America: God Shed His Grace On Thee Part 2 - History Talks

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After teacher people.

Men and women, as the 1630s arrived, Puritan communities began to thrive and flourish all over the Northeast.

And that began what is historically called the Great Migration, which lasted for the next 16 years and saw more than 20,000 Puritans embark for.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

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

I don't know how many of you guys have ever been to the Redwoods in California, but I have had the privilege of being there several times.

And there is this 33-mile loop that goes through the Redwoods called the Avenue of the Giants.

And you may not know this, but the most majestic and largest living thing on the face of the earth are the Redwoods.

And the Redwoods range up to as high as 350 feet tall and 60 feet in circumference.

Amazing.

And when you go there, you're just uh at least I was in awe.

And at one point there is that famous picture that I think, even if you haven't been there, you've probably seen in your picture books of that tunnel that's actually cut through a tree that you can drive through.

And I don't think we drove through it, I'm not even sure they allow you to drive through it now, but we walked through it and we were right there where all these redwoods are.

And I can't think of a more uh beautiful analogy, an illustration of the Puritans.

And that's what we're going to talk about this morning, this Thanksgiving weekend, is the foundations laid by the Puritans.

They are giants in our land.

They are, I'll just say this, for probably the last 100 years, they've been somewhat forgotten and ill-treated and probably miswritten about by historians.

But it's been amazing over the last 20 years to see how many people, how many Christian leaders, even some politicians, have kind of resurrected the vision of the Puritans.

You could arguably say that America is the vision of the Puritans, that the United States of America is the Puritan vision.

It was the Puritans that gave us the source documents for the Declaration of Independence, the Protestant work ethic, the Christian home, and integrity in the workplace.

From the mid-1600s through the late 1700s, they were the giants of our nation in systematic theology, historical understanding, and entrepreneurial vision.

Turn in your Bibles to Matthew 5, and there is this passage that you've read many times before that was the keystone passage for the Puritans.

Matthew 5 14.

You are the light of the world.

A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.

Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lampstand.

And it gives light to all who are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

We discussed last week that a candle had been lit in the New World through the pilgrims or the separatists in Cape Cod.

But what about the candles in the old world?

What was happening in England?

England had become a cesspool.

The Anglican church ruled with, in many cases, a cruel and iron hand upon Christianity in England.

In the same note, that has been the view that has happened even today about the Puritans.

Because what had happened in England at that time was a kind of a pressing out, a pushing out of this group of people who actually kind of despised the separatist.

So though the Puritans believed in the same Reformation theology in view of a very experiential, intimate relationship with Christ type of Christianity as the pilgrims did, because the pilgrims had come from more of a blue-collar, low-class society, and you know enough about England because it's still true in many ways in Great Britain today, of a caste system.

The Puritans who came from the upper class despised and even looked down upon the pilgrims.

And so they despised the fact that the pilgrims had left to go to the New World, but oppression began to increase in England.

And so doing, they were now, they were now in a dilemma.

So who are the Puritans?

Well, if you looked up the Puritans today, I don't know if you use Wikipedia or not.

Sometimes Wikipedia is helpful, sometimes it's not.

Such books as The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials called The Crucible carry an image of the Puritans as a people preoccupied with sin and guilt.

One modern author that I read wrote this the Puritans, whose main occupation was to prevent each other from ever having fun, and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.

But let's remember that as they came in the 1600s and into the 1700s, their view had good reason because they understood that success or failure was determined by the favor of and the blessings of God.

They understood, because of where they had come from, to a new world where they came here with nothing, that they had to have the blessing and the favor of God.

I'm in a situation right now with several people that are in relationships that are not under the blessing of the Lord.

And so in my correspondence with them and discussions that we've had most recently, the reminder of the fear of God hasn't gone over super well.

But for the Puritans, there was a deep sense of the fear of God.

The name Puritan as a name was mud from the start.

