It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, messianic Bible scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity, here to infuse you with faith, truth, and courage so you can stand strong in the Lord in these critical times. Thanks for joining us today on The Line of Fire. Michael Brown here as we come into the Christmas New Year season. We've decided to do things a little differently, break up our normal classes that we've been teaching.
Instead, I'm taking you back into a message. This is part two, called to stand. When I was first saved, I started preaching. It was a little church building. Maybe if everyone was there on a Sunday, there would be about a hundred people and that would absolutely fill it.
We could squeeze in a few more, but that was it. That was the context in which I got saved. But I saw myself preaching to masses of people. I saw myself, maybe it would have been a crowd of a thousand.
That would have been massive. And then at a certain point, even though I didn't want to travel, I had no interest in traveling, I saw God beginning to show me I was going to go to the nations. It was part of my calling. Maybe the biggest crowd I ever got to speak to was at the Call DC, September 2nd of 2000, with several hundred thousand people there. Or here's just a picture from from preaching in India and, you know, just the masses of people coming to hear the word. Or this next shot, a leaders meeting with 10,000 leaders in India, preaching there.
I mean, I've seen it. And this call to go to the nations. I've been overseas more than 180 trips. I've spent literally years of my life in planes flying and years of my life overseas. Privilege and honor.
Just between India and Italy alone, I've been to those two countries almost 60 times. And seeing God move and things where you just, all you can do is weep because of the goodness of God. You just weep in amazement at what you're seeing with your arms. But it was in my heart. I felt it was something I was supposed to do. It was nothing in our background, nothing in our church culture that suggested that.
It's just something God dropped in me. And then, as a Jewish believer challenged by the rabbis since my earliest days in the Lord, I had this sense of calling to Jewish ministry. And as I was going on in the Lord and challenged by the rabbis, I saw we didn't have material to answer them. That it just wasn't, it didn't exist.
There were no manuals you could go to or books that you could read that would show you how to respond to the Jewish objections to Jesus. And there were rabbis willing to debate, but we didn't have people ready to debate on our side. And I just felt this calling from God. Remember, nobody is anybody. Any good that comes out of us is God's grace. The more good that he does through us, the more we realize it's him, not us. Amen. The only ones that walk around boasting are the ones who really don't know God that well. The ones that walk around strutting are the ones that really don't understand the cross. I walk on the inside with a pronounced limp, knowing it's the mercy and the goodness of God. And any credit and glory goes to him. Amen.
But I had this sense of God raising me up. Here's a picture of me dialoguing with a counter missionary rabbi after a debate in New York City some years ago. We're still in regular contact. But if you go to his website, he has a whole section on me and talks about that my material is the best material. He even has a link to my testimony, amazingly enough. And by God's grace, I've had the privilege of debating rabbis, more rabbis in public settings than any human being on the planet. Here's what you have to understand. When God called me to do this, he was calling a nobody. He was calling someone that was shooting heroin at the age of 15. And when I first started dialogue with rabbis, I could barely even remember the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
That's how little Hebrew and Jewish education I had. It's like God delights in taking the most unlikely people and using them. You know what I'm saying? The more that God uses me, the more I realize you couldn't have picked a worse person in the natural.
I mean, just so many ways I could blow it and be stupid. It's the grace of God. It's the goodness of God.
So I'm saying this to encourage you. God used me to bring an outpouring to a church I was in in 82, 83. God awakened me because I had left my first love. I was still a serious committed believer, but I had left my first love.
Scholarship had become an idol in my life rather than a tool. And God humbled me and brought me through repentance in 82 and sent an outpouring of Spirit through me to the church where I served. But it was ultimately rejected after three months and six days of intense outpouring. It was rejected. I was rejected. Now actually excommunicated from the church.
My best friends wouldn't even talk to me. And the Holy Spirit moves on me in prayer in the spring of 83. And I'm in travail. I'm groaning. I'm praying. I have this agonizing burden for revival. And the Spirit says to me, you'll serve in a revival that will touch the whole world. I thought, you're crazy.
Not God, me. You're crazy. You've gone off the deep end. I remember thinking I had heard about William Branham and heard about John Alexander Dowie and these men at the end of their lives. They thought they were Elijah the prophet.
