In every generation there have been revivals, massive moves of the spirit that changed the course of history. In every revival, there were believers like you who chose to answer the call to become the one in their generation. Discover your call to be the one in your generation. Welcome to Revival Radio TV. I'm Gene Bailey and back with me, Pastor Greg Stephens. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. That's all from the news. And you know all that you do. And teaching in the school.
I mean, you got it. You're pretty busy, guy. I try to stay busy. Yeah. Keep you out of trouble. Well, I don't know about that, but. All right, so we're going to talk. This is you and I talk a lot of off the, off camera, and we, you know, run things by, and we talk about revival. And, you know, I always ask people, Greg, about revival. What is revival? And everybody always has a different answer. So let me start with you. What is what is in your in your mind? What is revival?
I used to think it was I used to say I've met and I've said this statement to you, revival begins when you hear something from God you've never heard before and you liked it. Revival ends when you hear something from God that you've never heard before and you didn't like it. It's it's but true historical revival, in my opinion, is it's it changes a community even. It's not just about you personally, but it literally changes the community that you live in.
Reformation. Exactly. Yeah. And I started studying this a little earlier, and I think somebody said this statement, and if you said it and I heard you say it, I don't I don't remember who said it, but I'm going to say it. Everywhere Jesus went, there was a revival. Yes. And a riot. And a riot, depending on which side of the street you were on, whether you were in cooperation with it or resisting it.
You know, we, we had Pastor John Kilpatrick on here a few years ago, and we were talking about Pensacola revival. Yeah. And, he basically said exactly what he talked about. What happened there made great moves of God. And but it was messy. But as through history, any time you saw a revival, it was big mess.
All the way around to everything from, you know, the, the paper products in the bathroom people were using, you know, and you'd have things break down and the carpet would wear out because you have so many. I mean, but there's also the whole lot of people. There's this video that we showed or I've shown before that that Sunday in Pensacola, where there's a point where Steve, says something, you know, he's calling people down and he says, that's it. People come out Steve Hill, that's it.
People come down here. This is what we've been praying for. And so there's this mass move, and there's this one camera in the back. And, you see all these people go to the, to the altar, but you also see these four other people stand up and walk out the door. And I thought, that is revival. Yeah. A great outpouring, a great departure because they were like, it was Father's Day. I'm sure they were good people. And they decided, well, we're going to go to lunch.
You hear so many people want fire. I want the fire. God, but you've got a risk and but you can't control that. No, pastors want don't want wildfire. I want it on wildfire. Watch. What? All right. We talk about that. So we explain what you mean when you say, well, I mean, because it's kind of things. Things. Unusual things will happen. I mean, people who are demonically oppressed will get delivered, start manifesting. It's it's it's it can get messy.
I remember working for a ministry many years ago over in Dallas, Texas, and they had a Bible school and in the Bible school chapel that day. It's like this hush came and they just worship and and there was no more classes. And it went that way for days. You know what we saw with Asbury? Yep. Here in the United States, just what we're seeing at Texas A&M, where there's just happening and people are getting baptized in water in the fountain, just whatever they can do. And here's the deal.
Nobody's leading it, you know? No, no church, no evangelist. Just come in. And I think we've cheapened revival in a in in regards to this Gene that we've shed called them. Oh yeah. We're going to have a revival and it's going to be April the 22nd, and it'll last 2 or 3 nights or two weeks. Two weeks. We really want to get serious about it. Yeah, yeah. But it's a three night revival, you know.
And I think that we've, we've cheapened what revival actually is to where if you ask that question to a lot of people, they give you so many different answers. Well, where I lived in Georgia, it was where my father grew up, and it was a methodist church. You know, I'm by no means knocking the Methodist church, but they had a campground, the Methodist campground there. And revival was every summer for two weeks.
And there was these little, they call them cottages, but they were they weren't tents and they weren't houses. And some of them were actually had wooden walls and everything, but they have sawdust floor. Right. So they were whatever you want to call that. And, everybody would come to send for two weeks and they would have guest minister speak in the, it wasn't a tent anymore. It was like a big wooden structure, but it sides were open.