Coined in the early 1560s, it was always a satirical smear implying peevishness, censorship, conceit, and a measure of hypocrisy.

And so the Anglican church began to push the Puritans out of the church.

But here's what's interesting.

I've had the privilege of being at the 16th Chapel in the Vatican in Rome, and when we were there, the beautiful Michelangelo fresco was being cleaned.

And it's amazing how dirty it had become.

So when you went in, there was scaffolding everywhere.

This is way back in the 80s, but there was scaffolding everywhere, and you'd look up, and like two-thirds of the ceiling had been cleaned, and a third was still smoky and dirty.

It had been hundreds of years since they had cleaned it.

And you could look and you could kind of barely see Michelangelo's fresco, but on this part, which they had cleaned, it was just gorgeous.

To me, that's also a picture of what we're attempting to do even today is to clean the description of the Puritans a little bit and give you the actual picture of what they believed in.

J.I.

Packer, in this book, which, if you're interested in this, a lot of this comes from this book, A Quest for Godliness, by J.I.

Packer, who's been one of my favorite authors over the years since I became a believer.

It's called The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.

And it's a quest for godliness.

Great book.

J.I.

Packer writes the difference between the Puritans and us today is maturity.

Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity.

Don't you love that?

I love that definition.

Let me read it to you again.

Maturity as a Christian is a compound of wisdom, good will, resilience, and creativity.

The Puritans exemplified maturity.

We don't.

We are spiritual dwarfs compared to them.

They were great souls serving a great God.

In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined.

Visionary and practical.

Idealistic and realistic too.

Goal-oriented yet methodical.

They were great believers, great hopers, great doers, and great sufferers.

Puritanism was at its heart a spiritual movement passionately concerned with God and godliness.

And it began in England with a man named William Tyndall.

And when you go to the area where Parliament meets, you can go to a park.

And it's just like, it's kind of like this nondescript park right there.

And you know, it's near where you can go to Churchill's underground bunker during World War II.

And one day we were out there hanging out around the bridge there that goes across to Parliament and where Westminster Abbey is.

And I'll just look over and I see this statue in this nondescript park.

So I'll walk over, and here's a statue of William Tyndall with the Word of God.

He was the one who was key in bringing us the Puritan vision.

So I would say this, a contemporary of Luther that Tyndale was, into the making of the Puritans would be Tyndale's Reforming Biblicism, John Bradford's piety of the heart, John Knox's zeal for God's honor in national churches, John Hooper's passion for pastoral competence, Richard Baxter's commitment to practical teaching.

But men and women, at the heart of Puritanism was a zeal for revival.

Puritanism was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal, and evangelism and spiritual revival.

And in addition, indeed, as a direct expression of its zeal for God's honor, it was a worldview, a total Christian philosophy, in intellectual terms, a Protestantized and updated medievalism.

And in terms of spirituality, a reformed monasticism outside the cloister and away from monkish vows.

The Puritan goal was to complete what England's Reformation began, to finish reshaping Anglican worship, to introduce effective church discipline into Anglican parishes, to establish righteousness in the political, domestic, and socioeconomic fields, and to convert all Englishmen to a vigorous evangelical faith.

And so this particular movement was gaining momentum in England.

The pilgrims were now establishing their colonies in the New World.

Puritanism was battling it in the Anglican Church.

But the situation dramatically changed under Charles I.

So this would be 1625 to 1649.

No sooner had he made William Laud the Bishop of London in 1628 than Laud presented the king with a list of English clergy.

So there was a list of English clergy, and beside their name was either a P or an O.

If you received an O by your name, it meant you were Orthodox and open for promotion.

But if next to your name was P for Puritan, you would be persecuted, and William Laud for the next dozen or so years gained the name the Enforcer.

They insisted that the Puritans conform to Anglican worship.

And at that point, there began to be a new discussion among the Puritans.

Should we leave England or should we say?

Should we separate or not separate?

