RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

The Message of the Evangelist: What it is not

Welcome to day 5 on revival and evangelism And today I want to discuss the message of revival.

Now, the message of revival is not revival .. revival is the work that God does in us. But whenever God does that work in us, He brings us back to our first love. And what is our first love? Our first love is what Jesus did in our hearts.

Do you remember that day that you opened your heart and you invited Christ to come into your life – your saw what He did for you on the cross. You saw what he did – the power of his resurrection – you believed in Him – you put your faith in Him and He forgave your sins. That’s the first love. That’s when God first worked in you and gave you a love for Jesus – you understood what it was that He did for you.

Now what I’ve discovered is that today in the generation in which we’re living, we’ve lost the simple message of the gospel. And revival brings us back to that simple message. There is power in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, when I say gospel what am I talking about?

That word gospel simply means good news. And what is the good news? The good news is simply this – that we’re sinners, we’ve failed, we’ve blown it – every single one of us have fallen short of what God expects – of His standard. But that God loved us so much that He sent Jesus to die for us – that He was buried in a borrowed tomb – and three days later, He arose from that tomb – He ascended to the right Hand of the Father and He sends His Spirit to dwell on the inside of everyone of us who put our faith in Him from our hearts. And that He transforms our lives.

That’s the good news. It’s simple as that. And what I’ve discovered is that a lot of people want to talk about the blessings that we have and we think that’s revival. Whoa, we’re going to go out and tell everybody about the great blessings.

Revival is when our focus gets off the blessings and gets back on the Blesser – the One who’s done that work in us. And we see Him – the message becomes the cross and what Jesus did on the cross for our sins – taking the punishment for our sins and it brings us back to that freshness and that simplicity and that purity of love for Jesus and what He did for us.

It’s not going .. sometimes I think we think that revival is some great new truth that we’ve discovered. Revival is going back to the simple old truth of what Jesus did for us.

I’ll never forget when I was first started ministering and preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. I was interim pastor of a little church, Pumpkin Center .. in Pumpkin Center, Louisiana. And I was pastor of this little church and there was a family who took a young boy in – this boy’s family had forsaken him – they took him in and they were just caring for him – loving him like Jesus would love him and that little boy had a stuttering problem.

And he came to church one Sunday and I preached the gospel that Jesus loves you – that Christ died for

you and oh, he was so moved by that that he came forward and gave his life to Jesus.

And he was so thrilled by what God had done in his life. He found someone .. he didn’t have a father and a mother who loved him – but he found a God who loved him. And oh he was so thrilled. So he would get on the bus to go to school and the other boys would laugh at him – make fun of him because he stuttered and he would say, “Dddddon’t dddo that .. JjjjJesus loves you.”

And it would take him awhile but he’d tell them about the love of Jesus. And when I would preach every Sunday as interim pastor of that little church, there would be – every Sunday he would have some friend with him. And they’d come down the aisle – and that little boy he had led to Jesus Christ. He was the greatest person who won others to Christ of anyone in that church – no-one led as many people as him. And the reason – he – saw – the love of God in the cross and what Jesus did for him and he couldn’t get over it.

Oh, I tell you .. when we come back to see the message – what the message is – what Christ did on the cross and that becomes our message. Oh, there’s power – there’s power in the message of the cross because only through the cross can people be forgiven. Only through the cross can people find the love that they’re searching for.

So we’ve got to come back to that simple message of preaching the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus and what it will mean to people.