Reviving Hearts: Prioritizing Christ Over Worldly Pleasures

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I share your sadness and your concern for the church in fact I see most of my ministry as a Ministry devoted to weaning the church off of the world and its Pleasures on to Christ and his Pleasures I try to speak and write in such a way as to create spiritual taste buds in people's hearts so that they find distasteful things that don't honor God and find desirable things that do. [00:02:35]

I think what we are longing for together has historically been called Revival a work of God in the church first we call it Awakening when it touches the world but in the church first rival a work of God that causes the hearts of God's people to burn like in Luke 24 didn't our hearts burn within us when when we walked with him causes our hearts to burn with love for God's word and love for God's people love for God's service all rooted in an increasingly intense love for God himself. [00:03:20]

Revival is a sovereign work of God we can pray toward it and we can preach toward it teach toward it write toward it embody in our individual lives as much of it as possible but in the end it's a gift God gives to his church with irresistible Sovereign power and I agree that we are certainly in need of it. [00:04:46]

The fact that all things are from him and through him and to him it had a significant Awakening effect upon me about 40 years ago David Wells wrote a book called no place for truth which made the case that the American church that in the American Church, God rests far too lightly on the people of God he doesn't have weight it was the same heart cry from Dr Wells as from JB Phillips God is marginal God has little weight in our worship services and little weight in our lives he's taken lightly he simply won among many Factor s rather than the all consuming factor. [00:05:38]

Do the people who flirt with the world and seem to be totally at home in secular entertainments that are void of God Christ Christian morality do those people really say with the Apostle Paul I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ for Paul Christ was the Supreme and all pervasive Treasure of his life. [00:06:57]

I would ask all of us how does our treasuring of Christ compare to our treasuring of entertainments offered us by the world where are our affections because it that is the key bottom issue is where are our affections not first our behaviors but our heart and when I say Your Heaven is too distant I mean that the reality of the afterlife is simply not operational in the daily mindset of many Believers and virtually all unbelievers. [00:07:41]

As I read the New Testament the call to lay up for ourselves Treasures in Heaven and not on Earth is pervasive we are called to set our minds on things that are above we're called to look to things that are Eternal not transient we're called to bank Our Hope on the rewards of the Resurrection not the rewards of this life Heaven is a dominant life shaping reality in the New Testament but a minor reality in most people's lives today. [00:08:22]

People are simply not thinking clearly when it comes to how tiny this Earth is not only in the universe which is not very significant but in the scope of Eternity which is very significant I wonder if people ever think this is this has been touching me recently anyway I wonder if people ever think that in a hundred years virtually every person alive today will be gone 8 billion people gone there is a complete turnover of Humanity on the Earth every 10 decades. [00:09:11]

Compared to Eternity those hundred years on Earth were nothing the Bible calls it a vapor lasts two seconds when you breathe it out on a cold winter morning if people were rational they would not be Earthly minded they would be Heavenly minded and if they were Heavenly minded they would not find their greatest Pleasures in the entertainments produced by Earthly minded people. [00:11:13]

We pray and we teach and we live with the hope that God would break in with Sovereign Reviving power and cause his word to be so loved that it will no longer be as Jesus says choked out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this world I see most of my ministry as a Ministry devoted to weaning the church off the world and its Pleasures onto Christ and his Pleasures. [00:11:33]

The number of people who live longer than a 100 is 0.002% of the population it is statistically insignificant every hundred years there is a complete turnover of humanity virtually everybody who was 22 years old when I was born are gone and in 22 years everybody born for me will be gone that turnover has been happening for thousands of years. [00:10:06]

Humanity has been around for thousands of years on the Earth but the Earth has been home to individual humans no more than a hundred years and in most cases way shorter than 100 years and after that brief 80 to 100 years or less every single one of those humans enters eternity. [00:10:55]

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