And what was interesting is at the conclusion of those many, many arguments and debates about what the Anglicans and what the Anglican Puritans should do was coming to the same conclusions that the Separatists had come to many years before, who had already begun to settle in the New World.

But the Exodus out of Egypt, as it were, needed a Moses, and there was a Moses indeed, and his name was John Winthrop.

John Winthrop pinned these words in 1612 at the age of 24.

I desire to make it one of my chief petitions to have that grace to be poor in spirit.

I will ever walk humbly before my God and meekly, mildly, and gently towards all men.

I do resolve first to give myself, my life, my wits, my health, my wealth, to the service of my God and Savior, who by giving himself for me, O Lord, thou assurest my heart that I am in a right course, even in the narrow way that leads to heaven.

Thou tellest me, and all experience tells me that in this way there is least company.

And those who do walk openly in this way shall be despised, pointed at, hated by the world, and made a byword, reviled, slandered, rebuked, and made a gazing stock.

Cambridge born, owning a sizable estate in Suffolk, Winthrop was an attorney in the court of wards.

John Winthrop decided it was God's calling to leave England and his reasons, he wrote in his journal.

What he hath planted, he will maintain.

Every plantation, and you're going to hear plantation a number of times here, but that means, you know, an establishment of the colony.

Every plantation his right hand hath not planted shall be rooted up, but his own plantation shall prosper and flourish.

Now listen to what he says here, because I think it's important in your businesses, it's important in your work, it's important in even a church.

Every plantation his right hand hath not planted shall be rooted up, but his own plantation shall prosper and flourish.

When he promiseth peace and safety, what enemy shall be able to make the promise of God of none effect?

Now this is important.

Neglect not walls and bulwarks and fortifications for your own defense, but ever the name of the Lord be your strong tower and the word of his promise the rock of your refuge.

His word that made heaven and earth will not fail till heaven and earth be no more.

Here's what I love about this.

I was reading it again this morning, I was reading it last night, I worked on it this week, but I was I was looking at that and going, how practical and yet visionary this is.

I think it encapsulates the great Puritan vision of having a vision for the supernatural, having a vision for a great God, but also get a job.

Okay?

Work hard, do your work, save your money, give your money.

Practical things like that were so much a part of the Puritan vision, but it didn't in any way take away from a great vision of supernatural things that God might do.

Isn't that important?

Because we tend in Christianity, as I observed this over the years, to be a Christianity that kind of has an idealistic, visionary hope without much practical reasoning.

And then there's another form of Christianity that almost worships practical reasoning, and there's no visionary hope in a supernatural, powerful God.

Men and women, we need both.

Like what John Wesley said, you know, to have our heads and our hearts on fire.

God gave you a head, and God gave you a heart.

Passionate, experiential, joyful Christianity.

But also pay your bills, balance your checkbook, drive old cars.

In other words, a practical Christianity that doesn't get yourself in massive debt, doesn't put yourself in a place where actually you're so distracted because you've made such poor decisions, but also not worshiping that.

Because there's many of us that, you know, we grew up in that Protestant work ethic type of family, and so the idea that God might call us to the mission field, or God might call us to give a large sum of money to the church or to the work of God, and it doesn't seem practical, and yet you've heard from God.

To do both, to walk on both sides of that road, to balance that of a practical side of using your head, but also a passionate visionary side that can take risk by faith.

That's the Puritan vision, that's the Puritan heart.

After 72 days, their ship, the Arbella, arrived in the harbor of Salem.

It was far from a pretty sight.

Winthrop soon learned that over 200 settlers who had come in the past two years, only 85 were still alive.

Over 80 had died while the rest had quit and gone home.

This was beginning to look like Jamestown.

Winthrop spent the night on the Arbella and prayed for wisdom.

Remember, like we talked about last week, as the pilgrims had come to Cape Cod, and they were to name that colony Plymouth after the city they had left in England.

Plymouth.

Well, in the same way, John Winthrop was about to do the same thing.

