last two years brought some of the most amazing, the most amazing conversions I have ever seen in my life. It has been astounding to see the redemption of God in some of the most desperate, horrible cases I have ever seen.

God's redemption will come. Now it may not sweep a nation. It may not sweep an entire city or a state. But it comes and we may Be expecting or anticipating a local revival in your church, in your family, in which the Holy Spirit of God is slicing through, rending the heavens, and doing things that we did not expect to see. But Praise God when it comes.

The effects are amazing. Verses 22 to 23, we read, Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness do spring, for the tree bears their fruit, the fig tree and the vine do yield their strength. Be glad then ye children of Zion. Rejoice in the Lord your God for He hath given you the former rain moderately. He will cause the come down for you the rain, the former rain, the latter rain in the first month and the floor shall be full of wheat and the fats shall overflow with wine and oil." These great illustrations of what some perceive as a millennial thing, friends, it is most definitely the New Testament Holy Spirit outpouring upon individuals and churches in entire lands in which amazing transformation happens that is prefigured by these great analogies.

This is a New Testament spirit-filled revival and it always always is followed up with true and real and pure joy. You're going to see not the fake joy as you didn't see the fake tears in the confession of the sin over the three, four, five, seven days of agony where men and women cried out to God for mercy upon their poor souls. What you find following this is always the rushing in of the Holy Spirit joy that is that true joy, that heart deep joy, in which an individual and a church receives this amazing joy that sustains you even in the midst of unbelievable sufferings and Persecutions is precisely what we find in the great revivals like the Korean Pentecost that was followed up by three of the most severe persecutions that Christians have faced in the modern century. Well the effects of the Holy Spirit breathing out these mass resurrections, amazing. Friends you've got to read the stories.

I wrote a book called Taking the World for Jesus. It's just coming out. But it was the most exciting, most encouraging story I've ever read to see the work of the multiple Pentecosts that have happened throughout the centuries and we are the product of not just one Pentecost but multiple Pentecosts that are the outpouring of the Reformation faith in the 16th century, the Great Awakening in the 18th century, on into the Welsh revival, the Scottish revival of the 1820s, and of course the Korean revival and the big Chinese revival of the last two decades. Friends, The effects of these, the wave of these effects that continue to roll generation by generation is our heritage. It is what God has done.

He has done great things. He has accomplished wonderful things in the history of the centuries. The Scottish revivals of the 1820s, I think of William Burns and his preaching throughout Scotland to thousands upon thousands in the streets of Scotland. At one point he said in a building he preached to 3, 000 men for three hours straight and not a single man left the building. And these people were so impressed with a word their hearts turned back to God and William Burns becomes the great preacher that establishes the very first churches up and down the rivers of China and God uses this Holy Spirit filled man to continue a revival that would eventually spawn the missionary movement that influenced so many nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Amazing that God brought a Pentecost to Scotland in which the very first missionaries that come out of the Presbyterian Scotland go to India, off to China, and then down into Africa in which these these people would put their lives on the line the average lifespan of a missionary to China to Africa was seven years and one missionary said build a graveyard before you build the church and these these Spirit-filled men and women of God formed the pavement by which the gospel of Jesus Christ made it into these continents. But it came out of these amazing revivals of God in which the word of God is impressed on the consciences of men and women. They see their deep need for Christ, they turn to Christ, and the revivals begin to affect future generations. These are amazing stories. As I mentioned, the Korean Pentecost or the Fijian Pentecost, in which Fiji was the worst island ever.

Of all the South Sea islands, they were the most ferocious in terms of the cannibalism. I can't describe to you the degradation of this tribe. They had more of the character, more of the viciousness to accomplish the most wicked deeds anybody had accomplished. For seven years, those Methodist missionaries were there and the chiefs would bring the sacrifices of the human bodies and they would sacrifice them 10 feet away from the front door of the missionary homes. The demonic oppression was intense.

It was unbelievably intense for some seven years. Only had a few converts gathered together in one small room. And one night, the man prayed. The old man, the new convert prayed and when he prayed the Holy Spirit of God came down like a rushing wind. He said it came like a rushing wind upon the peoples that were gathered and people started to weep and people started to mourn and then people started to cry out for God's mercy upon them and then it spread throughout the village off to the chief's house and then off to other villages and it captured the entire island chain of the Fijians, and the Fijian people came to Jesus in masses, tens of thousands of these cannibals that were the most vicious, that were so captured by demonic strongholds for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, all of that came down.

And the Holy Spirit of God radically transformed the islands of the Ficis. Friends, Pastor William Gibson reported on the 1859 Welsh revival in which the Holy Spirit of God influenced every town, every church throughout all of Wales. And this is what Pastor William Gibson said, it were worth living. Ten thousand ages in obscurity and reproach to be permitted to creep forth at the expiration of that time and engage in the glorious work of the last six months of 1859. 10, 000 ages.

