I’m currently way, way out in the boonies of eastern Texas, seven miles from the teeny-tiny town of Zavalla, which is 30 minutes from the mid-sized town of Lufkin. It’s definitely Nowheresville!

Tonight is the first cold night since I arrived here a week ago for a long visit with a friend who recently gained custody of her five grandchildren—ages 1-8.

I thought escaping Chicago for central Texas in mid-October would save me the feeling of winter coming, but it’s here now too.

Winter, as I am reminded of endlessly any more by what I read and observe, etc., is the season our country is in biblically.

Several nights ago, my friend (who does not have television reception of any kind) popped in a VCR tape of sermons from my church’s summer Bible conference in 1997. In it, Jordan actually predicted this coming winter.

He said toward the end of his study, “Can I tell you that in seven years, mark my word, I’m not a prophet or a son of a prophet, but in seven years we can meet right here and things are going to be drastically different in our nation.

He went on, “Politically there’s going to be a whole ‘sea change’ coming. It’s happened before and it’s going to happen again. You’ll face it in the next decade. I’m not a prophet. I’m talking to you about what I know is gonna happen because of what’s out there.

“Economically, socially and spiritually. We stand at a very critical point in history and the history of our nation and the history of the church. I’ve told our fellows, and I’ll tell you publicly— in the last year-and-a-half, as I’ve traveled around the country, the ripples of the future begin to appear.

*****

“There have been four great awakenings in our history as a nation. The first one was back in the 1700s with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield. And that great awakening recovered the truth of ‘justification by grace through faith alone plus nothing.’

“. . . That letter that was read (in a sermon) just this morning. . . That dear lady, Mary Love, writing a letter to her husband who was going to be beheaded the next day all because he had a Bible! He took a Protestant Bible and went out and preached ‘justification by grace through faith plus nothing.’ No tradition, no works, no church, nothing—just Christ and Him alone.

“The morning after he got that letter from his wife, the (court) gave him this legal document that said if he would just recant ‘faith alone in Jesus Christ’ they’d spare him. And his wife had written him in that letter, ‘Don’t, I’ll see you in glory.’

“You can sit in an air-conditioned room tonight with a Bible in your hand and faith in your heart because of people like that! And it was people like that who produced this recovery of Pauline truth of justification. The result of that great awakening was the American Revolution, by the way. When the pendulum swung back.

“The next great awakening took place in the mid-1800s; the 20s to 40s along in there. The revivalists—Charles Finney and those guys. The emphasis there was on the walk; on the doctrine of sanctification. You hear what I’m saying to you? First it was Romans 1-5. Then it was Romans 6-8.

“The next great awakening after that was with Moody and the Bible Movement of the late 1800s. And they began to recover the distinction between Israel and the Body of Christ and the Rapture and the revelation. That’s Romans 9-11!

“What are they doing? They’re laying again the foundation of grace! The last great awakening was 1962 to 1984. It’s called in history the ‘New Age awakening.’ A total abandonment and repudiation of Pauline truth in favor of human viewpoint . . .

“Every great awakening produced a social impact. The first one produced the American Revolution. The second one produced the Civil War and the liberation and consolidation of the Union. The third one produced the G.I. generation of the ’50s. They went out and won World War II. It was the Can-Do Joe. They put a man on the moon. They all took that truth and when it came time, it made an impact.

“You know what’s going to happen this time? When it comes time for the nation to make those decisions that have to be made in the death of winter and the grips of struggle, the heart and the core of Pauline truth ain’t going to be there. They’re going to need us desperately like never before.

“A little light shines real bright in the darkness. I challenge you tonight to be a Philippian—to take your own life and identify yourself.

“Where are you? You have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s what it is people. It is a PERSONAL relationship. I can’t have it for you. You have it. How’s it going? Is there anything to it? Is it just words on the page or is it something real in your heart? Where are you? What does it mean to you?

“When my kids were little itty-bitty guys I used to sit with them on the floor. They couldn’t even talk and I’d pray with them and talk with them about the Lord. It was real easy to do then. When they get grown it ain’t so easy. How about you and your family?

“Can I tell you that to be a leader in the cause of Christ—I Timothy 3 says that a man, if he’s going to be in the office of a bishop, a leader in the assembly, an elder, he has to have a relationship with the Lord that’s real and active and personal. And His family has to be there in those things. And you aren’t going to produce that kind of stuff with cheap stuff.

“Right here in this room tonight there’s some of you men and women who need to do some business for the Lord. But you want it to be without cost to you; without a personal involvement other than just going and been seen.

“How is it with the world around you? Are they any more than machinery or scenery to you? You see, I want to challenge you tonight. That ministry that Paul had; the spirit, and the source, and the substance of it needs to be yours, but it has to be yours in a real way. There’s some of you folks that could get going if you’d get real with what’s out there. We need you to do that.

*****

“What’s the chaff to the wheat? Down South in the grace movement I’d been a part of, they’d sit around and bicker and potshot and nosepick one another. And then I came up into the Midwest and found brethren who had perfected the right boot of fellowship to a fine art.

“I back up from that and I say, ‘You know, there’s an opportunity right now and we haven’t got time to be involved in all that other stuff!’ We’re not all there is but we is and we are what we are! Let me tell you something, your community, your nation, the church-at-large is going to need you in the next decade more than they’ve ever needed you before. We’re back in a position where ‘our time is at hand.’ And it’s time to fish or cut bait.

“When you understand the truth of the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery, that gives you a sense of your place in things. It gives you a sense of your place in the world—you know you’re not Israel; you know who you are; you’re an ambassador for Christ, a member of the Body of Christ.