It looked like a tent, but it was a wooden pavilion, I guess. And, they would preach for two weeks and everybody go home and talk about how great it was. My grandfather and that. But that was there was no. Yeah, signs and wonders. It was just we just moved church outside. Right. My my grandfather got saved with his brothers. There were 13 children in that family. They moved from Tennessee to Oklahoma, and he went to a brush arbor meeting. Oh, yeah.
And they were actually making fun of people at the brush Arbor meeting. That's what the and the boys were doing and throwing rocks and stuff like that. And he got saved one night. And when he got saved yet filled with the Holy Spirit, they never they were good Baptists. They had never heard anything of any of this. And he became a revivalist. I mean, I remember hearing stories of him where he was. He was preaching at a place some kind of Creek revival. They all had names like that.
Yeah. And, a little fireball fell. Yeah. And hit the altar. I mean, everybody saw it, and every saint in the place was slain, and every sinner came running forward, you know, to get saved. But so he would tell stories about things like that. And I'm like, I've never seen any of this. Yeah. And why do we not see that? He you know, I don't know. And I think maybe it's maybe we we don't have faith for it. Maybe we don't understand what faith for that is.
Maybe we don't understand the dedication it took for the people to to do those kind of meetings. Well, and let's in your that brings up another point. We don't have that sort of you said dedication commitment level isn't you know, we were busy. We would bombard gates of heaven when the heaven's gates were wide open. And so we, you know, there was a lot of misdirection or not misdirection, false things, but yet God still showed up. Because He honors His word. Yeah. He doesn't honor the person.
There were revivalist and healing people, healing ministers during the great healing move. Yeah. That had pretty bad stuff in their, in their personal life. But isn't that the way it's always is I think so I mean, not I'm not saying everybody's got bad stuff, but I mean, none of us are perfect.
So God didn't honor the actions that that man or woman, he honored his word, the gifts and callings and, and and the people that were putting a demand on that, you know, and so that's a flawed human up there, that's that's leading or hosting this meeting. Do you think that's the whole point that we've messed up is that we've started looking to men as stars or celebrities? Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. So then that then then we're rocked. When we found out they're not Jesus resisted that.
Yeah. When they wanted to make him this or make him that, he would always pull away and withdraw from the crowd. I'll give you an example of messiness. When he went across the Sea of Galilee and he gets to there and he meets the mad men in that area there who had the legion of demons in him. That was messy. Sure was. And the pigs went into the or the demons went into the pigs. Remember this. And he wants to go with Jesus. He says, no, you go back to your town and show them.
The people of that town didn't want Jesus around there. That was the riot part of a revival. Yeah. You know, the pigs were part of the riot, the revival. So in the front about the farmer with the pigs, who's going what did I do? Yeah, yeah. Well, no, the thing is, if you know a little bit about history there, and I know Revival Radio teaches history, if you know anything about history, that was a large part of where the Roman legions were, were based. That was food supply.
And so this is why they got and they were concerned because now all of the all of the food, the prosciutto just ran to the, into the Sea of Galilee, you know. So I think that was probably economic was probably part of it. But maybe that's something that happens with us too. It's an inconvenience to to our job or to our economy, you know, and a revival. Revival cost something, you know, to keep the building open. And I remember a revival when I was a kid that lasted an entire summer.
It transformed my father and our family and the direction of my life had it. And tell me about that. What happened? We were good little Pentecostal people. We do our little three point sermons, and we would go and we we preach on what we don't do. But we actually started we went to this meeting at a larger would have been a megachurch, you know, and that standard, Assembly of God Church called Faith Tabernacle is a homeless city.
And this evangelist that come in there and they extended and they kept extending and kept extending to the point that the local news Gene started showing up at the meetings because so many things were were happening. Council members were coming in and getting healed, and there was healings happening. And the local news guy was there. I mean, people were covering what is happening at this church. And so it transformed a city. It wasn't just a series of meetings. It literally was making an impact.
It was in Oklahoma City, in Oklahoma City. And I remember it made an impact on our family because for the first time, you saw a miracle happen, you know? Whoa. And you, you sensed a presence that you didn't sense on Sunday mornings. This was a the guy who was was the evangelist for that knew how to host the Holy Spirit. And I think that made a difference. Jesus went to places with people who knew how to host the Holy Spirit. I think that's where we've lost it. I think so why have we done that?