A million years he would have prayed and waited and hoped in the salvation of God to come down upon Wales in 1859. All the joy, all the victory, all the gloriousness of the Holy Spirit of God's work in the history of this world. The blessings are multitudinous. There's the former reign and the latter reign, the restoration of the years, the locusts of Eden. Where sin abounds, grace did much more abound.

Where Satan had a hold upon a people and had degraded a people to the lowest possible state, Grace abounded. Grace abounded more. Grace is glorious. Grace has manifested itself so many times with so many people. God's grace will not be undone by the curse of sin.

Grace will not be outdone. Grace will win. Grace will win and that bitter divisive proud dead garden somebody called a church begins the blossom forth with fruit Love and joy and peace and long-suffering and gentleness and goodness and faith springing up like flowers in a wasteland that used to be a desert. Now it's a garden. God has blessed a nation that used to be rife with denominations, rife with all forms of minor conflicts, completely saturated in all sorts of sins and degrading forms of sexuality.

God comes with His grace and by His spirit and brings a garden that paralyzed blind and slave sinner leaps to lose his chains. My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee." And people Will experience that and they will know it and it will respond in amazing joy because they know what it's like to To be free to be redeemed by the Lamb of Calvary Amen And our sons and daughters will prophesy generational faith, not generational apostasy. Right now, 97 percent of kids raised in homes in which a biblical worldview was somewhat experienced or walking away from the faith, according to George Barnum. We know all of this. But instead of that, imagine that God would bring a generational revival.

I hardly knew a pastor over my first 35 years of ministry or involvement in the church in which the pastor had not lost at least half of his kids. Brothers and sisters, this doesn't smack of New Testament revival in which the hearts of the fathers turn to the sons and sons turn to the fathers, and the men and the young men, young women and the boys and the girls are prophesying. It doesn't smack of that. We need the Holy Spirit of God to come upon our churches big-time, big-time. We want our children crowding into rest homes to share Jesus.

We want our children hardly wait to speak to somebody in the airport. I'm so thankful that we're seeing little pieces of this in our own families. I was on my way out here to this conference two days ago, and I had to use the restroom, and I was approaching the gate in which there are all these people gathered and there was this very, very dysfunctional looking young man who appeared to be a very, very, very tough background, the worst looking young man in the entire airport at that point, and I saw a young lady speaking to him. It was my daughter. She found the young man that needed Jesus, and she went right for him.

She's got his email. We're corresponding. He's interested in the gospel. This is what we want. Brothers, let's pray for it.

Let's pray for God to bring about these amazing results and, of course, the bold preaching as well. Let's close in prayer. Do any of you desire these things? Does this draw you in? Let's gather the people.

Come forward. Everybody come forward. Let's have a short time of prayer. Scott, can we do this just for a moment? Let's everybody come forward.

Come forward to the front. And elders, come forward up onto the stage with me. Scott, come on up with me. All the elders and pastors, come up here with me and let's pray for God to rend the heavens and to bring His reviving spirit upon our families and our churches. Let's do that right now.

Would one of you like to pray as well? Scott, would you pray as well? Let's pray. Father in heaven, oh God we pray that you would rend the heavens and then rend our hearts. God we pray our nation is in such need.

Father, our families and our churches too dry. Father, not enough of the Holy Spirit's work, not enough conversions, not enough repentance. Oh God, there's not very much mourning or weeping in our congregations. Oh God, we haven't seen the joy that we would love to see. God, we pray, we are here to pray and to wait and to hope expectantly for what you're going to do next.

God, we pray that you would come by your Holy Spirit, rend the heavens and rend the hearts of men and women and children. Oh God, that our children would prophesy. They would evangelize, they would share the word, they would speak it in family worship. Oh God, that you would bring us the rain, the former rain, the latter rain. Father, pour out your Holy Spirit, we pray upon this land.

Oh, the land is thirsty. Oh Father, the churches are so needy. Oh God, we beg of you, we plead with you. Oh God, that you would come and have mercy upon our families and our churches bring your Holy Spirit again Oh God we know you can do it we pray you would be glorified once again by the churches across this nation that the wicked will turn and see and say what great things God has done. Oh Lord, we know with all of our hearts that only you can give us the poor in spirit.

Only you can make us the poor in spirit. Only you can give us those who mourn and you are the only one who can make us mourn for our sins. You're the only one who can make us hunger and thirst for righteousness. Oh Lord, that you would do it, that you would come down and bless us. Please don't let us go down from this mountain without it, Lord, oh Lord.

That you would come and pour out your grace. Amen. And all of God's people said, you're dismissed. Thank you.