Living on the Edge

Dave Drury: Today on Living on the Edge, Chip welcomes guest pastor John Dickerson.

John Dickerson: Let us pray bold prayers of faith for the young people in our movement. Let us pray bold prayers of faith that they would be culture shapers, young people who are anointed by God to turn the cultural conscience to Christ as a nation-changing revival leader in God's hands.

Dave Drury: I'm Dave Drury, and this is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. We're in a series called Hearts on Fire: How God Sparks Revival, with Chip's friend and guest teacher, Pastor John Dickerson. Last time, John made the case that lasting revival has always depended on the next generation and on the older believers who poured into them. Today he gets practical with simple ways any of us can invest in young people, whether you're a parent, a grandparent, or someone with no kids at all. Well, if you can, open your Bible to Deuteronomy chapter 4. Here's John with his message titled The Next Generation and Revival.

John Dickerson: I want to give you today 3 ways to ignite the next generation toward lasting revival. First way is that we train, direct, and instruct our young people toward Christ and toward scripture. Now we're doing this with love, of course, because that's the way Christ did it, and we're doing this with grace, but we are also doing this very directly. We're being directive. This is what the Bible says. Here is God's will. This is God's plan, because we're not being good instructors in life if we don't give clarity and direction. Here's God's way of life. Look at these young revival leaders from scripture.

Josiah, who we just learned about, was trained by Zephaniah. Esther, a young revival leader who saved her whole nation from genocide, from murder, was trained up by her uncle Mordecai. And the list goes on. Every young revival leader was trained by someone in the faithful remnant. Three ways to ignite the next generation. Second is we model kingdom first living. Step one, you're teaching them God's word. By the way, way to go by bringing them here, by having your young person consistently involved here in your house, learn to teach them. But if you teach them and you don't model it, they're going to pick up what you do rather than what you say.

So model, here's what it actually looks like to seek first the kingdom of God. If you want to be part of nation-changing revival, it starts in your heart, and then you model it out for the next generation. Now, because God has chosen for you and me to live in the United States of America, I believe we have a responsibility to be aware of his work in our land. There have been four nationwide Great Awakenings, and every time that has happened, it's been birthed out of peril, division, and struggle. First Great Awakening, led to the Revolutionary War, actually. Second Great Awakening really dealt head-on with the sin of slavery, which was still being allowed in this nation, and the abolitionists formed.

It was a group of Christians who said, we will give our lives to abolish slavery. It moved the whole population to where the majority of people were anti-slavery, and then you had the Civil War as a decisive moment. If you study world history, you're not going to find many nations that have had a bloody fight to the death civil war, and then a hundred years later have any kind of unity. Most of those nations never recover. They never have stable government, they never have stable economies. You can't even really own private property for long because the two sides hate each other so much. How did our nation, think about this, how is it that now we can have a bowl game with Alabama Crimson Tide, and you could have a Big Ten Northern team, and a hundred thousand people can pack a stadium, and everyone just cheers for their team, and no one's trying to kill each other.

Like, what brought the nation back together after that kind of death and murder? I want to tell you about an unknown, overlooked person in the history of the American church, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Your school might have skipped this, but MLK was a Christian, not just a Christian. He read his Bible on the regular, and he was a pastor. He was a full-time pastor. That's what reverend means, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Why is he a junior? Well, because there was a Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., his dad. MLK grew up going to church at his dad's church, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and his dad was a Baptist pastor.

If you know anything about Baptists in the 1950s, it means that if you're a pastor's kid, you're there for Sunday school, you're there for children's church, you're there for full adult church, you're there for Sunday night church, and you're there for Wednesday night church. That's just two days of the week, okay? He grew up surrounded by scripture, dozens of Sunday school teachers and aunts and uncles and his godly parents. And then you look at his life, so full of courage and so full of love. What you won't find outside of Jesus is courage and love, grace and truth married together. You'll find very gracious people who surrender the truth and just end up giving the society away, or you'll find very truth-based people who just become angry because they don't have any grace.

That's human nature, those extremes. Jesus is the only one as God who was perfectly full of grace and truth. And as MLK, as a follower of Jesus, lived out the word of God, he exhibited a life full of grace and truth. Truth. He could be so courageous that he could march into death-defying odds or even the day that he was killed for his work as a Christian to bring about God's way of treating people equally. Courage, but courage that would say things like this: you can never defeat hate with hatred. You can only defeat hatred with love. How do you get the two of those together? You find them in Jesus, and you raise a young person to know Christ.