How have we? How have we forgotten to host, how to host his presence? Do you and I talk about this only here, which you. Jesus, never stayed in Jerusalem for much. I mean that we we have a record of. He stayed with Lazarus and Mary Martha at their house in Bethany, just a few miles away from the suburbs of Jerusalem. They knew how to host him. David knew how to host the presence of God.
He did its entire reign when he moved the ark out from a building, and he made a tabernacle outside, and Jew and Gentile alike could get into the presence of God. You couldn't touch the ark, but you could chat. You could sit in the shadow of the ark and the wings of the Almighty. You know, that's where those songs came from. It's about an openness to his presence and about an interruption. Every miracle Jesus did, for the most part, was an interruption to his schedule.
And I think that's our problem in churches in general. We don't allow an interruption to the schedule. Let me take a step back, and then I want to get to your point. There are some big churches that have like three services on a Sunday, right? They have like a 9:00 at 1030 and a, you know, a 1230. Well, you got to get this group out to get in the parking lots, got to empty so the next group can get in. And so there's, you know, if you don't end on time, you have a mess in your parking lot.
And it seems to me that sometimes not not every church that has three services does this, but sometimes that seems to be the very thing that doesn't allow the Holy Spirit to move, because we gotta clean out the parking lot to get the next group in here. How sad is that?
It is that we, we reduce what the Holy Spirit's doing down to clearing out the parking lot in time for the next service because we, you know, we've got a building program and we got, we got to raise, we got to get some funds in here, you know, tithes. And I'm really talking tithes and offerings. You know, and I'm not saying every megachurch does that, but if we're not careful, even our own lives, we can impart a control over what God's doing because we have our own ideas.
I know that the Holy Spirit does everything decently in order, so he knows the time constraints. Yeah, and situations that we have in a church service. I found because we had multiple services in California where we were at at the church out there, and I found that, the greatest moves happened in that later one. And we actually made room for that. Yeah. Now, there were times that things happened. Here's here's the deal. There were times that things happened in that earlier service.
And you've got to be I learned that you got a thankful for Brother Hagan on this. I learned that, okay, I don't need to preach this message to this group in here. Let's just go with this for the remainder of this hour. Yeah. And then that's being willing to just back up and say, sir, you have your way in this. But a lot of times we don't realize the greatest miracle is, that you've ever experienced was salvation. Sure. We don't even do that anymore much, Gene. Yeah. That's the greatest miracle.
Everything behind that is the simple. Yeah, easy compared to that. But some people don't think you have to move of God today. If if. Well, just a couple of people got to say, you know, that was a great move of God I. Yeah. But the deal is, is he does everything decently in order, but we have to be available to him to, to let him do what he wants to do. We can't control the Spirit of God. Let's say you and I are the Ark of the covenant right now. This is the mercy seat.
The Spirit of God would hover between the two seraphim, meaning that neither one of us control it. It says that he is in the midst of us. If any two of you agree together touching anything, he is in the. He's in the middle of this, meaning Gene doesn't control him, and I don't control. Yeah. And it says the spirit wills. I think we've kind of lost that in that. I'm still in love. I'm so in love with my notes and my message. Yeah, that I have to get my notes out.
We can become so civilized that we we format the Holy Spirit right out of this. Well, like I said while ago, Jesus was interrupted on most of the miracles he was headed somewhere else. That was part of the schedule I can't find this is a little sarcastic and I repent if I offend anybody. I can't find where Jesus in his disciples and found that woman with the issue of blood and said, now he's going to land at the boat at about one, about 105, he'll greet some of the Pharisees at the shore.
He's going to come up here past Peter's house on his way to the synagogue. Jairus will be with him. If you could stand about here at about 115, about 120, he'll pass by. You'll have a chance to touch him. It seems we've grown so massively in church in America. We we've had greater revelation.
Let's talk about just, you know, here on the Victory Channel when, Brother Hagan, as you know, you worked with him the revelation and Brother Copeland and the revelation and what we've learned about love and about faith. And you're like, whoa. And you get all of that. There's been in the church as a whole, there's been a greater revelation that we've walked into.
