The Day Of Restoration 1

Our Bible's up, wave them around, make Jesus glad and the devil mad.

And let's say this together Say Heavenly Father, I've tuned in on purpose.

Every Wednesday night.

I'm hungry for more of the Word and I have ears to hear what the Spirit is telling me about the time we're living in.

I know that I've been chosen to live right now and so tonight, by faith, I tap into the grace to withstand in the evil day.

In Jesus' name, amen, praise God, let's turn our Bibles to the book of Joel and one of the minor prophets I think they're all major, but he's known as a minor prophet.

And we're going to start reading Joel, chapter two, in verse two, and it says Be glad then, you, children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord, your God, for he has given you the former reign moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the reign, the former reign and the latter reign, in the first month, and the floors shall be full of wheat and the vat shall overflow with wine and oil, and I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten the canker worm, the caterpillar, the palmer worm, my great army, which I sent among you, and you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord, your God, that he has dealt wondrously with you.

And my people shall never be ashamed.

And you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I am the Lord, your God, and none else.

And my people shall never be ashamed.

And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy.

Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions, and upon the servants and upon the handmaids, in those days will I pour out my spirit and I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth blood and fire and pillars of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.

And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord has said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call.

And so tonight I wanted you to pay a particular attention to one of these verses.

It talked about verse 25,.

I will restore to you the years that the locus has eaten.

So that's what I wanna talk about tonight, the day of restoration.

This message is titled the Day of Restoration and, as a matter of fact, I had a prophetic word about this on Sunday night, just past Sunday night, and so those of you that want more Holy Ghost and a little bit freer service might think about Sunday night coming to Sunday night service.

But we did have a word about that, and these verses from 28 to 32, peter quoted on the day of Pentecost, and he was preaching to those that had gathered and witnessed everyone speaking in tongues their own languages.

People from every nation under heaven were gathered in Jerusalem and they heard them speaking in their own language and they said what meaneth this these people?

And Peter stood up and said these men are not drunk, as you suppose, but in verse 16, this is that spoken by the prophet Joel.

And then he began to quote verses 28 to 32 that we just read, and in the amplified it says this is the beginning of that, and so in the day of Pentecost, according to the Bible, the fulfillment of this prophecy that Joel made it began to be fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, and so it was the beginning of the time of restoration 2,000 years ago and then surely now, 2,000 years later, this must be the culmination.

Why would you say it's the culmination of this prophecy?

Well, because of the signs of the times that we're seeing, we're seeing these prophecies being fulfilled left and right.

And the biggest prophetic scripture was the regathering of Israel into their homeland, and so Israel became a nation Just in our generation, 70-something years ago.

So my generation has seen the restoration of Israel.

Israel was not a nation all those years, until just in this generation.

So we know, if in the book of Acts this was the beginning of that, then I think that we can scripturally say this is the culmination of that spoken by the prophet Joel.

I say it at least we can say that we're living in the day of restoration.

We're living in that day, and I notice here in Joel 2, 25, he said I will restore the years the enemy has devoured.

It seems like he's devoured years.

He said I will restore, surely I will.

Surely this is what the word I will restore means.

I will surely make amends, I will surely make restitution, I will surely recompense.

The word recompense means recompensate, pay you back.

I believe God is in the business of paying back what the devil stole, or making the devil pay it back even better.

And so I will make peaceable again the years that the enemy has stolen.

And you know, I tell you we've had some encouraging words the last number of years, but we still have to possess, by faith, what belongs to us.

And I know, sometimes it seems like, if we look at the natural, it's three steps forward and two steps back.

Maybe it's two steps forward and three steps back sometimes.

But listen, god is faithful to fulfill His Word.

He is the God of restitution and this, right now that we're living in, is the day of restitution, the day of amends being made, the day of recompense, of payback, and Acts, chapter three you know, if we just turn over the next page after the day of Pentecost, you know what happened.

