A Wake-Up Call

Let's go to the world.

Let's fulfill the task given to the church.

Let's dream the good dreams that the whole earth one day will be covered with the knowledge of the glory of our God.

This is the dream in God's heart.

This is the dream of the church.

And I think that we live in a very special time in history.

This is why my message has a very maybe uh unusual name.

A wake-up call.

A wake-up call.

Several passages saying the same thing.

In Romans chapter 13, verse 11.

Romans 13:11

The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber.

Because our salvation is nearer now than we first believe, nearer than ever before.

We are about to finish the race.

Wake up.

Ephesians 5 14.

For it is light that makes everything visible.

This is why it is said, wake up, O sleeper.

Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

If the church will wake up and rise up, the glory of our Lord will shine on us.

We will see the greatest revival in the history of mankind.

Romans 13, 12.

The night is nearly over.

The day is almost here.

So let's go.

Let's participate.

Let's be part of this great work of the Holy Spirit.

Let's put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

We are in a real battle, not against flesh and blood.

Our enemies are not humans.

Actually, the human beings are our inheritance.

They are our brothers and sisters.

They are the task to be fulfilled, to bring them back to the Father.

Our fight is against the evil spirits, against Satan himself, against his kingdom, the kingdom of darkness.

Put on the armor of light.

Wake up.

Dress yourself.

Be ready for the fight to be fought.

What kind of a weapons that we need?

2 Corinthians 10, 4.

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.

We don't use machine guns or rockets or submarines.

Totally different.

We have divine weapons, and they have a divine power.

To do what?

To demolish strongholds made by Satan and his kingdom.

To imprison the whole mankind.

We can demolish strongholds.

We can demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.

And we take captive every thought, every heart, every mankind.

We take captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ, to Christ Himself.

Can this be done?

Is this possible now with all the materialism and atheism and different religions that taking over the whole world and occupying the mankind?

Is this still possible?

I believe that we live in a very critical moment in history.

What God is doing right now in China.

Can you imagine now the largest number of born-again Christians, not in the West anymore, in China?

180 million believers, 23,000 new believers every day.

Can you imagine a hundred million?

Can you imagine a hundred million believers in India after so many years sowing seeds, watering the gospel there?

At last, at last, we are seeing millions coming to Christ, ready to die for his sake.

What God is doing right now in the Muslim nations.

Unbelievable.

Is this possible?

Yes.

If we use the armor of God, the weapons given to us by God Himself.

I will focus on three of them.

I don't know if I have enough time, but at least I want to cover the first two.

Yesterday I couldn't.

The first weapon given to us is the power of love and real passion.

The love of God.

The agape.

The unconditional love.

This unique kind of love.

The famous passage that we know in John 3.16.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

The love that you make that may make yourself a different person.

The love that you will make yourself outside yourself, not looking after yourself or your needs, but looking after others.

To give yourself, to sacrifice yourself for your enemies, to give life, not to take lives, but to give life to the dead.

God so loved the world.

Me and you are the byproduct of his love.

Because of the love of Christ on the cross.

Because of that, I surrendered my life to him.

He is so good, he's so great, but his love changed my life and your life.

There is power in that kind of love.

This love can penetrate, penetrate the walls, the strongholds to reach the secret place of the mankind.

The heart.

The heart.

The soft spot of the mankind.

Because in every heart there is a great need and hunger for such a kind of love.

In every movie, we may find a love story.

But this is not the kind of love that we are talking about.

We are speaking about agape.

The real, genuine love can penetrate into the heart of every mankind.

The child and the mother and the father, everybody.

He is in a great need to be loved that way.

And when the love touched my heart, it will he will soften my heart.

He will change me.

He will open me to hear the good news, the truth, that I may reject it for years and years.

And we, this is what we are seeing right now in our country.

I live in a in a very hostile community to the gospel.

I live in a maybe the largest or the most important Islamic country in the world, Egypt.

And for us, it's nearly impossible to cross all the damaged bridges and to cross all the hurdles that have been built between the Muslim community and the Christian community.

How come we touch their minds and their minds are totally locked?

They have been taught all their lives don't think, don't argue, don't discuss even your face.

Just believe in what you believe.

But we found that love has a great power to penetrate through all the walls and reach the heart.

Let me tell you a story.

It happened one day that we received a shipment from the Samaritan purse, the shoe box.

And it was a miracle to receive such a shipment.

So we decided not to go and distribute it randomly, but to make use of every shoe box, every gift, to go by ourselves, to give it to somebody and spend time with him to love him, not just to give him a gift, but to tell him about the love of God and the love of somebody in the West and our love.