And so Winthrop went to the Word.

Now we don't know this, but it sure appears, and I'm going to read you parts of it here.

It appears that he might have turned to Matthew 22.

Might be that he turned to Mark 12, where Jesus says the greatest commandment is that you love God with all of your heart.

Soul, mind, and strength than your neighbors yourself.

Because he created one of the great documents of our nation.

And the key to this document was love.

And he wrote, and I would encourage all of you to look it up, maybe even today or this week, A Model for Christian Charity by John Winthrop.

He wrote, This love among Christians is a real thing.

It's not imaginary.

As absolutely necessary to the well-being of the body of Christ as the sinews and other ligaments of a natural body are to the well-being of that body.

We are a company, professing ourselves fellow members of Christ, and thus we ought to account ourselves knit together by this bond of love.

It continues.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.

For this end we must knit together in this work as one man.

We must hold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.

We must delight in each other, make one another's condition our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community.

Isn't that beautiful?

Our commission and community in the work as members of the same body.

So shall we keep the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us.

When then one of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men of succeeding plantations shall say, The Lord make it like that of New England.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.

Winthrop was then able to turn the faltering, crumbling colony around.

Peter Marshall writes, Without a doubt, a miracle took place upon Winthrop's arrival.

A nearly dead colony was resurrected.

And from all reports, God's single instrument in this resurrection was John Winthrop.

Cotton Mather would refer to Winthrop as the Nehemias Americanus, in reference to the Old Testament leader who had brought the Israelites back from their Babylonian exile to the Promised Land and had directed the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.

But more important, Nehemiah had inspired them to resume their covenant with God.

Another 17th century report, quoted by modern Yale historian Edmund Morgan in his bibliography of Winthrop, said this So soon as Winthrop was landed, perceiving what misery was like to ensure through their idleness, he presently fell to work with his own hands, and thereby so encouraged the rest that there was not an idle person then to be found in the whole plantation.

And whereas the Indians said they, the newcomers, would shortly return as fast as they came, now they admired to see in what short time they had housed themselves and planted corn sufficient for their subsistence.

So, men and women, as the 1630s arrived, Puritan communities began to thrive and flourish all over the Northeast, and that began what is historically called the Great Migration, which lasted for the next 16 years and saw more than 20,000 Puritans embark for New England.

So, what can be learned about the Puritans?

I want to give you some final thoughts on what we can learn from the Puritans and really what we actually are living today, experiencing today, and consider it just a part of being maybe an American Christian by the teachings we've heard in our churches, the books that are written, that actually were integrated into the foundations of our land through the Puritans.

Here's the first.

And this is the most important, by the way.

The integration of God and his love into our daily lives.

Now, the thing to remember is how hard it might be.

How many of you come out of churches in your background that you would say it was a form of Christianity that really was relegated to that one day of the week?

It was really about kind of Sunday morning, right?

Okay.

A lot of us here.

Okay.

The Protestant idea that perceives Christianity as kind of being a one day a week, go to church, maybe give your money when the plate gets passed, or boxes in the lobby.

Form of Christianity was not in any way from the Puritan vision.

The banner over everything to the Puritans was holiness unto the Lord, and they believed Matthew 22, Mark 12, of loving God with all of your heart, loving God with all of your soul, loving God with all of your mind, loving God with all of your strength, and your neighbors yourself would be considered the byword, the vision of the Puritans.

They believed that the love of God should permeate your job.

That when you go to work, you're at work loving God with all of your strength.

That when you give your money, you are giving of your time, energy, and money to the Lord.

That's worship when you tithe.

They would say that going to church on Sunday and worshiping the Lord was about hearing the preached word, getting invigorated and equipped for the rest of the week.

And so there was this incorporation of the love of God into everything they did.

I would use the word integrity.

That the Puritans were people of integrity.

And listen to what I mean by that.

I mean the wholeness of the inner private life and the outer public life being in sync.

