The church has been in a period of renewal. Multitudes have been healed and restored. Vision and faith have been rising steadily over the last few years. This has been a wonderful time, but it is merely a preparation for what is coming. We are now about to cross the bridge from renewal to revival.

I am defining renewal as that which works to heal and awaken the church, and revival as that which results in the salvation of the lost and the empowering of believers to challenge the spiritual darkness of the times.

Last week I tried to make the case for why we need to seek the Holy Spirit first, especially when we seek to present our message. It is better not to have anything else but the Holy Spirit than to have everything else without Him. Even so, we do not have to make that choice. The greatest advances of the gospel have come when the state-of-the-art technological advances of the times were used for it.

We have been blessed by a core leadership team and staff that has been together many years. As a result, we have been through many battles together. I don’t think anyone enjoys conflict, but they nevertheless thrive on it. They come alive with focus and resolve when there are attacks. Even so, we have some that I have watched recoil with every new attack. Their first tendency is to draw back and retreat, but when they fortify themselves in the Lord, they tend to be the ones who stand with great endurance.

    I sometimes receive appeals from well-known, politically liberal Christians who want me and other conservatives to refrain from our criticism of President Obama, with one even calling this criticism “unchristian.” I responded by calling this request hypocritical. Admittedly, some criticism by conservatives has crossed a line or been too extreme, and I believe distorted.

We are often blamed for wrong prophecies that other people give, and as usual, this was the case with the Y2K debacle. I shared often over the last year that when I sought the Lord about Y2K He did not say anything to me for months. When I asked why He was not speaking to me about it, He said that He was not speaking because it was not going to be anything. When I called Bob Jones and asked him what the Lord had shown him about it, he said to not get caught up in the hype about Y2K. Few listened, including many prophetic people whom we know.

           In Revelation 4:1-4, we come to one of the most wonderful and encouraging passages in this great Revelation:

         After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things."

I have been studying leadership for almost forty years, and it is a subject so vast and deep that I am constantly learning more about it. One of the most curious things about leadership is that those who may not understand much about it can have a great deal of it. Likewise, those who can know a great deal about it can have very little of it. Having followers is proof that one is a leader.