The government didn't allow us to receive any more shipments.

So we decided to do our own gifts, much less in quality, much cheaper, but at least maybe it will be a better experience or a better expression about the love and the passion.

One of the non-governmental organizations that filled a certificate or an application that we may go and visit them, we went there and we discovered that this orphanage is sponsored by bin Laden himself.

All the members there are veiled, all the kids are veiled, very Islamic institution.

We knocked the door, and the man charged, opened the gate and said to the team, Who are you?

The team said, We are a team coming from a church.

A church.

We are a church.

Why are you here?

What do you want from us?

We have gifts.

You you have asked about the gift, and we brought the gifts to the kids, just gifts to the kids.

What is this?

This is a guitar.

What for?

We will play music.

No music here.

No music at all.

Music is against the will of God and against okay.

We will not play any music.

Come in, give the gifts and go home and don't come back.

Okay.

The team came in and we started to distribute the gifts and to hug the kids and to play with them and touch them with the love of God.

After a while, the man came to the man in charge and said, Okay, you can sing only one song.

Only one song about God.

Yes, yes, we sing about God.

That's that's all what we have.

Okay.

We don't mention Christ in our song.

Okay.

So everybody became in tears.

So he came back and said, Okay, please, another song.

Do you have another song?

Then another song, another song.

By the end of the day, he came to the man in charge of the team and said, Please come back.

Don't forget us.

Please come back.

There is power in this kind of love.

When you go out of your way, when you look after the need of others, when you touch people with God's love, when you give them a big hug, the hug of the Father.

There is power.

Love is irresistible.

The devil's weapons are hatred, hostility, and fear.

They want us to be afraid of them, they want us to be separated from them, they want us to be intimidated, but God didn't give us the spirit of intimidation, but the spirit of power and love.

In 1 John verse 4, chapter 4, verse 18.

There is no fear and love.

No fear and love.

But perfect love drives out fear.

Because fear has to do with punishment.

The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

Do you fear your enemy?

Do you fear your Muslim neighbors?

Then you are not perfected in love.

God's love.

The love will overcome the fear, will overcome all the hurdles and the dance and the strongholds built by the Satan himself.

Will give us the power to penetrate the heart.

Then the mind will be open to hear the gospel.

Touch the heart first.

In Matthew chapter 5, verse 44 and 46.

Matthew 5:44

But I tell you, love your enemies.

Love your friends, love your neighbor.

But most important, love your enemies.

If you love your friend and you don't love your enemy, so this is a love story.

This is the love of this world.

The love of the Father is to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.

If you love those who love you, what reward you will get?

Are not even the tax collectors, the sinners, they do the same.

We have a unique love.

The agape, the unconditional love.

We have been pushed by God long ago to deal with the drug addict patients.

Miraculously, we had five heroin addicts got healed and saved without any withdrawal tempt in one of our youth camps.

And because of that, we decided that we have something to help this community.

We have many drug addicts in Egypt.

And over the years, the program developed to be now the largest drug rehabilitation program in the whole Arab world.

We have 16 different centers, we have 500 beds with an 85 recovery rate, 85% recovery rate.

Why?

Why?

Most of the testimonies when you hear the people, the Muslims that they come, mostly we serve Muslims more than Christians.

The testimony is that here we have been loved unconditionally.

We have been accepted, respected as human beings.

We have been rejected by our families, by the community.

Here we have found the dignity and respect.

And because of this kind of love, we have the power now to defeat the addiction and to come back to the normal kind of love of life.

There is power in love.

If your enemy is hungry, Romans 12, 20, feed him.

If he's thirsty, don't kill him.

Give him something to drink.

In doing this, you will overcome the evil.

In doing that, you will heap burning cool in his head.

Don't be overcome by evil.

Don't be overcome by evil.

But overcome evil by love by good.

We have to have more love to love our enemies than the hate and the hostility that they have against us.

Do you understand what I mean?

Where to find this love?

Where to buy?

Which supermarket that I can find?

This kind of love.

The Father.

The Father.

In Romans 5, 5.

And hope does not disappoint us because of what?

Because God has poured out his love into our hearts.

By the Holy Spirit.

Do you have the Holy Spirit in your heart?

Are you filled by the Holy Spirit?

Then this is the pipeline between you and the Father.

Can bring the love of the Father into your heart to penetrate the hearts of others.

To go outside your way, outside yourself, and to give yourself to others and to go to them and bring them back to the Father.