But in the midst of this greater revelation, we seem to have lost a lot the other side of it, you know, and this is I've been in churches where there's been so much word preached, there's no room for Holy Spirit. And and that's just as wrong as all Holy Spirit in. Right. Never mind. You don't understand the biblical foundation. So let me tell you, behind the scenes with Brother Hagan.
Yeah, here's what would happen on every single night of a meeting that he would have or camp meeting, or, winter Bible, any of the big events that they had or services that he was only the singing team and video I was part of that we would get together before service. We had pre-service, we would go over, we had a print it up kind of what was going to do. They're going to sing this, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And it was all printed up.
We knew what we were going to do, but here's what we did. We prayed for the Holy Spirit before that, an hour or so before we would pray together as a team. You know what the Lord wants to do in this meeting? What what you want said what you want song and Brother Hagan would be doing the same thing at the same time. Maybe not with us, sometimes with us, but we would pray about knowing that everything's written down. But this is going to go out the window.
If all of a sudden Brother Hagan says, I think we ought to sing something else, I think this ought to happen right here. Hey, come up here. I think you've got the word for it. He was so willing to to do that that we learned. Yes, we've got a format and this is a plan. But at any given second, if the Lord wants to heal somebody, we're not going to stop him from doing that because it's not the time for that. That's what they did with Jesus. You can't heal on the Sabbath in the synagogue.
And just to show them, he would heal on the Sabbath in the synagogue, just to just to see what they would do, because he would know what they would do. And those are manmade rules that have limited the Spirit of God. And I submit that we have those same kind of traditions that have limited the Spirit of God. I, it's a corporation gene.
And I don't mean that I know that sounds so cold and calloused, but once you start down the path of, we've got to raise a certain amount of money every year and this and that and the other and do this, then that becomes the driver. Yeah, if you will, for the minister. And they don't intend to be that way. That's not the way. That's not why they went to Bible school. Sure. It's not why the church was formed. That's not how this church was birthed. But sadly, that became the reality in the end.
And I think a revival would look like for that church, a revival for that church would look like, we're not going to go. We're not going to be concerned about how the money comes in. Or do you think we're going to be concerned mostly about you pointing people to you? It's all about you see, Gene, here's the deal. It's his faith. It's his righteousness. It's his blood. It's his name. It's his body. Right? And not me. It's not about us. The, you know, I was you were talking.
I was thinking about the Azusa of street revival. And we love to talk about the signs, wonders and miracles. And they were wonderful. But let's in the natural look, we have a black man son of, you know, he's blind in one eye. The son of a sharecropper comes across, goes to the west coast, and he goes to a church to preach and teach on something. He does not have the revelation of in his own body. Yet he doesn't. He doesn't speak in tongues yet, but he knows this. So he gets there.
The church is locked. It's chained because they don't want him. Somebody got to him. The heresy hunter got to him and said, hey, don't let you know he's not going. So but and then we know what happens on Bonnie Brae Street and things start flowing in the middle of that. There were other you got Charles Parham, you got some other ministers who that got little jealous of what was going on. And started the messy part, got involved. And this is not a knock on anybody.
But there was this didn't all flow well. And in the middle of all of this, the great earthquake of 1906 happens in Calcutta. Right? So you've got disaster, disaster happening. This was not the picture perfect revival that we like to think of because of what was going on naturally, the physically, the, the great earthquake here where so many people died.
You've got a lot of death around you and you got a lot of destruction, but you've got signs and wonders and miracles and healings and the revelation of the baptism, the submit. That's why you have signs and wonders and miracles because of what's happening in the natural. Do you think is when we have that in the natural that we're more open to it or more desperate? Is that it? I think so, I think you realize maybe in the earthquake in particular, you realize your humanity.
Well, I can tell you just from, you know, I lived in Southern California for a while, and every time a rolling, I learned very quickly determining which type of earthquake you're going through, the rock or a roller, you know, and so and but the first time I went through one, you know, we were in a restaurant and, and the guys that have lived in California all their lives just continue eating. You maybe grab their water glass and pull it back over, you know.
But the ones that are just they're going, what's going on? You know, they're diving under the tables, you know, but you, you start being familiar with what's going on and. Oh, that's good. And then when that's happening, you can miss, you can not be prepared because you go, oh, well, that's just we've seen this before. Government says in the United States on the secular level, never waste a good disaster or crisis. Yeah. Rob Emmanuel said that. Right. No crisis, go to waste. That's it.
