Across America and around the world, God's people are crying out for a fresh encounter with Him. Everywhere we travel we hear churches pleading with God to revive them, their nation, and their world. There is widespread dissatisfaction with today's church. Numerous...

Two facts about the triune Jehovah are assumed, if not actually stated, in every single biblical passage. The first is that he is king—absolute monarch of the universe, ordering all its affairs, working out his will in all that happens within it. The second fact is...

Revival has been one of the most mysterious, compelling, sublime, and desperately needed phenomenon in human history. You cannot remain indifferent to it although it produces a wide variety of responses. Over the centuries revival has produced massive influxes of...

Jesus believed the Old Testament to be the very words of God and predicted that the New Testament would be likewise. Pause for a moment with me and ponder the implications of that statement. It was this one point probably more than any other that convinced me of the...

Confessing our inability to God gives us an incredible confidence before him. It does so because the source of our confidence shifts from our limited ability to his infinite willingness. Isaiah left his encounter with God’s holiness a changed man. His writing takes on...

People are different. It is bedtime. I go into my daughter’s room to tuck her in. She is surrounded by stuffed animals and cherished dolls. She is in that sweet, still, twilight moment between wakefulness and sleep. I sit on the side of her bed, look deeply into her...

I am a committed Christian, actively involved in serving Christ inside and outside my home, the second daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham. I am not just a nominal churchgoer but am presently engaged in a ministry of my own through which I call others to repentance of...

When the old Reformed theologians dealt with the attributes of God, they used to classify them in two groups: incommunicable and communicable. In the first group, they put those qualities which highlight God’s transcendence and show how vastly different a being he is...

The origin of the Bible is another reason why I believe the Bible is God’s Word. The Bible’s unity, structure, and subject matter argue for a supernatural authorship. Have you ever imagined how all of this could possibly come together? It would have to be miraculous....

There are few things in life more frustrating than knowing you need to change, wanting to change, and trying to change, but not actually changing. How do I know? Because I have tried so hard so many times to change, only to hit the same brick wall of failure time and...

It is clear from what we saw about money that the battle cry of Christian Hedonism is world missions—sacrificing the comforts and securities of home for the unreached peoples of the world. Paradoxically, here where the sacrifices are greatest, the joys are deepest....

In God’s presence, not only did Isaiah see that his goodness was not that good, he saw that his strengths were not that strong. Isaiah specifically bemoans the filthiness of his lips. A prophet’s “lips” were his trade. He would have felt about his mouth the way a...

More than almost any other Discipline, journaling has a fascinating appeal with nearly all who hear about it. One reason is the way journaling blends biblical doctrine and daily living, like the confluence of two great rivers, into one. And since each believer’s...

I believe in the Bible because of revelation. The Bible claims to infallibly reveal the very words and mind of God. Now, step back for just a second to ponder this incredible claim. I am an early riser and enjoy the wee hours of the morning before the sun comes up. I...

Lest you think that this is merely the cranky, judgmental Old Testament God—God in his middle school years—who morphs into a much nicer and more flexible deity in the New Testament—Jesus, the meek and mild—consider what happened to the New Testament couple Ananias and...

Like a lot of you, I was pretty amazed at the videos coming out of the Asbury Revival of 2023. Who knows how many I watched. I found myself praying, “Keeping it going, Lord. Cause it to spread. Bring it here.” Then I watched in amazement about a time—and I am old...

What Paul is warning against is not the desire to earn money to meet our needs and the needs of others; he is warning against the desire to have more and more money with the ego boost and material luxuries it can provide. Let’s look at the three reasons Paul gives in...

The underlying question . . . Is it intellectually feasible to believe that the Bible could be God’s Word? In this chapter and the next, I want to share with you why I believe the Bible is God’s Word. As we journey through the chapter together, we will revisit the...

Sometimes I run across preachers or teachers today who claim to be “apostles” or “prophets.” Often they’re just using those titles in their most general senses. Missionaries may use the term “apostle” as “one who is sent” or preachers may use “prophet” as “one who...

What does the Bible mean when it calls God wise? In Scripture, wisdom is a moral as well as an intellectual quality, more than mere intelligence or knowledge, just as it is more than mere cleverness or cunning. For us to be truly wise, in the Bible sense, our...

I’ve lived long enough to watch an alarming erosion occur in modern Christianity. The church I entered back in the 1950s is not the same church as today. Large, influential churches are looking more and more like they got their genes crossed with Wall Street and...