Acts, chapter three, one they went to the temple in the hour of prayer and the lame man was at the gate, beautiful, and Peter and John prayed for him and he was healed, healed of his lameness He'd never walked, and he stood upon his feet and started walking and leaping and praising God, going into the temple and there were multitudes of people saw it and so they gathered there and Peter didn't waste the opportunity, he began to preach, and so he started preaching here in verse 19.

He told them, he said repent you, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.

Let's just say this out loud together times of refreshing.

The word times means an appointed time, an appointment, a specific time, and there are specific times of refreshing, and I believe I had a word about that too recently.

I mean, you know, after going through this run up of this election and to have the election wind up as disappointing as it became and all of the prayer that was made, we're tempted to think that it didn't matter.

We're tempted to think that God's not hearing us, listen.

Nothing has been wasted, and there's times of refreshing.

There's something about coming to church and hearing the Word of God that can lift all disappointment off of you.

In fact, the last here recently I've preached on banishing fear and overcoming discouragement, and here tonight, the day of restoration.

So we need encouragement.

The Holy Spirit is encouraging us now.

He doesn't want us to be down.

In fact, the first words of the verses that we read tonight was rejoice, then Be glad, then you, children of Zion and rejoice, and we need to put on the rejoicing clothes.

And so so he says here to the, to the Jews that gathered repent you, therefore, and then, when the times of refreshing shall come, from the presence of the Lord, and he shall send Jesus Christ, who before was preached unto you, whom the heavens must receive or retain until the time of restitution.

So here's that word, restitution, which means restoration and all of the things that we just read, the times of restitution of all things which God has spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.

So again I wanna go back to what the Bible said in the book of Acts, that this whole, this whole time in the book of Acts was the beginning of that which was spoken by the prophet Joel, and so that includes what he's preaching right here.

This is the beginning.

Back in the book of Acts, 2000 years later, we have the time of refreshing that's available to us.

We have the time of restitution of all things, mainly the restoration of the glorious church's authority.

I tell you we have had mighty prophecies by men of God like Oral Roberts and others Kenneth E Hagen that have prophesied that in the last days we're gonna see the gifts of the spirit and operation even greater than they were in the book of Acts.

And I believe that that's coming.

I believe it will ride on the edge of seeing the greatest move of God we've ever seen.

So now's not the time to be downtrodden, now's the time to rejoice and be glad.

And so the times of refreshing and you know we have to be refreshed.

It takes coming to church and being in the anointing, being in the presence of God.

You know you can get refreshed by yourself, but God doesn't intend for this to be a lonely process.

He says neglect, not the assembling of yourselves together.

And so there's a refreshing that happens every time we get together here at Glorious Way, and then that's key to receiving the restitution, or the recompense, the payback that we are due.

God wants to restore the years that the devil has stolen, and so I believe God is performing in these days all that the prophets have spoken.

I mean we're beginning to see these prophetic words, we're beginning to see them.

I think about all the Middle East nations.

You know, up until just a few decades ago, probably 1940s those nations had no meaning.

They had no real boundaries.

They were countries on a map, but they were not significant.

Nobody talked about them.

They didn't have.

Mainly, they were inhabited by nomadic people and it's not until our generation that they've become real nations.

That, for instance, iran, what are you know?

They're threatening to build a nuclear bomb, and you better believe them.

If they can do it, they'll do it.

And so you have all these nations that are lined up against Israel.

Every bit of that was prophesied and it's coming to pass in our day.

So we not to look at the negative but look at the positive.

Look at, look at how it's near for the coming of the Lord.

See, that's what we ought to be thinking about.

He's coming, coming very soon.

You know I didn't have this in my notes, but I think it's time here for us to turn back to Isaiah 60 and look at these verses.

I was reading the other day and was reminded.

In Isaiah 60, verse one, it says Arise, shine.

This is another prophetic word by the prophet Isaiah about the end days.

Arise, shine, in other words, get up, see.