Look at these American revival leaders from all four Great Awakenings. Every single one of them was trained by an older believer in a faithful remnant during their childhood. For MLK, his dad, his mom, his local Baptist church. For D. L. Moody, it was his uncle. For John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, it was their mom and dad. Notice the average age, 28.8 years old, average age of Christian leaders who launch America's four Great Awakenings when they began ministry. So if they're 28, then do the older ones of us have any work to do? Well, we do because 100% of those, 100% of revival leaders in the Christian revivals of this nation were trained up by intentional Christian parents or grandparents, an uncle or an aunt, or even a spiritual father like a Mordecai Ham or Zephaniah in the case of Josiah.

Nation-changing revival does not happen by accident. It doesn't happen by just thumbing up and hearting anytime you see something on social media about revival. It's probably not hurting, but that's not going to cause revival. It happens when the remnant goes all in to train up the next generation for Christ. What if we don't go all in for revival? I personally believe that we're in the same position that Israel was in 600 years before Christ, that our nation has chosen a path that will lead to its own division and destruction, unless enough of us in the faithful remnant return to God and can lovingly encourage our neighbors toward God.

Deuteronomy 4, verse 9, God commands this, knowing our tendency to drift, only be careful, watch yourselves so that you do not forget. Don't forget the things God has done that you've seen, and then teach them, teach what God has done to your children and to their children after them. Why does God command this? Joel 1, verse 3, tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation. This is God's will. Why does God command this over and over? Because if we don't, we will sleepwalk ourselves right into judgment. We will sleepwalk our society right into self-destruction.

When we look at Israel in the Old Testament, God's people, their tendency was to drift away from him. And the same has been true in the United States. There will be a Great Awakening, and a lot of the nation will turn to God, and then prosperity follows, and then the nation drifts from God. We've seen that especially in the years since World War II. You know, when Billy Graham and MLK were leading what is considered the Fourth Great Awakening, it was also in a time of turmoil. Turmoil on many fronts. One, World War II had ended, and when World War II ended, the nation was exhausted, depleted.

All these young GIs are coming home, the soldiers, and they have PTSD, so alcoholism was on the rise. Find out about the Holocaust and just this horror of, wow, all this new technology of the last 50 years has just been used to kill people at an industrial level, the Jewish Holocaust in Germany. And then finding out, wow, the Soviet Union is now the other world power, and they've got similar death camps, and not to mention there's the atomic bomb, and there's the nuclear age, and people were unsure of what to do. And then on top of that, you've got a nation that has outlawed slavery, but is still living in the consequences and really the judgment and the fallout of having practiced the sin of slavery for so long.

Dave Drury: You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and his friend, guest teacher John Dickerson. We'll return to today's message in just a moment, but first, life doesn't always let you sit by the radio at the same time every day. That's why there's the Chip Ingram app. Today's program, plus video teachings and so much more, all in one place, whenever and wherever you're ready. Just search for the Chip Ingram App in your app store. Well, now here's John continuing today's message.

John Dickerson: During that time, as MLK and Billy Graham, and they're just symbolic of many others, as they pointed the nation to Christ. I'm not saying that the US has ever been perfect. No nation will be perfect except for Christ's kingdom when he returns. But as many in the nation chose Christ, it did move the moral needle back toward Christian values. And then what happened? The greatest wealth creation in the history of the world, from the end of World War II till now, has been the greatest wealth creation. Greatest improvement of medical care and healthcare and lifespan. Greatest improvement of women's rights and human rights, which have been exported around the world.

The whole post-World War II order. I know I'm really getting into professor mode here, but this is important for you to know. The world you were born into is what's called the post-World War II order. In other words, after World War II, when NATO and the United Nations were formed, it shaped the global order we now live in, and it was shaped by Western nations that had won World War II and had Christian values. If you remove Christian values, if you remove Christ and the Bible, the UN doesn't work. If you remove Christ and the Bible, NATO doesn't work. The post-World War II order doesn't work, and we're starting to see that around the world.

I'm getting very geopolitical here, and I should zoom us back in. My point is this, our nation, we're in the normal phase. First generation loves the Lord. Second generation is born into prosperity and also loves the Lord, but not quite as much. Third generation is born into great prosperity, and oh yeah, grandma and grandpa used to talk about Jesus a lot. This is how family fortunes get ruined, and that's the season we're in as a nation. We're three generations after the Fourth Great Awakening, and now we have to decide, is there going to be another Great Awakening, or are we going to just keep drifting from God?

