Living on the Edge

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

John Dickerson: If you want to experience revival, the way you walk about life, you've got to have some urgency for the kingdom of God in your life, for the kingdom of God in your family. And you also, as you become more active in obeying God, remain dependent on God rather than on your own strength.

Dave Drouilly: I'm Dave Drouilly, and this is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Today Chip is stepping aside for a good friend of his, pastor, author, and award-winning journalist John Dickerson. John is helping kick off a brand new series called Hearts on Fire, How God Sparks Revival. And if the word revival sounds like something out of a history book, stay with us because today John asks a question every one of us will face sooner or later. When evil shows up in your life, your family, or your nation, how do you stand against it? Well, here's John with a message titled Urgent and Dependent.

John Dickerson: Here's what I want you to know as we go into this revival series. This is really important stuff, and so you're going to hear me being pretty serious. There's something I want you to know about our movement. We take God seriously. We don't take ourselves too seriously. And I want you to know as we go into this, when it feels maybe a little heavy, a little urgent, maybe even a little intense, that here's why. There are two paths in life. There's the path of Jesus that leads to life and joy. And there's every other path which ultimately leads to death and to pain.

And revival is literally a life or death matter when it comes to eternal life. We're going to see that in cultures and nations revival can be a life or death matter in this life. And as intense as that is, can I just remind you that the motivation in all of this is I want you to experience God's path of life that leads to joy. One of my favorite revival stories is a story that you're perhaps familiar with, but I can almost guarantee you did not know it's a revival story. It's the story of a little shepherd boy named David.

This took place about 3,000 years ago in the country of Israel, facing off in an ultimate fighting challenge, a fight to the death against a giant guy named Goliath. And David is somehow able to face this evil when all the other men in Israel don't have the confidence or the spiritual power to. And here's the question I want to ask you today. How do you defeat evil when it surfaces in your family, in your life, or even in the civilization that you live in? There was a family that came to me within the last year or two here.

They have a teenage son, and the parents came and they said, John, we're just not sure what to do. Our son has gotten into some really dark stuff. His His friends are just into these really kind of death and dying and John, we were going through his text messages, and one of his friends is texting him and saying, you should kill your parents. I remember talking with that dad and saying, you have a decision to make as a dad in the spiritual realm. You've got to decide if you're going to go to battle for the soul of your son.

And if so, what it means is you're going to have to give up your ego to share this with other people who can pray for you. You're going to have to give up your career to say whatever it takes to help my son, I'm willing to do. You're going to have to pray like never before. And he did all those things. He did all those things, and as we prayed, God in time gave the victory. A few months later that same son was worshiping here at our Sunday night gathering, totally different friend group. Listen up.

The battle of good versus evil, it will come into your life. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. There is a supernatural realm in your life. And can I just tell you in our nation, in the world right now, the supernatural realm, it is not stagnant, it is not still. Good and evil are fighting each other when that surface is in your life. Would you like to discover today how to defeat the evil that has stepped into your life or how to be prepared when evil does step into your life to be like David?

Stated positively, how do you get the best from God in life? Because David defeated Goliath, it led to life and prosperity and freedom for his family, his town, his nation. How can you have the same kind of victories for your family, for your community? David was prepared to face off with pure evil in a battle to the death because David had been reviving his love for God daily. And that's the answer to our question, how do you face evil? It's this, pursue revival as if your life depends on it. What is revival? Reminder, it is that you are reviving your love for God daily.

God, I love you more than anything else. Oh God, I I started to place my faith in my abilities or my reputation or my wealth or my family. Those aren't bad things, but I love you more. Every day you're kind of tending to your heart to make sure that you love God more. That's what revival at its core is. Things we associate with revival like, you know, hundreds of baptisms and emotional worship and the whole culture moving toward biblical values, those are the fruit or the result of individual believers who have been actively reviving their own love for God just as David did.