Don't let a good crisis go to waste. And they do that. Why haven't we learned that the church, when there's a when there's a crisis that happens, why aren't we the hands and feet of Jesus? Why aren't we the ones on the scene now? Some are unaware. Samaritan's Purse and and different organization and Operation Blessing. There are people on the ground. But. But why are local churches? I remember the fires in San Diego. Our church became a zoo.
We had a our parking lot was full of horse trailers that came out of the mountains to get all their horses out. We had people sleeping all over the building. Because the city asked me, hey, we need help. You've got the biggest parking lot right here on this, on this highway. And I remember, I remember one of our our leader said, oh, you think that's a good idea? We just we just re carpeted all that. We just redid all of that. Here it is. There it is. And I remember saying, no, let's open it up.
Let's open it up. Yeah. And I think that's maybe in some ways where we miss it in the fact that, well, what who who are these people? What are they going to be doing here? We're where we are. Put them. Where are the bathroom? How is this going to work? You know, showers and all that kind of thing. Yeah, we'll worry about that later. Right now, we need to feed these people like Jesus did. What do we have? Maybe that's the answer. What do we have?
And he says, well, we got this little kids lunch here. That'll work. Well, and maybe we need to look at Gene. What did we have? What does your church have? What do you have for your neighbors? Yeah, that are in need or in crisis. I'm telling you, those fires and in LA and I'm sure there were churches that they got involved. Oh yeah. Cheyenne and others. But yeah, but and dream centers doing a big relief.
That's that was the perfect opportunity to minister to people in a time of need, you know, two hands in front of Jesus, like you said exactly that because we're his body, right? Right. And it's one thing to tell him you love him. It's another thing to tell him you love them and actually love them, you know, and not want something from them. You know, we're going to talk about in the next show. We're about out of time. But I want to talk about relationship and faith and how that works together.
But what you just said about the fires is an example. When we reach out as the hands and feet of Jesus, as people that need help, and we're offering to help, we actually foster a relationship. You're hungry. Here's something to eat. You know, you need to. He did. That's what he did. And that opens the door for the of the gospel. You know, we've been, we've been trained, a lot of us that are older and like the, the the Emmaus road or the Jesus Road, and this is how you do it.
And when people and the evangelism explosion I went through that these 11 steps, you know, and you just it became a formula. It became a formula instead of a relationship. So maybe that's a revival, maybe helping my neighbor who's washing machine broke or whatever. Maybe that's a revival. That's right. Let me tell you a quick story about that. So I put in a really big generator at my house, and I have an obviously a neighbor on each side of me.
Well, recently power went out and our whole neighborhood, and, my generator kicked on. So it's real obvious who has power, because, I mean, this engine's running and all the lights are on, and. But I knew they've got a freezer. So I reached out and said, you know, Terry, let them know. Run a extension cord over here. We can plug in and keep their food cold. That I mean, it was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. And you didn't tell them love.
You show them love. Yeah. And Timothy Paul writes this. It says in the last days. Yeah perilous or hard times will come. And and because men will be lovers of self. And he goes on the other thing. Selfish number one thing he said he didn't say you could you could confess away hard times. He said, hard times will come. That's right. And the number one real deal is selfishness. Gene, if I selfish, this is about not giving money. It can be if I withhold what I have the power to give.
That's right. I open the door to hard times and go. All right, we're out of time. Thank you for joining us today. Greg. You come back next week, I'll be here. All right. We got we got more to talk about. Revival. Make sure you go check out the website revival radio TV. Thank you to Brother Copeland victory channel for keeping Revival Radio on the air all these years. It's been amazing what's happened. We hear. I hear from you. They talk to me about flashpoint and talking about Revival Radio.
But there's always those people that go, and we love flashpoint, but we really love revival radio because we learn about what God's doing. So thank you for watching. Thank you, Greg, for being here. And we'll see you next week. Thank you for supporting the mission of Revival Radio TV. Just follow the information on the screen to join us in partnership here on the Victory Channel. As we dig deep into the history of revival together. Just text RRTV to 36609 or on the web at govictory.com/RRTV.