Mercy & the Mantle of Revival

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

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   Hallelujah, may be seated. If you're listening this morning by Blogtalkradio or by Shoutcast radio, we welcome you to Fire and Grace Church. I'm Pastor Dean Odell and we're just going to dig into the message this morning. Um the Lord just kind of through praise and worship there just kind of changed everything. It's quite a few things on my heart this morning. Before we go any further, that song we sang there at the end, Remember Mercy, I want everybody to turn to the prophet Habakkuk. Somebody say Habakkuk, some say Habakkuk. It doesn't really matter as long as you find it. Three chapters. I want to read those verses. Because I want it to be understood that even though I I know from God, I know from God's word, I know from God's Holy Spirit that we're headed into very dark and difficult times. We're headed into what the Bible calls the great tribulation. The great time of trouble and trials and testing. Jesus stated that it would not be like anything that had ever been before. That's hard to even comprehend. That Jesus said that it will be worse than anything the world has ever experienced before. That season of time. But make no mistake about it. That God Almighty, the creator, no matter what the devil has planned, and even though he has judgments planned for the earth and for wicked mankind that he will hear the prayers of his people who humble themselves and repent and cry out for mercy and cry out for people around them. Our prayers can determine how bad things are. We're not going to stop certain things from happening. There are certain major events and major prophecies and major things that the Bible says will happen. They They are going to happen. But there's a lot of stuff in between. There's a lot of things not spelled out like how it goes for you. How it goes for your city, your church, your community, your state. How it goes for you. That's an important issue. God is able and I want to say this, God is able in the midst of the darkest storm, in the midst of the most terrible famine, in the midst of the worst attacks and armies and battle and warfare and whatever may be going on, God is able to be your refuge and your

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   provider and he is able to supernaturally keep you, to supernaturally provide for you, to supernaturally protect you, to to give you grace and strength not only to endure the time of great trouble but to thrive. To be anointed, to be empowered to do above and beyond what you even think you can do. So, I want you to understand, I believe that we should be crying out right now. We should be on our faces crying out for God to have mercy on America. Though we don't deserve it, but let's understand what is mercy in the first place. Mercy is undeserved kindness. See, we get grace and mercy messed mixed up. We say grace is unmerited favor. No. Mercy is unmerited favor. Mercy is undeserved kindness. Mercy is when you deserve judgment, when you deserve wrath, when you deserve discipline because of your sins and your wickedness and your evil and your lukewarmness and your compromise, and God decides to be kind to you. It's when the judge should should put you in jail and slam the door and say you're going to be there for years, and he goes, "You know what? This time, though you broke the law, though you've broken it three, four times now, and you're in my courtroom again, I should put you in jail. You deserve it. That's what the law says, but this time I'm going to have mercy. This time I'm going to show you undeserved kindness. America does not deserve another revival, another move of God, another outpouring of the spirit. We've had many, and yet the church has become more and more wicked, more and more lukewarm, more and more compromised, more and more watered down. It is amazing that even that that even for a second that a seeker-sensitive gospel, a seeker-sensitive mentality of ministry, could even take hold in America with all the truth that has been preached, the Bible truth that has been preached. But the idol to have a BIG CHURCH, THE IDOL TO HAVE a big budget, the idol to be somebody famous, even within Christianity, is what has driven this lukewarm, watered-down gospel. And now we have a lukewarm, watered-down church at the time we're about to move into the darkest season the world has ever known. There's a lot of shepherds out there. There's a lot of ministers and evangelists and pastors and even prophets that have they've been so watered down by their lust for money and fame and numbers. You know, there's prophets out there that have visions from the Lord, have the gift of prophecy and word of

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   knowledge and word of wisdom, but they've sold that out. They've prostituted it out. And now a deceiving spirit, a lying spirit works through them. Some of them used to be real prophets. Some of them used to be real pastors. Some of them used to be real churches that gave real truth. But I want to say this. The Lord spoke to me very clearly when I was at the Brownsville Revival in 1996. It was August of '96. You have to remember that I went there the first time, I think it was in June of '96. The revival started in June of '95. So, by the time I got word of it and and got to go to the Brownsville Revival, it had been going for a year. And from then on, I went almost weekly for I don't know, almost a year. I went almost every week between 19 Actually, I went all the time between 1996 and 1998, all the time. And rather frequently in '99 and even 2000. But I realized something that Well, we need that again, don't we? But the spirit of God spoke to me very clearly there that there would be another revival like Brownsville, another one. Years later. I knew it would be years after Brownsville ended that there would be another revival. And the Lord spoke to me in 2007 and he told me these words. He said, "The Brownsville revival is the Elijah. The next revival will be the Elisha." But here's the thing. It's not going to be You know, the Brownsville revival, we you know, I heard Steve Hill, you know, many of you know the evangelist that God used to lead the Brownsville revival passed away this past week. Um And they thought things were bad in the mid-90s when the revival hit. And it was. You know, we're right in the middle of Bill and Hillary's reign as emperors of the United States. We had just gone through the Gulf War and everybody thought it would Well, everything's going to be okay now. So, everybody left that that when the Gulf War started, everybody ran to church in 1991 over fear that we were about to erupt into World War III in the Middle

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   East. The churches filled up and then right after that when the United States and the coalition forces won so easily, everybody was back at ease because Israel didn't retaliate against Saddam Hussein's pounding them with Scud missiles, everybody thought, "Oh, it's going to be okay." And then the internet was taking off at that time. And see, this is probably one of the greatest curses that's come on America and the world because what took place in 1995 and '96 through the internet was the pornography industry exploded. And so you had a a lot of people that may have been struggling with lust issues privately now had a way to easily access every imaginable perversion and evil in the sexual realm. And so now, since '94, '95 the internet revolution you got to realize that now we have had about 20 years of of of a generation not just through the the internet, but through movies and television and cable channels, we've had a generation that is just saturated with sexual immorality and perversion. And it's found its way in the church. And if you don't believe me, even back in the '90s and the early 2000s, they said when a Christian con- conference would check into a hotel that the pornography pay-per-view channels would skyrocket. And there were a lot of ministries that had to, when they booked a hotel for a conference, would have to ask the hotel to shut that off to all the rooms that were in their block. Adultery is rampant in the church. Pre-marital sex, fornication is rampant in the church. We've seen it revealed that within the Catholic church, and it's not just within the Catholic church, but it's rampant in the Catholic church more than other, but even child molestation is rampant in the church. As Nancy could tell you as she discovered when she became the CEO of a pregnancy resource center she can tell you that women in the pews, Christian women, fill churches that's had abortions and had abortions while they've been Christians. And then we got pastors that get up. This This is what their congregations are eaten up with. And we got pastors who get up and talk about your best life now.

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