That 's why scripture tells us David was chosen by God because he was a person after God's own heart. A church that is experiencing revival is simply a church where enough of the people individually have chosen to revive their own love for God. When that happens, and that can happen across multiple churches, entire regions can experience spiritual revival. And if that happens in enough cities and states, entire nations can experience revival. If your obedience to God in these next 40 days would result in a revival for your kids or your grandkids, for your friends, your classmates, for the people you work with, maybe for the nation itself, which group would most motivate you to say, I'm willing to deny myself, I willing to step out of my comfort zone to pursue revival.

Here's the thing, if you want revival for your own heart or any of those groups that you care about, you're going to have to live with a posture of urgency and dependence. What does that mean? Well, you know, your posture is how you normally stand, right? Some people are like this more and more with our phones, right? Some people are like this. Your posture is the way you walk about life. And what I mean is if you want to experience revival, the way you walk about life, you've got to have some urgency for the kingdom of God in your life, for the kingdom of God in your family.

And you also, as you become more active in obeying God, remain dependent on God rather than on your own strength. What does this mean? Well, urgent action means that we will do all that is in our control to do as we work for revival. We're not just praying, oh God, please bring revival and but not doing any action ourselves. We're doing everything we can to bring about revival, but we're doing it with a total dependence on God. That revival is a spiritual thing, and we need God to show up. All of our best efforts will mean nothing unless he shows up, but he does require our effort.

And you can see this balance between God's part of revival and our part of revival in the story of David and Goliath. Look at verse 45. David says to Goliath, you come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. So notice David is not at home in his closet praying, God, please defeat Goliath. David is on the battlefield. He's doing what he can. And yet he is prayerful and he is dependent on God.

It's a both and. In fact, David's confidence as he faces off with a far superior physical opponent comes from this lower line. Goliath, you have defied God. David continues verse 46. The Lord will deliver you into my hands, Goliath. So God's going to do his part. I'm dependent, and I'll strike you down. I'm going to do my part. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals. Violent. If the Philistines weren't so well documented of what they were going to come and do, it seems, you know, it is bloody, but it it's exactly the only option they had, right?

It's either be killer be killed. And the whole world will know there's a God in Israel. So I'm going to do my part in facing evil, but my dependence is on God. All those gathered here will know it is not by the sword or spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give all of you into our hands. God's going to deliver you, but our hands are going to be active in the process. As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly.

Dave Drouilly: You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and guest teacher John Dickerson. We'll get back to the message in just a moment. But first, did you know that you can take Living on the Edge with you wherever you go? Download the free Chip Ingram app from your app store, and you'll have today's program, video messages, and daily discipleship tools right in your pocket, ready whenever you are. Well, now here's John continuing today's message.

John Dickerson: Think about that. David ran quickly at this opponent that no other Israelite man would step out to face. Ran out to meet him in battle, reaching into his bag. David takes out a stone, he slings it, and the point is this, David does his part. Here's that God desires revival in your life and the lives of the people you love, even in our nation. God desires revival more than any of us. He's eager to do his part if we'll step out like David and do our part. Work for revival like it all depends on you.

David did everything that depended on him. And if he hadn't, the story probably wouldn't have gone the same way. But as you work like it all depends on you, pray for revival like it all depends on God. American Christians tend to get tangled up in this little thing between God's role and our role. And some of them say, well, we're just going to pray every day for revival, but we're not really going to do anything. And others say, we're going to do all this work for revival, but we're not really going to pray. And in the story of David we see it's a both and.

Work like it all depends on you, pray like it all depends on God. What would your week look like this week if this week you said, I am going to do everything in my power to bring about a revived love for God in me? I'm going to do everything in my power and I'm going to pray, God, would you revive my love for me? Bring revival in me, bring revival to my loved ones. I want to help you experience revival by helping you today to understand three things. The first, what is revival? We've covered that.