That's what my mind said. That's what's just happened to you. You're deluded. Come on. You're excommunicated by your home church. Not because of some sin issue, but because of the leaving and trying to do it the right way. They didn't think it was the right way. Anyway, I ended up excommunicating.
My best friends won't talk to me. And now the Spirit's saying, you're going to be using a revival that touches the whole world? Seriously? But I couldn't shake it. And the more I pray, the more the fire would burn. And the more I'd seek him, the more reality I'd see in this. And then glorious things happen.
He tells me to quit my job, go teach at a Bible school in Long Island. God miraculously opens the doors, causes our house to sell miraculously. One thing after another falls into place. God begins to stir my heart to write on revival. And then he supernaturally connects me with Leonard Ravenhill. Leonard Ravenhill being the great giant of revival in the last generation, great man of prayer.
To this day, I've never ever prayed with any human being that prayed the way he prayed. The brokenness and the death and so humbling just to get on your knees with him. God connected us closely the last five years of his life from 89 to 94. He was 82, I was 34. God connected me with David Wilkerson preaching at Times Square Church regularly, seeing God move there.
This man just a strong prophetic message. Even though I got to spend time with him every single time I was there and an occasional time meeting alone or having a meal together, I used to say it was like fellowshipping with a razor blade. He'd just look at me with a compassionate man.
He'd look at me, how you doing, Mike? It's like, I'm clean. Really, I've had a good week. I'm clean. Just something holy about it.
Just frail human being like the rest of us. But these were the man God connected me with closely. And I knew it was going to happen in fall of 95.
Or, yes, I'm sorry. 93, 94, God starts stirring my heart. God's moving here, God's moving there. Different things are happening.
I'm wondering, I thought I was supposed to be in the thick of this. I thought this is going to be a revival where I get to serve that touches the whole world. And I started to write a book. The title is From Holy Laughter to Holy Fire America on the Edge of Revival. The last pages of the book, I paint a picture of what revival looks like based on the experience I had at Niagara Falls. I paint a picture of that and the closing words of the book are, are you ready?
Are you ready? I knew something was there. I knew something was about to break. The book came out in March of 95. Revival broke in Pensacola, the Brownsville revival, June of 95.
Three months after that book was published, with those words, are you ready? And God used a colleague of mine, Steve Hill, we just celebrated 10 years since he went with the Lord yesterday. Preaching passionately every night, calling people to repent, get right with God. God used him to help ignite the revival. And 11 months later, God called me to join the team there and be part of this and serve in this revival where people came from 130 nations. Touched the world. To this day, we have laborers that we've sent out that were touched in the revival, trained in our school, serving all around the world, bearing incredible fruit. Some of them literally reaching multiplied millions of people with the gospel.
Chris Donald has served with some of our team in the Middle East. God doing amazing things. And you have to picture a move of such intensity that people would begin to line up outside the building at six in the morning. They'd stand in line for 12 hours for the doors to open at six at night, for the service to start at seven.
And it would go five, six hours, night after night after night, for years. Front page coverage in the New York Times. Everyone from CNN to 60 Minutes to Rolling Stone magazine covered what was happening. And friends of mine that knew me from those old days on Long Island that knew me in the 80s, they'd come and say, Mike, you told us this was going to happen.
You told us you'd be in the midst of this. It was God. It was God. When God spoke that to me, nobody knew me. I just did a little preaching in neighboring states. I was finishing up my PhD work at NYU.
It's not me, it's God. But it gave me that assurance in the midst of the Brownsville Revival. Seeing God move in incredible ways. Hearing extraordinary stories of outpourings of the Spirit in the local schools.
Talking to the principal of one of the schools and the district superintendent, former principal, now district superintendent for all the schools in the county. Him telling me the impact there were on the the impact the revival had on the schools. He said, I'm an eyewitness. In the midst of that, God begins to stir my heart about a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution. God begins to stir my heart in the late 90s and begins to speak to me.
As surely as there was a civil rights movement in America, there will be a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution and you will be right in the thick of it. He began to speak this to me. He's spoken to me so many times that as I was praying over this a few years later, I concluded this is either God or I've lost my mind.
