Journey of Desire Part 1: Desire of All Nations - Christmas

You're listening to the road with pastor teacher Steve Holt.

If you don't literally stop your thinking sometimes and renew your mind with the power of the Holy Spirit to think differently, to think positively and good and wholesome and pure Philippians 4.8, you won't do it.

I want to challenge you as we go into this Advent season.

Let the joy of the Lord be your strength through the power of the Holy Spirit in the renewing of your mind.

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We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

So advent means desire or expectation.

And I remember as a kid, I was trying to think through what were some of my favorite Christmases.

And I remember that I got into cowboy stuff probably around third grade.

So third grade.

Now cowboy stuff's not really that big anymore.

You don't have that many westerns.

But man, back in the day with Roy Rogers and stuff like that, you always had these cowboy stuff.

And I remember you could get a cowboy outfit from the Sears Roebuck catalog.

And it had a little hat.

Had a little hat, you know, with this braided sort of braid going around, and it had a gun belt.

Okay.

And then it had the holster with the two guns.

I just couldn't wait.

I was so excited for that.

And I remember one time, uh, another time, where I had, my dad did this thing with me.

We were living in a cabin in South Carolina.

Dad was kind of on a sabbatical for ministry, and he was uh University of South Carolina working on a mental health uh degree, another master's degree that he was getting.

And so we were in this cabin on my on my grandfather's ranch, and I kind of got into hunting a little bit.

So, except that I didn't have a gun.

A little bit of a problem, right?

So dad would go hunting, he would take, and we had a dog, and we'd go out and quail hunt.

That's where, for you that don't know, that's where you these birds fly up and you you you wave at them.

Okay?

At least I did because I didn't have a gun.

But anyway, I was learning, and then he he told me that if I he had these little prerequisites that I had to follow through with, he'd get me a 20-gauge single-barrel shotgun.

It was going to be at Christmas.

From Sears again.

You know, Sears used to have shotguns.

And I still have it, it's mounted there in my office at home.

Yet expectation, I was so excited.

I kept kind of had to fight not to look around the corner or in the closet or these places where things were hidden, right?

Well, that's really what Advent is.

And churches all over the world, from Roman Catholic to Methodist to Presbyterian to Independent to Pentecostal, celebrate Advent, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.

And so these candles are litten, are litten.

These candles are lit at Advent, not at Lent, that's before Easter.

And it's an anticipation of the coming.

Well, historically, when you study Advent, it wasn't just about the coming, the first coming of Christ.

It's also an Advent or an expectation of the second coming of Christ.

So it has a dualistic prophetic meaning.

And I want to take you to a kind of obscure passage in the Old Testament that I'm pretty positive you've not heard spoken from in relation to Christmas.

So turn to Haggai.

Now Haggai's the minor prophets, so it's going to be near the back or the latter part of the Old Testament.

For you that use phones and iPads and stuff, you can just put it in and it'll just automatically go there.

It's on page 650.

Only kidding.

It is in my Bible, but Haggai, very interesting passage.

The Jews have returned from exile.

They've been in exile, and a few of them had the opportunity under Cyrus and then later Darius to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.

How many of you know that God can use a non-believer, a secular king, to bring about God's purposes?

Well, that's how God used Cyrus.

And you can read about it in Isaiah 45.

But in Haggai, they've gone back, and the work is languishing, and Haggai, coupled with Zechariah, these two prophets, Haggai only for four months that he prophesied, is admonishing the people.

Why have you quit rebuilding this second temple?

Well, in the midst of saying that and admonishing them, which is really what the whole book of Haggai is about, we come to these three verses that I think relate to advent, they relate to desire, they relate to expectation.

How many of you, as we go into 2020, have some hopes and expectations that are new for the coming year than they were last year?

How many of you?

Yeah.

Because inside all of us, within the heart of all of us, is this desire for more.

A desire for more than what we've experienced so far.

In some cases, a desire for more stuff, hoping that that'll fill a void in our hearts.

But in this passage, this cryptic prophetic passage from Haggai, he speaks to actually what the real passionate desire of all of our hearts are, wherever you are in the world.

So he's speaking to a desire that the Israelites had, where they had taken all of their passionate desire and coming back to Jerusalem to rebuild their own homes, their paneled homes, and they had neglected the temple of God.

And then this is what Haggai says to them.

Verse 5.

So Haggai chapter 2, verse 5.

