Ant in winter

Recently Jordan reminded the congregation that no matter what a person’s age, this decade would be the most influential decade of their lifetime.

We’re now nearing the fourth quarter of this current winter cycle where the issues of decision-making and applying the will of God are crucial to an individual's future.

Proverbs 6 says, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest."

Jordan says, “Be like that ant. Be wise, redeeming the time. There’s a sense in which you and I have a responsibility to go out and rescue time from being lost. If these things about wintertime are true, and that life is seasonal, the time that you make the most difference is here.

“Once in a lifetime you go through the opportunity to live that once-in-a-lifetime privilege of making or breaking the heart of the future. Winter is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal or to destroy the soul of a people who goes through that next cycle. It’s a critical time with critical opportunities.

“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.

“If you don’t know that, then you need to wake up and quit reading books written 50 years ago about reaching people 50 years ago, and look around you today. The best in Christendom today is so washed out and shallow, and sorry and flesh-oriented, that it couldn’t even get in the door 50 years ago.

“Unsaved men 50-75 years ago had three times the character of Christian leaders today. Christian people today accept low-living and character defects in fellow Believers, and give them ministries that when I was a kid people would have looked at them and sneered and said, ‘How in the world do you call yourself a Christian and do all that stuff? I don’t want to know what you have to say.’

“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.

“How you come out of winter into the next spring is up for grabs. It’s up for grabs during the winter.

*****

“If you want to see how nations operate, you’ll see it laid out in Genesis 8-10 and you’ll the satanic counter-attack in Gen. 11 (internationalism and getting rid of the pattern set up). Genesis 9 lays out the great ethnic divisions among the nations.

“Noah’s three boys—Ham, Shem and Japeth—are the progenitors of the three ethnic races that make up humanity. With each one of those boys and their descendants, Noah gives a prophecy about them and when he does, he gives a prophecy about the contribution each is to make.

“Those divisions are not designed to be divisions; they’re designed to be distinctions in the contribution. If you’ve done something, you know that one ingredient does one thing and another ingredient does another, and another, and then you have the whole. It’s the old sin nature that makes them divisions. When each division makes the proper contribution it’s designed to make then you have the proper functioning of the whole. In the ages to come in the millennial kingdom, that will be exactly what happens.

“That’s why when the gospel goes into any culture, no matter what culture it is, it doesn’t bring the culture of another group into it, it goes into that particular culture and purifies that culture and brings out of it all the best that culture can contribute.

“And instead of trying to go in and Westernize or Southernize or Midwestize or Californiaize, you come in and honor the dignity of who these people are and that God designed them to be that way, bringing in the gospel and the life of Christ, and the truth of God’s grace and what that brings out, and then the group is full and able to make the contribution to the whole that it’s designed to make.

“I’m telling you what the answer is to the ethnic, racial strife in the world! I’ve read accounts of missionaries, sociologists, anthropologists, etc., going into the most hinterlands of humanity, where people have had no contact at all with civilizations, and they sit down and say, ‘What are your dreams, what do you want, who do you think you are, what is it you desire?’ and you know what? The list they come away with is exactly the list you’d make! They say, ‘I want a better life for my children.’

“You say, ‘Hey, this people have never been civilized yet; touched with the blessings of the civilized world. How do they know all of our questions?!’ Folks, it’s because we all come from the same place. The same God made us and made us to operate on those four basic principles laid out in Genesis.”