Keeping Your Intensity
About this sermon
Dean Odle exhorts believers to retain spiritual intensity under pressure rather than surrendering ground to temptation, discouragement, or distraction. He describes the adversary’s strategy as repeated pressure that persuades a Christian to retreat a little at a time and then accept the loss as normal. Walking away from the Lord, enduring disappointment after disappointment, and seeking quick stimulation are presented as different ways spiritual desire can be drained. The message therefore calls for sustained, Spirit-enabled resistance rather than confidence in a passing emotional high.
Chronological teaching outline
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Opening prayer and testimony establish the need for the Holy Spirit’s guidance and for a life whose love for Jesus remains visible. A reference to Charles Finney accompanies the claim that love for Jesus and fullness of the Spirit should produce active concern for others.
Odle warns that spiritual pressure is designed to make believers retreat incrementally and insists that surrendered ground must be contested. He describes the enemy’s strategy as pressure repeated until a Christian yields a little, then treats that loss as the new normal.
He describes how repeated disappointments and appetite for quick stimulation can drain spiritual focus and intensity. Walking away, disappointment after disappointment, and the search for quick dopamine are named as different routes into the same loss of zeal.
The king’s reluctant striking of the arrows becomes a picture of partial obedience and the victories lost through halfhearted persistence. In 2 Kings 13, Elisha is angry because the king strikes only three times; five or six strikes would have represented complete victory over Syria.
The message calls Christians to keep pressing toward Christ even when political, cultural, or family circumstances oppose them. The application ranges from public controversy to household faithfulness: the Christian’s measure is continued movement toward Jesus.
Odle draws on ministry stories, including church work in Nigeria, to show the cost and fruit of sustained commitment. Reports of believers planting churches under hard conditions counter the assumption that age, fatigue, or opposition ends one’s usefulness.
He explains that believers who actively follow Jesus should expect resistance, misunderstanding, and spiritual conflict. Odle refuses the idea that Christians can avoid being thought strange while living openly under Christ’s commands.
Grace is defined as the Holy Spirit’s power for obedience; Jesus’ resistance of temptation models active, Scripture-grounded endurance. Christ’s scriptural answer to Satan shows that resistance may need to be repeated; grace supplies strength but does not eliminate the fight.
Christ’s rebuke of Laodicea is applied to comfortable Christianity that has lost urgency and wholehearted devotion. Revelation 3’s image of being spewed out makes lukewarmness a spiritual danger rather than a harmless lack of enthusiasm.
The closing prayer asks God to restore strength, holiness, and a persevering spirit that will not retire from the calling. Prayer for the church and for himself ends the teaching with dependence on God rather than confidence in emotional intensity alone.
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- 0:00:00
I'm sorry. I've come with my. And I forgot that you're in a.
- 0:06:49
Jesus, we thank you, God almighty, that you have given us your word. We thank you for the Bible, Lord, we thank you for the truth. We thank you that you've given us your believers, your followers. You've given us your Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us into all truth. Lord, I ask you to help us as we walk by faith and not by sight, as we are in constant spiritual warfare against the forces of darkness. Lord, we ask for your strength. We ask for discernment and revelation. We ask that you would put in us a heart that will fight and fight and fight and keep fighting and not grow weary and well doing. Lord, help us to be those kind of people, Lord. I pray, and it's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen. Amen. You may be seated this morning. Welcome, everyone, to Fire and Grace Church. Those watching and listening from all over. All right. Y'all ready to get into it? I had to run to my office. I had to find a quote in a Charles Finney's book. I'm going to read this here. And if you've never read Charles Finney's book, Revival Lectures, of course, it's kind of a thick book. And if you don't know who Charles Finney was, he was one of the greatest revivalist America has ever known. Pretty much just him. He spearheaded the Second Great Awakening. He was so filled with the Holy Spirit that he would go in places and thousands of people would just fall under conviction of the Holy Spirit and get saved. He was a lawyer by trade, and so he knew how to argue his case. He also knew the power of prayer. And he talked about if you have much of the spirit of God. And this is what I I want to help you with. If you if you love Jesus and you are full of the Holy Spirit and you're all about following him, of course, you need to understand that you're going to be targeted by the devil. He's going to leave the lukewarm ones alone. He's got them. All right. I want to read something that Charles Finney said. And this is in his chapter on being filled with the spirit. And it's just excellent. It says here, he said, basically, if you have much of the spirit of God, you must expect very frequent and agonizing conflicts with Satan. Satan has very little trouble with those Christians who are not spiritual, but lukewarm and slothful and worldly minded and such do not understand what is said about spiritual conflicts.