Haggai 2:5

According to the word that I coveted with you when you came out of Egypt, so my spirit remains among you, do not fear.

For thus says the Lord of hosts, once more, it is a little while, I will shake heaven and earth and the sea and the dry land.

Verse 7.

I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the desire of all nations.

And I will fill this temple with glory, says the Lord of hosts.

Very interesting passage.

He's saying that there's a desire in all of our hearts, the desire of all nations, it's the desire of all governments.

They don't know it, but it is.

That's what's exciting about missions.

That's why I love when I've gone to India so many times and done teachings with those pastors there.

I could not probably plant a church in India, but they can.

And so hundreds of pastors are there, and they're giving their lives.

Many of them have probably perished, died on this earth, gone to heaven since I spoke to him the last time, which is about five or six years ago.

But the desire of the nations in India, the desire of the nations in China, the desire of the nations in Ethiopia, the desire of the nations in Germany, all over the world, there's this desire for something more of an unconditional, loving relationship with a Savior.

And he's saying there's a desire of the nations, and we've got to rebuild this temple.

And there's a prophetic meaning here, it's a powerful meaning here.

And I don't know how many of you have been around with me when I've talked about the prophetic, especially when we went through the book of Revelation.

I shared that the prophetic nature of Scripture always has an immediate meaning, but it also has a future meaning.

It's both end with the prophetic.

So he's speaking here of a new temple being built under Zerebabel.

This temple, because the temple of Solomon had been destroyed, it's just been leveled.

It's just stones and just the foundation.

They're starting to rebuild it.

He's speaking of that.

Come and rebuild the temple.

But he's also speaking of another temple to come.

And I want to speak of two other temples that are coming.

That Zerebel is speaking of, the desire of all nations that Zechariah is going to speak of, that Hosea is speaking of.

The first, in the context of what's written here, is this immediate temple that they would rebuild it.

And some 20 years later they would finish it and they would rebuild.

And this would actually be the temple.

That would be the temple that Jesus would come and worship in.

That Jesus would come and actually kick out all of those that were selling and buying and using it more as an enterprise than a place of worship.

It was a place where the Holy of Holies would come.

It'd be where the Ark of the Covenant would be.

But he speaks of another temple.

And it's a temple in the second coming of Christ because we believe that God is going to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

God's going to rebuild that temple in the last days in the second coming of Christ.

That we're going to see right there in Jerusalem, where the right there where we see the Dome of the Rock now, there'll be a new temple.

A new temple will be built with an enlarged and empowered and re-energize Israeli nation that will be coming to Christ, preparing for the second coming of Christ.

But there's a third temple.

There's a third temple that's the present now temple.

That's you.

You're the temple of the Holy Spirit.

You are the temple.

You're a holy priesthood.

God has put his spirit in you.

So that spirit that hovered over the nation of Israel, but yet only came upon certain prophetic people in that time has now been translated into an empowering upon every one of us that are believers in Christ.

So look back at verse 5.

According to the word that I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt, so my spirit remains among you.

Do not fear.

Some of you coming into 2020 have a lot of fear.

We are going to see a shaking in our nation.

If you think the last three years have been interesting.

Politically, socially, spiritually, and culturally, man, I don't think we've seen anything yet.

2020, a year of an election, a presidential election, we are going to be shaken to the core, and it could create fear.

Some of you that are investors, some of you that are in real estate, some of you that watch and and are involved heavily in the stock market, you know that an election year is very, very volatile.

And you might have fear.

Here's what he's saying here.

Haggai is saying, just as I led you guys out of Egypt, and I've now led you back under Cyrus, and I've led you back under Darius.

I'm bringing you back to rebuild the temple.

Don't fear.

My spirit is with you.

Men and women, as we come toward Christmas, quit fearing.

Make a choice today not to fear.

How many of you know you have to keep renewing your mind all the time against fear?

I mean, I was driving, I was driving in today, and seriously, you guys, it's amazing where your mind goes.

Something happened, something I saw, and I went back, and I started having all these negative thoughts toward a particular person, particular pastor.

Guy's a jerk.

He's up to no good.

Like I'm so perfect, right?

I had to, I didn't literally stop the car, but I had to stop mentally my thinking and say, stop that.

I rebuke those thoughts in the name of Jesus, and I just started blessing that guy.

And I blessed his wife and I blessed his family, and joy came back.