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Call 1-800-771-5584, 1-800-771-5584 or online at trivita.com. And now back to the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, ready to infuse you with faith, truth, and courage. All right, here we go. Last segment of the message. Call to stand. May it be a blessing to you. But I'm telling you, as sure as I'm standing here, I heard this from God over and over and over.
And he also laid on my heart, you're going to be on National Talk Radio. At that point, it was impossible. It was unrealistic.
There was no way it was going to happen. But I have been on daily National Talk Radio now since 2008 with the Line of Fire broadcast. Because God said so. Because God said so. And thank God for the exposure the broadcast has gotten and being in the top 0.05% of podcasts worldwide. I mean, to me, it's a tiny audience in terms of what's in my heart and what God wants to do. And every single day, I speak as if I'm speaking for the Lord.
So whether it's three people or three million, it doesn't matter. We're speaking for the Lord. The words, moms and dads, you speak to your kids at home are just as important as the words I speak on national radio. The words you speak as a believer in your place of business, on your campus, or in your own social media posts. They're just as important as the words I speak on internet. We're all speaking as representatives and servants of the Lord. Amen? But I'm just sharing this for one reason only. To bear witness.
And I knew these two things would go hand in hand. For years, I was introduced daily on the radio as your voice for moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. And for years now, as your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. And for years, our ministry was known as Ask Dr. Brown.
You get one of those Israel books, you'll see, we had specially printed with the publisher, Ask Dr. Brown. We were allowed to do that together with the Orthodox Jewish man we're working with. For years, that was our ministry name. But really, we got some questions raised to us at the end of last year.
Why is that the case? I said, well, it's been our name for years. It's kind of a portal where everyone can go because we have so many different resources and things like that.
I said, but if we were naming it today, we wouldn't name it that. He goes, exactly. Because my main role is not the Bible Answer Man. My main role is not theologian. My main role is to equip the body to change the world, to reach my Jewish people with the gospel, but to equip the church to take a stand. So we switched our entire organization, website, everything, just to the line of fire, because we're all in the line of fire today. We're all in this battle.
That's the reality. But it was also to position ourselves more specifically for this season of gospel-based moral and cultural revolution. 2004, God laid on my heart, reach out and resist. 2004, God laid on and resist.
2004 into 2005, in terms of gay activism, reach out to the people with compassion, resist the agenda with courage. I didn't ask for the assignment. It's not my background. I don't come out of homosexuality.
It's not my testimony. It's not something I had a specific burden for, but God made clear to me, everybody's going to have to deal with this. This will be the issue of the generation.
This is 2004. And since then, I've met with government leaders in different countries of the world, justices and leaders in high places to share about these things. I was invited to Peru to speak to congressmen and university chancellors about these very issues, not to demonize people, but to talk about social consequences while preaching love for individuals. And this is all part of God's saying to me, there's going to be a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution. There's going to be a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution. The church has to get healthy. The church has to get revived. But a healthy church means a shaken America. America shaken with the gospel.
That's what it means. From revival to reformation. From outpouring in the church to awakening in society. That's what I live for.
That's what I breathe for. And I've been saying that things are changing. That those on the radical left, for whom we pray, people just like you and me who need Jesus. Pastor Landon called me once after the transgender debate in Texas here, and thankfully lawmakers standing on the right side of those issues. He began to read what those were saying on the other side. And those that wanted to see kids be exposed to surgical mutilation and chemical castration, things like that, because they were pained and conflicted about their gender identity.
Pastor Landon called me and said, Dr. Brown, they sound just like us. I said, exactly. In their mind, they're doing this for the kids. In their mind, this is the best interest of the kids.
And we're hurting them by not allowing this to happen. We care about people. We care about individuals. Jesus shed the same blood for each of us, whoever we are, however we identify. He shed the same blood. We all come the same way. We sang about it today through the cross, through the blood. But hear me. I'm going to bring this to a close in the next couple minutes.
I knew that those with a radically different social agenda would overplay their hands. I've been writing about it for years and years and years. I can take you to the page where I said, this is going to happen. Same sex quote marriage is going to become the law of the land. This is going to happen. Court cases will go against us. People will lose jobs. This is going to happen. This is going to happen.