The second, why does revival matter? We're about to cover that. And the third will be our brief conclusion where we say, what does this mean for you this week if you want to begin to experience revival? Why does revival matter for you? Well, very simply, God commands us to pursue the reviving of our love for him. Jesus was once asked, what is the greatest commandment? If you had to boil all of the Bible down and summarize it to one command, Jesus, what would it be? And Jesus without hesitating replied very simple, it's this, love the Lord your God with all your heart.

Revival is not about religion, it 's not about rules, it's not even about performing. And you do these 15 things to be part of revival. It's ultimately about your heart. Do you love God more than you love anything else? That's where revival begins. Love him with your heart, your emotions. Love him with your soul, your unseen being. Love him with your mind. How many of your thoughts throughout the day are God-oriented thoughts? Jesus says, all of scripture, if you will love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, you will end up obeying and doing everything else that's in here.

So we're commanded to constantly be reviving our love for God. Why does God command you to do this? Well, it's for your own good. Here's the reality about you and me, if we don't pursue the reviving of our love for God and for his work, then there will be a cooling off of our love for God. It's just It's just our natural tendency. And what happens as your love for God cools off is that the allure of sin starts to heat up. And things that when you were really on fire or warm in your love for God you wouldn't have considered you start to dabble with.

And And And then as you dabble with the sin you you start to play with the sin. And then the sin starts to take a strangle hold on you. Sin always leads to death of relationships, death of dreams, even physical death. Sin always leads to destruction. So God in love says, make it a way of life that you're constantly tending to your heart love for me because you are created to be a worshiper. And if you're not worshiping God, you'll end up worshiping sexuality or self or the US dollar or your retirement account or the next toy or some relationship or the next identity piece in your life.

If we did not wander from God, we wouldn't need to pursue revival. But the reality about me, and I would guess it's true of you as well, is just like Adam and Eve, we have this propensity or this tendency to wander away. Here's what revival looks like in scripture. I call this the blessing judgment cycle. This is really a visual summary of the Old Testament and even the gospel, what Jesus did on the cross. I'll walk you through parts of this. Let's start at the 1:00 position if this was a watch face, the 1:00 which is where people turn to God.

When you turn to God, he will bless you. I'm not promising you that you'll win the lottery or never have the man flu again, okay? But when you turn to God and you start to say, God, I will live life your way, guess what? Your relationships will improve. Obey him long enough, you will get free from sins that used to control you. Obey him long enough, your career will improve because you're on time, you're honest, you're reliable, you get along with people. Those things tend to pay off. And so what happens is that blessing then leads to comfort.

You are more comfortable after years of obeying God than you were when you were living apart from God. And what does comfort lead us to? Sadly, comfort leads to complacency. We get complacent, we get distracted. And then out of complacency, not even doing it on purpose, we start to worship other things. We start to worship our wealth or our comfort or our family or a love relationship or worship ourselves or our sexuality. We start to worship some other thing. And then here's what happens whenever a person of God starts to worship some other thing, God sends a call to repent.

In the Old Testament this came through the prophets. Actually, in the story where David faces off with Goliath, the reason it's a revival story is that there was a king named Saul who had gone through all of this. He had turned to God. God had blessed. The people were wealthy and prosperous. It led to complacency. And guess what? When the Philistines were invading Israel, the people of Israel were worshiping other gods. They were worshiping other idols. And a prophet named Samuel had been telling them, repent, turn back to God. David had, but most of the nation had not.

And here's the fork in the road that you face today and you'll face it repeatedly in your life is right here at about the 8:00 position. God sends a call to repent. I'm his messenger today for that, okay? You have a choice to make. Will you repent? If so, then you go through revival and it takes you right back up to turning to God and you go through the good part of the blessing cycle again. Whenever we don't choose to repent, we go in some level down the judgment cycle. Now these can be really severe, these can be smaller at times, but families and even nations can make this choice.

And what's inspiring about the story of David versus Goliath is the whole nation was choosing the judgment cycle. That's why the Philistines were invading. But David's faith and his love for God was significant enough to change the course of the entire nation. What if your revived love for God in these 40 days could change the course of someone you love? What if your revived love could change the course of your family? What if our revived love as a movement could change the course of the nation that we live in? When people don't choose revival, they don't repent, it leads to judgment.