Not just one of speaking or having a bumper sticker on the back of our truck, but actually living it out and showing the love of God in everything that we do.

Number two, the depth of commitment to the preaching of God's Word.

The depth of commitment to the preaching of God's word was the Puritan vision.

For the Puritan, experiencing God through the Bible was the most important part of your life.

Let me say that again.

For the Puritans, experiencing God through the Word of God was the most important part of your life.

Jesus Christ was central to everything.

The Bible was supreme, and the preaching of the gospel and the word of God was the cornerstone of everything.

The Puritans would not understood a form of Christianity where we open the word or we carry the word to church, but it's never opened and it's never spoken of at home during the rest of the week.

That would not have been a Puritan.

Now that could have been an Anglican, because that was typical Christianity in the old world.

They came to be a light on a hill and to make a difference through the experience of God's Word.

J.I.

Packer writes, the essential thing in understanding the Puritans was that they were preachers before they were anything else.

Into whatever efforts they were led in their attempts to reform the world through the church, and however these efforts were frustrated by the leaders of the church, what bound them together undergirded their striving, and gave them the dynamic to persist was their consciousness that they were called to preach the gospel.

All of the Puritan magistrates in the early colonies used the Bible for law and justice matters.

Puritans gave us the practice of meditation and systematic study of God's Word better than anyone else.

At the center of the Puritan worship service was the preaching of the Word of God.

So if I remember my dad taking me in one time, we were in a Presbyterian church, and that was when I first discovered the Westminster Confession of Faith.

So I was a young guy, I was 22 years old, I was on staff with Campus Crusade, I was at the University of Maryland, and I walked into this massive church called Fourth Presbyterian in Washington, D.C.

Dick Halverson, who was the chaplain to the Senate, had been the pastor there.

I'd met Dick and been invited to the church.

I came and here was this majestic, beautiful church.

And the pulpit was in the center.

I'd never seen that before.

Now I'd seen that in Baptist churches growing, but it hadn't really occurred to me.

But Dad came up, Dad's Lutheran, remember he's a Lutheran pastor, and we went, I said, Dad, you got to see Fourth Press, it's really cool.

So we go to Fourth Press and we go in there and he goes, Do you see the pulpit in the center?

You know how all the Lutheran churches is to the side.

And I go, Yeah, what's that mean?

And he goes, That's that's the Puritan vision.

Presbyterianism is probably the closest in terms of a denomination to the reformers of Puritanism today.

And I would say over the last 30 years, the independent church movement, which you're a part of right now with the road, is probably the closest.

But as far as a denominational group, it'd be the Presbyterian Church.

And so many Presbyterian churches, not all, but many of them have the pulpit in the center.

Many other Protestant churches have the pulpit over to the side.

Because to the Puritan vision, this was the central point of worship.

Was the opening of God's word.

Not how good the guitars are, not how good the piano is, or how good the voices are, as important as that is.

But all of that is built upon the foundation of God's word to the Puritans.

So the preaching of the Word of God.

Number three, I love this.

The Puritans gave us a passion for effective action.

I hope almost all of you voted during this last election.

And I would just say, if you voted for the wrong candidate, I hope you didn't vote.

But the Puritans would have, it would have never been conceivable to a Puritan not to vote.

It would have been inconceivable even to the pilgrims not to have a day of fasting and prayer before the election.

Because it was so vital, it was so important that we're involved in the secular pursuits of our nation.

Because remember where they came from.

Don't miss this.

Remember where they had come from.

They knew of an oppressive government that came in and told you how to preach and made the pastor give his transcripts to the enforcer, William Laud, as the bishop of London, to check out what was going to be said, or they were put down as either an O or a P.

They remembered that.

See, we've never experienced that.

We see little ebbs and flows as it relates to our religious freedom.

But to a Puritan and even to the pilgrims, this was huge.

And it was important we voted in the right people.