Isaiah learned two things about himself that forever changed his theology: his goodness was not that good, and his strengths were not that strong. HIS GOODNESS WAS NOT THAT GOOD Nearly 90 percent of Americans think that they are “above average” when it comes to...

Money is the currency of Christian Hedonism. What you do with it—or desire to do with it—can make or break your happiness forever. The Bible makes clear that what you feel about money can destroy you: “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and...

Revival is by nature rarely respectable, usually unpredictable, and often messy. There may be mixture in such outpourings especially in the onset of an awakening; unity as well as controversy, truth, and error. Genuine revival is “born, not of the blood, nor of the...

Sir Lionel Luckhoo is a defense attorney listed in the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most successful lawyer” for pleading the cases and winning 245 successive acquittals for his clients. His testimony in Leading Lawyers Look at the Resurrection...

Isaiah had gotten off to a pretty good start in ministry. He had a good reputation and was making quite a name for himself. He was one of Israel’s premier preachers. But one day Isaiah had an encounter he was not ready for. He found himself face to face with the God...

Ian Thomas is a friend of mine, a great Bible teacher. And I love what Ian Thomas had to say about old Moses out in the wilderness. You remember, Moses was the man who came out in the wilderness, and he saw the burning bush. You remember that story? There was a bush,...

My favorite short story is “The Bet,” by Anton Chekhov, a Russian writer of the last half of the nineteenth century. The plot involves a wager between two educated men regarding solitary confinement. A wealthy, middle-aged banker believed that the death penalty was a...

The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse. Make...

Amy Carmichael has beautifully bound together in her poem the two ancient concepts of time. One, expressed by the Greek word chronos, refers to “the minutes of our hours,” or the notion of duration and succession. The other, kairos, is what Dr. James Houston calls...

The church today needs many things, but its most critical shortfall is not larger attendance, money, buildings, or programs. Its greatest need is for revival. Our generation must experience revival, or our churches face increasing irrelevance and ultimately God's...

Our word majesty comes from the Latin; it means greatness. When we ascribe majesty to someone, we are acknowledging greatness in that person, and voicing our respect for it: as, for instance, when we speak of “Her Majesty” the Queen. Now, majesty is a word which the...

For decades sincere believers have asked, “Why don’t we have revival?” And for decades the answer has always been the same: We don’t have revival because we’re willing to live without it! . . . Sure we want revival. But we don’t need revival. That’s the difference....

Along with these misconceptions are several important issues that must be examined in any serious study of revival. The following are some of the most challenging issues related to revival. We will touch on them here but will address them more fully throughout the...

Quick. What do people who fast look like? What kinds of people come to your mind? Do they appear a bit strange? Are they John the Baptist types? Legalists? Health nuts? Does Jesus come to your mind when you think of fasting and “fasters”? Jesus both practiced and...

The coming of revival in our time will demand personal preparation among God’s people. Jeremiah said, “Thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘Break up your fallow ground and do not sow among thorns’” (Jer. 4:3). We must sow our seed in anticipation...

Revival may come through weeping and wailing, tears and praying, sackcloth and ashes, but the ultimate result is joy. “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6). When revival has come, the people of God rejoice in their God and...

As we look at the critical subject of revival, we must consider some key issues and address some common misunderstandings if we are to understand what Scripture teaches about revival. We will identify some of these here, but we will take the remainder of the book to...

We don’t want revival. The churches don’t want it; the members don’t want it. Very few pastors even want a genuine, heaven-sent revival. We like things the way they are. After all, revival means change, and we don’t want change. We’re too comfortable with the way...

If the focus shifts onto our giving to God, instead of His giving Himself to us, one result is that subtly it is not God who remains at the center but, instead, the quality of our giving. Are we singing worthily of the Lord? Are our instrumentalists playing with...

Seeking to understand revival is like attempting to comprehend the Trinity. We cannot fathom the triune nature of God because He is divine and we are not. People display supreme human arrogance when they insist they will not accept the gospel claims until they...

IN THE 1970s we almost saw a sweeping revival in our land. The revival at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, impacted not only that school but also hundreds of churches across the country. We stood on the precipice of what could have been another awakening. Bible...

We have now put four things in place: God has a people, God has certain expectations of his people, God’s people have every reason to live up to his expectations, and God’s people often fail to live up to his expectations. If we had to leave it there, we would be...

When it was time for him to leave the earth, Jesus said that his friends were lucky, because then the Holy Spirit could come and form a new community. Although his bodily presence was leaving the earth, this new community would become Jesus’ new body—“the body of...