That's what God told me Just March.

The first was Monday, so that was 22 years ago, monday that God told me to wake up the church.

Arise, taliphakummi, in other words, kumi, means get up, arise, shine, for the light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee.

We read that and then, when we read the next verse, we kind of forget about the glory.

And it says for behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people.

So we think about the darkness and we we talk oh yeah, there's gross darkness.

Well, that's true, but what about the glory?

The glory is here and the glory is coming on the church more and more.

So we have every reason to rejoice and be glad, and we need to, we need to have times of refreshing so that we'll be ready to, because light always overcomes darkness.

The church will always overcome darkness until the day it's taken out, and we will be taken out by the Holy Ghost one of these days soon.

And so we have these things that God is doing, he's performing in these days all that the prophets have spoken, and so we have plenty of Bible examples that we can look at, and I wanted to show you a couple tonight, mention a few of them.

The first one I think about, about the devil stealing years, was the life of Moses.

The life of Moses.

Moses spent 40 years as the son of Pharaoh's daughter.

He spent 40 years learning the world's wisdom.

He was very brilliant in all the learning of Pharaoh and all the learning of Egypt 40 years.

And then, of course, you know it came into his heart to be the deliverer.

That he was the deliverer, you know he tried to do it in the flesh and he killed the Egyptian and of course somebody saw him.

So he fled to the backside of the desert and there he was 40 more years and he was helpless.

I mean, basically he learned he did all of his talking to the sheep.

I mean, he hardly ever talked to a human, I guess his wife and his kids whenever he saw them.

Most people know that when, when you're a shepherd, you spend almost all your time with the sheep, it's a sleepless nights, day after day after day, and 40 years of that.

You can imagine that he got pretty discouraged.

You can imagine that he completely forgot about being the deliverer of Israel from Egypt.

And then the burning Bush experience and God called him.

God hadn't forgotten and he said well, choose somebody else.

I can't even talk, I'm a studer, I can't even speak.

I don't even know why.

You know, and it didn't take him long to hit his stride, you know.

And so then he spent another 40 years in the glory.

I think about Moses.

I mean, he went up on the mount to receive the law and he came back down and had to put a veil over his face.

The glory was was on his face, so bright, he was so powerful.

I mean he spoke and things happened.

He was the most powerful prophet in the in of that time.

Maybe he's more powerful than any Old Testament prophet.

They feared him, even though they they criticized him a lot, but when in his presence they, they had to yield.

And so he had 40 years learning the world's wisdom, 40 years where the devil seemed like he had stolen years, and then 40 years in the glory.

And then you have Joshua.

Joshua was right along beside him.

He had 40 years serving Moses, suffering with Israel and the wilderness, putting up with all their whining and crying and complaining.

I mean he'd seen the promised land, but he did get to go in.

He had to wait till all those people died out, and and then, finally, 30 years in the glory.

I mean here's a man that commanded the, the sun, to stand still in the moon and the valley of Abjohn.

You know, agilon, that's the right word.

And and so he had 30 years in the glory, after this seeming inactivity and, in the wilderness, seem seemingly, you know, obscurity.

He wasn't the man in charge, he was just doing what he was told.

Seemed like a person that was wasting his time If you look at it in the natural.

And yet there aren't any wasted times with God when you're obedient to him.

And how about Caleb?

The same thing.

Caleb is in the same situation as Joshua.

He and Joshua were the only two of the 10 spies that had a good report.

And what did they get for their trouble?

They got to wander in the wilderness with the rest of the disobedient ones.

It didn't seem like they got any reward at all.

But you know what their reward came?

God paid them back.

God recompense them.

They all got their, their share of the inheritance.

And so with Joshua, 40 years suffering with Israel, five years after that he spent helping the others possess their land.

He had an inheritance, but he didn't get to go get it.

He had to help everybody else for five years.

So at the age of 85, he finally asked leave of Joshua's age.

Joshua, is it okay if it's all the same to you?

