God's War for America
Did you ever wonder why God isn’t doing something? You see America being torn apart, battered into submission, and molded into some ugly weak version of her former self. All in the name of progress. When the moral bottom society becomes the loudest voices of influence, shouldn’t God act?
I believe He is acting. But it is happening in a wholly unexpected way. He is at war to save our nation. The real question is, Are you ready to understand what your assignment is in His war to save America?
In a last-ditch effort to save America, God will pour out His Spirit. It will not be within the “system” but outside celebrated circles. It will restore much of the Spirit-filled Pentecostal churches from business-model entertainment centers back to a movement. Many small churches will become ground zero for the glory of God.This event will not be painless. Wicked agendas will topple. False doctrine will die an early death due to the healthy appetite of young converts. Church empires will be given the ultimatum to return to dependency on the Holy Spirit or suffer total loss.His miracle will be a great boon to some, but a horrendous event for others. It will be a day of rejoicing and mourning. A panoply of extremes.If you think the next revival is something to grow your church—forget it! This time it will be an act of war. It must topple man-made religious empires led by those who are traitors to their original calling. It must raise up those unknown and not esteemed to places of power and influence.Saving a nation in our condition can’t be painless or comfortable. The kind of moral awakening God prescribes for us must be messy and glorious.Take Acts chapter 5 as a model. The casual observer would be stunned and baffled. On the one hand, God is using the shadow of Peter to heal thousands in the streets. On the other hand, God is killing people in church. The day of the Lord is darkness and light, blessing and judgment, healing and death. The day of the Lord is one of the only things described in the Bible that evokes equal parts yearning and dread.Take Amos 5:18 and Psalm 110:3 as examples:
Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! For what good is the day of the Lord to you? It will be darkness, and not light.Your people shall be volunteers in the day of Your power; in the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, You have the dew of Your youth.
In the lead-up to this miracle, God is working on two sides of the street. On one side is the Lazarus generation and the other side is a prophetic core.Out of graves in the inner city and on campus, the Lazarus generation will rise. Today they are in gangs, on drugs, or screaming for leftist revolution. Then, in a way that no man can take credit for, they will be struck by the resurrection power of Christ. Tomorrow they will be baptized in the Holy Spirit and operate in frightening zeal.Meanwhile, the prophetic core wanders, feeling outside the mainstream. They have been ostracized for wanting revival. They have been punished for not getting with the slick programs. They have huddled together to pray and compare notes. They are starved for the fire, glory, and presence of God. They feel helpless and forgotten, but in their weakness they are being made strong.
At the moment of power, the day of God’s power, these groups will collide. The core that yearns for revival doesn’t know they are being forged to be the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of resurrected youth. We will see a new fulfillment of Matthew 11:12, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”
The Lazarus generation will find church—as we know it today—unbearable. Only this radical core will understand from their own brokenness how to “loose them, and let them go.”You may remember the Jesus movement. You may recall that as older Christians were receiving the baptism and leaving mainstream denominations hippies, addicts, and campus radicals were being saved.Barefooted, longhaired youth invaded churches in Southern California. Some churches turned them away. Pastors like Chuck Smith and Ralph Wilkerson embraced them and saw explosive growth. Eventually, millions were saved nationwide.The hallmark of that revival was acoustic, gentle choruses and a message of unconditional love. This reflected the gentle love matrix of the hippie movement.Remember, Jesus is seen as both Lion and Lamb. The Jesus movement expressed His lamb nature…now comes the lion. The plaintive cry will now give way to the prophetic roar.Out of the matrix of today’s death metal, gangsta rap, violent protest, and intense division, young lions will emerge who will fulfill Joel 2:28, “I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” Whereas the Jesus movement was marked by the gift of tongues, we will now see tongues of fire and prophecy. The prophetic gift will be delivered from the fleshly parlor tricks in which it has been imprisoned to nation-altering status. It will prophesy truth to power with paralyzing conviction.God is issuing fair warning. He is recruiting those who will abandon the corrupted forms that cling to many believers. He is sending out a call to submit to preparation.
