| Time | Text |
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Coming Back Strong
00:04:06
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| What do we do with this dream that you've been given? | |
| I believe the Lord gave me the dreams to wake the church up. | |
| Most of the criticism that I'm getting, I've gotten quite a bit of criticism, has come from the dream that I posted. | |
| When I posted it, it had no hope. | |
| It had no, it was just gloom and doom. | |
| And I understand that when I, like I said, I was a shepherd that saw the wolves coming. | |
| I was a pastor who had a dream about opposition, persecution, things that were coming to the church. | |
| And I know that judgment begins in the house of God. | |
| Peter said, we share in his sufferings. | |
| And even Jesus said, through many trials and tribulations will enter the kingdom of heaven. | |
| But what I saw coming was a warning for the church to wake up. | |
| We have people who sit in our churches every day and they've heard the gospel for decades and yet they've never really committed their lives to him. | |
| Or they're going to wait until they're older, wait until they've got all their younger years behind them and then give God what's left. | |
| And Jesus said, if you want to be my disciple, you have to deny yourself, take up the cross, and follow me. | |
| And there's only one thing that you do on a cross, you die on. | |
| And that's what he's called us to do. | |
| And so I believe that God gave me the dreams to warn the church that we need to wake up, that we are not exempt from persecution and opposition. | |
| The Chinese church has been praying for years that persecution would come to the American church because we've become so lukewarm and so complacent and so compromising. | |
| Nigeria is going through a time right now where there's almost a genocide of Christians. | |
| In the Muslim world, if you become a Christian, you could be killed. | |
| You're ostracized from your family. | |
| You're removed. | |
| In nations, in North Korea, China, the underground church, pastors and Christians who have been put into prison because of their faith or for their preaching. | |
| And for some reason, we have thought, well, we are exempt from that. | |
| And the Lord, it doesn't say that anywhere in Scripture. | |
| It says judgment begins in the house of God. | |
| And I believe the Lord gave me the dreams to wake the church up, to warn that these things are coming and that we need to be prepared as much as we can, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. | |
| But most of all, spiritually, to get our hearts right with the Lord to make sure, you know, all the prophets, they gave that message of what was coming, the judgment, the terrible things. | |
| But he always said, if you return to me, I actually preached from Joel chapter 2 myself just yesterday morning. | |
| And in doing so, I'm reminded that the Lord says, return to me. | |
| But he says, return to me with weeping, fasting, mourning. | |
| In other words, the return back to Christ is going to have some conditions. | |
| He is coming back for a spotless bride, a spotless church without spot or wrinkle. | |
| He's coming back for a bride that is ready for him. | |
| And right now, I don't think the church is where it needs to be. | |
| We've made a lot of mistakes. | |
| We have not always lived up to the expectations of the word. | |
| The reason the world talks about hypocrites in the church is because we are hypocrites at times. | |
| But God's trying to say, wake up, walk back to me, come back to me, be the example. | |
| Deal with your sin. | |
| Address your sin. | |
| Confess your sin, it says in James. | |
| And that's one thing we do not do in the church world because we're afraid if people know what we struggle with, they're going to think that we're weak or whatever. | |
| And those times need to be behind us because the church needs to wake up and be the voice, the voice for God. | |
| We need to be the example to the world because there's a watching world that is watching us every single day and they're lost. | |
| In my opinion, there's only two kinds of people in the world, those that are lost and those that are saved. | |
| And we're supposed to occupy until he comes. | |
| We're supposed to preach and teach and baptize and do all those things, but we got to do it every single day. | |
| So I believe the dreams were a wake-up call to the church to get ready. | |
| Because number one, Jesus is coming back. | |
| We know. | |
| We know he's coming back. | |
| But he's coming back for people that are ready and watching. | |
| And that's why I believe he gave the dream to me to get out there. | |
| I believe that's why it went viral because once again, I had 1,100 friends that I put on a Facebook page, and within a week, it was up to almost a million people who had watched it. | |
| And that had to be the sovereign hand of God, because it was not me. | |
| I know that for a fact. | |