If you don't literally stop your thinking sometimes and renew your mind with the power of the Holy Spirit to think differently, to think positively and good and wholesome and pure, Philippians 4:8, you won't do it.

Philippians 4:8

So I want to challenge you as we go into this Advent season.

Let the joy of the Lord be your strength through the power of the Holy Spirit and the renewing of your mind.

Verse 6.

For thus says the Lord of hosts, once more, it is a little while, I will shake heaven and earth and the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all the nations, and they shall come to the desire of all nations, and I will fill this temple with glory, says the Lord of hosts.

Now, what I'm about to say, you're not going to like to hear.

Most of the time, God gets our attention, moving us toward the desire of our hearts and our nations by shaking our lives.

He shakes you.

He shakes you emotionally.

He shakes you relationally.

He shakes you in a marriage.

He shakes you financially.

He shakes you.

That's God's way.

He shakes us to wake us.

And if you're not awake fully where God wants you, he's going to shake you.

Now we can make that choice to wake up before the shakeup comes.

But he's always going to do a shaking so that we'll trust him more.

So that he'll shake you out of your lethargy.

He'll shake you out of your own self-sufficiency.

He'll shake you out of your own self-empowerment to have to trust him, to have to surrender again to him and say, Holy Spirit, I can't do this.

But you're my desire.

You're the desires of my heart.

So he shakes us into view.

He's shaking our nation right now.

Our nation is being shaken.

America is being shaken at its very core.

It's being shaken at the very core of what this church and what the church and what the nation was founded upon.

And it's only going to increase.

And the enemy is at work, and God's at work.

Because in the last days, it's going to get a whole lot darker.

And it's going to get a whole lot brighter.

So you guys know that I hunt.

And always the coldest part of the day is right before the sun rises.

And if you're smart, you know to always hunt with your back to the sun.

Because it's really hard to aim with the sun glaring in your eye.

I mean, I'm from Georgia.

I'm not real smart.

I figured it out.

But you, you know, so you got the sun behind you.

So what happens is the sun comes up and you're in the shadows, usually of a valley.

So even though the sun has come up, it's really, really cold.

So you might have gotten there at 5 a.m.

and it was 10 degrees.

Well, I can promise you, it was 10 degrees then.

At 7 a.m., it's about 3 degrees.

So it's gotten colder.

And I see that as a picture of what's happening in the latter days.

As the sun is rising, as we're getting closer and closer to the second coming of Christ, it's going to get colder.

It's going to get darker.

And you're going to see this stark contrast, read Psalm 2 about this, this sharp contrast behind the desire of the nations coming and the anger of the nations against the desire of the nations.

God shakes the heavens and the earth.

And there in the first coming of Christ, there was a shaking of the heavens.

Matthew 2.

Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem saying, Where is he who has been born, king of the Jews?

For we have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him.

So these magos, these magi, had seen a star before Christ was born.

They had seen it and started to follow it.

Some believe these were the magicians, these were the spiritual leaders coming out of what once was Persia.

Possibly the distant descendants of Daniel.

Who knew that there was there were constellations, there was going to be something in the heavenlies that would speak of a Messiah.

Everybody knew that in the Middle East at the time that was educated.

So it was nothing new.

And then they saw this star, this kingly star.

God was shaking the heavens.

And they followed that.

And they came.

God's going to shake the heavens in the last days.

Matthew 24.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.

The stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

And he will send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet.

And they will gather together his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.

God always shakes the heavens and the earth when he's about to do something great.

So turn in your Bibles to that classic story in Luke.

Turn to Luke in the New Testament, Luke chapter 2.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

In Luke chapter 2, I believe we have the best narrative of the birth of Christ.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.

Interesting.

The narrative begins politically.

God shaking the political world of that time to prepare the way for the first coming of Christ.

Verse 2.

This census first took place while Corinius was governing Syria.

Political again.

Interesting.

So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.

So Joseph's world gets challenged.

Joseph's world gets shaken by the political elements of the time.

Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David.

So he has to walk 70 miles.

To be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

So it was that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and behold an angel.

The angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid.

Then the angel said to them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be to all people.

For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

And this will be a sign to you.

You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with them angels, a multitude of heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.

Now, interesting.

God's shaking the heavens again.

He's shaking the heavens with angelic powers coming forth to proclaim the coming, the first coming of Christ.

And with that, the proclamation, the first proclamation about Jesus is that he's the desire of all the nations.

Look at verse 10.

The angel said, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be to all people.

So he comes to the Jews.