The second weapon.

The power of prayer.

The power of prayer.

If you love your enemy, the first thing that you will do, besides touching him with the love of the Father, you will pray for him.

John 14, 12.

I tell you the truth.

Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.

He will do even greater things than this, because I am going to the Father.

I don't understand.

If I believe in you, I will do what you have been doing in your lifetime here, and even greater thing.

I'm not greater than you.

How come?

I didn't see anybody did something greater than what Jesus did in his life.

You don't understand.

Please hear the verse clearly.

The second verse, because I am going to the Father and what?

And I will do.

He did, and he is ready to do more things.

Through what?

Through the prayer.

I will do whatever you ask in my name.

I was so happy with the with the praise and worship songs this morning.

It's all about that.

That we cry out to the Father.

Send the Holy Spirit, glorify the Son, glorify yourself.

I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.

You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

Anything?

Anything?

Blank check.

I write any number.

Hundred million dollars.

Anything?

A Mercedes.

A castle.

Four wives.

No, no, you don't understand.

Anything that I have been doing.

Anything that may bring glory to the Father.

Anything of that kind, I'm ready.

What I did, I'm ready to do it again and again, and even greater than what I did in the past.

We had a wonderful meeting in Brazil with a group of senior pastors of big churches around the globe, mainly from the third world countries, only from the third world countries.

One of the pastors, I had a great time with him because he is a pastor from Indonesia, a Muslim country, the largest Islamic country in the world.

More than 200 million Muslims there.

And he was really encouraged by his testimony.

Because his church is very small.

Only twice 25,000 members.

Very small church.

In an Islamic nation.

And mostly from a Muslim background.

See who he was sharing with me what God did with them there.

The visions, the dreams, the miracles, the healings.

And by the end of the sharing, he said to me, Okay, let me tell you one thing.

You will understand what God is doing with us.

In my church, eleven people have been raised from the dead.

Eleven in one single church.

Jesus in his lifetime on earth, he raised only three in one church in Indonesia.

Now he raised eleven.

He is ready to do what he was doing, and even great if we ask in his name for his glory.

Whatever we pray, whatever we ask for his, he is ready to do it.

He is ready to be sent.

This is our experience back home.

Out of desperation that we cannot do what we have been told to do.

We cannot go to them, okay?

But you can.

Okay, let's send you to them.

Lord, we cannot visit, they are imprisoned, they are untouchable people, but you can go to them in visions and in dreams.

Especially, we prefer dreams than visions.

They can maybe at the daytime they can run away, but in a dream they cannot go anywhere.

They will have the whole thirty years we prayed this crazy prayer.

Thirty years with tears and agony.

Lord, do something, restore what has been taken from us in censures.

And lastly, we are seeing Him doing so.

He is visiting Muslims in big numbers in visions and dreams.

We are not talking about one or two, a thousand or two thousand.

We estimate in Egypt alone maybe more than a million Muslims have been visited by Christ in a vision or a dream during the last 20 years.

Nothing is impossible for him.

I shared a couple of stories yesterday.

I will share different stories and collect the stories so you can.

A couple of weeks ago, a lady came to us and said, I have been visited by Christ in a dream.

And I accepted him.

And since then I started to pray for my family.

So after a while, my my my my uh um my husband uh visited by Christ, and then my daughter visited by Christ, and then my sister visited by Christ, and then her her husband visited by Christ, and then my aunt visited by Christ, and then my her daughter visited by Christ.

Now we are a big number in one family and we don't know what to do.

Can you help us?

Can you help us?

We do campaigns to share the gospel, and we encourage our people to go and visit their neighbors and invite them.

A man in our congregation came to me and said, I have three Muslim families and I invited them and they are ready to come.

Would you give me the microbas?

They are far away from the church, they cannot come by themselves.

I said, For the Muslims, you can do anything, they have the priority.

The first day in this campaign, I was speaking, I was preaching.

So I found that the second and the third row are filled with veiled women and their husbands in between.

You know that they can marry up to four wives at a time.

And the man in charge, sitting beside them smiling, I did what I promised.

Here they are.

Preach the gospel.

So they were very attentive, very attentive, especially during the praise and worship time.

At the altar call time, I said, if you want to accept Christ, stand up.

Two or three of them stood up, to my surprise, veiled woman, in front of everybody.

After the message, after I said, if you need any special prayer, there's a room there, you can go, and we will be with you until after midnight.

So a family, a husband and wife, and grandmother and kids, kids went to for this special prayer.