But it will overplay its hand and there's going to be a pushback. You know what's wild in terms of what's taking place in society? You know, the boycott against Bud Light because of the celebration of a trans-identified individual.
That was not led by Christians. Let's stop drinking bud and the church is going, no that's not how it happened. I mean you're talking about people like Kid Rock. When you think Kid Rock you don't think holy. Right? Kid Rock, you know, shooting Bud Light.
This was a grassroots thing. When you have Joe Rogan with the world's biggest podcast. Joe Rogan will smoke pot on the show. When you have Joe Rogan talking about going to Target, not wanting to see these bathing suits where a boy who identifies as a girl, they have extra material so that they can tuck things in.
He goes, that's weird. That's Joe Rogan. When you think Joe Rogan you don't think Bible.
Joe Rogan, Bible. And it seems God's at work in his life and thinking there may be some awakening taking place. All I'm saying, this is not led. This is not led by the church.
This is not led by the church. This is society waking up because the radical left or those on that side overplay their hand. It's just what happens friends.
It's just what happens. You have people now like Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists of this generation. Totally hostile to who we are and our faith.
Mocking it. He's under flack by trans activists because he says there are only two sexes. You get Bill Maher, irreligious Bill Maher, atheist religion-mocking Bill Maher speaking out against cancel culture and radical trans activism. You've got J.K. Rowling, long-time gay lesbian advocate, author of Harry Potter.
She gets into big trouble because she posts only women can menstruate and that caused an uproar. Think what? That's the madness we're living in. But here's the key. For this revolution to succeed, it has to be led by you and me. I don't mean that we have to have all the political offices and be in top in every position. What I mean is that we have to be the salt and we have to be the light and we have to lead the way.
And it's got to be based in prayer and the preaching of the gospel and setting captives free. But friends, if you and I will rise up in this moment, we can see America shaking. You can see your community shaking. It doesn't mean we take over and dominate. Our call is to serve, not to dominate.
We want to bring people under the lordship of Jesus through the gospel. But it means that our influence will be felt. It means that there will be a change. It means that the next generation will say, what we got was crazy. All this confusion was crazy. And 78 different gender pronouns is crazy. We care about the people who are confused, but we reject this madness.
So let me end here. Here are some quotes that I've memorized that have challenged me over the years. I want to give you, as an apostolic elder here, I want to make a deposit of what God's put in me and put in some of you. Just three quotes. Here's the first.
Joseph Parker, who was a contemporary of Spurgeon. The man whose little sermon is repent sets himself against his age and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man.
Off with his head. You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven. The old Keith Green song, pledge my head to heaven. That's where it comes from. A quote Leonard Ravenhill's book, Why Revival Tires. That's one to memorize.
That's one to remember. Because we will be going across the culture. We will be swimming against the tide and going against the grain.
So if you say I want in, just like Esther, if I perish, I perish. Here I am. Send me.
Use me. We are not like radical Muslims who say we love death. You love life. We love life. We celebrate life.
But we don't love our own lives. They belong to the Lord. Amen. Two more quotes. Also I found this in Why Revival Tires decades ago. The Methodist preacher W.E. Sankster.
Something for us to think about. How shall I feel at the judgment? If multitudes of missed opportunities passed before me in full review and all my excuses proved to be disguises of my cowardice and pride. Can I read that again? How shall I feel at the judgment?
If multitudes of missed opportunities passed before me in full review and all my excuses proved to be disguises of my cowardice and pride. And one more quote from James Taylor from several generations ago. The world may frown. Satan may rage.
But go on. Live for God. May I die in the field of battle. That's not a death wish. Just by saying I'm in.
I'm in. One more time. The world may frown. Satan may rage.
But go on. Live for God. May I die in the field of battle. Thanks friends for tuning in. I pray this was a blessing to you during this Christmas new year season. Thanks for standing with us. The place to go for support is thelineoffire.org. We appreciate it deeply.
This is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for tuning in. Just a reminder that we are listener supported. If we have been a blessing to you, if you're being enriched in the word and prayer and your own walk with God through this broadcast, then stand with us so that we can reach many, many more and bless many, many more. Together, friends, we're making a difference. So go to thelineoffire.org. Thelineoffire.org and click donate.
