I want to bring you a report of what is happening as a result of the ministry of our book, Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth.
We expected a lot of criticism and backlash, but we were not expecting to hear from so many thousands of beloved saints of God who wrote to us saying, "We have seen the same things! God has been saying to our hearts that judgment is near! Your warnings express exactly what the Holy Spirit has been saying to us!"
You have heard of the hound of heaven. This is the Spirit of God who tracks a man down and never quits on him. He never gives up until He finds him. What I want to talk about now is the hunter of hell, who hunts down the most precious children of God to seek and destroy them. That is the Devil himself.
At one time his name was Lucifer, and he was a chosen, powerful ruler with God. This Morning Star, as Isaiah called him, was a bright star in God's firmament, a mighty angel, highly arrayed and chosen. But he became lifted up with pride.
Is it possible for a Christian to stay clean and pure in a world filled with violence, immorality, and corruption? Or is it inevitable that the spirit of this age will wear down the saints of God and vex their souls? It happened to Lot and his family in Sodom, and it is happening to multitudes of Christians all around the world. The overwhelming temptations of this evil generation have already caused numbers of Christians to compromise and indulge in ungodly practices.
I come from a long line of preachers that goes back several generations. So I wasn’t surprised when my oldest son, Ashley, wanted to preach as soon he was old enough to form sentences. My dad was visiting when Ashley announced he wanted to preach his first sermon to us. He led us to his room where he’d set up a cardboard box for a pulpit. Dad and I sat on the floor as Ashley launched into a message he called “The Day the Sins Got Out.”
I’m moved by the Holy Spirit to tell you the simplest thing you’ll ever hear. You might think that as we go through life we need a deeper, more complex theology to understand it all. But the opposite is true. The most important thing I could ever tell you is this: Your Father loves you.
No truth, no fact, no reality is greater, deeper or better than this one. Maybe you think, “I know that already. It’s step 1 in the Christian life. Why is this supposedly revelatory news?”
When I was a teenager, being “on the edge” meant losing your cool. It was being nervous, anxious, about to plunge over an emotional precipice.
Today, being “on the edge” means something very positive. It suggests breaking boundaries, thinking outside of the box, living on the cutting edge of hopeful change.
I once conducted a funeral service for a young man from our church who died of cancer. When I arrived for the service, I was told the young man’s mother was the only surviving member of a family of five. Her husband had died three years earlier and her two other sons had also died. This was her fourth funeral and the third son she’d had to bury.
“Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward” (Hebrews 10:35). If you are a Christian, you are in a fierce war. In fact, you’re in a life and death battle for your faith. Satan is determined to shipwreck and destroy the faith of all of God’s elect. And the stronger your faith, the greater will be his attack against it.
God promised the prophet Zechariah that in the last days he would be a protective wall of fire around his people: “For I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about” (Zechariah 2:5).
Isaiah also testifies to this: “For thou hast been a…shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall” (Isaiah 25:4). “There shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain” (4:6).
The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). At the time these words were proclaimed, the Israelites had just returned from captivity in Babylon. Under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the people had rebuilt Jerusalem’s ruined walls. Now they set their sights on reestablishing the temple and restoring the nation.