“It gives you a sense of your place in history. We’re not in the prophetic program; we’re in the mystery program. It gives you a sense of your place in the church—you’re members of the Body of Christ and you know who you really are. It gives you a sense of your place in the will of God.

“The dispensation of grace is an age of a remnant mentality. It’s not an age that’s pressed forward by corporate activity. It’s an age where the work of God is done through faithful men. Through individuals in whom the truth lives and works banding themselves together in local assemblies to go do the work of the ministry.”

“It isn’t carried on in big organizations and religious movements. That’s why we don’t have an organization here, by the way.

*****

“When we were asked to leave (the Berean Bible Society) organization, there was a group of 10-12 men who met in my living room. One of them asked, ‘Well, what are we going to call the new organization?’ and I said, ‘Who wants to nominate me for the board of a new organization?’ The room was silent. You know why? The men in there understood.

“There’s an old saying, ‘In the seeds of the formation of a religious institution are the seeds of its own destruction,’ and I’ve been to meetings where they discuss, ‘Well, how do you stop that?’ but nobody ever gives the answer.

“The way you stop it is you don’t do it! You don’t build something that’s designed to self-destruct! People say, ‘Well, but, but, but . . .’ No buts about it, you just don’t do it!

“What do you do? You go do what God gave you to do. And you don’t try and improve on that. The dispensation of grace is going to come to a close. It might come to a close tonight or it may not come to pass for another 50-100 years. I don’t know.

“But the dispensation of grace always ends in total apostasy and today the church-at-large lives in an abject state of failure. You can’t read II Timothy and not see the church in ruin in the ‘last days.’ And every day today is one of the ‘last days.’

“But it’s going to be faithful men. Little ‘remnant mentality’ people who are going to be true to the faith, true to the doctrine, and keep going, and they’re not going to be out trying to build something that they’re not. They’re going to go out being who they are.

“Now, most of you folks here tonight are capable of being Philippians. Most of the church is stuck back in Corinthians or Galatians, though. Those two books, you can take and identify almost any Christian ministry today.

“Almost any Christian believer you know is either a Galatian or a Corinthian. They’re either hung out under the legalistic strictures of Galatianism—mixing law and grace—or they’re over in the Charismatic mania of the flesh at Corinth.

“By the way, there are two great theological groups that are at loggerheads with one another today—Armenianism and Calvinism. There’s the man-centered Corinthianism and the Moses-centered Galatianism.

“Most of you folks have grown beyond—you’ve come to understand the establishment truth in Romans about Calvary and you’ve gone on to the doctrinal truths in Ephesians. You’re an advanced breed, frankly. I count it in honor to know you in that way and I rejoice in that with you.

“The biggest problems the Philippians had, as I said earlier, wasn’t what they knew. They were mature believers. The understood Ephesian truth—advanced truth, mystery truth.

“Their problem was working together in unity and harmony of mind and purpose in defeating the satanic policy of evil that’s designed, not just to get you to defect from the doctrine, but designed to attack you and one another and sew discord and animosity among the brethren so you’re just as ineffective as if you didn’t know the doctrine.

*****

“When I moved to Chicago in 1979 (after a lifetime in Alabama) it was a shocking experience for me and my wife. If it hadn’t been for the folks in our assembly, my wife and family would have never made the transition.

“The people who brought us here had absolutely no idea or actually any concern about what was happening to my family, and if it hadn’t of been for the saints at the church doing what the church always does, and is designed to do and should do—

just naturally caring for one another—we would have been in a mess, but we weren’t.

“I began to fellowship with these folks and I began to ask about J.C. O’Hair. I worked with Pastor Stam. I met Charles Baker. Those three names. . .

“Mr. O’Hair was a visionary. I heard stories about things he had planned and was going to do. I talked with people who knew him but never heard those stories because those were ‘quiet’ stories. Those were stories he had in his mind and in his heart that he wanted to do but didn’t get done.

“He wanted to start a Bible institute. He wanted to tear down the old church building at the corner of Wilson and Sheridan and build a nine-story high-rise in its place that would have 600 students the first year.

‘Whoa, we can’t do that! That might be a success!’ A guy actually said, ‘He’ll do it too! We gotta stop him!’ and they did, for good or bad.

“Now, Mr. Stam was a pugilist—he’d get out and contend and fight for the faith. They’ll never be a better writer dispensationally than Stam.

“Mr. Baker was an academic. And those three men working together led the grace movement into existence as we know it. And there’s not a place in America and hardly around the world that knows some of the truth we rejoice in about right division that didn’t come from those men’s ministries.

“When I moved to Chicago, I realized things weren’t in such good a shape. I’d go to meetings like this and be the youngest man there. I traveled around the country and I’d find people were discouraged and down in the dumps and didn’t really understand what was happening.

“By the way, in 1870, six men met in a Chicago suburb; six pastors met in a suburb of Chicago. They came from six different places in the Midwest to study the pre-millennial Second Coming of Christ and decide if they thought that’s what the Bible taught.

“Those six men studied and came to the conclusion that there was a distinction between the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ to the earth—one for the body, one for Israel.

“They said, ‘We’ll go home and we’ll study and a year later we’ll meet again.’ A year later, they rented a little room in Boston to meet. They went there to meet and the word got out and they began to have crowds of 100-150 people come to that little week of meetings. The next year, they scheduled another meeting and they had 500 people. The next year they had an even bigger meeting and it became known as the Bible Study Movement.

“It was out of that Bible Study Movement that the Scofield Reference Bible—

Dr. Scofield and those men were recovering truth and it was out of that that fundamentalism in the 20^th century got its teeth and strength to battle against the modernists and destroy them.

“It was out of that movement that J.C. O’Hair and the Grace Movement came and progressed on into truth. You and I stand in very much the same situation tonight in 1997.”