During a revival service in 2006, a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma saw a 58 year-old man suffer a heart attack and fall back into his pew. Since people around were experiencing God, they assumed him to have become overtaken by the service. At the end of an extremely long service at 11PM, when the service wound down, people noticed that the man had not moved for at least two hours. They also noticed he was blue. That’s when they knew something was wrong.

They called 911 while people prayed passionately for the man’s healing but he was “pretty cold by then,” says one observer. The ambulance arrived and took him to the county hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The pastor responded to the media with, “We want people to meet with God at our meetings, but not face to face.”

I’m sure that placed a new emphasis on the remainder of the revival services.

We can define revival as a period of unusual blessing and activity in the life of the church. Revival means awakening, stimulating the life, bringing it to the surface again. Revival is not intended to cause death but to bring life to individuals and to the church. It happens in the church amongst believing people, and affects those that are outside also. Now this is a most important point, because this definition helps us to differentiate, once and for all, between a revival and an evangelistic campaign. An evangelistic campaign is the Church deciding to do something with respect to those who are outside. A revival is not the Church deciding to do something and doing it. It is something that is done to the Church, something that happens to the Church.

Bro. Larry

“Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.” Exodus 20:9-10

Earlier this week on Monday we celebrated a holiday called “Labor Day.” We tend to celebrate it as the last big fling of summer with cook-outs, trips to the lake, etc. Labor Day was created in the early 1900s to allow workers a day off from their labors as an honor for their efforts. In 1940, the revised Fair Labor Standards Act established the 40-hour workweek. Any work above 40 hours was classified as overtime and required a higher rate of pay.

Yet some successful businessmen, organizations, and governments feel we need to be logging more of our 168 weekly hours at work. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (China’s version of Amazon), “is a big fan of extreme overwork” and recently praised the “996” schedule. Those numbers stand for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days per week. Ma, the richest man in China, called the 12-hour workday a “blessing.” Even the state-run media railed against Ma’s blog about work and called the 996 “unfair and impractical.” Tesla’s Elon Musk claims “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

Uber used to rally behind the slogan, “work smarter, harder, and longer,” and WeWork uses its co-working spaces to post the phrase, “don’t stop when you’re tired; stop when you’re done.”

There is sufficient research that shows that people who work more than 55 hours a week “perform worse than those who go home at a normal hour and rest.” Work was God’s gift to man before the Fall, but the curse of sin has altered work and our understanding of it ever since.

Bro. Larry

* Quotes referenced in Newsweek.

Traditionally, May and June have been the most popular months for weddings. One of my daughters even had a May wedding. I recently read an article that the month of August is competing for the number one wedding month by gaining in the numbers of weddings performed.

Today, there is more to discuss than what month is the most popular for wedding ceremonies. Morality issues of same sex marriages, the popularity of divorce, and couples living together outside of marriage threaten the God-given covenant of marriage. During the past few years, immorality in relationships of couples has sank to a new low with the LGBT movement involving same sex marriages. The God-established marriage is at risk.

A gentleman in his forties, who had never been married, told me, “I don’t have anything against marriages. Marriage is a great institution. But, who wants to spend the rest of their life in an institution?” Marriages have been called institutions, family units, a partnership, a team sport, and even a war zone. One man said that his house was like a war zone and reminded him of the Battle of Armageddon. Marriages are too often like war zones and were never meant to be that way.

The most intriguing description of marriage was as “a team sport.” Teams come together to compete, learn, grow, and win, and that speaks somewhat about marriage. But thinking about marriage as a “T.E.A.M. sport” goes even further. T.E.A.M. stands for “Together Each Achieves More.” Two people of opposite sexes, personalities, backgrounds, etc. coming together as one to achieve more . . . more in life and more in honoring the Lord. Not only is marriage a TEAM Sport, it is the ultimate TEAM Sport. Join the team with your spouse pulling together for victory in your marriage.

The words of Jesus spoke of marriage as a oneness, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:5-6).

Bro. Larry