- 0:09:50
Perhaps they will smile when such things are mentioned. And so the devil lets them alone. They do not disturb him nor he them. But spiritual Christians, he understands very well and they are doing him a vast injury and therefore he sets himself against them. Such Christians often have terrible conflicts. They have temptations that they never thought of before. Blasphemous thoughts, doubts, atheism, suggestions to do deeds of wickedness to destroy their own lives and the like. And if you are spiritual, you may expect these spiritual conflicts. And that's just one of his points that he makes in revival lectures. The battle is real. And I'm just going to say this. I've been over my many years of walking with the Lord Jesus through times of such intense spiritual battle, mental, emotional, physical, from other people, persecutions and times. It just seems like that you just want to slow down, just give up, stop, you know, back away. And what the Lord has always shown me is that it just takes a person to overcome these things. You have to be a person who will refuse no matter what you feel that you refuse to back away from your intensity to follow Jesus and to fight the devil and to resist temptation. In fact, it's not real faith if you see it. You understand? Or what I'm saying too is if you're, if you feel it, you get what I'm saying? If you feel, have to feel it for it to be real to you, if you have to feel good and riding high in the Holy Spirit all the time to do what you need to do, you're still immature and you're going to have to learn the lesson that sometimes, in fact, a lot of the times and the older you get in the Lord as you walk with him, you're going to have to just maintain your intensity no matter how you feel. In fact, that's kind of the definition of an adult. You know, we go to work and we don't feel like it, right? We take care of our kids when we got a fever, right? You understand? It's like the body and the mind will try to tell you, just back away. And that's what the devil wants.
- 0:12:50
He wants you to back away. And see, here's what happens. If you back away from prayer, if you back away from the word, if you back away from worship time, if you back away from church and fellowship and those that you back away, the devil knows you're going to get slowly get weaker and weaker and weaker, and then he's got you, then he can bring the stuff and you just cave like a house of cards in a whirlwind. You have to maintain your intensity and walk by faith and not by sight in those times when the battle is intense. This is why in Ephesians six, when he said, what, having done all to stand, stand, meaning don't allow yourself to lose any ground. Don't move backwards. You hear me? There's no rope-a-dopes in this, uh, battle. And for you people that don't understand a rope-a-dope is what Muhammad Ali used to do. He used to just move backwards and let them wear out and he would guard himself the best he could, but he'd let the other fighter wear out, especially as he got older. This was his trick. And then he would start pounding them. But when the devil, you can't give up ground. You can't step back. You can't ease up your intensity. You can't do it. Somebody say don't lose ground, but I'm going to tell you the number one way Christians lose ground, I'm going to tell you what laziness. The fact is a lot of times I don't feel like it. I'm tired way, way, way, right? One thing that we learn about our soldiers is if they're in the midst of a battle, they don't even get, take a break, go to the bathroom. Why? Cause you, you get up, I got to go run to the bathroom and then you get shot. And that's one of the things I've shared this before, but you know, our Navy seals and special forces, one of the things that their training takes them through. And the reason they put them through such hell is to make them realize that their mind can overcome what the body's trying to tell them. Meaning they, they realize that they can push their body further than they ever realized. And basically what they learn to do is tell the body, the flesh, no matter how much pain it's in, no matter how uncomfortable it is, keep doing your job.
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