Those magistrates and every Puritan lawyer had his Bible by his side.

I was excited years ago when my son Isaac was being recruited for baseball to go to a particular university and meet with the athletic director, and he made sure, and he may have done it because Pastor Steve's coming.

But there in his books were great books.

Bible was right there, central there, in his set of books behind his desk, and he had other books there of uh of trying to live out his Christianity as an athletic director at a major university.

The Puritans were not dreamy.

Anyone know dreamy Christians?

They're just always, uh, I had a vision from the Lord.

I I had a dream from the Lord.

And you guys know that I believe.

I just met with the we had our boiler room prayer time here.

I said, visions and dreams are the language of the Holy Spirit.

Every major decision that I've ever made was led by visions and dreams, so don't get me wrong.

But I know of dreamy Christianity where you just want to go, dude, I don't care about your visions and dreams.

When's the last time you actually spent time studying God's word?

Well, he told me to divorce my husband.

I just know he did.

And I go, man, your form of Christianity needs some help.

We need to put you in discipleship 101.

Puritans would not have understood this kind of dreamy Christianity that had no time for the systematic study of God's Word.

Daydreaming, idleness, and passivity were never a part of the Puritans.

They were strong men of action, crusading activists without a jolt of self-reliance, workers of God who depended utterly on God to work in and through them.

Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, the great English statesman and soldier, made strong prayers before he went into battle.

The Puritans prayed long and strong prayers before they went into court.

Anyone, whether they were a laborer, a blacksmith, one who was a lawyer, began their day with long and strong prayers for their work that day.

So the Puritans gave us a passion for effective action.

That's why I love that video that we showed a few weeks ago by Franklin Graham, just before the election.

I hope all of you saw that.

Some of you missed it because you were having coffee and donuts in the lobby and you missed the very beginning.

But look up the seven, put put in seven minutes, election, Franklin Graham, um on YouTube, and you'll find it, and it's very powerful.

And if the the Puritans would agree with what Franklin Graham is saying in there for effective action.

Number four, the Puritans gave us a stable family life.

The Puritans gave us a stable family life.

The Puritans created the Christian family in the English-speaking world.

The Puritan ethic of marriage was to look not for a partner whom you do love, but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life.

The Puritan ethic of home life was based on maintaining order, courtesy, and family worship.

Every Puritan home, there was a time each week where they came together as a family with the Word of God.

The old idea of the family Bible came from the Puritans.

How many of you still have a family Bible somewhere in your home?

Any of you?

Wow, not very many.

We don't either.

I found a Bible that I found out was the family Bible when we were moving my mom and dad, and it's now open in my office, but it was never necessarily esteemed.

Not that the family Bible makes a huge difference, but that was part of the fabric of the Puritan family.

The idea of the Word of God being opened as a family.

One author writes, the Puritan family, as they believed, endeavored to make a family a church, laboring that those who are born in it might be born again unto God.

Puritan preachers made much of Proverbs 5, 18 and 19.

Men, listen up.

This is a good one.

May you rejoice in the wife of your youth, a loving doe, a graceful doe, a graceful deer.

May you be captivated by her love.

Passionate at work, passionate in the courts, passionate at church, and passionate at home.

Christ was the head of the home, and the man was the leader of his family.

Puritan men took seriously their roles as leaders of their homes.

Number five, and lastly, the Puritans gave us an ideal for church renewal.

Renewal is not a word they used, but they spoke of reformation.

They didn't use the word revival, they used the word reformation.

Isn't it interesting how important our past is?

You know, what we're going to see in some cases, and I know of many families where this happened, where kids have grown up in a very loose experiential form of Christianity, meaning that not un not that different than what you experience here.

We have communion, we have an antiphonal reading, we have worship.

There is a style to our worship, but how many of them sometimes will gravitate to a more liturgical worship?

For many of us that came out of liturgical worship, sit down, stand up, sit down.

I used to say, if you've missed your aerobic exercise during the week, go to a Lutheran service.