Now depending on how long you've been reading the Bible or what your concept of God is, you might think, well, gee, that sounds really mean of God. A lot of judgment, most judgment is self-inflicted. It's our own consequences. Isaac Newton said for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Most of the judgment in our lives is just our own consequences. Here's an example. Someone drinks a little too much and they decide to drive. They're swerving around, they get pulled over, they get a DUI, they get their license taken away. Now they don't have a driver's license.

Did God judge them? Nope. They just did that to themselves, right? Person has an affair, blows up their marriage. Did God do that? Nope. Most of our judgment is self-inflicted. And nations when they deny the truth of God tend to choose demonic ideologies that can bring judgment to the whole nation often by just natural consequences. There are times of divine judgment in scripture as well like Noah's flood or Sodom and Gomorrah. We can see this in the Old Testament, but we can also see this in recent history. The nation of Germany was from about the 1500s to the 1800s a quote Christian nation.

So Marx and Nietzsche say, we don't need God anymore. We are a once Christian nation. We're willfully turning away from that to do life better without God. You get to the 1940s and between 6 and 10 million Jewish people exterminated with industrial efficiency. Talk about choosing evil after knowing what is right and what followed, incredible judgment.

Dave Drouilly: That's guest teacher John Dickerson here on Living on the Edge with a message titled Urgent and Dependent. The first lesson in our brand new series Hearts on Fire, How God Sparks Revival. To learn more about what John just shared, including a small group video study and more, go to the revivalproject.org/livingontheedge. John reminded us today that revival at its core is reviving your love for God every single day. Well, that's exactly why we want you to know about Chip Ingram's growing deeper in Christ, a 365-day journey to true discipleship. Each daily reading is designed to help God's truth move from your head to your heart and into how you actually live.

And this November it's also available in a beautiful new leather-bound edition, making it a perfect gift for someone you care about. As you look ahead to Christmas, pick one up for your own time with God and another for someone you'd love to see grow deeper in Christ. Purchase your copies of Growing Deeper in Christ today by going online to livingontheedge.org/offers. Revival has always spread one heart at a time. And this program reaches new hearts every day because of the friends who support it. Would you be one of them today? Whatever the size, your gift helps carry God's word into places we could never reach on our own.

Donate online at livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. Prefer to send a check? Write to us at Living on the Edge, PO Box 3007, Suwanee, Georgia 30024. Well, now here's Chip Ingram.

Chip Ingram: Thanks so much, Dave. You know, it's easy for life to feel fine, nothing really pressing, ignoring all the signs. And as a result, God kind of becomes background noise. That's exactly the drift John was talking about today. We want to move forward, but trying harder is only working against our progress. Listen very carefully. Revival isn't about trying harder. It's about reviving a love for God that's already in you. It's just gone a little cold over time. And that's where the story of David comes in. He wasn't fearless facing Goliath, but he leaned into God's love.

And you got to ask why because he cared more about God than he feared the giant. So while everyone else in the army saw a monster too big to fight, David saw an opportunity for God to show up. That's the same urgency John was carrying forward with us today. And here's why this matters so much because it's not just about you. John and I are close friends, and he often reminds me, revival is a choice that starts with a person. And we all want that big thing to happen out there and revival among young people and a transformation like we've read about.

But it starts with one person, one heart, then one life, one family, one church. And then we've seen God in history sweep across nations. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to pause right now and say, Lord, my heart needs to be revived. Rather than trying harder, I ask you to allow me to grasp how deeply you love me today. And Lord, I choose to draw near to you and I claim your promise you'll draw near to me. And let me encourage you, stick with me and John for this whole series.

The world is desperate for revival. And it begins first with you and with me personally.

Dave Drouilly: Next time John Dickerson continues his message with a look at what he calls the blessing and judgment cycle and why choosing revival can be a matter of life or death for a person, a family, or even a nation. Join us right here on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.