Now, on the one hand, we can't control the nation, but we can control ourselves, and then we pray for the nation, and that's how great awakenings happen. So, how can you influence your loved ones, your neighbors, your nation toward God? Here's what we've learned. You train up the next generation, you model kingdom living, and then third, you serve the next generation in your local church. If you say, John, I travel a lot, I'm not able to be a small group leader or really directly serve, okay, then fund it. Fund the ministry to the next generation, or ideally do both. Be a small group leader, be investing into young men and women so that on a weekly basis, as they're saying, wow, how does the Bible, how do I apply it to this cultural struggle?

Every week there's a new one, and they need someone who can sit down with them. I need someone, we all need someone who can sit down with us and say, here's what Jesus' way of life looks like in this situation, or maybe I don't know, but let's look at the relevant scriptures and let's pray for wisdom. It's not about always having the answer, it's about always pointing back to the one who does have the answers. More than a dozen mature Christians invested into a young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. before he was a reverend. Picture an 8 or 10 year old Martin Luther King Jr. running around the Baptist church, maybe sliding on the ground in his dress pants and making holes in the knees.

I know I did that as a boy in a Baptist church. Picture Billy Graham when he's 19 or 20, and he's got all this zeal for the Lord, but he's immature and he's got rough edges. There's people in every one of those seasons who invested in these young ones. Serve our kids, serve our students, serve our young adults. Here's the point. God uses Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, nursery volunteers. He uses aunts and uncles, moms and dads. He uses older siblings. He uses spiritual fathers like Mordecai Ham or John the disciple. And if we're serious about seeing revival in our land, then each one of us have to find our place in raising up the next generation.

Very simply, we plant the seeds for tomorrow's enduring revival today. Well, let's close where we started, the state of our nation, the hatred, the division, the peril. People who just want to stand and yell at each other, people who literally would kill each other if they were allowed to. Can any of the idols of our land heal this division? Can the idol of the US dollar bring those people together? No. How about the idol of education or the idol of science? They might do some good, but they're not going to bring these two sides together. There's only one power that changes people who hate one another to people who love one another, changes people who would take to people who would serve.

It's the power of Christ, and we don't force it on people, but we do boldly declare the good news, and we invite them to the foot of the cross, that they also might experience the new life that we have. Because we're all going to go out, us and our kids and grandkids, and we will be misunderstood, we will be labeled, we will be prejudged at times with prejudice. How do you live for Christ? Peter tells us how. He says this, live such godly lives, such good lives among the pagans, that is the unbelievers, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, in other words, the assumption is you will be accused of doing wrong, follower of Jesus.

You will be accused, you will be prejudged. When they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your good deeds, and they'll see that you don't actually fit what they're saying about you. What does this mean? It means you show up at work every day, you show up in your school every day, you show up in your neighborhood, at your athletic fields, in your home, and you are obeying Jesus every day. You're doing your best to live like Christ. You're loving your enemy. You're blessing those who persecute you. You're standing for truth boldly, and you're courageous even as you have unconditional love and grace, and your actions speak louder than your words.

Yes, declare the good news with your words, but declare it simultaneously with your hands, your feet, your daily life. And what this scripture says is there will be people who prejudge you and label you, and you're going to disprove their stereotype through your actions. And it's as a generation does this, that the whole stereotype of what is a Christian, it changes over time as we disprove it with our actions. Your actual love for the lost becomes irrefutable, and I just want to close by celebrating how God is doing this right now in this movement as we speak. It's happening with our high school students, it's happening with so many of you, it's happening with our middle school students.

This is Tyler, he's an eighth grader here in Brownsburg, and Tyler has leukemia. He's battling leukemia. And what I love about the way our young people are living out the way of Jesus in our culture today is that at the public middle school where Tyler attends, connection point kids who love him and care about him, they pray for him in their school, and they invite their classmates who don't know Jesus and don't know what Christianity is about. They don't force it, but they invite them, hey, if you want to join us in praying that God would heal Tyler, you're welcome to join us. That group has grown to over a hundred middle schoolers who are praying in the public school, student-led, constitutionally protected, and they're not forcing it on anyone.

