| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
The Refiner's Fire
00:05:19
|
|
| Why does God allow the church to become corrupt and compromised? | |
| Because not all churches are on fire for God today. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So obviously God gives us free will and choice. | |
| So that's why throughout the New Testament there are problems being dealt with. | |
| Moral compromise, theological error, spiritual pride. | |
| You know, Paul, all the letters that deal with him, Jesus deals with it in the book of Revelation. | |
| So the bad news is there is a lot of sickness in the body right now. | |
| There is a lot of corruption. | |
| There have been so many falls with leaders and different things. | |
| It's a painful time. | |
| But if we can get low, rather than strut, the last thing we need to be doing is strutting now. | |
| God gives grace to the humble. | |
| And the bad news is we're in a bad place. | |
| The good news is this is the time for revival. | |
| This is the time when we finally recognize, oh, we do have great needs. | |
| The world has changed the church more than the church has changed the world. | |
| So rather than boasting, let's fall on our faces and cry out. | |
| We can use this as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block. | |
| Amen. | |
| You write that when our eyes are open, we realize that we are far more sinful than we realized. | |
| At that point, are we hanging by a thread? | |
| This scares me that we're getting that far away. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So think of someone like the prophet Isaiah. | |
| He goes into the temple to worship and he sees God. | |
| He sees the Holy One of Israel. | |
| And as a result, what does he say? | |
| Woe is me, I'm undone. | |
| I'm a man of unclean lips and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts. | |
| Maybe two minutes before that, he was feeling great about himself. | |
| Maybe compared to everybody else, he was a godly man. | |
| But in that holy presence, same with Job, he encounters God and says, I heard of you by the hearing of my ear, but now my eye sees you and I repent in dust and ashes. | |
| Or Peter, when he's out on the boat with Jesus in Luke 5, and there's the miraculous catch of fish, he falls to his knees and says, depart from me. | |
| I'm a sinful man. | |
| So God's holy presence, when he begins to come in in revival, we've had pastors in the Brownsville days, they would bring their church people to the revival because their people needed God. | |
| And the pastor was the first one to respond to the altar call. | |
| And he tells us afterwards, I feel like I got saved all over again. | |
| But it's not because God wants to hurt us or scare us. | |
| It's because he wants to cleanse us. | |
| It's like a cancer patient when the doctor says, okay, we have a serious problem, but here's the solution. | |
| That's how it is with God. | |
| There is always a holy solution. | |
| Amen. | |
| Having the word as our measuring rod, does that make our sinful actions worse? | |
| Yeah. | |
| If we compare ourselves to ourselves, hey, I'm tall compared to you. | |
| If I compare myself to an NBA basketball center, I'm a little guy, right? | |
| So, hey, I may be holy compared to you. | |
| You may be holy compared to me, but that's not the standard. | |
| The standard is the word of God. | |
| Hey, let's do something like the Sermon on the Mount and read the Sermon on the Mount and see how holy we are. | |
| But this is where grace kicks in. | |
| This is where we say, God, in myself I'm weak, but by your grace I can overcome. | |
| In myself, I fall short, but by your grace, I can live a holy life. | |
| And we've seen it. | |
| We've seen God's transforming power. | |
| So I tell people, hey, rather than line up all your excuses, be honest with God. | |
| I'm struggling here. | |
| I'm addicted to porn. | |
| I've got a terrible relationship with my wife. | |
| I scream and yell. | |
| I'm out of control. | |
| I've got this secret habit nobody knows about. | |
| Pastors, leaders, rather than just cover the thing up, be honest with God because he knows anyway. | |
| And when we're honest, then he's got the solution with the cross, with his grace, with the blood of Jesus. | |
| And that's why we see in revival sometimes very intense confession. | |
| I've seen it in meetings even in the last year or two. | |
| The end of the service, the conviction of sin is so intense that people literally get on the platform and take the mic and confess. | |
| I remember a boy, oh, I don't know, 11, 12 years old, getting up publicly at a service early last year, crying. | |
| He said, I've been so disrespectful to my mother and father. | |
| I can't believe I treated it. | |
| And they all hug him and they're loving him. | |
| And what? | |
| He felt he had to do that because God was moving so deeply. | |
| But it's like the refiner's fire. | |
| That's why fire has been such a key word in my life for so many years. | |
| You throw the gold and silver in there. | |
| It looks good to start. | |
| But then when it gets in the fire, all the impurities come up. | |
| And I was preaching in a church of maybe about 6,000 in California early last year, hungry for the Lord, reaching out to the lost. | |
| And I preached on the refiner's fire. | |
| And I preached on why revival can be uncomfortable because it brings up to the surface the sin, the problem, but so it can be skimmed off. | |
| I get back to my hotel room after the meeting. | |
| I'm on my knees praying. | |
| And suddenly I feel all this stuff. | |
| I'm wondering, where is this coming from? | |
| Selfishness, pride, ambition? | |
| I'm saying, Lord, is that me? | |
| Is that who I am? | |
| And I was, wait, I just preached on Refiner's Fire, and all this junk that I didn't even know was there is coming up to the surface. | |
| God wants to skim it away so we can really shine. | |