All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Feb. 22, 2021 - Jim Bakker Show
09:02
A Prophetic Tale of Two Cities - Perry Stone
|

Time Text
Tale of Two Cities Revival 00:09:02
You talk about the judgment warning taken from the tale of two cities.
That intrigues me.
What do you mean by that?
Do you mind if I read this?
Because I think reading it, it's a little bit more effective than me trying to explain.
I'm going to read this real, it won't be a long, it'll just be a moment.
So this is from the book, and it's the introduction.
Now, everybody listen very carefully because again, I am in, I'm in California when this revelation came to me, and I had never heard it preached.
I'd never thought of it before.
But watch carefully.
In the earliest 20th century, two life-changing shakings occurred the same year, with the first influencing the second.
The location for both events was centered in the state of California.
The first struck without warning on April 18th, 1906, at 5.30 a.m. West Coast time.
Without any warning, the ground in Northern California began violently shaking with the epicenter centering offshore near San Francisco, a city of 400,000 inhabitants.
A deadly 7.9 quake rocked the region.
Devastating fires from broken gas lines licked up wooden structures burning for days.
The beautiful red brick buildings in San Francisco, common during that era, collapsed in piles of broken wood and crumbled stone.
Over 28,000 buildings lay in smoldering ruins as gas lines burst.
When a body count was conducted, 3,000 were dead and over 80% of San Francisco's buildings were destroyed.
The quake also ruptured the San, this is important, the San Andreas fault line from Oregon all the way to Los Angeles.
Now, here's the part that gets real intriguing.
The same month and year, April 1906, going from the smoking rubble of San Francisco to the busy streets of Los Angeles, another historical shaking of a different type impacted the religious world.
Nine days prior to the great San Francisco earthquake on April the 9th, 1906, a series of revival meetings were being organized by a black minister named William J. Seymour.
These nightly prayer gatherings included testimonies followed by Seymour's preaching and were being conducted in a house at North Bonnie Brace Street.
During one meeting, the exciting crowd began jumping and shouting, causing the porch to collapse.
Over outgrowing the small house, the revival and prayer meetings were moved to a cleaned-out livery stable located at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles.
The historical revival spread like wildfire, continuing from 1906 to 1915, attracting thousands of visitors.
Was there a specific trigger that helped thrust Los Angeles, California into such an amazing revival in 1906 instead of some other Western state?
20th century scholars know that historically there were three major revivals.
Of course, one was in the East Coast, central part of the United States and West Coast.
But why Los Angeles?
Are you ready?
Here's the key.
One clue for the success of the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles may be connected with the destruction of a major California city.
Now here's the bottom line.
The reason Azusa Street was so effective was because it had been predicted that with the opening up or the shaking of the San Andreas fault line, that it went all the way from Oregon to Los Angeles, that it would eventually, probably within weeks, months, or years, Soon, the city of Los Angeles would end up like San Francisco, completely decimated by another earthquake.
The people were hearing this.
They were giving warnings about it.
The point that I want to make is the possibility of a judgment.
And in 19, right around a year after the quake, in fact, I was at a bookstore.
Here's the illustration.
and found a book on the San Francisco earthquake written by a secular journalist, not a Christian, one year after it occurred.
And this secular journalist who had included black and white pictures and documented almost like a diary the pre-moments, the moment, and the aftermath of the San Francisco quake said the people believed it was a judgment from God.
Now, you would never hear that today.
Oh, you talk about being lampooned and lamblasted and criticized and cut down to use the J word, as I call it in the book.
The J word.
Nobody wants to use it because it sounds negative.
And the big answer is, why would God do it?
Why would God allow it?
Why does God let innocent people suffer?
God's a good God.
Why would he do that if he's so good?
So it brings along what we call philosophical questions that people bring up that Christians don't want to deal with.
The point I'd like to make in the story that I call the Tale of Two Cities is that Los Angeles became ripe for revival because the people were afraid of judgment.
And so Azusa Street lasted for many years, affected tens of thousands.
That small livery stable packed all day long prayer meetings, services running through the day, late into the night.
It impacted that city.
It actually impacted the entire world.
And somewhere around seven to eight different full gospel denominations came out of the Azusa Street revival.
So it's interesting to note, and it's very interesting that we paint this parallel for today, that anytime the Lord allows or permits the earth to be shaken or for people to go through a time in which the earth is in travail, in birth pains, and the earth is quaking and nature is upended and the laws of nature are being broken, gravity is being turned on its head.
I mean, whatever we want to call it.
Remember this.
It is not that God is trying to kill people.
He's not that kind of God.
It is, however, that judgment in which the security of human beings is taken from their hands causes men to lean toward the hand of God and seek his face.
Because the Bible talks about, and there's this kind of a strange verse, I'm paraphrasing it here.
Well, let me say it this way.
It's often been said, God puts eternity in people's hearts.
Every human being is given a measure of faith.
Some do nothing with it and fall into unbelief because their unbelief completely crushes out whatever faith they would have.
However, in the instances of what we're discussing right now, it's important to grasp this, that if the Lord allows, especially, let's say, a Christian, a nation with the Christian foundation, such as what the United States has, to go through something clataclysmic, it is for the sake of people turning their heart to him.
God wants men and women to spend eternity with him.
You're going to spend eternity somewhere.
And despite what some people believe, you only have two options, and there are only two.
One is heaven and then ruling with Christ on the new earth and the new Jerusalem coming down in eternity and we live with him in the city on a new earth.
Or it is separation from him in what's called a lake of fire or hell.
Now, some people don't believe in hell or lake of fire.
There have been hundreds, actually thousands of people with life after death experiences, some of them atheists, who saw the place and came back believers and now are serving the Lord because they saw it.
So we can't take this lightly.
But Jim, the thing is that the tale of two cities reveals to us how that, number one, something can happen suddenly that we're not expected.
And number two, that when tragedy comes on a national level, the purpose is not to make people become angry that God allowed it, but for the purpose of them humbling themselves to turn to him so that they can gain through Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of their sins and a covenant with Christ, a redemptive covenant that will cause them to spend eternity with the Lord.
Export Selection