They're being bold and they're being loving. Take a look and be encouraged.

Guest (Male): Just thank you that we're able to do this and gather together and just, I love the impact that it's making on everyone.

Guest (Female): God, I just pray that you would just watch over Tyler and just give him a healing in his mind and that you just give him good thoughts as he goes through hard battles.

Guest (Female): Dear God, I pray that you help Tyler and the doctors that are giving him medicine and please help him heal.

John Dickerson: Yeah. You're not going to find that in the news, you're not going to find that anywhere else, but this is the way Jesus people live. I'm praying for a church in every city to be experiencing what we're experiencing now over years and decades. It could truly change the nation toward Christ, and I'm inviting you to join me in that being your life story.

Dave Drury: You're listening to Living on the Edge with guest teacher John Dickerson and a message titled The Next Generation and Revival. You can learn more about what John has been exploring in this study, including a small group video study and more, by going to therevivalproject.org/livingontheedge. And if you know of a young person in your life who loves podcasts, be sure to share this series with them through the Living on the Edge podcast. John left us with a picture of middle schoolers praying boldly for a classmate battling leukemia, young people already living the way of Jesus. Moments like that grow out of a faith that's nurtured day after day.

Chip Ingram's devotional book, Growing Deeper in Christ, is a 365-day journey designed to nurture exactly that kind of faith. And right now there's special pricing on both the paperback and the new leather-bound edition, so with Christmas only weeks away, consider getting a copy for yourself and for a young person you'd love to see grow stronger in Christ. Get your copies of Growing Deeper in Christ today at livingontheedge.org/offers. John asked a question today that's worth repeating. What are you planting into the next generation? One way to answer is by giving to a ministry that's actively reaching them with the gospel.

Your gift helps carry clear biblical teaching to young parents, students, and new believers who are just figuring out what it means to follow Jesus. Give at livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. And if you prefer to use the mail, write to us at Living on the Edge, PO Box 3007, Suwanee, Georgia 30024. Well, now here's Chip.

Chip Ingram: Thanks, Dave. You know, as I talk with, people of all ages, really, because I think it's more of a personality issue than a age issue, but I think a lot of us feel like, oh yeah, especially when they talk to me like, oh, Chip, you have this platform and you have influence, and I can see where you or someone like John Dickerson talks about all this, but I don't really have any real position to influence anyone. And you just assume that anyone who's really going to change the world, needs to be like, a Billy Graham or some famous pastor or missionary or be the president of a company or you name it, right?

Fact of the matter is, is that what John help us remember is all of us are a link in the chain of what God does in major revivals. One of the most major movements in God was a guy named Billy Graham. I've been to the Cove. It's a conference center that the Billy Graham Association owns and runs, and there's a hallway all the way around that has a picture of Billy speaking to millions and millions of people, and then innovation after innovation where radio was started, and then, you know, simulcasts, and, you know, this man, very ordinary farm boy that God really used. What most people don't know is another name, a guy named Mordecai Ham, who was a traveling evangelist, you know, the old timey stuff, you put up a tent and the music's not very good and you call people to trust in Jesus.

It was that ordinary guy that led Billy Graham to Christ. And even as I'm listening to these messages a number of years ago, John Dickerson, who has written now a number of award-winning books and leads a church and has a network of pastors and churches that are teaching this revival material all across America. I got to know him a decade or more ago, and John and I just became friends, and I got to team teach with him, and, before he ever gave a message, we'd meet together, and after he gave the message, we'd go up and go through it, and, I just passed on what I knew. And John's doing things so beyond anything I could ever dream, but it was just seeing a young guy with a lot of potential and the right heart from where I sit.

And the truth is, you sit someplace else, and you have gifts I don't have, and you have wisdom I don't have. But I'd ask you today, who do you see that has potential? Who do you see that you should invest in? The fact of the matter is, long after many of us are gone, if the Lord doesn't come back, he's going to use some young person that seems very ordinary now, that God will delight to do an extraordinary thing through that ordinary person, but you will be the link in the chain that helps them believe that he could actually use them. Young people need an older voice to give them permission to become all that God wants them to become.

Why don't you pray and ask God who that person is, and then go invest in them.

Dave Drury: Next time, John Dickerson begins his final message in our series on revival, and if you've been feeling tired, distracted, or worn down in your faith lately, it's one you won't want to miss. Join us next time here on Living on the Edge.

Announcer: Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.