He actually comes to a central location.

He comes to a place fulfilling all those prophecies of hundreds, even thousands of years before, at a particular time in history, the fullness of time, he comes, but it's for all the nations of the world.

Which had been prophesied through the Abrahamic covenant that we would be blessed to be a blessing to all the nations of the world.

And the Jews would reject that.

And now, as we see the life of Christ coming forward, what happens, men and women, is he raises up a new kind of people.

Us.

Weird people.

People from Colorado, people from India, people from Bangladesh, people from Russia, all over the world, God begins to move with the power of his Holy Spirit, shaking nations, shaking people, and men and women.

There has never been such a flood of new churches being planted and people getting saved as there is today.

It is amazing.

China is being overwhelmed by the church.

And we say, ah, the only reason things happened in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union was because of a guy named Gorbachev.

No, there was this powerful church that had been raised up in Poland and East Germany and Hungary that had been praying and fasting and crying out to God to a point where it was an implosion within these governments and it was a takeover by believers and the church all over those nations.

And Gorbachev was smart enough to know that he couldn't keep up with the wave of what God was doing.

Men and women, listen closely.

I'm going to make a little prediction.

I believe in the next three to five years, if not earlier, we're going to see China implode.

There is such a move, so many new churches getting planted.

There's so many Christians in the Communist Party right now, they don't know what to do.

And I believe China's going to implode.

And it could be that Hong Kong's just the beginning.

They were interviewing Lek Walesa recently, and if you guys remember the solidarity movement in Poland with Lek Walesa, he said, if they'll invite me, I'll go and stand with the people in solidarity with them for a regime change in Hong Kong.

That's Lek Walesa, who, as you may remember, became the president of Poland after the rebellion.

God's on the move, He's shaking nations, He's shaking you.

If He's not shaking you, then get ready because He will.

But He's gonna shake you because He wants 2020 to be the best year of your life.

He wants you to discover the desire of all the nations.

He's saying, Come home.

Come to me.

Quit fearing.

Replace fear with faith.

Replace your troubled mind with a mind and a heart that believes that the best is yet to come.

That God's got something great for your marriage.

God's got something great for your student.

If you're a student and you're you're going to college and you're just in those beginning stages, you don't know what God's called you to do.

But if you'll fast, if you'll pray, if you'll get on your face and you'll call out him, he'll show you.

Take it from me, he'll show you.

He'll show you what to do, he'll guide you.

It won't be, you know, it won't be the 25-year plan, but he'll tell you how to do the next right thing.

And when you do the next right thing and the next right thing and the next right thing, you find that you're way over here, right where you're supposed to be.

But you couldn't see that yet.

But just do the next right thing.

If you're sleeping around, maybe you should stop that.

Well, I don't know.

You know, I really want to I really want to marry a really a good girl.

But it's really hard for me to be single right now and and control myself.

You ever thought that there's good girls that don't want to marry people like you?

Be the person that you want to marry.

Be the person that you want to marry.

And everybody's not doing it, by the way.

Everybody's not doing it.

I probably know two or three hundred young people that are saving themselves for marriage.

Now, granted, they hang out around here.

Because the only place you see good-looking girls at bars is beer commercials during football games.

I did enough bars in my time, and there ain't no girls in those bars that look like the ones in the commercials.

Hello?

Is that who you want to marry?

And if you're one of the girls in the bars, I just challenge you.

Go after the desire of the nations instead of the desire of your body.

Watch what God will do.

Some of you are in financial, you're getting shaken financially.

Come to the desire of the nations.

Start getting your finances under control in 2020.

You can.

You know, you can actually stop.

Let me let me give you a novel thought.

I've got a PhD in this.

You can stop what you're doing that's bad.

You actually have the power to do that.

And you can actually change through the renewing of your mind and with good friends and people around you, and you can start doing what God wants you to do.

You can.

It's amazing.

Good people do it all the time.

Good people do it all the time.

Dumb people don't.

Repent of dumb.

Repent of dumb and go after smart.

Read a proverb a day.

Just start there.

Just read one proverb a day.

Today's first.

You can start.

You can go all the way through December if you've never done it before.

First, there's 31 Proverbs.

There's 31 days in December.

One proverb a day.

Start today.

Read it.

And then just let God speak to you one or two things in Proverbs and just start doing it.

That's what Liz and I do.

We read a proverb a day together before we start the day.

After a cup of coffee.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

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Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.