Working on my forthcoming book, Vessels for Fire and Glory has taken more out of me than I ever imagined.A. W. Tozer said that he took no delight in preparing a certain message “because of the reality of meeting Satan’s opposition head-on”:
"I have never given more time and more pain and more prayer to any other series of sermons in my ministry. Because of their importance, I have literally felt Satan attempting to thwart the purpose of God. I have felt I was in raw contact with hell. There are so many in the Church who are spiritually blind that I tell God that I want to be able to see—I want to be a lower-case 'seer.' I want to penetrate and understand and have discernment concerning the whole plan of God. I want to appraise the situation and see it as God sees it—to know the role of God in this day of religious confusion."I would never compare myself to Tozer, but his experience resonates with me deeply. When I was asked to write Vessels for Fire and Glory, my first thought was about how viciously the devil would attack me. When I began writing, the attack was worse than I imagined.This message exposes a condition among believers that Satan fiercely tries to hide. But it must be exposed.
Spiritual Entitlement
After fifty years of ministry, I have seen every doctrinal float in the parade. I have witnessed a new generation getting thrilled by the “newness” of something that had passed through the Church many times before.
One float has lingered way too long—the spiritual entitlement float. This is the idea that God is so taken with us that He has overruled His character in order to humor us and pamper our consumerist Christianity.Entitlement permeates our videos. It oozes from our conferences. It colors our definition of faith and grace. Entitlement always breeds ingratitude, boredom, and denial. Denial may be the most dangerous.Those under the spell of these conditions will bristle at any correction or warning.Suggest to them the possibility of America’s destruction? Sacrilege. Suggest the Church slept through America’s downfall, or worse, that she was complicit in her undoing? Blasphemy!
If Tozer believed many were blind and religiously confused back in his day, what would he make of the Church today? What would he say to the Church?
America’s imminent destruction is now clearly in view. God is waging a war to save us. My passion is to understand what He is doing and to find my role in His miracle. Or as Tozer said, “I want to appraise the situation and see it as God sees it—to know the role of God in this day of religious confusion.”
God's Campaign to Save America
I am an evangelist. I am not a prophet. In 2012 I was minding my own business when God ordered me to write blogs about America’s political situation. He told me that someone else refused to obey His call to write the blogs I wrote.I loved the life I had before that blog. I was busy winning lost souls and seeing wonderful miracles of healings in some of our nation’s worst areas.The funny thing is that as I decried the evils of drugs and gang violence, the Church at large was blessed. But as soon as I began to expose leftist government—the worst drug and the worst gang in the inner city—I was attacked. Remember, I spent ten years reaching out on the University of California, Berkeley campus. It took no time at all for me to see how insidious socialism and Marxism truly are. These two ideologies ruin anything they touch.
However, because God was behind the blog, millions grabbed hold of its message.Then I got a very dark sense about 2019. Apparently, Dennis Prager felt the same thing and wrote this at the beginning of 2019: “The Democratic Party and the media will do to American political life what it has done to the arts; the universities; the high schools; the Boy Scouts; race relations; religion; the happiness of so many women (misled by feminism regarding marriage and career); the moral fabric of American life (morality reduced to feelings); late-night television; mainstream Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism; pro football; and the sexual innocence of the young: It will poison it.” He was painfully correct.Now America is sinking and suffocating in a mire of God-hating ideologies. The forces on the left now seem capable of taking the law into their own hands with impunity.
So, what is God doing about all this? Since America was a miracle from the beginning and the teachings of Jesus influenced our creation, God will not let America die without mounting an astounding counterattack on evil. He is warring to restore firepower to the movement that began in the lowly Azusa Street Mission. Rediscovering the power of the Holy Spirit holds the greatest potential to save our nation.In this hour it is not enough to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit—not nearly enough. Every soldier of God must know what God is doing in their time. The New Testament begins and ends with the drama of willing vessels having their lives interrupted, ruined for mortal pursuits, commissioned for great exploits, and then launched into an amazing adventure.