Because you're always standing, you're always sitting in.

If you could just put some weights, you know, right here, you could get your workout in with all the liturgy and stuff.

So they had come out of liturgical worship.

They had come out of a kind of what I would call a dead orthodoxy.

And they had come to experience in a personal, vital, dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ, to love him with all of their heart.

And they wanted a church like that in America.

They didn't care what denomination it was, they wanted to see a church that was alive in Christ.

And so Packer says this in his introduction Revival I define as a work of God by his Spirit, through His Word, bringing the spiritually dead to living faith in Christ and renewing the inner life of Christians who have grown slack and sleepy.

Don't we all struggle with that?

With the tendency to become slack and sleepy.

In revival, God makes old things new, giving new power to law and gospel and new spiritual awareness to those whose hearts and consciences have been blind, hardened, and become cold.

Revival thus animated or reanimates the churches and the Christian groups to make a spiritual and moral impact upon communities.

That was the true Puritan vision.

So men and women, may we remember this.

May we be reminded here this morning of that's your foundations.

Isn't that awesome?

Those are the foundations of our faith, foundations of our Christianity.

Encourage you to look inward as we go into 2017, as we come into the new year.

What's God saying to us about revival?

As we go into the week of impact, January 9th to the 15th, when we go into that time with the 24-hour war room, and we go into that time of each night.

I hope you can come with us.

Monday through Friday, we'll be meeting.

And the theme is make Jesus great.

Make Jesus great.

Starting in our own personal lives of loving Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I've made it my prayer this year, and let me tell you, God's been doing it.

Where the Lord says, you know, if you pray according to his will, he hears you.

And if he hears you, you know that you receive the request that you've made of him, right?

So that isn't that the struggle we said, well, what's God's will?

I don't know how to pray, I don't know if that's God's will or not.

Should I buy that house?

Should I buy that car?

Instead, there are things actually in Scripture that are clearly his will.

And one of them is the greatest commandment.

Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbors yourself.

He said, Everything in the prophets, everything in the scriptures are fulfilled in that command, that great command.

The greatest man who ever lived gave us the greatest command ever given that we might live the most exciting life ever offered.

You know that's his will.

Right?

And so begin to pray as you go into Christmas, as we come into this next month, begin to pray as we go into 27.

Begin to pray, Lord, I want to love you with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my mind, with all of my strength.

I want to love my neighbors myself.

You think God's not gonna, oh no, I can't believe he's praying that.

What a ridiculous prayer.

Who could ever do that?

My son didn't have revelation.

When he said that, the greatest command in all of the Old and New Testament.

The greatest command ever given in all of Christianity.

Let us be a church that begins to pray, God, would you give me a love for you where, Lord, I would love you with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my mind, with all my strength to love my neighbor as yourself.

God, I can't do that.

I do not have the fabric, I do not have the spiritual sinew.

I do not have the endurance, I do not have the wisdom to do that.

That is impossible.

And yet Jesus told me that I could love him with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength, my neighbor as yourself.

So Lord, I pray you do that in my life.

That's revival, man.

To me, that's the essence of everything about revival is God doing a fresh work in our lives to that place where we begin to love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And it will happen, I promise you, you'll be walking into work and you're gonna love him with all of your heart.

You're like, oh, I can't believe this.

I'm moving into heresy now, but you'll actually be doing your taxes.

That's probably a miracle right there.

You're doing your taxes.

Okay?

You're doing your taxes, and you actually tell the truth.

You actually say the truth because you're loving him with all your mind.

You think God's not gonna honor that?

You think God's not gonna begin to bless you financially?

You think God's not gonna bless you at work, God's not gonna bless your marriage and your family.

Hello.

It's as simple as that.

That's what God wants to do.

So let's make that our prayer, right?

Let's make that our heart.

Just pray that prayer every day.

Take you 45 seconds to pray that prayer and watch what God will do.

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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