The woman was demon-possessed.

By the name of Christ, she was delivered.

And they celebrated and they went back home filled with joy.

After midnight, they opened their apartment, a very small apartment in a remote area.

They were shocked because the whole apartment was filled by a very strange light.

To be sure that they are not delirious or something wrong happened to them there, back in the church, they knocked all the doors of their neighbors to come in and to see the light, to be sure that it's real.

Everybody came in for 45 minutes.

The whole apartment filled with this very strange light.

They went to bed that night, Jesus visited everybody in a dream in this home.

Everybody.

After a month, the lady came back to the church and she said, Can I have a communion?

Of course.

I said to her, I'm I'm hearing that the light is still on.

She said, Yes.

Every day for half an hour, anybody can come and see.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine Jesus is ready to do anything if we ask?

We have a mighty weapon to cry out to the Lord.

But what kind of a prayer is this?

What kind of a prayer?

The disparate prayer.

Exactly the song that we sang a couple of minutes ago.

The disparate prayer.

This is the prayer heard from Moses himself.

Moses went back to God after his people decided to forget about God and to worship the bow.

They made the idol by themselves and they worshiped him.

So Moses went back to God and said, You are right.

They have done a great sin against you.

They deserve the punishment.

They deserve to be they you are right, you are righteous.

Destroy them if you want.

But this is the prayer.

Please, please, Lord.

Exodus 32, 32, please forgive their sin.

Please forgive their sin.

And if not, if not, then plot me out of the book you have read.

Either to live with them or to die with them.

Do we pray the same kind of prayer?

Do we pray for our nation?

The same kind?

Forgive them.

Reveal yourself to them.

Have mercy on them.

Or let me die.

I have nothing to live for, except for my nation.

I have nothing to dream of, except your glory to cover the land.

I have nothing else.

Take me home.

If my people will not return to you, take me home.

This is the same prayer prayed by Jeremiah.

My head were a spring of water, my eyes, fountain of tears.

I would weep day and night for my people.

Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed.

My eyes will flow unceasingly without relief until the Lord looks down from heaven and sees.

This is the prayer heard from John Knox way ago before the revival in Scotland.

Twelve hours over the mountain praying the same prayer.

Lord give me Scotland, or I die.

Or I die.

The desperate prayer will make a difference.

Will open the gate of heaven.

Will wren the gate of heavens and he will come down to reveal himself to his enemies.

Lastly, the power of truth.

The love will touch the heart.

The prayer will open the spirit, will reveal the glory of God to our brothers and sisters.

Then they are ready to listen.

Then they are ready to listen.

Then they will have a lot of questions.

Then they will come to us asking about the hope that we have.

And 1 Peter 3:15.

1 Peter 3:15

But in your heart set apart Christ as Lord.

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone.

Always be prepared.

Are you prepared?

If you love your neighbor, if you love your enemy, if you pray for him, he will come back to you.

And he will ask why you are different.

Why do you love me?

Why you care for me?

Why you are happy in your marriage?

Why your family is different?

Why you have hope.

Are you ready to answer him?

The answer that can convince him, can lead him into the real repentance.

We have one message for everybody.

God loves you, there is a plan for you.

Repent and receive Christ.

This is not the message for everybody.

If you're a Muslim comes to you and ask him about the hope that you have, don't tell him this.

He will not understand.

You have to understand his background.

Paul said it very clearly.

Paul said it very clearly.

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible.

To the Jew, I become like a Jew to win the Jew.

To those under the law, I become like one under the law.

I have become everything to everybody, so I may save some.

We have a homework to do.

We have to study, we have to learn, we have to take seminars, we have to be ready to answer those coming to us.

To tell them the truth that they need to hear.

There is a ringing bell in heaven.

Calling all of us to come together.

Everybody.

Wake up.

Rise up.

This is the time.

Put on the armor of God.

Use his mighty power, not your power.

His mighty weapons, not your weapons.

We have a promise, and we can inherit the promise.

To see the millions and millions coming to the knowledge of the living God.

Let's stand up and pray.

Lord, we come humbly before you.

Awaken us, awaken us.

Awaken our spirits.

Make us ready to love, to pray, and to preach the gospel.

To use your weapons by your power.

To see the greatest revival in history.

In the west, in the east, in the north, in the south.

We come as your family.

Your family, your sons and daughters.

Your bride.

Make something, Lord.

Do something in our heart.

Open our eyes.

Let us see.

Yes, Lord, yes, here we are to go into the whole world.

Amen.