With Spring coming like a freight train

(well, sure enough, I haven't finished new article so I will have to post tomorrow now)

"A documentary produced by Moody traced some tribal regions in Africa that, when Europeans came in contact with them in the 1700s and 1800s, they were in dark savagery. Moody traced the lineage of some of these tribes into more ancient times and discovered that the native people a thousand years before had light and knowledge; they had associations with truth but they rejected it!

“What happens with light rejected is it becomes lightning and so you don’t know where those people have been because you haven’t been there,” explains Richard Jordan. “You aren’t God and you aren’t accountable for them. But do you know how they got there? By holding the truth (the truth God put within them) in unrighteousness.

“The Scripture’s real clear in Romans 2 that if you walk in the light you have, no matter how dim the light is, it will give you light.”

*****

“If I told you today, ‘I’m going to send you to a remote island all by yourself and you’re not going to see anybody for 10 years, and I want you to study God’s Word,’ what books would you take with you as study aids?

“First thing I would do is take a King James Bible, an English dictionary, a concordance, Treasury of Scriptural Knowledge. Maybe you’d take a bible dictionary, take a commentary or two. Take a 1611 Bible. Take a Strong’s Concordance.

“Do you realize a Strong’s Concordance was first published in 1890? It was the first English concordance. In 1885, if you wanted to find a verse, you had to remember where it was. You ever do that? ‘I know that verse’s in there somewhere; where’s it at?’

“Now you don’t even own a concordance anymore because the Bible app you got on your stupid phone is hooked into it. Do you understand you are a privileged group of people that in church history didn’t exist?!

*****

“That last wintertime era is the one that gave birth to what we know as the ‘the grace movement.’ J.C. O’Hair became pastor of North Shore Church in 1924. He died in 1958 as pastor of the church. The heyday of the ‘Grace Movement’ as we’ve come to understand it was there. The big names you hear—C.R. Stam, Charles Baker and O’Hair—that’s their era.

“Now, I’m no J.C. O’Hair and you’re no Stam or Baker, but we don’t need to be. All we need to be is who we are. We just need to be where we are taking advantage of who we are to the fullest—to be for this season who it will need us to be.

*****

“Every springtime in this country has had a spiritual awakening. That’s the cycle in Anglo-American history in which the Reformation took place. The first reformation was a recovery of Pauline truth.

"The next great awakening was the Puritan awakening. The era of the Puritans, in the first quarter of the 1600s, produced the King James Bible. The fruit and on the vine. It’s the era of tremendous, wonderful activity in America. Jonathan Edwards and the great New England revivals changed the course of America—justification by grace through faith.

“The next great awakening in the 1800s was led by Charles Finney and had to do with the doctrines of identity. The next great awakening was the one that led into dispensational understanding.

"The fourth great awakening, in the 1960s, was called in history the ‘Conscience Revolution’ and it’s the first awakening in American history that wasn’t based on Bible. It was a New Age awakening. Historians call our world today 'post-Christian'.

“Today you’re involved in ministering to the first generations in American history that didn’t have some basic spiritual consensus or underpinnings that pointed them at least in the right direction."