I'm not getting any younger.

I'd like to go to you know, and get he brawn and make it mine.

Is that okay with you if I leave now?

So at the age of 85, he possessed that mountain and he got his inheritance and he, he brawn.

And so you see these, these Bible examples that they got there, that they got their inheritance, they got the glory, they got recompensed.

I'll give you one more.

How about Joseph?

You know, joseph was a dreamer.

Joseph was daddy and mommy's favorite out of the 12 tribes and he was hated for it.

So he had 18 years in his family where he was picked on, where he was, you know, made fun of, mocked, and then they sold him into slavery and he had 13 years in prison, thrown into prison for an unjust and lying accusation wasn't true, you know, by the time he's 30 years old, he's thinking man, this has been a waste of time.

God gave me all these dreams, you know.

But I don't believe he ever gave up on those dreams.

I believe he stayed encouraged, I believe he encouraged himself because he recognized that God's favor upon his life.

And then, 14 years as prime minister of Egypt and he ultimately got payback.

He ultimately got to reunite with his father.

He got to see his brothers again and they vowed to him.

He did get vindicated.

And so I wanna make a point here that there is no wasted time in God's kingdom.

I don't care what you've had in your heart that hasn't come to pass.

Maybe you've been believing for a certain thing and it hasn't shown up and you haven't given up yet.

But from time to time you're tempted in that area.

Well, you know, the Bible's filled with those types of situations, so that we can draw courage and draw strength from their experiences.

Because one thing you can that you can stake your life on God is faithful.

If he said it, he will do it.

If he spoke it, he will make it good.

He will make it good and see it in obscurity, we learn to trust God.

You know faith and patience inherits the promises.

I know God spoke to me many years ago.

Well, I mentioned in this message I mentioned about in March 1st 1999, god told me to wake up the church.

I'll be honest with you.

I have, over the years it's never left me I've done whatever I could do to obey that command in that assignment and I admit sometimes I think, well, if I'm making any progress?

I can't tell it.

But you know, just this past year, during the COVID thing, god has opened the door and I can see results.

Now I can begin to see that people are listening, people are waking up and I see signs that the church is beginning to awaken and be ready for the return of the Lord, just little by little by little, and so you know there's no wasted time with God.

God, I mean in obscurity.

We just learn.

You know you feel obscure when you feel like, well, what's the use?

What is my ministry worth?

He told me to do this and I've been doing it, but I can't see any fruit.

You know what?

God is the one that grows those things and let's just let Him be in charge of when it comes to pass.

I know there's gonna be a day of restoration and I believe we're living in it.

I believe there's recompense coming.

I believe there's payback.

Praise God, he is faithful to restore and to recompense.

You know we're gonna receive double for our trouble and fame, for our shame.

Amen, oh, come on, let's lift our hands.

Lord, we thank you that you are faithful to watch over your word, to perform it.

Lord, we know that and we re-energize ourselves.

We stir ourselves up to believe that fresh and new.

And so the key we'll get back to the very beginning of these verses in Joel.

Joel was talking to people who were disappointed.

He was talking to people that were in captivity.

He was talking to people that were down and kind of out.

And what did he say to them?

Be glad, then, you, children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord, your God.

So we get back to that right there.

We need thanksgiving and praise, we need to be people of praise, we need to rejoice, we.

You know.

Now's the time not to let ourselves slip into self pity and being negative, negative, negative I mean, you're just looking through the eyes of flesh.

Let's look at what God said and let's hold that in high esteem and know that he is going, he's going to be faithful, to restore those years that seem to have been stolen.

They really haven't been stolen.

He's just gonna bring up to pass a mighty manifestation.

And so be glad and rejoice, praise God with a loud voice, don't mind who knows about it.

And our rejoicing is proof that we are trusting God and it's proof of our faith.

The day of restoration, the day of restoration is here.

Amen.

Be encouraged tonight.

Praise God, be encouraged.